Day 491: Paper Towns

originally published May 5, 2013 Welcome to beautiful sunny Argleton! While this gorgeous English village won’t appear in many tourist guide books, you’ll nevertheless be impressed by its stunning… minimalism. In fact, Argleton is so profoundly minimalist, one could say it doesn’t actually exist. But it must, right? I mean, it shows up on Google […]

Day 490: From Human To Kuman Thong

originally published May 4, 2013 Every so often a headline grabs my attention and won’t let go until the blood has drained from my cranium, leaving me unconscious and limp, like a pile of soggy overcoats in a long-neglected closet. Certainly when I read “Briton Arrested with Roasted Human Foetuses For Use In Black Magic […]

Day 489: William ‘Boss’ Tweed – The Etheral King Of New York Scummery

originally published May 3, 2013 It would present a genuine challenge to any amateur historian to unearth a more succinct tale of greed and corruption than that of William “Boss” Tweed and his cronies at Tammany Hall. Not often does someone opt to steal so much from so many, and to do it so damn […]

Day 488: A May-Long Party Of Gardening, Gobbling And Geekery

originally published May 2, 2013 Happy May, everybody! Well, happy May yesterday. I was about 280 words into my article about ghosts and New York State real estate law when I realized I was supposed to pen my monthly kilograph on the observances you might not find on your Walmart-purchased The Abs Of Jersey Shore […]

Day 487: The Ghost Clause Of New York State

originally published May 1, 2013 Shopping for a new home is often about as pleasant as prying one’s fingernails back with a pair of pliers, whilst listening to a man who smells of… is that boiling cabbage and hippo farts?… try to sell you an insurance policy in the back row of a Kanye West […]

Day 486: My Golden Ticket To Big Rock’s Wonka-esque House of Magic

originally published April 30, 2013 Today, rather than order off my tired Wikipedian menu of kooky trivia, anecdotes from history or 990-word setups for a single joke about bacon, I’m going to cook up something special. I spent today (well, yesterday by the time my finger-tappings dance their way to my readers’ eyes) walking the […]

Day 485: 1000 Words About Words

originally published April 29, 2013 I’ll admit it. There are some days when I feel like posting a photograph and saying, “Look, there’s my thousand words. I’m done.” 485 days in a row of poking into some topic or spewing out some schtick can make a guy want a break. But sometimes it’s the words […]

Day 484: The Darkness Of The Padded Walls

originally published April 28, 2013 With no cash prize, with no great inheritance on the line, would you be willing to spend a night in an abandoned insane asylum? This is the sort of question which could open up an episode of American Horror Story (in fact, I think it did). A question which the […]

Day 483: Terra Incog-Neato

originally published April 27, 2013 You’d think with humankind’s great need to stretch our fences and occupy as much space as humanly possible, there would be no unclaimed land left. How could any snippet of earth be left flitting in the breeze, with no one to step forward and cram it into their pockets? Sure, […]

Day 482: Newman’s Own Hangover

originally published April 26, 2013 A couple weeks ago, I penned a brief history of some of the college antics that I never participated in, mostly because they were obsolete long before I went to school. In some cases (telephone booth stuffing), before I was even born. There are still a number of ridiculous rituals […]