Day 451: Fahrenheit & His Super-Friends

originally published March 26, 2013 Having grown up being fed the beige paste of the metric system in school, I was always intrigued by the exotic, flamboyant, and outright chaotic nature of the imperial measurement system. Twelve inches in a foot, three feet in a yard, some seemingly arbitrary number of feet in a mile… […]

Day 450: The Nuke-Fiddlers

originally published March 25, 2013 My parents gave up long ago on ever seeing me come up with any scientific discoveries. Maybe it was the time when I tested the resilience of ants by placing them in the middle of a sewer grate to see if they’d crawl to the edge or fall in. It […]

Day 449: Deported But Not Departed – The Clem Vallandingham Story

originally published March 24, 2013 Much like economics, I tend to steer widely around politics on this site. For the most part, I find the current state of partisan-led showboating to be uninspiring, unproductive and most importantly, unfunny. Besides, I work full-time, I’m in school full-time, and I’ve got a full-time commitment to lifting up […]

Day 448: The Soviet Film Defectors

originally published March 23, 2013 We all know that the USSR and America spent much of the 1960’s throwing stuff up into space to see who could be more sci-fi awesome than the other. But at the same time as highly educated, meticulously-trained astronauts and cosmonauts were taking turns staring down at the planet from […]

Day 447: My Plea For The Right Size Weekend

originally published March 22, 2013 There are a few topics to which I will almost never turn while searching for fodder for my daily writing regimen. Religion is one, because I don’t feel the need to fuel heated, angry debates any more than I believe I should be pushing my own chosen religion (Jediism, of […]

Day 446: Blood-Bananas

originally published March 21, 2013 Summing up the extensive history of the United Fruit Company (now known as Chiquita, the banana people) in a thousand words without glossing over a handful of jaw-dropping incidents won’t be easy. Nor do I anticipate an easy slide into my routine of bacon-inspired smartassery and Star Wars references. I […]

Day 445: The Mighty Cheeto

originally published March 20, 2013 Consider the Cheeto: crisp, yielding, with the audible snap of a thousand tiny hands sharing one unison clap. It lands upon the tongue in a Riverdance of dissolution, its crunchy remnants clip-clopping past the molars in a crumb stampede (a ‘crumpede’ if you will), down the gullet’s hungry waterslide. Its […]

Day 444: The Lexicon Gets Jiggy With It – Words From The 90s

originally published March 19, 2013 As a full-time juggler, manhandler, and crass exploiter of words, I sense a giddy little lightning shiver of excitement when a linguistic topic floats to the top of the chum-pile for selection in my daily tithe. I’ve marveled at some of our most recent additions to the western lexicon, today […]

Day 443: Unkillable Television

originally published March 18, 2013 It’s easy to look at prime time television and come to the conclusion that there simply isn’t much fresh or original going on. Have a look at the top ten ratings from the Nielsen people for the week ending March 4, the most recent they have on their website: NCIS, […]

Day 442: Gilles de Rais – War Hero, Aristocrat, Serial Killer

originally published March 17, 2013 If I were to be struck by a plummeting satellite piece today, my obituary would lack a lot of highlights. Sure, I had kids, undertook a ridiculously large writing project, and there was that time I managed to stuff 27 pens in my mouth at once, but it ain’t much. […]