Sadly, people, unthinking people, often refer to pigs and pork in negative tones. Worse yet, they malign basically intelligent animals by comparing them to a species not much higher on the evolutionary scale: to wit, political animals. ☞ When it comes to their own kind, pigs— and peccaries in particular— are most tender in their […]

Another insufferable time change accompanied by collective pain felt in the ying yang over yet another leftover folly of modernism: daylight savings time. Most annoying is that jerking the clock back and forth started as a gift from Nazi Germany and human engineering at its finest, stretching daylight hours for getting more work out of […]

Sweet as Bible stories can be to passionate youth is the bitterness felt by the cruel remarks when callow playmates mock that passion. Both bitter and sweet, then, would be the tales told of Miriam and Saul and Ruth. The more to press upon friends and associates a sincere glory in David and Abraham, the […]

We, who seven years ago Talked of honour and of truth, Shriek with pleasure if we show The weasel’s twist, the weasel’s tooth. W.B. Yeats The bulk of mankind do not pass through boyhood. Thomas Jefferson Boyman barges into the station to get a gander… oh, excuse me, you don’t say that anymore. Let’s start […]

Sometimes off-center, many times overly gushy, but when it’s working, poetry still says it best. In his poem “In Place of a Curse” John Ciardi chooses a novel voice for delivering his sentiment. He’s campaigning as a candidate for the position of the Almighty. And the summation of his “speech” reaches into the heart of […]

Maybe we’re looking for lazy in all the wrong places. Maybe it’s easier to look at the flip side of lazy, and that would be slavery. Whatever popular notion of that shameful practice, it should be noted that slavery did not originate in the U.S. Most of our common ancestors lived in some form of […]

It’s not a stretch to equate the dot.commie doodle LOL, meaning Laugh Out Loud, with the same symbol for Law of Lazy because laughing out loud and universal laziness are related. Canned laughter offers a perfect example: allowing others to laugh for you signifies a laziness to laugh on your own, as well as the […]

☞ The wandering way to becoming a post-modern prospector is paved with what is referred to in corporate speak as “off-ramp careers.” The way started as a farm and cannery worker in order to fund a scholar fantasy at what was then San Francisco State College (now officially restyled as a university terrorist training camp). […]

☞  Observing current English usage, with all the cant and can’t be said, foreboding words and forbidden words… So much blather to uncover and so little time. Yet, with that incessant barrage of new gobbledy gook hitting at us from all sides, the task of launching yet another term goes begging. ☞  The particular neologism […]

It’s been eternally puzzling why, in this Manichean world, efforts of great worth go unnoticed while slugs receive honors. The vision of Laurence Peter offers a view of hope to ease this lapse. Dr. Peter conceived of a world-view nearly rivaling that of Newton and Einstein. Like those great seers who surmised universal magnetic force […]