Do you watch those “Fix Your Failing Business” sort of shows? Restaurants, hotels, whatever — they’re all the same. People with failing businesses invite in an expert, listen to their informed and professional opinions, and then launch into a litany of reasons why things are just fine as is and why the expert is an idiot.
All the best work in the garden is done on your knees. Not the biggest work, mind you. Not the work that’s most noticed. I said the best.
Emily Ratajkowski, well known body-paint model and social commentator, complained recently that she doesn’t get “serious” roles in Hollywood. (I have trouble assigning the word “serious” to anything related to Hollywood, but that’s another article.)
Every once in a while I will deviate from my standard policy and read some comments on a YouTube video or other internet post. I will never cease to be amazed at the willingness of complete strangers to weigh in with the most subjective criticisms imaginable. I don’t know where the term “trolls” came from, but I like it. It conveys the image of some semiliterate, untalented nobody lurking in his basement (which is to say, his mom’s basement), lobbing ill-conceived and ill-informed mortar fire at people who are actually doing something with their lives.
Maybe it’s American Idol’s fault. …
Alton Brown is one of my favorite television celebrities, back from when I actually watched television. I heard him talk one time about he and his young daughter watching the Mythbusters guys blow things up on their show, after which she turned to him and said, with attitude, “So, what did you do on your show today?” Apparently, “Cutthroat Kitchen” wasn’t quite literal enough for the young lady.
We have been inordinately blessed with rain in recent days. As a result, my lawn is greener and lusher than it ever has been. The grass is not exactly “high as an elephant’s eye,” but it might create some visibility issues for the neighborhood possums.
So, of course, it is time to cut it. Well past time, in fact.
I know it’s a debated position, but I firmly hold to the view that the “moving walkway” would be called a “moving standway” if we were supposed to let the machine do all the work. Not every visitor to Hollywood Studios agrees with me. And that’s fine.
Others, though, “stand” in such a way as to impede my walking. …
I bought a package of roasted and salted Brazil nuts. The package has a label. The label includes a warning. My nuts, it seems, were processed in a plant that produces nuts. Wow. That’s just, … what’s the word I’m looking for?
A study commissioned by Hasbro revealed that fully 68 percent of Monopoly players have never read the rules. I believe it. Like most people, I learned Monopoly by listening to an experienced player explain the rules. As a result, I have always played some bits of the game wrongly. Free Parking, for instance. It does nothing. Absolutely nothing.
It is trendy these days to admonish millennials into better practice of what is being termed “adulting.” Basic skills such as cooking, shopping, laundry, auto maintenance, and the like are being neglected. As a result, a generation is going off to college unable to boil an egg or sew a button.
The cry goes out from far and wide to bring back home economics classes, shop classes, and financial literacy classes. Get our schools to empower our children so they will have a chance of coping in a world that will soon try to eat them alive.
