lifestooserious.com

There comes a time in a person’s life where bluntness is important. When the right thing to do is walk right up to the five-year old who just rammed a shopping cart into your car and threaten to ship him to Guyana. Even when sleeping, I’ll wake up sweating with similar, sometimes reprehensible urges.

I’m what you might call an active sleeper. I’ll wake up choking, believing I’ve swallowed a paperclip, steel wool, or functioning dental drill. Other times I twist and turn trying to find a comfortable position while my muscles impersonate a roasted turkey. Such anomalies jolt my wife awake right after she hits slumber land. Before going to bed I scan her side of the headboard for loaded small-caliber firearms.

I’ve strayed way off the topic. Bluntly speaking, I’m very worried about stupid people raising offspring. Oh, don’t give me that kind of look. You know perfectly well what I’m talking about.

It’s tragic there’re no credentials required for parenthood. Not that having a diploma automatically qualifies you as having a brain. I’ve known quite a few Ph.D. folks without the common sense God gave an earthworm. (more…)

Contentious remarks will surely light up during this final year before all businesses must comply with the 2005 Montana public-area smoking ban. Not too many fence sitters here. There are basically two camps: people who detest eating cigarette butt smelling tuna fish sandwiches and, folks who willingly eat those same sandwiches because, with their tainted taste buds, all food tastes like it was rolled in a well-used ash tray.

But I’m supposed to be writing a humorous column here, paradoxically authoring something witty about the world of tar-laden lungs, hacker’s cough, yellow teeth, and stinky breath. Doing my best to lightly step around the smoking maladies of cancer (lung, pancreatic, esophagus, and throat – to mention a few), shortened life span, bronchitis, emphysema, and stroke.

To avoid being too serious, I’ll have to ignore the lies about product innocence told by tobacco companies beginning in the 60’s. I should creatively devise jokes about the tobacco industry’s seven dwarfs telling congress in 1994 that “nicotine is not addictive.” When, in fact, nicotine is a super toxin that, drop for drop, is more lethal than strychnine, three times deadlier than arsenic, and creates an addiction that can be harder to break than heroin. (more…)

A recent New York Times front-page headline asked, “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” Astutely put – but what else would you expect from professionals who routinely hail taxicabs driven by carbon-based lifeform keenly able to confuse “literacy” with a street off Brooklyn Queens Expressway right next to Linden Hill?
What is literacy in this fast-paced, digital world? Some espouse that the printed word stimulates the mind more effectively than, say, typing in “cheat” codes for the video game, “Call of Duty V: The Toilet Gets Clogged.” Others say surfing the Internet, gleaning information from potential sleazebags with horny toad personal hygiene habits, is the way of the future.
Regardless, literacy authorities point to reading and writing as essential to brain development — explaining why mine is a Cro-Magnon variety. I spent excess time in the rebellious 60’s glued to a TV watching vixens like the blond bombshell Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. Who had time to read a book?

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