Check out this billboard. Apparently, there is a "Bike Show" at the "Family Arena" in St. Charles, Missouri (St. Louis area). If you attend the Bike Show, you can "Register to Win a Free Breast Augmentation." I'd avoid buying only your raffle ticket in the name of the family, however,…
Marc Gunther created his blog to probe Corporate America for signs of social responsibility. Hence, the name of his blog: "Marc Gunther - Corporate America: Making the World a Better Place . . . or Not." My sister-in-law (an architect who specializes in green issues) referred me to his site. …
This is a no-brainer, or so I thought. Before asking my extended family this question at a family gathering this weekend, I assumed that everyone would agree to my hypothetical proposal. As distasteful as it might seem at first, I assumed that everyone in the room would (if given the opportunity) agree that they would eat nothing but dog food for one year in return for $1 million.
I write this post having tasted dog food on two occasions in past years. On those two occasions, I’d chomped on a nugget of dry dog food, the kind that comes in a 40 pound bag. I thought it tasted like cardboard, but it was not disgusting. On the other hand, it was not food I would be inclined to eat again unless given an incentive. Note: I have smelled canned dog food before, and I would not be inclined to eat that stuff. The canned dog food I smelled had a strong disgusting odor to it. It looked and smelled like it was no longer safe to eat.
So there I stood with various members of my family in my mother’s kitchen when I raised the question: who would be willing to eat nothing but dog food for the next year in return for $1 million? To my surprise, the rejections and objections started pouring in, even though I went first and even though I proudly stated that my answer was absolutely “yes.”
Two of my sisters and my mother each …
Today is Easter. Colorful eggs (pagan tradition), bunnies and chicks (pagan symbols), and consuming dangerous levels of foamy sweetener in scary yellow bites (Peeps™). Let's not forget the "meaning behind it": The anniversary of yet another demi-god risen from the dead. I enjoy this take on that subject. Anyway, why…
I enjoy chatting with Martian anthropologists. They visit Earth without preconceptions and they ask obvious questions.
Recently, I encountered a Martian anthropologist who was struggling to understand what Easter was all about. I tried to explain it in simple terms. I first tried to tell the Martian Anthropologist (I think it was a “she,” so I’ll use the feminine pronoun) about Good Friday. I told her that a magic fellow named Jesus dies every year on Good Friday and the Christians get all glum, even though He doesn’t really die every year, and we’re not entirely sure that there was a Jesus or that he was truly magic.
I paused, then explained further. I told her that Catholics are my favorite kind of Christians because I was raised Catholic and because they strive so hard to not eat meat on Good Friday. She asked why they didn’t eat meat and I said I didn’t know, especially since they eat fish and fish seems to be meat. At church, it gets even stranger, I explained. Catholics eat bread that they claim was “transubstantiated” into the actual body of Jesus (even though it still looks and tastes like bread. The ironic twist is that this bread is supposedly meat and the Catholics eat it on Good Friday, even though they promise not to eat meat on Good Friday.
Then, every year on Easter Sunday Jesus is said to rise from the dead and save us, even though we weren’t the one’s …
