Category Archives: The Petri Dish

Observations of culture

‘Tis the Season…Or Not

Hark!  My Uncle Harold is singing, merry gentlemen are resting, and everywhere you look, gay yuletides!  This can only mean one thing: ‘tis the season to leave the ‘i’ off ‘it is’ and shamelessly throw around tidings of comfort and joy, comfort and joy.

Therefore in the spirit of joviality and good cheer, I would personally like to take this unique opportunity to don my red hat, roll up my Greensleeves, and wish you and yours all the generic goodness and generally pleasant emotive responses that customarily accompany the festival of your chosen religious tradition coinciding with the sun’s winter solstice! Continue reading →

High Way to Health

Regular readers of this blog are obviously getting the USDA recommended allowance of dietary fiber. And if such readers also happen to comeback to this site from time to time, they will have noticed that I have recently, through no fault of my own, been the victim of healthcare.

After being molested by the staff of my local physician (to include a test for pertussis which involves scraping a sample of one’s frontal lobe via the nasal passages), I was diagnosed with pneumonia. Panic I did not, for I had had this dreaded disease before, albeit the “walking” version which I think means that I had pneumonia but not really—kind of like zombies are “walking dead,” meaning they are dead but not really or like Republicans are “walking conservatives,” meaning they are conservatives but not really. Continue reading →

My First Year as a Socialist

This week marks the one year anniversary of my tenacious and unrelenting participation in that vile, habit-forming procrastination tool known as Facebook. Luckily, my involvement has been limited to the shallow platitudinal aspect, as I have yet to be Zuckered into actually buying stock, but nonetheless… Feel free to congratulate me and send me expensive gifts in recognition of my enduring perseverance through this difficult time.

I have thus far successfully avoided other social media, though I am continually pressured to join the likes of LinkedIn, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, Quechup, Yammer, CafeMom, BlackPlanet, Frühstückstreff, etc. I am also regularly badgered by my Wisconsin friends to start tweeting but am a tad fearful of Twitter, mainly because I don’t understand the lingo. #hashtags. Continue reading →

Go Ahead, Take My Advice…Please

Being middle-aged and rapidly ascending the slopes of Mount Geezerhood, I find myself in the increasingly awkward situation of not knowing what I want to be when I grow up. Like any strapping, red-blooded American boy, I went through much of my life more than a little concerned about what it meant to be ‘strapping’.

I also went through the typical childhood process of determining my future profession from my consumption of 1970s television. Over time, I weeded out many of these options based on the information I gleaned from my expert friends at school who seemed so much more worldly than I—the very same ‘experts,’ I later realized, who ate boogers and paste. Continue reading →

White Men Can’t Dance (and Neither Can Their Daughters)

People are having entirely too much fun these days. Luckily we have 24-hour news channels to keep us somber. And rainy days and Mondays. And celery.

I read somewhere that you burn more calories in the process of eating celery than the celery actually provides, so if you were to eat an all-celery diet you would eventually come to resemble an Olsen twin. Studies show that this is why God created celery in the shape of a U: to make it conveniently capable of containing a substance that would effectively kill its taste and provide fleeting pleasure, like peanut butter or some sort of manufactured cheese product in a can. But I digress… Continue reading →