The Last Annual conTIMplating 2016 Presidential Voting Guide

Since the big and somewhat embarrassing presidential debates over these past couple of weeks, I’ve been inundated with an email asking my impressions on this country’s current entertaining and yet entirely nauseating presidential race.  It went something like this direct quote:

Dear Tim,

I’m torn.  I don’t know who to vote for in this presidential election, and the debates aren’t helping.  Your blog seems to have a lot of words.  What do you say?

Well firstly, let me say thank you for seeking out such wise counsel in such a time as this.  You obviously have no friends or family and nothing better to do and I am resultantly humbled.   My answer to you is thus:

Dear Torn,

You have a very funny name.  Are you related to Rip? Continue reading →

An Open Letter to Those Who Write Open Letters

Dear Open Letter Writer,

While I appreciate the time and effort you put forth in stringing various words together into often complex sentences, and while I also appreciate you usually starting with a positive and complementary tone before going on some sort of impertinent rant, on behalf of literates everywhere I feel I must respectfully request that you refrain from future compositionary activity and stop writing open letters.

I fully understand that writing open letters is all the rage right now and fewer things have contributed to this tiresome trend greater than the marvel of the electronic interweb and its various addictive time-vacuuming social media outlets, but before you jump on the metaphorical exhibitionist bandwagon there are some things you should probably know. Continue reading →

What Is It About Food That Makes Me Want To Eat It?

032Austin, Texas: named for Stephen F. Austin, considered to be the ‘Father of Texas’ and the first bionic man.  I was lucky enough to have a day to putz around in Austin recently and so I did a little googling to find out what exactly makes Austin tick other than its mild case of Turrets.  I did know that Austin is known largely for being the Blue bastion within a perpetually blushing Red state, but I didn’t want to go down that road.  One road I did want to go down was 6th Street, known largely for mayhem, collegiate debauchery, and launching up-and-coming artists into the satiatingly saturated and highly self-congratulatory music industry.

But nah.

Being a transplanted Minnesotan, I decided instead to go on safari and hunt amongst the Texan (George) bushes for that wild, elusive and somewhat dangerously delicious game found predominantly in The South of the United States known simply as Continue reading →

Blame It On Rio

So I’ve been watching the Olympics this past couple of weeks.  Or trying to.  What with all the commercials and commentary and human interest pieces designed to get chicks to sit down and watch sports I think I might have seen a long jump.  And dressage.  Dressage.  Don’t get me started on stupid Olympic sports <coughcough rhythmicgymnastics coughcough>.  What kind of person is it that devotes years of their waking spare time to dance around with a little rubber ball?  And why isn’t Prancercising an Olympic sport?

Not to get on a rant here, but I’m about done with the Olympics—and it’s not just because I don’t know whether or not to capitalize the ‘the’ in front of it.  I alluded to the main reason for my apathy in the above preceding and foregoing paragraph, but more and more I am finding the Olympics downright unwatchable.  Thank you, various networks of NBC.  I’ll bet you didn’t know the Olympic theme had words.  Cue the tympani… Continue reading →

I Saw Dead People

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A couple of weeks ago I found myself in Paris with some time to kill and instead of purchasing Nintendo stock like I should have been doing, I decided to fritter away my time at a sidewalk cafe eating batter-fried foods.  I found finding French fritters a frustrating fiasco however, and so I elected instead to head to the local cemeteries, as I have been dying to get into them for some time and take selfish selfies with the post-mortem celebrities interned therein.

The first cemetery I went to was the more renowned Père Lachaise (pictured above), which is a French term for ‘two matching Lachaise’.  Père Lachaise is chocked full of superstar corpses, many of which are tied to French history and culture.  Thanks to my public school upbringing, I was familiar with exactly none of them as they were named neither Napoleon nor Gérard Depardieu.  There were some names I recognized however, and I put together a quick Wander Around and Stumble Upon strategy to miss almost all of them and take up as much time as possible making U-turns and backtracking.

Like most Ugly Americans, the first grave site I visited was that of Continue reading →