Tag Archives: opinion

How to Be an Award-Winning Blogger

I have been blogging now for exactly 18+ months or so (give or take) and I must say, I am all Baghdadified (that is, in shock and awe) that I have not received any smugly satisfactory and pretentiously praiseful honors from within my own pompous peer group such that I can properly puff myself up with conceited pride and self-important pomposity.  Nor have I even received a nomination!

But then I watched television last Sunday night and what I discovered via the Columbia Broadcasting System made me involuntarily exclaim, “Oh Lorde!  I have been doing it all wrong!”  I have been foolishly just sitting at my computer and writing, not at all using the obvious tactical strategery it takes to be an esteemed and celebrated success in one’s chosen field.  How could I have not seen it sooner?

Being the unselfish egoist I am, I will share what I learned the other night Continue reading →

Weighing in on Christie (pun intended)

I don’t usually get too excited about political scandals due to their inevitable and foreseeable nature, but this ‘Bridgegate’ thing has gotten me more worked up than a paleoista at a food court.  Specifically, I am more than shocked and dismayed that ‘Bridgegate’ is the best name the media could come up with for this nationwide local issue and frankly, whoever invented it should be made curator of the Lame Museum.

Really?  ‘Bridgegate’?  It’s like the creativity pipes got frozen in the polar vortex of banality and spewed liquid dull all over the floor of the triteroom.

Call me more progressive than my insurance company, but it’s about time we stopped putting ‘-gate’ at the end of anything that hints at the unethical or seemingly naughty-naughty.  Other stupid examples include Continue reading →

Am I Racist if I Dream of a White Christmas?

Evidently writing about racism is like working for the CIA:  just when I thought I was done and out, they pull me back in.  Race, racism, race baiting, race profiling, race walking, race horses, race for the cure, emb-race the suck—enough already!  It’s time that we as a culture dug deep, looked within, and somehow found the strength to stop being so stupid.

The latest manufactured media hullabaloo is about the race of Santa Claus.  That’s right, Santa Claus.  And it all started with Slate blogger Aisha Harris.

Who?

Exactly.

Aisha got everybody riled up by saying that Santa should be a penguin.

A what?

Exactly. Continue reading →

I Love Making Up Non-Fiction

About a year ago I waxed eloquent in Pulitzer-winning fashion about my favorite fiction books.  Since then I have been swamped with an e-mail asking about my favorite non-fiction books, to which I have been hesitant to respond because non-fiction books are hard—especially when being thrown at you for taping the end of the Alabama-Auburn game over one’s wedding video.

In my defense, I have already watched the end of that game way more often than any wedding video.

And in retrospect, my defense is perhaps not as strong as I had anticipated.

The problem with ranking non-fiction books is that when you combine the sheer number of categories with varying personal tastes you almost have a possibility for every time Lorde is played on the radio.  Continue reading →

Save the Animals! Ban Environmentalists!

I remember as a kid listening to ‘Animal Stories,’ a regular feature on WLS Radio in Chicago whereon two DJs known as ‘Uncle Larry’ and ‘Li’l Snot-nosed Tommy’ would bring all the low-information voters up-to-date on actual happenings in and around the monarchial animal kingdom.  Usually, said stories consisted of how a certain animal came to meet its unfortunate and untimely death in a bizarrely humorous and/or particularly grisly manner.

For example, Uncle Larry might tell Li’l Tommy about how the key to the city was given to a cat for saving its owner’s life then at the ceremony, the cat scratches the mayor as it is being held up to the crowd and in painful surprise is subsequently dropped into an operating wood chipper; or maybe how a black bear was shot by a neighborhood-watching brown bear who was reported on the news as being a polar bear further fomenting the whole bear-relations situation to where it was unbearable. Continue reading →