Of All the Words We Should Ban…Really?

So the latest word we can’t use for females is the ‘b’ word.  No, not that ‘b’ word; that one is still okay.  The other one.  ‘Bossy.’  Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (no relation to Andy Samberg) has started a campaign to ban the word ‘bossy’ from our absurdly language-dependent culture.  She claims that the adjective discourages girls from pursuing leadership rolls wherein they can actually be bossy and tell people what words they can and cannot use.

If you ask me, which nobody does for obvious reasons, this whole thing is kind of like the anti-bullying movement that is bullying us into not bullying or congresspersons staying up all night and burning the midnight oil to tell us to stop using so much energy or Al Gore flying around in his private jet to get us to reduce our carbon emissions or Al Sharpton making $5 million a year by telling us how oppressed he is or….You get the idea: we are being bossed into banning ‘bossy’.

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

Am I Racist if I Stay Home on Black Friday?

Here we are in Nickname Week again: Thanksgiving Thursday followed by Black Friday followed by Small Business Saturday followed by Sleep It Off Sunday followed by Cyber Monday followed by TIMMY Tuesday et cetera, et cetera, advertisement nauseam.

Thursday is the actual holiday that is causing this moniker mayhem.  It is known as Thanksgiving, or as they say in Texas, THANKS-giving.  Of course, they say a lot of things in Texas you don’t really hear elsewhere, like PO-lice and GUN rack.  Be that as it may, I will try to arise from my turkey coma long enough to pass off as this week’s post a few reflective reflections to test your reflexes.

Thanksgiving was first declared a holiday by George Washington, but credit is usually given to Abraham Lincoln because he freed the slaves and wore a really cool hat.  Continue reading

Shouldn’t Veterans’ Day Be March Fourth?

This past week was Veterans’ Day here in America and, as always, it brought to the fore awareness of correct apostrophe usage.   Veteran’s Day was originally established as “Armistice Day” to commemorate the aptly-named Treaty of Versailles being signed in the Palace of Versailles outside the town of Versailles but was later changed to Ve’terans Day to recognize all the new and improved veterans after they realized that The Great War that was The War to End All Wars wasn’t actually that great and didn’t end all wars at all but instead caused a number of follow-on wars and thus created more veterans that needed recognizing.

And so traditionally on Veterans D’ay, the government shuts down in such a way that doesn’t even make the news and people get together to post gratitudinal platitudes on Facebook.  Being a veteran myself, I received a number of thank-yous for my ‘service’ that included keeping America safe for democracy, defending the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, and seeing how many foreign-made beverages I could get past the customs agent. Continue reading

Most People Just Celebrate Halloween for the Boos

It won’t be long now and the neighbor kids will be running across my lawn and, under the approving eye of their loving parents, practice extortion.  They call it trick-or-treating, but everyone knows it’s just a huge shakedown.  Here I am a grown man and I have to shell out a Jujube so some little six-year old brat doesn’t unload the leftover tomatoes from his grandpa’s garden on my screen door?  What kind of sick tradition is this?  I don’t even know what a Jujube is.

It turns out that the tradition of Halloween is one of those Christian origin things that people prefer to ignore the origin of…like science, or equality, or torturing people to get them to recant—oh wait; everybody remembers that last one.  It’s true, though.  Halloween is a religious observance; something about remembering all the saints and martyrs who died of hypoglycemia.  But don’t tell the politically correct secular police or they might get all hissyfitted into a new pair of whinypants and we’d have to start calling it Holidayween and kids would no longer be allowed to ‘cross’ the street to trick-or-treat. Continue reading