Today I am haunted by yesterday and the tragic death of Playwright Wendy Wasserstein. She died of lymphoma at the age of 55. Her sister died of breast cancer at 60. Wendy, unmarried, left behind a six-year-old daughter named Lucy Jane who was born three months premature and weighed 1-pound, 12-ounces at birth.
I have resisted posting about this topic because I didn't want to encourage even more hate on the web, but now that some time has passed and more protections have been set in place, I am prepared to tell you on January 16, 2006 -- Martin Luther King, Jr. Day in America -- something awful happened here.
A friend of mine claims once a woman reaches the age of 21 she is free game for any free man even if she's "taken."
His reasoning is if a woman is smart and talented and beautiful she will not be unattached long because a man will hunt her down and lock her up like his property in a relationship or a marriage.
Have you noticed a creeping rise in Image Spam flooding your Inbox?
Image Spam is the newest wave of Spam where the Spammers send you a text image selling sex pills and penis extenders and such that looks like text but the Spam is really an image file pretending to be typed text. Sometimes some innocuous real text is included with the image to trick Spam filters that may be looking for small image-only emails.
Writing a letter of recommendation is usually an ordinary experience, but there are times when writing such a letter can become a tar pit of emotion and psychic distress. You feel suspended in amber as you search for the right phrase to recommend a person who deserves no recognition.
Are you required -- by moral pitch or professional bitumen -- to write a letter of recommendation even if that person did not live up to your expectation or the requirements of the task?
When we moved to New York twenty years ago from Nebraska -- after first deferring through Washington, D.C. for a year -- we rented a giant, three axle, Ryder truck for the price of a van -- they were out of vans when we arrived with our prepaid reservation -- and we motored into the muggy urban core of the Big Apple by driving down the wrong way of a one way sliver of Riverside Drive near Columbia University in the repressive heat of a mid-August afternoon.
It is not enough today to "do your best" or to "try" or to "make a go of it" because all those phrases indicate you did not set out what you intended to accomplish.
In America, "trying" has unfortunately replaced "getting it done" for many of our young people and that is a frightening watershed event in the marking moments of our history as a nation.
We all hate Internet Explorer 6.0 as a web browser because it is slow and clunky and unfriendly. Unfortunately, most of the world uses Internet Explorer because it is bundled for free with Windows and so we, as content providers, must deal with that horrible fact of how we are experienced throughout the world.
When a person says to you without provocation, "I am a good person" that is your cue to politely excuse yourself from the room and run hard in the opposite direction because you are about to get scammed or harangued or lectured.
One lesson young women know, but can never quite learn, is how many young men misunderstand kindness from a woman as affection.
The difference between kindness and affection are bright and clear. Kindness is what you should extend to every person. Affection is reserved for intimate reciprocal relationships where the affection expressed is given and not demanded.
Young men are anxious to connect to young women.
Do you have a tattoo? If yes, why did you decide to get your first tattoo and how many do you have now? Are they all in color or are most of them black and grey? Are you desecrating your body with tattoos or are you celebrating it instead?
If you don't have a tattoo why have you decided against forever marking your skin?
I was finally able to see the new Willy Wonka movie starring Johnny Depp and I was incredibly disappointed. Johnny Depp is no Gene Wilder and Tim Burton is no Mel Stuart. Johnny Depp's Willy Wonka is a trans-gender, Carol Channing-like, homoerotic child-lover whereas Wilder's Wonka was touching and human and funny and delightful.
Depp's Wonka lusted after childhood while Wilder's Wonka found the wonderful in children. Burton's movie is dark and evil. Stuart's movie is bright and dream-like. The songs, acting and script are better in the Wilder version. The Depp version is maudlin and modern and if you've seen Wilder's original you will only be disappointed in the pale remake.
I am still undecided if Dick Clark's return to television on New Year's Eve was exploitive, sad or brave. It was probably a mix of all three but that's a coward's analysis so I will pick a vein and rip it open.
Do men or women better clean a house?
When I clean the bathroom it takes ten minutes and I think it looks great! When my wife cleans the bathroom it takes several hours and it looks spectacular!
I believe we both do an outstanding job; my beloved wife, however, believes "her way" is the only way and when I ask her to teach me her cleaning secrets she says, "I shouldn't have to tell you" to which I then reply, "I guess you'll have to live with my great 10 minute cleaning job"; that comment results her not speaking to me for the next several hours.
Frankly, I think she's jealous I can do in 10 minutes what takes her 18 times longer to accomplish!
The 2006 midterm elections are our nearest hope for relief from the constrictive conservative religious agenda that is wrenching our freedoms against us and returning us to a time when things were perceived as better and morally old-fashioned.
Are the Nixon lies the same as the Bush lies?
Or is one worse than the other?
Have a great New Year!
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