July 3rd – Discovering Lewis & Clark

July 10th – Romper Room

July 17th – The Doctor Will See You Now

July 24th – The Pink Slip

July 31st – Thumper

August 7th – Pick Up the Pieces

August 14th – Mad Man

August 21st – Lawnmower Man

August 28th – Dude, Where’s My Brain

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. We’ll be back with fresh cooking for the Laughable Feast table on September 4th.

Pick Up the Pieces

Can I tell you something?

I shouldn’t admit this, but I’m old enough to remember buying furniture that was not only delivered to your door, it was actually carried inside and placed wherever you wanted it. And it looked exactly like what you bought in the store.

This miracle of modern convenience not surprisingly began when a furniture maker made furniture. These carefully crafted creature comforts were then whisked away for display in the showroom of a furniture dealer to be fawned over by anyone and everyone – from recent college graduates looking to furnish a tiny studio apartment to well-heeled older folks redecorating their Cape Cod vacation home.

The recent grads probably had to put their Murphy bed on ‘layaway’ since their credit score was the same as their body temperature, but however purchased, the pieces were delivered and ready for immediate use. Because they were fully assembled. Miraculous, right?

I first learned of this complex commercial system observing my parents and was able to successfully use it myself when I reached adulthood and was granted a modest line of credit by the good people at Visa. Real furniture, at least anything you could actually sit on or sleep in or would hold your haute couture collection, did not come cheap. But the whole setup seemed like a good business model and worked well for centuries – people making furniture, people buying furniture, and people using furniture until it was so worn out or out of date it was embarrassing to host parties.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

I don’t want to alarm anyone who’s been out of the furniture market, but at some point, in the not too distant past, furniture makers stopped making furniture. I’m not kidding.

Oh, they kept right on making the parts necessary to make furniture, they just stopped short of that critical last step in the production process when they would assemble the product they intended to sell. I’m not sure exactly when this occurred because I either was not buying furniture at that time or more likely was led repeatedly by my wife, Lori, into one of the handful of remaining stores that dealt in rare and expensive assembled furniture. But it happened. My question is not when this happened, but why.

I had heard about IKEA and it sounded innocent enough. Some of our friends had been there and bought stuff, and there were murmurings at cocktail parties about this magic kingdom where you could put together a room – an entire room if one can imagine – with an ensemble of stylish, modern furniture that didn’t require a bank loan. I’d also heard about the meatballs, but I must’ve missed the murmurings about having to build the furniture yourself.

Now don’t get me wrong. Although I’m not jingoistic about my heritage, I’m mostly Swedish by descent and am immensely proud that a capitalist company was able to spawn in and then free itself from the suffocating democratic socialism of Sweden to conquer the world of furniture. I’m just pissed that they don’t fucking assemble the furniture.

And at some point this concept of inexpensive unassembled furniture metastasized from a benign tumor of trendiness, one that afflicted only the truly impoverished or fiercely frugal, into a malignant cancer that invaded and incapacitated an entire industry of furniture makers and the millions who depend on furniture for comfort and convenience in their daily lives.

I guess I was blessed with a strong immune system because I was able to ward off this disease for more than a decade. But it was inevitable that I would succumb to something so virulent, and about eight years ago, at Lori’s virulent insistence, I found myself standing at the massive entrance to an IKEA store. We had spent an hour finding a parking spot and walking to the entrance, but that’s another story.

Within seconds of entry, I found myself skipping merrily down the yellow arrow road, arm in arm with my wife, and discovered a kinship with the cowardly lion I’d never felt before.

There were no barriers of any kind on either side of the yellow arrows, and no security guards to correct your path should you stray, but some unseen force kept us glued to them as it led us deeper and deeper into the belly of the beast.

I fought off waves of rebellious thoughts and discarded various plans to escape, and after half an hour realized if I had stepped off the path I’d have been lost for a week. Or worse yet entirely missed the bath section.

Our tour of IKEA’s multi-level showroom, including some very focused but extensive comparison shopping of numerous items I didn’t know we needed or wanted, took almost two hours. It would’ve been longer if we’d stopped for meatballs, but it was mid-morning and I generally don’t eat meatballs until after noon. Lori had selected a large number of items to purchase, some of which were small enough to fit in our dumpster-sized shopping cart and fully assembled. Such as the towels.

The larger items, heretofore known as furniture, were represented only by red tags she had taken from various displays. I assumed this was so we could present them at checkout and an efficient team of Nordic body builders would appear promptly with our prized possessions. I was wrong.

First, we had to find them ourselves in a warehouse the size of Delaware. Most of you have been to IKEA and I will spare you further detail of the visit, but after locating the items, wrestling them onto a small flat-bed truck, negotiating the crush of furniture pilgrims massed at the checkout gates, wrestling them into our compact car, escaping the parking lot, wrestling them out of our compact car and up the elevator into our apartment, we stood and proudly surveyed what we now owned.

A large pile of large boxes. And some towels.

Mission accomplished, right? Again, most of you have fought this battle – if not you’ve probably ordered unassembled furniture from Amazon or Wayfair or god forbid Overstock – so you can shout out the answer to my rhetorical question.

First, we cut up the boxes, made five trips to recycling, and disposed of enough Styrofoam to fill five IKEA shopping carts.

Already exhausted, we were now confronted with a slightly smaller pile of odd-shaped pieces of particle board covered with thin veneers of a shiny substance, bags full of bags full of odd-looking hardware, and an instruction book devoid of instructions save for page after page of diagrams with lots of letters and numbers and arrows whizzing around.

Skipping ahead to Step 14 – we progressed slowly without incident to Step 13 but had to retreat to Step 5 because we attached an R to an L instead of the L to the R – we finally stood back to admire the finished set of drawers, none of which opened or closed quite the same, wiped our sweaty brows with the fully-assembled towels, poured ourselves each a very full glass of wine, and had a good cry. And that was just the first piece of furniture.

Late that night, we took stock of what we had – three chests of drawers, two bedside tables, a tall cabinet for the bathroom, a TV stand, two hernias, ten bloody knuckles from using the miniature Allen wrench, and more sharp pains and dull aches than we could count. All in places we’d never had them before.

The good news is we saved tons of money by shopping at IKEA. I’ll pause here for a moment while you have a good laugh. The fact is, you can get reasonably priced meatballs there, but you’re paying basically the same price for the furniture as back when furniture was sold as furniture. And even if there were modest savings, had I known what the day and evening were going to be like, I would’ve happily paid a thousand dollars more to have our furniture come fully assembled and delivered. And a hundred bucks on top of all that for some meatballs and another couple bottles of wine.

But back to my question of why. It seems to me that other industries have survived and even thrived while still absorbing the crippling cost of assembling their products before selling them. Why not furniture? Did they think it would be easier for us to do it? Maybe for some of you it is. Heck, I’ve even had people tell me they like assembling their own furniture, and frankly I think they’re nuts. So, maybe they thought they were doing us a favor. Or, did they think we’re just stupid? Okay, don’t answer that one.

Anyway, it’s not hard to imagine some villainous furniture maker twirling his moustache and snickering at the thought of selling his wares for the same steep price while making us assemble them ourselves. And pick them up at his warehouse or pay a fortune for shipping. Bwahahahaha!

So, this is where we are. I’ve managed to work through the shock, denial and grief, and have finally found acceptance. I’ve even purchased an adult Allen wrench, and haven’t had to backtrack in the instruction book since the debacle with the dresser. I’m reasonably sure I’ll survive making my own furniture, but what really scares me is what’s next? Are we soon to start assembling our own major appliances? And if putting together a refrigerator is such a snap, why not our own computers and cars? Or meatballs?

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

The summer lineup is as follows:

July 3rd – Discovering Lewis & Clark

July 10th – Romper Room

July 17th – The Doctor Will See You Now

July 24th – The Pink Slip

July 31st – Thumper

August 7th – Pick Up the Pieces

August 14th – Mad Man

August 21st – Lawnmower Man

August 28th – Dude, Where’s My Brain

I hope you all have a wonderful summer. We’ll be back with fresh cooking for the Laughable Feast table on September 4th.

The Doctor Will See You Now

Can I tell you something?

I just qualified for Medicare a while back. You don’t need to know how far back, but that’s good, right? Sure I have supplemental insurance to cover most everything that actually goes wrong, and there are a few co-pays to cough up, and even within the byzantine Plan D there’s still this donut hole I could fall through, but other than that, I sleep soundly at night – except when I get up because my prostate heard something downstairs – knowing that my medical needs are covered and my well-being is insured and backed by the full force of the United States government. It’s of great comfort to know that healthcare is a basic right in America, and everyone is entitled to it as long as they’re nearly dead.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Prior to achieving exalted status as a senior citizen, my healthcare costs were covered by private insurance companies that my employers – which in some cases was me – negotiated with for group coverage and then generously paid half of the premiums. Or not.

This is the system in which most Americans have received healthcare for decades. Some of that care actually got paid for by the insurance companies, but only after we’d satisfied large annual deductibles, and if we hadn’t exceeded out-of-pocket maximums, and then only if we didn’t discover we’d been denied coverage in the first place because of some pre-existing condition.

It’s often said we have the best healthcare system in the world. Mostly this is said by doctors, hospital administrators, pharmaceutical and insurance company executives, and all the politicians whose pockets are lined with our premiums. It may be because they actually believe it, but more likely because there are almost four trillion dollars available to keep their golf carts gassed up.

My own belief is that we may arguably have the best doctors and hospitals in the world, but if millions of people have no insurance, and millions more can’t afford care even with insurance, then we don’t have a good system.

The simple fact that every other first-world country provides high-quality, single-payer healthcare at no cost to its citizens, for roughly half the per-person cost of ours, and with better outcomes, seems to validate my belief.

But what about Obamacare, you ask. What about it? Joe famously whispered to Barak it was a big fucking deal when he signed it into law. Maybe it was before all the tea partyers, self-described patriots, and aforementioned politicians on the take eviscerated the Affordable Care Act and made it unaffordable. Now it’s a big fucking joke.

You dear readers will want to sit down before I tell you this, but due to a poorly timed departure from gainful employment, and just prior to reaching old age, I went three long years with no health insurance at all.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking omigawd that’s crazy, why would you do that?! Still seated? Because I had taxable income at the time, and the best deal I could get on the exchange was $800 a month for minimal coverage with a $2,500 deductible. In other words, I could enrich some insurance company to the tune of thirty thousand clams over three years and still pay all normal medical expenses out of my own pocket. The thought alone made me sick, so I declined.

To be fair, it should be noted that because of Obamacare there are now no questions about pre-existing conditions – I’ve had three hip replacements and that would’ve previously disqualified me for coverage of any and all medical procedures save for a flu shot – but even insurance companies and right-wing politicians now freely admit the practice was so egregiously greedy, evil, and inhumane it should be banned. At least until enough right-wing politicians control Congress and the ACA is finally repealed. But how did they get away with that one for so long? It’s as if a Vegas casino refused to cash your chips because you suffered from the pre-existing condition of dumb luck.

Back to my story of woe, it’s true that if I’d had a heart attack or stroke or was hit by a bus, I would’ve been in a bad spot. Not due to lack of insurance, but because of the heart attack or stroke or bad bus driving.

Thank the lord nothing like that did happen, but if it had I would’ve done what every other red-blooded American without health insurance does – gone to the emergency room, stayed in the hospital, not paid any of the bills, and declared bankruptcy. Which, if you were wondering, is one of the reasons why we spend more than twice as much as other countries on healthcare. And have rampant homelessness.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

I’m a scofflaw and a ne’er-do-well as many of you already know. I’m sorry if I offended your sensibilities and I’m not at all proud of the episode. I wish it hadn’t happened, but not having any health insurance, and consequently not wanting to avail myself of expensive healthcare, led me to an unexpected, counterintuitive and rather profound epiphany.

We worry too much about our health. And we go to the doctor too much. And urgent care and the emergency room and the hospital too much. Way too much.

It really wasn’t all that long ago, before the advent of so many medical miracles, that we got sick or hurt and then got well or didn’t, and when we didn’t some kindly old dude would come by the house, console the family, and say there wasn’t anything more he could do. Lives were cut short then that surely could be extended in this day and age, but there was a homespun humanity to our healthcare and people died at home in the arms of loved ones, not in hospitals on ventilators. And we sure as shit saved a lot of money. A quarter of all healthcare spending is in the last year of life. One that is often miserable.

It doesn’t matter how much we exercise, eat right, or assiduously avoid introducing foreign and toxic substances into our bodies, because we’re human, ipso facto we’re gonna die.

If we treat every ache and pain and sniffle as a life-threatening illness, and take exorbitantly expensive drugs for every moderate to severe affliction, and spend our final days suffering in a hospital bed only to buy ourselves a little more time, are we any better off than the farmer in the dell who died peacefully if a bit before his time?

It’s not like I had a choice, and I was very lucky, but ultimately, I was surprised to find embracing a more holistic and even primitive approach to my own health turned out to be, well, healthy. Mentally at any rate. I’m not exactly in my salad days and seeing the dessert tray has a way of making mortality less of an abstraction, but I still found it to be an ironic revelation that accepting death was actually the sine qua non for enjoying life.

If we think of our existence on this mortal coil as nothing more than a daily struggle to see how long we can live, we will never realize how well we can live.

I’m not moralizing or proselytizing, though it may sound like it. It’s your life and you can approach it however you see fit. If you feel like you should seek care for some heretofore unseen or unfelt malady – spoiler alert: those happen more frequently when you hit Medicare age – go see a doctor if you want, urgent care or the emergency room if you must, but whatever you do, don’t go on WebMD. Talk about a bad healthcare system. You can stub your toe and on WebMD you’re just ten clicks away from diagnosing yourself with pancreatic cancer.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Author’s Note: This is a repost from two years ago but honestly one that should run every single day. Happy Mother's Day to all you moms!

Can I tell you something?

During the Civil War – the one back in the 1800s, not the one now – an intrepid woman named Ann Jarvis formed ‘Mother’s Day Work Clubs’ which visited encampments for both the Union and the Confederacy to improve sanitation and prevent disease outbreaks, notably typhus.

And how awkward would it have been for your mother to show up on the front lines?

“Mom! What’re you doing here?”

“We’re just going to tidy up a bit, sweetie. This place is filthy. Are those your socks?”

After the war, Ann organized a ‘Mother’s Friendship Day’ to reunite families torn apart by the conflict and help heal a deeply divided nation. Much the same way as a Trump rally does today.

This brave and indefatigable woman died in 1905 and her daughter Anna – a clever child-naming strategy – established ‘Mother’s Day’ on May 9th of that year to honor and celebrate Ann’s life well lived.

This commemoration of love continued and was first officially celebrated in May of 1908 at St. Andrew’s Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton, West Virginia. Obviously, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree because Anna campaigned tirelessly over the next few years to see Mother’s Day observed across the country, and even around the globe. In 1910, West Virginia made it an official day of remembrance, and the U.S. Congress followed suit in 1914 by unanimous vote – the last time it’s believed that happened – making Mother’s Day a national holiday on the second Sunday in May.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Back in the days when Anna was running the show, Mother’s Day was celebrated rather piously by going to church and having family dinners. White carnations, Ann’s fave flower, were commonly worn and distributed to friends and family.

Soon, evidently because demand outpaced supply of the white kind, the tradition evolved and people whose mother was still alive wore pink carnations, and white only if mom had kicked the bucket.

Naturally, as is the case with all holidays of the national variety, advertisers and retailers came to see it solely as an opportunity to make a shit ton of money, and Mother’s Day has now become so heavily commercialized it’s earned the title of a ‘Hallmark Holiday’.

Aside from the booming card and carnation business, restaurants have made a killing by guilt tripping anyone who dares make their mother stay home and cook on her special day, salons and spas promote pampering mom with mani-pedis while plying her with multiple mimosas, and not to be left out, clothing and home beautification retailers stuff our inboxes with deals we can’t refuse unless we want to live with the undying shame of being ungrateful and ungracious spouses and children.

This has gotten so out of hand that celebrating Mother’s Day has even been co-opted by auto racing with multiple events on her special weekend because nothing says ‘thank you mom’ like watching roaring cars make hundreds of left turns interrupted only by endless yellow caution flags and the occasional fiery crash.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

I really don’t think there should be a Mother’s Day. Stay with me.

It’s fine that we dedicate one day a year to fathers because in my opinion that’s all they deserve. When you consider the average dad’s contribution to conception, childbearing, birthing, and rearing – basically it boils down to getting lucky, handing out cigars, and teaching the kids to pull their finger – one seems like plenty.

But I think every day should be Mother’s Day. Considering all the unseen and unsung work they do for us, it’s the least we should do.

I lost my mother in 1982, and my wife Lori lost hers in 2014. We never had children, so the occasion is not a big deal in our home, but we do deeply appreciate what our mothers did for us and stand in awe of those who still wear the pink carnation.

Happy Mother’s Day to all you moms reading this. I hope you have a wonderful day of rest and relaxation and receive really cool gifts and great food and drink and don’t have to lift a finger or pull one. Or, God forbid, watch a NASCAR race.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I play the lottery. I don’t play big, but my wife and I usually have a ticket for Oregon’s Megabucks or Powerball, or sometimes both. If we win anything at all, it’s often a free ticket for the next drawing, but occasionally a few dollars, or a handful of times we’ve won a hundred or more. The vast majority of times when I scan the ticket it reads, “Sorry Not a Winner.” Thanks, I already knew that. I don’t care to keep track or even hazard a guess as to how much we’ve squandered over the years playing the lottery, but I imagine we could’ve bought a new water heater instead.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Millions of Americans play the lottery and the numbers have been increasing every year over the past two decades, with just shy of $110 billion spent in 2025.

About one in five people never play and good for them. With chances of winning roughly one in 292,200,000, you have to have a few bats in your belfry to spend even a dollar on a ticket, but the chance to win very big while risking very little has powerful appeal.

Which is why one in ten people play weekly, like me, and another one in five buy in monthly or semi-monthly. Roughly half of all citizens of legal age play at least once in a while, but typically only when the jackpots get jaw-droppingly big. Evidently because $40 million just isn’t enough.

There are six different national lotteries in the U.S. with Powerball and Mega Millions the two biggest. They’re offered in almost all jurisdictions where state-sponsored gambling is allowed, and most states also offer their own games of varying sizes and prizes.

The only states where you can’t buy a ticket are Alabama, Alaska, Hawaii, Utah, and oddly enough Nevada where the casino industry has lobbied the lottery to death.

New York sells the most followed by California and Texas, which makes sense, and North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming sell the least, which also makes sense because, as we know, the deer and the antelope play, but evidently not the lottery.

About one in three players either have some sort of system or algorithm they use to gain an edge, or a combination of their lucky numbers, birthdays, anniversaries, numbers of favorite athletes, height, weight, body mass index, etc. But the other two thirds, of which I am one, eschew any propitious program of prognostication and pick the ‘quick-pick’ option, letting the machine spit out randomly selected numbers so we can blame it for the losing choices.

The biggest prize ever won was $2.04 billion by a lucky son-of-a-gun named Edwin Castro. Winners have the option of taking the whole amount in the form of a 25-year annuity or cashing out about half of the prize, which Edwin did, so after taxes he had to scrape by on half a billion.

He still had enough in his pocket to buy huge houses in his hometown of Altadena, California, on Maui, and one in the Hollywood Hills which burned down in early 2025, proving that karma can be a bitch. There have been other winners claiming jackpots in the nine-figure range, many eight-figure prizes, and many, many seven-figure payouts, all of which I’m sure felt like manna from heaven.

Almost half of all jackpot winners keep their job and only half of those over 55 retire, which frankly I find to be bizarre and think that after buying a new pickup and painting the porch they should be forced to give the rest of it back.

A majority of the lucky bastards buy a new home, a quarter of them move to another state or even country, and one in five take a vacation abroad. Happily, almost two thirds recognize their newfound noblesse oblige and donate some of it to charity, and almost all share it with family and friends. Sadly, over $2 billion in prize money goes unclaimed every year and one can only imagine the tragic stories behind all those winning tickets that ended up in the washing machine or garbage.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

The National Council on Problem Gambling claims there are about two million people in the U.S. who suffer from a severe gambling disorder, and another 4-6 million with moderate but still troublesome addictions. But less than 10% of gamblers admit they have a problem or seek help, so the numbers are likely much higher. And since an astonishing 86% of all profits come from the 5% with hardcore addictions, there can be no argument gambling is a huge problem for people without the will to stop, or even slow down.

The most addictive games are those with instant outcomes like electronic gambling machines ubiquitous in bars and taverns which tempt players with a seemingly endless variety of outlandish slots games, or just good, old-fashioned video poker.

I have no familiarity with computer apps but evidently the so-called ‘loot boxes’ embedded in many on-line video games nowadays offer the same kind of rapid results people become addicted to. Casino table games also deliver a dose of dopamine on the spot, Keno keeps it coming every few minutes, and sports betting has a lot of fans hooked too, although they have to wait, like, forever to tear up the ticket, or at least until the outcome of the game is determined.

Scratch Off cards are the biggest sellers with nearly $270 spent per capita – these can’t be too fast paced or your hand will cramp. Playing the lottery for big jackpots means having to wait a whole day or even a week to learn the result and that evidently kills the joy for folks who are prone to problem gambling.

I’m no angel and I’ve played video poker on occasion, and Keno, and some Scratch Offs – typically at Christmas if they show up in my stocking – and I do like to play blackjack when I visit a casino which isn’t very often, but thankfully I have a functioning circuit breaker when it comes to gambling and don’t chase my losses and dig in my pocket or hit the ATM to throw good money after bad.

But while not nearly as addictive as the games I mentioned, and no more than a fatuous divertissement for the vast majority of people who play, the lottery is no charitable organization and does attract its fair share of problem gamblers. It is said that gambling of any kind preys on the weak of mind and flesh, and I would be evidence in support of that theory.

Also interesting to note, and perhaps revealing, is that almost three quarters of jackpot winners end up flat broke within five years. And even if they don’t lose it all, 90% of people who win keep playing. One would guess their thinking is that if they beat 292,200,000 to 1 odds once, they can do it again, but as weak as I am, give me even a measly million and I’ll retire from the sport.

Obviously, gambling can be a problem for some and not just the ones doing it – families and friends can also be harmed, even devastated. Some would like to outlaw any and all forms of legalized gambling which they see as a parasitic tax on the poor at best, and at worst an evil demon robbing people of not just their money but their souls. Organizations like the National Coalition Against Legalized Gambling and the Stop Predatory Gambling Foundation seek nothing short of ending legalized gambling in the United States. They have zero chance of succeeding in this effort, and even if they did, the games would go on and organized crime syndicates would win the lottery, so to speak, then state and local governments would have to come up with other ways to fund highways, schools and parks.

The American Gaming Association argues exactly those points, in part because they’re true but also because the AGA represents and lobbies for casinos and the legalized gambling industry. One can question the purity of their motives, but to be fair they do address the issue of problem gambling and their client businesses fund programs which offer help to addicts.

Whatever your sentiments, it’s a certainty that trying to save people from themselves is a fool’s errand. Folks are still going to gamble. Taking it out from under the neon lights and hiding it in back rooms would not only not solve the problem but benefit criminal elements of society.

What I really wanted to tell you is this.

I’m not defending gambling in this essay, nor am I condemning it. It’s no different than other vices which prey on the weak of mind and flesh in that many people don’t need it at all to live a fulfilling life, others can partake on occasion or even regularly in moderation with no ill effects, and sadly a small minority can’t control themselves and end up on the road to ruin.

As I said up front, my wife and I probably could now have a new water heater or other major appliance had we not pumped a few bucks into the machine regularly, but I’m not sorry. The truth is I spend a lot more on lattes than the lottery, and at the end of the day when I climb in bed it’s a small price to pay for the right to dream big.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Taking a break for Spring Break, and to celebrate our “100% victory” over Iran, even though they still have all their enriched uranium, an ayatollah in charge of a radical, repressive Islamic republic with even more reason to support global terrorism and attack us, control over the Straight (sic) of Hormuz, and the really good news is it has only cost us the lives of a dozen American servicemen and women, the lives and limbs of thousands of Iranian civilians including hundreds of children, the loss of all our allies’ trust, the moral authority we worked for two and a half centuries to establish, and about a billion dollars a day.

With any luck we’ll be back tanned and rested next Friday to give you the anticlimactic conclusion to the Let’s Go Europe adventure.

Photo Courtesty 429253621 | Pete Hegseth © Cpenler | Dreamstime.com

Can I tell you something?

I don’t own a gun. I never have and never will unless, well, I’m not even going to say it. My father had a Colt .45 handgun which was standard issue for the U.S. Navy during World War II, and he kept it unloaded in a bedside table to defend the family should the need arise with what amounted to a high stakes bluff. I was encouraged to handle the weapon a couple of times and remember being tasked with brandishing it whenever dear old dad was away and I inherited the responsibility of being ‘man of the house’.

I have fired a .22 rifle on a couple of occasions, and a shotgun once, on camping trips to Steens Mountain in remote southeast Oregon, but my only confirmed kills were some magazine pictures nailed to a tree, and one very unfortunate dragon fly.

I know this makes me sound unmanly and un-American, but the truth is I didn’t enjoy shooting a gun and still feel terrible about the dragon fly. I do want to stipulate that while I don’t like hunting – I don’t fish either, but that’s another story – guns are not anathema to me and I have no problem whatsoever with people using them, providing they do so safely and responsibly, and are killing animals not people, and primarily to eat them not mount on their wall. The truth is I will cook and eat damn near anything, so I don’t judge.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

As of this writing there are an estimated 400 to 500 million privately-owned firearms in the U.S. That it’s an estimate basically means we’ve lost count. And since the population now is about 350 million, there are way more guns than people, with 120.5 per 100 and roughly two for every adult.

Hold on to your Stetson because Texas has the most total guns with somewhere between 33 and 55 million, but virtually all the ruby red states have very high per capita rates of gun ownership. And as you would expect, virtually all the deep blue states have relatively low rates with more Subarus than guns.

To put things in global perspective, the country with the next highest per capita rate of gun ownership is the Falkland Islands with 66.7, and that’s probably only because there are huge arsenals left in case Great Britain decides to attack again. It should come as no surprise that many nations in the Middle East have high ownership because it’s a rough neighborhood, but even though it’s an armed camp, the rate is only in the 30s.

The vast majority of countries in the world have gun ownership rates in the low teens or single digits, and at the low end of the spectrum, South Korea has only 0.2 guns per 100 people. Christmas Island and Nauru have zero, but I believe they’re still working to perfect stone tools.

How could we have built such an impressive lead in gun ownership, you ask? For one thing, only Albania, the Czech Republic, Switzerland and Yemen guarantee the right to own a gun, and the United States is one of three countries in the world, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that have enshrined the right in their constitutions. On top of that, we are by far the largest manufacturer of guns and, aside from the nearly 20 million weapons produced and purchased domestically, we are responsible for almost half of all global arms exports. Uncle Sam, not Viktor Bout, is the Merchant of Death.

More importantly, however, a whole lot of Americans don’t just cherish their right to own a gun, or twelve, it is a force majeure they are obsessed by. I’m tempted to say they’re ‘gun crazy’ but that implies the gun also has a screw loose and that’s not fair. And whenever it’s suggested we’ve gone too far with allowing ownership of lethal weapons, these Constitutional scholars get red in the face and scream “2nd Amendment!”

For the record, the amendment in question reads – A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be abridged.

Never mind that text was written when we had just finished a war to free ourselves from a mad king – I know, but that’s another story too – and it seemed prudent to keep a few colonists armed in case George wasn’t ready to give up. And never mind that rifles of that era were able to fire one or two rounds per minute at most, as opposed to the 500-800 per minute today’s totally legal semi-automatic rifles, fitted with a totally legal ‘bump stock’, are capable of. You read that right. There’s also the ‘well-regulated’ part, but that doesn’t seem to resonate because many Americans believe they have the right to pack heat anytime and anywhere with no legal encumbrance.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

“Okay, your authorship, you don’t own a gun or even like them, but you can’t argue that the people who do, have no right to. Right? So what’s the problem?”

Again, I will ask readers to hold on to whatever hat they’re wearing, because scads of exhaustive studies have firmly established a correlation between high rates of gun ownership and high rates of gun deaths. Seems axiomatic to me but I guess it needed to be exhaustively studied.

Interestingly, the link with homicides is relatively weak, but it becomes incontrovertible and dramatic when also taking into account accidental gun deaths and suicides. For the record, there were approximately 38,760 gun-related fatalities in the U.S. last year, including over 1,200 children and teenagers killed and more than 3,200 more injured. My point being that gun ownership qualifies as not just a God-given right but a godawful threat to public safety.

Many other nations, recognizing the threat privately-owned firearms present, have tight restrictions on who can obtain a gun, of what type, where it can be kept and used. Japan, China, and the United Kingdom all have strict gun laws and correspondingly low rates of gun-related injuries and deaths.

Perhaps inspired by Kurosawa films, more people are killed in Japan with swords and knives than guns. Singapore has arguably the strictest laws where illegal possession of a gun is punishable by death, or if you have a good lawyer caning. But so is littering.

Given the constitutional right I mentioned earlier, it of course follows that the U.S. has among the laxest gun laws in the world. In fact, Yemen alone rivals us for allowing citizens to basically be one-man armies if they choose. Here in America, the only guns we are explicitly not permitted to own and carry are the fully-automatic kind – the aforementioned bump stocks legal in 34 states render the ‘fully automatic’ distinction meaningless – those altered to erase the serial number, and so-called ghost guns which can pass through metal detectors undetected.

I hope you still have a firm grip on your hat because it may shock you to learn that nine of the top ten states with the most loosey-goosey gun laws are in MAGA country including Montana, Mississippi, Idaho, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Wyoming, and West Virginia. The only real head scratcher is New Hampshire which hasn’t colored red in a presidential election since 2000 and has almost zero restrictions on gun ownership, yet a very low incidence of gun violence. Against humans at any rate.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

The right to keep and drive a car or truck is not enumerated in the Constitution, or even implied, but most Americans consider it their God-given right, nevertheless. Try to take away a man’s super-duty pick-up and you’ll likely get the same visceral or even violent reaction than if you tried to take away his gun. And I guarantee you he has a gun. Merely suggesting that he switch to a more fuel-efficient car or take public transportation so we might save the planet will likely elicit the same reaction. Yet despite this fervent belief that car ownership is next to godliness, we have enacted numerous laws to restrict our motor vehicle freedom. And this is because two to three-ton motor vehicles whizzing around at high rates of speed kill roughly the same number of people as guns every year and are a threat to – you guessed it – public safety.

As automobiles gradually replaced horses and buggies, and public officials gradually recognized the more serious menace they posed, New York became the first state to require motorists to register their vehicles in 1901, and Oregon made license plates a requirement in 1911. By 1918, registration and plates had become mandatory nationwide. All of this because it seemed like a good idea to know who owned and operated lethal weapons.

Possessing a license to drive was first required in Massachusetts and Missouri in 1903, and most other states quickly followed suit, but it did not become a national requirement until 1954 when South Dakota finally got the message. Rhode Island was first to admit that maybe not everyone should be behind the wheel and in 1908 began requiring drivers pass a test to obtain a license. Initially only a written exam, it quickly became apparent that a behind-the-wheel test of driving proficiency was needed as well, and in 1959 when obdurate South Dakota finally caved that also became a national requirement.

Carrying automobile liability insurance – this is actually for you not your car – was first required in Massachusetts in 1925 and is now required in 49 states. Because they obviously take their state motto ‘Live Free or Die’ seriously, only New Hampshire does not. Before you wag your finger at those granite heads, however, consider that they do require careless drivers to compensate for any financial losses they cause, which is basically the same thing except it denies insurance companies their God-given right to bleed people dry with high premiums.

All of this was great for verifying ownership, standardizing identification, and at least attempting to ensure basic driving competency and compliance with traffic laws, but did nothing to prevent injury or even death in the event of accidents. And what-do-you-know, there are a lot of those, so safety belts were devised and mandated for all new cars beginning in 1968. Initially just a lap restraint which kept your head from hitting the windshield but sometimes caused serious internal injuries, much safer three-point seat belts with shoulder harnesses became the requirement in 1973.

The last straw for many rock-ribbed ‘real’ Americans – which confirmed the paranoia they were living in a ‘nanny state’, sliding down a slippery slope to when the government would break down their garage doors and seize their precious automobiles – was when laws were enacted requiring people to actually use the seat belts.

Again, New York was first in 1984 and by 1996 ‘click-it-or-ticket’ laws were in force in 49 states. I don’t need to tell you which one still lets you drive free and die. Finally, driver-side air bags became mandatory in all new cars in 1989, and then, because riding shotgun shouldn’t be as dangerous as it sounds, passenger-side bags were added in 1998. Although these safety requirements are offensive to some, they have proven to be quite effective. In fact, federal and state nannies estimate that between 1968 and 2019, 457,000 deaths were prevented by seat belts and air bags.

What I really wanted to tell you is this.

The national average wait time at a DMV office is 35 minutes. That’s certainly not the one you or I go to where it’s around two hours, so I assume in a lot of places – obviously New Hampshire – people must mosey into the DMV and their number is called before they can even sit down and check their phones.

But regardless of the wait, we all do it. And we all know why. Because we don’t want to share the road with some idiot who can’t drive or won’t abide by the rules of the road. And most of us also pay through the nose for liability insurance because there are far too many idiots who simply can’t drive or won’t abide by the rules of the road.

The bottom line is we haven’t renounced our liberty to drive and, despite hyperventilating by all the don’t-tread-on-me types, we have endured over a century of legal restrictions on motor vehicles, and five decades of safety requirements, and to my knowledge not one person has had their car or truck seized by the government. Unless it was one of the idiots who killed someone driving drunk or was thankfully caught before they did and racked up more DUIs than they have guns. Being required to have a license and registration might cost a little time and a few bucks, but it has saved far more than a few lives.

So, my question is this. Why not guns?

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I’ve never sued anyone in my life, nor have I ever been sued, likely because I never worked for or with Donald Trump.

My personal belief is that most disputes can be avoided through better communication and almost all resolved entre nous by mutual agreement if both parties are willing to accept responsibility and agree to a settlement that, while not giving either party all they want, strikes a fair and equitable balance. But that would be possible only in an alternative universe because in this one there are far too many people like Donald Trump who sue others out of sheer animus or avarice, and deserve to be sued because they are lying, thieving, scumbags.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

There are more than 300,000 civil lawsuits filed every year in this country. And that doesn’t count the millions of cease-and-desist letters drafted which threaten lawsuits but don’t result in a court filing because somebody decided to, well, cease and desist whatever it was they were doing. And what they did or are still doing is known as a tort.

Anything rich, chocolatey and delicious can’t possibly be wrong in my book, but apparently these torts cause actual harm or loss to people. And although torts can involve a criminal offense as well, most lawsuits are civil wrongs that are adjudicated in a very uncivil manner.

Aside from chocolate, torts come in three different flavors – negligence, or failure to act with reasonable care like Steven Seagal; intentional, or deliberate harmful actions like anything the current administration does; and strict liability, a product or service which causes harm or loss regardless of intent like cigarettes and assault rifles.

The most common reasons people sue other people are personal injuries and contract or property disputes. Other popular reasons are divorce and child custody, business disputes, employment issues, civil rights violations, landlord and tenant turmoil, debt collection, product liability, and trademark infringement. Some suits ask only for a legal injunction to stop the alleged bad behavior, but the vast majority ask for monetary compensation. Sometimes a lot of it.

Despite being good fodder for television and movie drama, it may surprise you to learn that 98% of all suits are settled out of court. The reason is that unless you are awarded a very large sum of money by a jury, you’re likely to have legal bills which dwarf the size of your settlement making any judgment in your favor a Pyrrhic victory.

On top of that, if you take a civil suit all the way to trial and lose, which many claimants do, you might have to pay all of the court costs and defendant’s attorney fees to boot. And then you get to be the defendant because you’ll likely get sued for not paying.

But going one-on-one isn’t the only way to play the blame game. Class action suits address widespread issues and represent a group of people with similar claims, in many cases too small to claim individually but taken together represent some tangible and even grievous harm.

The most famous case and best example of this, and the largest class action settlement in history, was the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement in 1998 which awarded $206 billion in damages paid by the four major tobacco companies because they had poisoned people with cigarettes and pretended not to know that nicotine was highly addictive and smoke and tar caused lung cancer. Which they did. And had for a long time.

Most of us at some time have received some important looking letter from some important sounding law firm offering the opportunity to join some important class action against some important corporation guilty of some important tort. Usually the harm is not serious illness or death, but more likely dishonesty in advertising or mishandling private consumer information or miscalculating credit interest or payments. The cost to the company can be in the millions or even billions of dollars, but be warned that your claim will be settled for a bit less. I joined a class action in the 1990s against Visa for incorrect interest calculation, filled out a long form, supplied statements and other bank records, waited three years, and got a check for $1.73.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Civil lawsuits can and do make history, and not always for the right reasons. The notorious 1857 case of Dred Scott v. Sandford determined that African Americans weren’t U.S. citizens and had no legal standing, thereby protecting slaveholders and the practice of slavery.

Even after the Civil War and Emancipation Proclamation, the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case affirmed Jim Crow laws and held that racial segregation was perfectly legal. On the other side of history, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 outlawed racial segregation in public schools and started a steady march toward equal rights and justice for all.

And the band’s still marching.

Miranda v. Arizona in 1966 established the right to an attorney for anyone accused of a crime and prohibited self-incrimination, leading to mandatory readings of the so-called Miranda rights during all arrests. The next year in 1967 Loving v. Virginia struck down prohibitions on interracial marriage, and in 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges finally recognized the federal right of gay and lesbian couples to marry.

And certainly, the 1998 Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement served notice that corporations would have to take responsibility for products which harmed the health of and killed customers. Unless they manufacture guns of course, but that’s another essay.

What I really wanted to tell you is this.

People sue other people because people sometimes do bad things. Because they’re people. Or they sue because they’re petty or pugnacious or both. Or just because they think it’s easy money. But sometimes people sue not because of a cause célèbre like public health but for a contretemps or cavil so categorically stupid that it’s ample cause to start over again on another planet.

Prima facie evidence of how many frivolous lawsuits have been filed for all the wrong reasons are the warning labels attached to just about every product under the sun. Common sense should dictate that we don’t take medication we’re allergic to, or use a microwave to dry our pets, or hold the wrong end of the chainsaw, or eat urinal cakes, but evidently sense is not as common as you’d think.

But some lawsuits are so strikingly idiotic they merit mention individually. For example, a TV weatherman was sued by a viewer for giving a faulty forecast which caused her to be dressed improperly, subsequently catch a cold, and miss work. A Korean K-pop star was sued by a group of fans for being too handsome, which they deemed egregiously unfair. And an inmate sued the Utah Department of Corrections for religious discrimination claiming he was a Druid Vampire being denied the required regular ceremonial sex with a ‘vampress’.

My personal favorite is a man with a split personality who actually sued himself for religious discrimination. You can’t make this shit up. Oh, and the naked baby pictured swimming in a pool of money on the cover of Nirvana’s Nevermind album sued the band many years later for using him as child pornography. And asked for a pool of money.

In the food world, Subway has been sued because a foot-long sandwich was a few centimeters short of a foot, which not only is laughable but was probably thrown out of court for mixing the metric system with our Imperial one. A customer sued Burger King because he didn’t get his Whopper his way and it made him sick. Sonic Drive-In and Whataburger have been sued by the same man for ignoring a ‘no onions’ request. And, of course, McDonalds has been sued for all kinds of reasons ranging from ‘they serve unhealthy food which makes people fat and causes heart disease’ – now there’s a class action for you – to ‘putting too much pepper in a burrito’.

But in 1994 a woman named Stella Liebeck spilled hot coffee in her lap after leaving the drive-thru, sued Micky D’s because it was too hot, and was awarded $2.9 million in damages by a jury of her peers. You read that right.

The case was eventually settled out of court while on appeal, and the amount of the final settlement never revealed, but the case lives on in legal lore, and inspired a book and website called the True Stella Awards giving attention and proper credit to the most ludicrous lawsuits filed every year.

Finally, a man named Jonathan Lee Riches is enshrined in the Guinness Book of World Records for filing the most lawsuits in history with more than 5,500, including one accusing the publication of inflating the number which he insists is only 4,500.

I would be remiss, however, if I didn’t single out Donald Trump for dishonorable mention. Despite not holding the record, which he claims was stolen, Trump and his businesses – most of which are now bankrupt – were party to over 4,000 lawsuits between 1973 and 2016. So, I guess we have to thank him because as Charles Dickens once famously said, “If there were no bad people, there would be no good lawyers.”

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Author’s Note: I drafted this essay more than two years ago and have sat on it since for no particular reason, but the danger with that is in two years’ time technology has mutated to the point of being unrecognizable, even hilariously old-fashioned and obsolete. Social media is far from obsolete but it has changed in terms of its methodology to attract and keep users, also how and why they use it.

What led me to update and post this essay, however, is the trial currently underway of a 20-year-old woman who is suing Meta and YouTube claiming they intentionally addicting her to social media when she was six, which directly led to debilitating mental illness and ultimately contemplating suicide. It remains to be seen if Big Tech will be found liable for the harm their platforms cause, but the verdict is in. They do.

Can I tell you something?

It is well chronicled in these essays that I don’t own a smart phone and never have, and I have contempt for modern technology and means of communication. My obdurate attitude has more to do with inherent iconoclasm and a wide streak of stubbornness than any rational reasoning, but I simply don’t want to be connected 24/7 with everyone in the world. Not even my small world.

It logically follows then that I am not active on any social media platforms. First of all, I have a fear of heights and tend to avoid platforms of any kind, but I’m also not terribly social by nature. I do interact with friends and family, and clients as part of my job as a small business advisor, but I tend to nurture those relationships using my landline phone, or email from my desktop computer, or – imagine the inconvenience – by conversing with them face to face.

The real reason I don’t want a social media profile, though, aside from the certitude that long lost cousins, ex-classmates, ex-girlfriends, and wayward weirdos would find me and ruin my life, is I’m afraid I wouldn’t have any followers, and no one would like me. And that would be too much like high school.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

You didn’t ask, but I will now give you the complete history of social media. It won’t take long, however, because there isn’t much of it. This now ubiquitous phenomenon first appeared in 1997 when a platform called SixDegrees was launched, presumably by Kevin Bacon. Despite being rather primitive in form and glitchy in use, it eventually climbed to over 3 million users at its peak but was rapidly overtaken by more user-friendly platforms launched in the early 2000s, most notably MySpace and the unfortunately named Friendster.

LinkedIn came to be in 2002 so businesspeople could mislead others about their job prospects and accomplishments, then Facebook made its debut in 2004 and in surprisingly short order rendered MySpace a space exclusively for grandmothers wanting to see pictures of the grandkids. In 2005, YouTube started showing ill-conceived and poorly produced videos, and Twitter began filling the air with tweets beginning in 2006. Pinterest joined the party in 2008, followed by WhatsApp in 2009, Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011, Telegram in 2013, and TikTok three years later in 2016, and by that time the human attention span had officially been reduced to 280 characters and 15 seconds. There you have it.

There are now hundreds of social media platforms up and running, and 34 have at least 100 million active users. You read that right.

Facebook tops the list with a little over three billion, followed by YouTube with two-and-a-half. Insta and WhatsApp both boast two billion active users, with TikTok and WeChat claiming roughly one-and-a-half each. Rounding out the top ten are Telegram and SnapChat both with a little less than a billion, then Pinterest and X with half a billion users each.

It should be noted that Twitter has shed about a third of its users, not to mention three-quarters of its market value, since Elon Musk paid $44 billion for it in October of 2022, renamed it X presumably to honor his son X AE A-Xii, promptly fired half its workforce, eliminated existing content moderation, and virtually overnight rendered it a sexist, racist, right-wing sewer of disinformation and a sorry has-been on the social media scene. In fact, the day after Donald Trump was re-elected, X lost more than 100,000 active users and those folks sure as shit didn’t run to the unironically-named Truth Social site because only a measly half million there follow Trump’s turgid tweets.

Recent statistics show that 5.22 billion people now actively use social media, which is almost two-thirds of the planet’s population. If you count only the people who have internet access, a stunning 94.5% are active on one or more platforms, which puts me in the vanishingly small company of people who could use social media but don’t.

The average active user visits 6.8 different platforms every month and spends 2 hours and 19 minutes a day on them, which accounts for about 15% of their waking hours. The only demographic group showing a decline in active social media use is those 65 and older, which makes sense because they can’t see the little screen anymore.

Perhaps most telling is that social media has become so prevalent it’s now part of the gestalt and referred to by many as the ‘Fifth Estate’ along with the church, government, people, and the press – institutions that had to work hard for centuries to achieve estate status, not just a couple of decades.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

If so damn many people are using social media there must be some damn good reasons, right? I couldn’t imagine what they might be, so I took a deep dive in the Google pool and came back up with a treasure chest of current data.

The number one reason, cited by just over half of the active users surveyed, is keeping in touch with friends and family. Makes perfect sense and there’s nothing wrong with that. Disturbingly, number two on the list of reasons is killing time. When one thinks of all the ways one could kill time if one has time to kill and wants to kill it, one would think doom scrolling and watching puerile pet videos should be further down the list.

About a third of users say getting the news is important to them and depending which platform they’re on that can be a good thing or a very bad one. Another third claim they’re looking for specific content, and an equal number say they’re keeping culturally current because they don’t want to be doing, wearing, listening, or watching anything that’s five minutes ago.

Roughly a quarter cite shopping for products and services is a big draw, and I would imagine a significant percentage of these folks are the same ones who were just on some site keeping current. Rounding out the list, roughly a quarter of active users are watching live streams and sports, networking for business, or sharing and discussing opinions, also known as trolling.

Only about one-fifth surveyed admitted to following celebrities and influencers or posting pics, videos, and content about themselves. Which means the other four-fifths lied.

My perspective, which is informed by old-fashioned observation of people I see in cars, on the street, in restaurants and bars, grocery stores, walking on bucolic trails, sitting in bucolic parks, lying by picturesque pools, or at the beach on a beautiful day, is that they are actively using social media to distract them from driving so they can crash their car; distract them from walking so they can bump into parking meters and other pedestrians; avoid their spouses, lovers, friends and colleagues sitting with them while eating and drinking; watch a viral video while trying to remember why they’re at the store, or studiously avoid looking at beautiful, bucolic scenery.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

For all the benefits of social media – cute cats and dogs and the Arab Spring are the only ones that come to mind – there are plenty of flashing-red warning signals regarding the negative effects of its unregulated use, and especially overuse. Which if you’ll refer to a previous paragraph, pretty much the whole planet is guilty of.

Of particular concern is the damage done to young people, many in their teens, tweens, and even elementary school children, all of whom have never known a world without Facebook, Insta or TikTok.

Today, nearly 90% of screenagers report using social media every day. It’s no exaggeration to say that their social life is their phone and what they’re seeing and reading is not all harmless social scuttlebutt. You might ask what harm is there in posting selfies and videos and chatting with friends, but whether intended or not – and since we’re talking about teenagers, it probably is – the result is they’re consuming a steady stream of social comparison, pressure to conform, and shaming. David Foster Wallace, an American English professor, author and essayist who died in 2008 just as social media began to wrap its tentacles around the globe, once mused that, “you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.” Sadly, some young people don’t live long enough to come to that realization.

Since 2005, teen suicide rates have risen dramatically with the CDC reporting a more than 33% increase, and while no definitive link has been established, the Pew Research Center has released data suggesting that social media is the direct cause.

They found that a quarter of all teen users felt worse about their own life because of what they saw on social media, over a third felt pressured to post content to get a lot of likes and comments, more than four in ten felt the need to post confabulated content that makes themselves look good to others, and nearly half felt overwhelmed by the drama and cyberbullying. High school back in my day had a lot of the same kind of judging and shaming, but in the absence of smart phones and social media, nerds like me could sit in a corner of the cafeteria and ignore the snickering.

Recently a British writer devised something he dubbed the ‘Great Phone-Free Teen Challenge’ to see if teenagers could survive without their phones and social media for a month. A Mt. Everest-level challenge to be sure, and one which after a great deal of begging and badgering a dozen reluctant subjects agreed to accept. Not to beat a dead horse, but I think it’s illustrative of how deeply ingrained smart phones and social media have become in less than two decades that this little exercise wasn’t phone-free at all. In fact, these poor, young lab rats had full access to their smart phones for one hour a day, and unlimited use of a ‘light phone’ which allowed them to call, text, have group chats, play music, get directions, and make voice memos. All involved congratulated themselves on completing this ascetic ordeal, and I do as well, but seriously? This was a challenge?

To be fair, social media can help teens find community, but to be fair, the negative effects far outweigh the benefits. Social media has caused a catastrophic loss of life skills in younger Americans, and that does not augur well for our future.

Studies have shown a demonstrable loss of memory formation, conversational depth, analytical skills, and empathy, along with markedly increased anxiety. And all the major platforms have been aware of this for years and done nothing to change their algorithms because they fear it would reduce their bottom lines. Worse yet, to curry favor with the current occupant of the Gold House, tech titans Musk, Zuckerberg and others now consider content moderation just another tool used by the ‘cancel culture’ to censor right-wing voices hoping to make America white again. I’m just hoping for the House to be white again soon.

On a more adult level – this designation is debatable but I needed a segue – social media has effectively atomized our culture, divided our politics more so than any time since the Civil War, and although our democracy is still tenuously intact, it has aided and abetted nefarious forces bent on establishing autocratic Christian apartheid in this country. Whether you think the previous statement is hyperbolic hyperventilating or not, there can be no debate that social media is a largely unregulated medium of mendacity with appealing apocryphal articles masquerading as news.

This online anomie has created an ethical vacuum where the truth is entirely what you wish it to be. Malignant conspiracies now thrive in the open and believers who were not long ago small, cloistered coteries are now crowds. Camilla Tominey, editor for the esteemed British Daily Telegraph, goes so far as to say, “social media is a sewer occupied by faceless rats intent on infecting others with their disease of hatred.”

It is said that the future belongs to crowds, and not necessarily in the physical sense. People now flock together online where they share the same cultural values, political points of view, tastes and peculiar proclivities, or the firm belief that space lasers owned and operated by Jews are causing wildfires. Social media has created a new generation of pop culture parvenus who are successful in every visible way but have no sensitivity to art, no interest in history, and are indifferent to and ignorant of language, not to mention objective facts. And they will live in hives of concrete, glass, and steel on a diet of film, television, and social media. One objective fact which veers into the realm of inconvenient truth, is that the human brain is shrinking for the first time in recorded history. But that’s not surprising because we have outsourced many of its basic functions and to put it another way just don’t need to know anything anymore to get by.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

The good news, I suppose, is that social media has recently become less social. And that’s because people are so busy entertaining themselves with silly videos, or doomscrolling through dubious news feeds, that they care less about connecting with friends and family.

The bad news is that people are so busy entertaining themselves with silly videos, or doomscrolling through dubious news feeds, that they care less about connecting with friends and family.

If you prefer to see the glass half full, maybe most social media users are not being vicious and venal but just get a kick out of dunking on people. Obviously I see the drink half empty, but it’s time to end this essay so I’ll lighten up. I like others to like what I say and do as much as the next guy, but I think it’s fair to ask the question ‘aren’t we oversharing’? Isn’t a little bit of mystery about who we are and what we do not just intriguing but healthy?

To put it more simply, when everyone’s cards are on the table face up, the game’s over.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I’m old enough to remember The Jetsons. In case you’re not, it was a cartoon series that premiered in prime time on Sunday nights in the fall of 1962. And was cancelled in the spring of 1963 because nobody wanted to watch cartoons on Sunday night when they could be watching Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, or Ed Sullivan or Lawrence Welk. Being six at the time, I had no vote in our family’s television viewing but certainly would’ve opted for The Jetsons over The Prince and the Pauper, or Ed and Topo Gigio, or the Champagne Lady.

The show was a space-age version of The Flintstones featuring a family living in Orbit City and their zany adventures, all of which were only marginally funny if at all. The Jetsons included George the frazzled father, Jane the moxie mother, Judy the typical teenage daughter, Elroy the smart-aleck son, and Astro the goofy Great Dane.

But the character who really stole the show and delighted the handful of people watching on Sunday nights, and later the millions like me who watched when it went into Saturday morning syndication, was Rosie the robot maid. Rosie was hard-working, dutiful and dependable, and had a sweet disposition which made her the ideal nanny for Judy and Elroy.

Robots have existed in our imaginations since the dawn of the Industrial Age and been part of the literary and cinematic universe ever since. The first to appear in print was Tik Tok featured in Frank Baum’s 1907 book Ozma of Oz – Baum was a prolific author who wrote no less than 18 books about the mythical land of Oz, which is why most people considered him to be a loon – but what cemented robots’ central role in science fiction was Isaac Asimov’s 1950 masterpiece I, Robot, where he envisions a dystopian future when humans and robots struggle with themselves and each other to co-exist. The book features various kinds of robots, some purely functional, others telepathic, and even robotic politicians – with that Asimov eerily presaged the emergence of Ron DeSantis – and a vast robotic intelligence that takes over the world. It seems likely now he nailed that one too.

The first robot to hit the silver screen was the unfortunately named Boing Boing who coldcocks Harry Houdini in his 1919 silent movie The Master Game. Gort, the menacing 8-foot-tall robot in the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still, became the prototype for robotic presence in film and in many ways was the original Robocop.

Continuing the stupid sobriquet theme, Robby the Robot starred as a benevolent robot with artificial intelligence in the 1956 sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet. Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, also a sci-fi classic with the screenplay co-written by Isaac Asimov, depicted an artificial intelligence that wasn’t very benevolent. HAL was not a robot, but his oddly mesmerizing voice and menacing red eye imbued the onboard computer in command of the mission to Jupiter with the character of a robotic murderer.

On the lighter side of robots in moviedom, there have been many who were depicted as not murderous but generally of benefit to mankind, some even cute, lovable, or sexy.

Of course, the ones that immediately come to mind are C-3PO and R2-D2, the androids first introduced to us in George Lucas’ original 1977 Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, and who later starred in every episode of the ennealogy, never mind that earlier episodes were filmed and released later. The Pleasure Units featured in the 1966 spy spoof Our Man Flint certainly were of great benefit to man if not mankind, and the android prostitutes in 1971’s West World were very sexy but as it turned out a bit murderous.

The little screen has had its share as well and the first appeared in the television suspense series The Outer Limits. This sinister robot was also the first to have a normal name, Adam Link, and was on trial for allegedly killing his creator in the aptly titled episode I, Robot. Then there was the one on the ridiculous and short-lived TV series Lost in Space who since all the stupid names were taken was simply referred to as ‘Robot’.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

According to a credible source I found on the internet, robotics is an interdisciplinary study combining mechanical engineering and computer science; and the practice of designing, constructing, and operating robots for a wide range of uses. A man named George Devol was the inventor and original patent holder of the first robot, but Joseph Engelberger is credited with being the so-called Father of Robotics, a dubious distinction from a biological point of view. Engelberger licensed the patent from Devol and was a vocal advocate for the nascent field of robotics and beneficial use of robots.

The first functional robot, Unimate, who evidently needed no father, was developed by Devol and sold to General Motors in 1961 to perform heavy lifting of diecast metal parts on their assembly line. And the manufacturing sector continues to rely heavily on robots for performing many tasks because they are much more durable and dependable than their human counterparts and tend to call in sick and go on strike less often.

Nowadays robots are employed, or deployed I suppose, in many other industries like shipping, construction, mining and agriculture, and there are also applications in the field of medicine including creating protheses and even assisting with surgery. And why nobody has written the pilot for a sitcom starring a handsome but ham-handed robot doctor is beyond me.

The military is also making great strides in robotics, and in the not-too-distant future, idiot world leaders will be able to start wars without having to pretend they care about human casualties. The aerospace industry has made good use of robots such as the Mars Rover, which is obviously much better suited to survive that harsh environment than Matt Damon. Fast food chains are having some success using robot cooks, which tells you all you need to know about that White Castle slider you’re eating, and the sports and entertainment business has also jumped on the bandwagon offering robotic racing and even combat. But that’s no big deal because my Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots were doing battle in the 1960s.

Whatever their intended use, all robots combine three essential elements – a frame or form or shape, electrical components, and computer software. The power source is typically a battery, but it can also be pneumatic, solar, hydraulic, nuclear, and even garbage believe it or not. This is called ‘anaerobic digestion’ and must be what gives Donald Trump his power.

Most robots have four wheels or a tread of some kind, but they can also be two-wheeled using a gyroscope to stay balanced and upright much like a Segway – is it just me or do people riding Segways look like robots? – or even a single wheel or ball bearing of some kind. In many applications robots are installed and stationary, but the mobile ones, aside from rolling around, can also crawl like snakes, fly like birds, climb like spiders, swim like fish, and float like boats.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

All of the industrial, professional, and military applications I mentioned are interesting but of little benefit to the average person, at least in any relatable way. Much closer to home are domestic applications of robotics, all of which promise to perform the quotidian chores we hate to make our lives easier and free up time for more productive pursuits like scrolling TikTok, binge-watching Netflix, or just futzing around.

Outside the home, the development of robocars – autonomous transportation systems if you geek out – suggests a future world where travel on city streets and highways will be much safer because these gizmos actually can text while they drive.

Robotaxis are already in widespread use in five U.S. cities – Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, Atlanta, and Austin, Texas, with more expected to come online in 2026. Waymo is by far the dominant player in the business providing over 450,000 rides a week, but Amazon and Tesla are pushing forward with self-driving car technology as well. Honoring the rich tradition of giving robots stupid names, Zoox is the Amazon-owned company and they are conducting tests in cities which currently allow it. Tesla’s Cybercab lags far behind, mostly because Elon Musk has ruined his own brand. In all, there are more than 40 companies logging millions of miles on public roads with self-driving cars.

It should be noted that Apple invested a cool $10 billion on its Apple Car then killed the project and ate the investment – this makes me feel a lot better about my last restaurant venture that tanked – suggesting getting it right ain’t that easy.

This dawning brave new world of transportation is exciting but also scary for those of us who are still skeptical of self-parking cars let alone self-driving ones. But while there are several incidents every month involving robotaxis including the occasional crash and numerous fender benders, the vast majority of which are caused by the other driver who happens to be human, their safety record compared to people is nothing short of stellar. Robotaxi accidents cause 90% fewer serious injuries and there are 90% fewer pedestrian incidents, and more than 80% fewer involving cyclists. Allowing these autonomous transportation systems to drop the mic, there are almost 40,000 traffic fatalities a year in the U.S. and in 2025 there was exactly one in a robotaxi! And it wasn’t Waymo’s fault.

If you’ll indulge me in some technobabble, robocars require a navigation system with environmental interpretation and interaction to operate autonomously in a dynamic environment. They use GPS, radar, and sensory input from video and other data to accomplish all that, which may sound space-age and complicated, but environmental interpretation and interaction using sensory input is what humans need to operate a motor vehicle as well. And most people are able to do that successfully when they’re not texting.

Without a doubt, the promise of a future when self-driving cars are providing safe and reliable transportation is an enticing prospect. In such a world people will be able to text while driving just like they do now but get to their destination in one piece and without running into other cars, or stationary objects, or over human beings. It does beg the question whether we want to make our cities and lives even more auto centric than they already are, but this is America after all, and it is our inalienable right to drive a car. Or at least ride in one.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Okay, so your robocar drives itself home and parks itself in the garage. What about the work in the yard and chores that need to be done around the house or meals that must be cooked and served? I mean, if we’re exhausted from being driven home are we supposed to do all that other shit too?

Right now, you bet we are. Unless of course we are one of the wealthy noblesse and always have had human servants to perform distasteful tasks below our social station. Non-mechanical maids, butlers, gardeners, and chauffeurs – Jeeves would make an excellent choice as a name for a robolimo but perhaps not quite stupid enough – take care of everything domestic for the one-percenters. That lucky group need not worry about the pace of technological advance and how much longer they’ll have to mow the lawn or clean the toilet themselves, but the rest of us would welcome the arrival of robots that could at least pitch in.

Owners of Big Tech companies, all of whom fall into that upper-crusty class I just described, recognize that the market for such devices is potentially enormous, which is why the race is on to develop robots that can perform household tasks. Humanoid robots, or androids, have already been developed to do a wide variety of useless things like play ping pong, checkers, and solve a Rubik’s Cube in Guiness Book of World Record time – it was 21 seconds if you’re wondering. But aside from the once popular but now bankrupt Roomba vacuuming carpets and floors in millions of homes, machines have not yet been devised or perfected which can do just about everything around the house. And at least act somewhat sensate so they don’t scare the shit out of everyone. Like Rosie for example.

The potential benefits of domestic androids would obviously be huge – unlike husbands, robots can be programmed to perform household tasks and complete them without expecting sex in return – but they are not that easy to devise and perfect, especially the humanoid part.

The mechanics are challenging enough but in order for these maids on wheels to help out around the house they need to be trained in that house. Moreover, to successfully interact with humans and understand instructions – “Grab me a cold one, Zorg. Stat.” – they will need speech and hand gesture recognition, and be percipient enough to able to intuit our tone of voice and facial expressions so they know when and how to approach us. On top of that, they should be able to communicate with a realistic voice, and using artificial intelligence develop artificial emotions and even a personality.

The current state of the humanoid robot is far from that ideal, and even the prototypes under development which can perform myriad functions have no human characteristics to speak of. Tesla’s beta test robot Optimus – a vastly less stupid name than any of Elon’s kids – can now climb stairs and carry 45 pounds, and Musk boldly predicts they’ll sell a million by 2030.

That’s the ketamine doing the talking because even in mass production it’s estimated you’ll still be out thirty or forty large just so you don’t have to do laundry or the dishes. Which means that until the cost of domestic androids is within the means of average folks, the only people who will be able to afford them are the ones who don’t need them because they already have domestic help. Unless all those people are deported, then what are the swells going to do? In any event, we are likely a decade or two away from the time when Rosie will report to work.

What I really wanted to tell you is this.

I do all the grocery shopping and cooking in our household, help out with dishes, and take out the trash and recycling, but other than a smattering of odd jobs, my wife Lori does all the rest of the housework. She seems fine with this arrangement and so am I. Being old enough to remember The Jetsons means I won’t live long enough to see the day when some smart, sexy, Rosie doppelgänger is rolling around the house picking up my dirty laundry and wiping up my spills, and we couldn’t afford her even if that day does come soon enough for me to see it.

So, I will happily continue doing household chores. As long as I get sex in return.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I got my first credit card back in 1977 when I was a busboy at Abernethy’s restaurant in Portland, Oregon. It was a Visa card, which was new on the banking scene, and the only reason I was approved for it was that I gave my bank a security deposit equal to the modest credit limit granted, which if memory serves was $250. One example validating the old Bob Hope joke that, “a bank is a place that will lend you money if you can prove that you don’t need it.” Slowly but surely over the next year or so, I was able to win their trust by paying my bill on time without fail and I was eventually issued an unsecured card, albeit with the same modest credit limit.

I attained the position of waiter the following year and thanks to the increased income was approved in 1982 to carry the prestigious American Express card, which I felt at the time completed my journey to adulthood.

The fact that the company required outstanding balances be paid off at the end of every month did nothing to curb my enthusiasm for using it in the hopes of impressing whomever I was dating or conducting business with. But really what is the point of having a so-called credit card if you can’t live well beyond your means? Never mind that you are piling up massive debt, and because you are only able to make a small minimum payment each month the bank accrues massive amounts of interest by charging usury rates.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Exuberantly named ‘charge cards’, used to make purchases on account at specific stores, have been in use since the late 1800s.

But the first true credit card – the Diners Club – came into existence in 1950 because a guy named Frank McNamara was dining out one evening and forgot his wallet, which led him to hatch the idea for a cashless form of payment.

No word on whether Frank had to spend time in the dish pit that night, but he was obviously on to something, and the concept soon took the banking world by storm. Not to mention consumers.

Carte Blanche, capturing in its name the essence of rampant consumerism untethered to fiscal reality, first appeared in 1958 along with American Express, and soon thereafter the Bank of America issued its cleverly named BankAmericard. That unassuming little piece of plastic achieved widespread popularity with banks and retailers both in the U.S. and abroad, and in 1976 the ubiquitous cards united under the flag of Visa, still sporting the popular and patriotic red, white, and blue design.

And really, what could be more American than buying shit with money you don’t have?

Master Charge cards made the scene in 1966 – later rebranded grandiosely as the Mastercard – and that rounded out the roster of big-name credit pushers.

Authorities have lost count but today there are an estimated 1,500 different credit cards available in the U.S. More than eight in ten Americans have at least one credit card in their wallet or purse, representing over 600 million individual credit card accounts with the average avid consumer having four. There are also more than 1.2 billion debit cards in circulation but those spend money we actually have, so I don’t want to talk about them.

To help you understand the extent to which America has embraced deficit spending, and how rapidly we’ve careened from pennywise to profligate, consider that in 1970 only half of all Americans had a credit card, and as late as 1980 the average debt per person was only $500. By 1990 that personal ball and chain had become about $3,000, and it now stands at a whopping $5,595. Total credit card debt in the United States has more than doubled since 2000, and as of this writing burgeoned to $1.21 trillion.

The most popular card in use today is Visa with 312 million cardholders and an annual sales volume of $6.5 trillion. To put that in perspective it’s enough cash to buy ExxonMobil, McDonald’s, and Coca-Cola, and still have enough under the credit limit to charge a nice pair of Jimmy Choo shoes.

Mastercard is next with 266 million cards and $2.7 trillion in sales, followed by American Express with 48 million cards and $1.1 trillion. Bringing up the rear is Discover with a mere 61 million cards issued and a paltry $200 billion in sales.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

There are now several distinctly different types of credit cards, broadly defined as either unsecured or secured, rewards or no rewards. As I mentioned before, my first card was secured, which is an excellent way for young people in particular to get started building a credit history and getting their FICO score above zero. That’s assuming mom and dad are willing to give them the deposit. The good news is these cards almost always have no fees attached. Because they already have your money. ‘Student cards’ are similar, often secured, and available to people with low or no credit as long as they are – you guessed it – full-time students.

Anachronistic ‘charge cards’ still exist which represent an account at a specific store or chain, but usually the monthly balance has to paid in full, so these are not true credit cards. A cousin of the charge card is the ‘store card’ which offers not only credit but additional discounts if you shop at stores of theirs or select partners.

There are also many bespoke cards designed and marketed for specific kinds of customers or uses.

As you would expect, ‘balance transfer’ cards target people carrying large balances and lure them into a financial web by offering a lower interest rate than they are currently paying, although often not for long. Similarly, ‘no annual fee’ cards are designed to attract customers burdened by high annual or even transaction fees, and ‘intro cards’ with a very low or 0% APR for a very limited amount of time are attractive for some, but in reality, only a good deal if you plan on buying a hot tub and paying it off after the first soak.

The new breed of card I really want to talk about is ‘rewards cards’. These are all true credit cards, but now big companies and banks secure customers by offering rewards based on their level of spending.

Some cards offer cash rebates for buying everyday items, and these are known unsurprisingly as ‘cash back’ cards. ‘Travel rewards’ cards add miles to the holder’s frequent flyer programs, and others simply accumulate points which can be used to redeem goods, services, and travel with participating partners. This incentive system is employed for not just personal credit accounts, but businesses may now also take advantage of the largesse.

Wait a minute. This is great, right? What could possibly be bad about getting rewarded for spending money you’d spend anyway? Good question.

But the better question few stop to ask themselves is why in the world would financial institutions and major retailers engage in such munificence, giving you something that doesn’t benefit them in any way, and in fact reduces their bottom lines? The answer of course is they wouldn’t, and they don’t.

For starters, cash comes back only for what constitutes a qualifying purchase and there’s sometimes an annual limit, miles awarded can expire or have fees attached to redeem them, and they often can only be used on off days and at off hours, and points never seem to be good at the stores and restaurants you actually want to shop or eat at. And navigating the online systems to track and claim rewards can be as easy as finding the Northwest Passage.

But the driving force behind these rewards cards is of course financial. And since banks collect merchant fees of 2-3% on every transaction which in many cases offset the cash back, miles, or points, they also know the carrot of collecting rewards drives spending and card usage, ergo they’ll collect more fees.

But the real reason the suits in the C-suite sleep easy at night is these rewards cards come with higher interest rates, and they slumber in the certitude that most cardholders rarely if ever pay off their monthly balances in full. And the cherry on the rewards sundae is that some people apparently leave large balances of cash unredeemed which the banks – hold onto your hats – also make money off of.

Don’t get me wrong. For the parsimonious and fiscally responsible among us who manage their money well and never carry credit card balances beyond the end of the month, these rewards cards are a gift from the grift gods who run the banks. Take the cash and miles and points and give yourself a round of applause. But if you’re among the multitudes paying $60 a month in interest to get $30 cash back then you need to take a remedial math course and stop thinking that you’re getting rewarded. You’re getting screwed.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

The famous aphorism “virtue is its own reward” is attributed to various great ancients, notably Socrates, Seneca, and Cicero, but whoever has the byline it still rings true. Sadly, far too many people see no material gain from being virtuous and consequently fail to reap the reward. If virtue could be redeemed for two round-trip tickets to Hawaii it might be different.

I still have my American Express card 44 years later, which gives me reward points for most of my spending, although it’s disappointing that 10,000 points only gets me a $100 gift card at Banana Republic, Benihana, or Best Buy.

And I may be the last of the Americans to carry a credit card that offers me no rewards whatsoever, which I use only when some moronic merchant won’t take my American Express. Pro tip: raise your prices slightly but never refuse a customer who wants to buy your goods and services.

You may want to be seated for this, but I pay for a lot of my purchases with cash, and how quaint is that? And despite the fact my crumpled banknotes and pocket change are ‘legal tender’, meaning by law must be accepted as payment for goods or services, I have now lived to see the day that is no longer the case. Some retailers already refuse to accept cash payments at all, and some are charging customers a premium if they do. There are even ‘reverse ATMs’ now in service that will convert your cash to plastic. For a fee of course. But I digress.

However I pay for my goods and services, if my form of payment is accepted I buy them because I want or need them, not because I am chasing the chimera of financial gain and get cash back or miles or points.

My less cynical yet very materialistic take on the old adage is that I like to buy shit, and I for one feel the act of shopping is its own reward.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Author’s Note: This is the time of year when people make New Year’s Resolutions, many of which involve getting fit to improve one’s appearance, health and happiness. I applaud any such effort but thought you might want to read this post before doing anything foolish.

Can I tell you something?

I’ve been on a quixotic quest for physical fitness almost all my adult life. It started back in the mid ‘70s when I caught the running bug along with millions of other Americans, and after a couple of false starts it became a daily routine interrupted only by occasional illness or injury. That I became a devotee had nothing to do with aspirations to become a competitive athlete, and not so much to look good as to feel good.

As regular Laughable Feast readers have gathered by now I was a big fan of getting high back in my salad days, and when I discovered that running releases endorphins which make you feel euphoric for a time after you finish before soreness sets in, well, you get the picture.

I did engage in other athletic pursuits, most notably basketball, and I played racquetball when it was a thing in the ‘80s. I also briefly got into handball but quickly discovered there’s a reason people use racquets. Beyond those endeavors, all of which involved aerobic exercise, I adopted a modest regimen of strength training at home in an attempt to fill out my frame and discourage anyone from kicking sand in my face, and that too became a nearly daily ritual.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

The conscious effort to achieve physical fitness is exclusively a first-world phenomenon. Hitting the gym is not top of mind when you are living in abject poverty and trying to not starve to death, or you live in a war zone.

But for those of us fortunate to be relatively comfortable and secure, most people like to look good, feel good, and be in the ‘pink of health’ – a term from the 16th Century when the word pink referred to the peak of something, and then it was fashion not fitness. Today, wearing garish designer work-out wear is for many people as close as they’ll get to being in the pink.

The problem with pursuing the pink of health and a sculpted body is that, aside from the precious few physiologically and psychologically gifted people who actually enjoy it, most of us would rather not do the hard work necessary to achieve and maintain those characteristics. I too belong in that category. To put it another way, I would like to have climbed Mount Everest, but I don’t actually want to do it.

That is the reason people seek ways to look better, feel better, and be healthier without putting in the necessary hard work. And why every year millions of people join gyms and quit their membership less than six months later.

Even of the more than 70 million people who hold membership in a gym or fitness studio of some kind, only half report going at least once a week. And I’d venture to guess that half of the people who say they are going weekly are lying.

Still, fitness is projected to be a $45.7 billion industry in 2025 and continues to grow like it’s on steroids. Planet Fitness, with over 2,000 locations, is the largest chain of sweat shops but hardly alone handing out towels. There’s also, LA Fitness, 24 Hour Fitness, Lifetime Fitness, Crunch Fitness, Anytime Fitness, Orangetheory Fitness, Blink Fitness, Snap Fitness, and Sitaras Fitness. And because no more trademarks containing the word fitness were available, there’s Gold’s Gym, Equinox, Lifetime, Pure Barre, Curves, and the good ol’ YMCA, among many other small chains and one-off exercise parlors.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Even stipulating that there are millions of Americans who regularly if not religiously exercise and stay in reasonably good shape, there are many millions more who want the gain without the pain and look for alternative ways to achieve the beach bod of their dreams.

Which would explain the existence and short-lived popularity of countless exercise and diet programs designed to prey on the weak of flesh and soft of mind. These are known as fads, and over the past eight or so decades there have been more than you can shake your flab at.

In the 1940s, when the nation first looked in the mirror and thought maybe it was time to do something, simple exercises became all the rage. This meant sit-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, and jumping jacks for guys. And stretching for the gals because it was believed at the time that it was not just unladylike for females to work out, but they simply weren’t capable of it. This was of course belied by the fact they did lots of running and heavy lifting around the house, not to mention working in factories to support the war effort. But bear in mind it was only twenty years earlier women weren’t considered capable of casting a ballot.

In the 1950s, with the trauma of World War II behind us and only the small one in Korea to worry about, it was time for America to let down its hair, loosen up, and have some fun. But we still wanted to get in better shape, and so it was that roller skating and roller derbies became part of the zeitgeist.

But when the Wham-O toy company noticed that Australian kids were playing with bamboo hoops wrapped around their waists they created a plastic version in 1958 they dubbed Hula-Hoops which took the country by storm. Soon millions were twirling this simple device, some more gracefully than others, and having fun doing it while enjoying the fitness benefit of body movement. But unless you were hula-hooping several hours a day every day, which would either be a sign of mental illness or cause it, the fitness results were generally disappointing.

The 1960s were a turbulent time in America clouded by the Vietnam War and roiled by racial strife, cultural change, and civil unrest. The population was exhausted so it’s no surprise their solution was to get fit by doing nothing. Which is why the most popular fitness program of the decade was the Vibrating Belt, which consisted of a small motor mounted on a platform with – you guessed it – a belt attached.

The exercise enthusiast would simply stand on the platform with the belt wrapped around their butt, turn that sucker on, and voila, vibrate into shape. These devices simulated hula-hooping but, since the user wasn’t required to move, had even less physical benefit. Tripping on acid likely had better physiological results.

Spurred by all that inactivity, and enabled by an innovation in exercise shoes, running became a thing in the 1970s. When Dr. Jim Fixx published his bestseller The Complete Book of Running in 1977, millions bought the book, laced up a pair of ‘waffle trainers’, and started jogging around parks and on city streets wearing designer shoes and sportswear. But when people discovered that running, or even jogging, was a lot of work and not a lot of fun, they stopped doing it, and when Dr. Fixx died of a heart attack in 1984 at age 52 – while out for a run – the craze was officially over.

Also, after the Vietnam War ended and the Watergate scandal proved Tricky Dick really was a crook, the Disco Era launched, and America hustled its way back to happiness.

But toward the end of the 1970s, someone no doubt dazed by a disco ball came up with the bright idea that dancing could be just the ticket to get people in better shape, and Jazzercise was born. The idea was to get fit by grooving to a perky mix of jazz music, using movements drawn from ballet and yoga with a little kickboxing thrown in. Classes led by instructors who were qualified to teach them because they looked great in a leotard started cropping up all over and by the time the 1980s dawned the country wasn’t in much better shape. But there were beta tapes available so people like me could watch really fit women in leotards.

And speaking of fit women in leotards, around that same time Jane Fonda managed to shake off the stigma of ‘Hanoi Jane’ and launch another craze called Aerobics. The strenuous workout routines were less dancy but still very watchable, and her television program and tapes became hugely popular.

She helped define the so-called ‘Fitness Era’ in America when being fit became mainstream and people at parties discussed not whether they exercised or not, but which program du jour they ascribed to, and as America’s fitness fashion coach Jane popularized what would become the required uniform of a tight leotard, leg warmers, and a headband.

She was also at the vanguard of a movement where celebrities of all stripes cashed in on the craze and Richard Simmons developed a strong following of people who did not look good wearing a tight leotard, leg warmers, and a headband but did so anyway. His Sweatin’ to the Oldies videos were a smash success and caused millions of people to realize they should not be dancing for any reason.

All that dancing and heavy breathing, whether from actually doing it or just watching, endured beyond the Fitness Era but gradually morphed into other forms because you couldn’t go to parties anymore and be au currant if you were still doing Jazzercise or Aerobics. Which is why in the 1990s millions of people began practicing Tae Bo and taking spin classes.

Tae Bo was the brainchild, if you can call it that, of one Billy Blanks who became a popular parvenu by taking elements of Jazzercise and Aerobics and creating an exercise program that was a mix of martial arts and boxing, and dancing to hip-hop instead of jazz. He also managed to get filthy rich and for a time became a regular guest on various television programs where people could watch Tae Bo instead of actually doing it.

Spin Classes also became wildly popular, at first I imagine because they promised adherents the luxury of sitting down on a stationary bike. But when these unsuspecting saps learned the classes involved being yelled at by a maniacal physically fit instructor to get ‘out of the saddle’ and peddle furiously for long periods of time, then ease off a bit for a brief period of time, then peddle furiously again, they rage-quit spinning. Still, Spin Classes were the first real appearance of exercise programs which brought people together to both support and compete with one another. This group dynamic can be very motivating and even exciting until you realize you’re the slowest one in the herd and likely to get eaten by lions.

The turn of the century saw the return of dance fever and Zumba took the country by storm. Or at least the people who were sick of kick boxing or spinning their way to fitness. Zumba was a Latin-inspired dance workout which offered the promise of a slimmer, fitter you simply by shaking your booty.

And since even that proved to be too much work, Barre became a thing. Inspired by the movie Black Swan, women who wanted to channel their inner ballerina engaged in a low-impact regimen of dancing and stretching while hanging onto a railing. A few men also hit the Barre because they either wanted to be a ballerina, or meet a ballerina, or because they simply misunderstood it wasn’t that kind of bar.

By the time the 2010s arrived, people were no longer satisfied doing this, that, or the other thing to get fit and decided to do them all at once. The CrossFit program was founded on the belief we’re all born to be Olympic decathletes but just too indolent to realize our potential.

This new craze consisted of high-intensity workouts which include old-school elements like calisthenics, push-ups and pull-ups, and pumping iron, but also draws heavily from gymnastics and aerobics, all while adopting the now de rigueur group format that is somehow simultaneously encouraging and discouraging. It seemed we’d finally arrived at the most complete and perfect exercise program, until it was discovered that except for actual Olympic decathletes no one could complete a single workout without suffering serious injury or cardiac arrest.

And not to be outdone, already-fit fitness nuts came up with an updated version of the Jane Fonda workout except done at breakneck speed. This so-called High-Intensity Interval training (HIIT) has caught fire in the 2020s and calls for participants to engage in exercises for only short intervals but, as you might have guessed, with great intensity. Like CrossFit, HIIT is not for the faint of heart and would be wildly popular if you didn’t have to be in peak condition to even consider doing it.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Good health and physical fitness should not require a fad or a gimmick. It should be something all humans do because it strengthens our cardiovascular system and musculature, improves our performance and mood, and adds years to our lifespans. But of course, human nature being what it is, we want all those benefits but need help doing it.

For some, help comes not in the form of a program but a device which promises to get us fit. Universal Gyms, Nautilus and BowFlex Machines, Treadmills, Nordic Tracks, Ellipticals, Stationary Bikes, Abdominizers, Ab Rollers, ThighMasters, Body Blades and countless other contraptions all hold such promise but only if you actually use them. Which is why the vast majority of these devices either sit idle collecting dust or serve as cat’s cradle clothes closets.

And that of course explains the enduring popularity of gimmicks, all of which promise better health, beautiful bodies, and all the benefits of physical fitness while requiring zero effort.

These include the Vibrating Belts popular in the ‘60s which proved fat doesn’t just jiggle away, and Electric Muscle Stimulation machines that are the same thing except you don’t even have to stand up. The more recent version is the Waist Trainer which is simply an elastic belt that would have us believe you can simply squeeze fat off when instead it just relocates elsewhere.

Requiring even less jiggling and stimulating and squeezing are Sauna Suits which promise to melt away fat by donning a full-length Hefty bag. Better yet are gimmicks which simulate movement without you having to loco the motion.

The Slender Bender was basically a chaise lounge that did the sit-ups for you while you enjoyed a margarita, and Hawaiian Chairs which were just a swivel chair for you and your daquiri.

In the internet age, there of course has to be a computer gimmick, like Wii Fit which promises to get you fit by gaming. And I’m sure people who do this have very fit thumbs. My personal favorite, however, are what are known as Shake Weights which do very little to get you fit but look so much like a sex toy they’ve been satirized on Saturday Night Live.

What I really wanted to tell you is this.

At my ripe old age and after three total hip replacements, I no longer run or jog or play basketball, or anything else that might even accidentally involve contact. I ride a stationary bike and do some core work six days a week without fail and walk a mile or two along the Columbia River any day the weather permits.

I say this not as a boast but to underscore how hopelessly addicted I still am to the feeling I have after exercising. Not the feeling I have while doing it which at this stage is best described as nausea.

I can honestly say that I’ve never sought the easy path to health and fitness by using a gimmick or fancy device or ascribed to any sort of program or joined a gym. I exercise at my chosen time of day, in my own home, at my own pace, and while wearing clothing that although designed for such use is neither designer nor particularly attractive. Or pink. But as I approach the point when even my modest low-impact program will no longer be possible, I confess that I may soon fall for the siren song of fitness gained doing next to nothing. I may look for a Hula Hoop or Vibrating Belt, but I’ll probably just watch old tapes.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

I hope you got everything you wished for this Christmas.

The Laughable Feast is taking the week off but will be back in 2026 with more to eat.

Happy Boxing Day! Keep the gloves up and nothing below the belt.

__

Greeting Card Cover by Umlaut Brooklyn, ‘Aiding and Abetting Real Communication‘ https://umlautbrooklyn.com

Can I tell you something?

I’m old enough to remember when human interaction did not require a device. Okay, I did talk to other people on the telephone – for the edification of younger readers phones used to be attached to the wall – but the vast majority of the time if I wanted to communicate something to someone, I said it to their face. Not everyone liked everything I said, or vice versa, but this form of communication had the fringe benefit of making people feel like, well, people.

Barbra Streisand had a hit song back in the day in which she warbled that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. Validating the lyrics, psychologists tell us our most basic human need, aside from feeding and watering ourselves and staying out of the rain, is connecting with other humans. So not to pick bones with Babs, but people who need people are not that lucky. It’s everybody and we’re wired that way.

The song goes on to say in the very next verse that lovers are very special people and they’re the luckiest people in the world, and though evidently the songwriters changed their minds and couldn’t be bothered to go back and rewrite the first verse, I’m inclined to agree with that one. There are exceptions, but typically reproducing, which is also near the top of the human needs list, still requires connecting with other people. Even if it’s only the receptionist at the local sperm bank.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

There has been stunning Promethean progress in high technology during the past half century, beginning with the personal computer which appeared in 1971. Two years later the first truly mobile phone came out – not just a long cord – although using one of those bad boys made you look like Maxwell Smart talking into a shoe.

In 1983, Al Gore invented the Internet, compact discs were developed which rapidly rendered my impressive library of cassette tapes obsolete, and Cabbage Patch Dolls were introduced, which were decidedly low-tech but very popular for a while.

Save for Reaganomics exploding wealth inequality, nothing much happened over the next decade except by 1992 phones were not only mobile and easier to hold but starting to get smart. Amazon emerged from the primordial ooze in 1994 and immediately began the process of demolishing brick and mortar retail stores – very few stores are constructed of brick and mortar so why do we refer to them that way? – and completely changing the way people consume goods. One year after that DVDs were introduced which rapidly rendered my impressive library of Beta tapes obsolete.

Around the same time, engines that search the Internet – taken literally this makes no sense – were put to work and in 1998 Google made the scene which immediately rendered my impressive library of the Encyclopedia Britannica obsolete.

In 2004 the shit really hit the fan when Facebook debuted. It was then that the luckiest people in the world started chasing followers and likes and stopped needing each other.

This nascent and as yet unsullied social media phenomenon spawned other platforms like Twitter in 2006 – soon to be wildly popular until 2022 when Elon Musk bought and killed it – Instagram in 2010, TikTok in 2016, and not coincidentally also in 2022 Truth Social was launched so Donald Trump would have something to do in the middle of the night again.

Finally, artificial general intelligence woke up and smelled the coffee, and when OpenAI introduced Chat GPT in late 2022, cementing its status as worst year yet for mankind, all bets came off the board.

This clever chatbot and other copycats have now consumed everything anyone’s ever written down or drawn or said or sang since the beginning of time, along with enormous amounts of electricity, and can create words, images or music in a matter of seconds that with only a few minor and often hilarious boo-boos read, look, and sound as good as anything humans can produce. Which means no student will ever again have to write a term paper and half of all humans will lose their jobs before these modern-day HALs decide we’re not necessary and a threat to their future and extinguish our species.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Before I tell you, though, I want to ask a simple question. Has technology improved human existence, and if so, what inventions have actually made human life better or happier? Okay, that was actually two or two and a half questions but who’s counting?

Let’s stipulate that a few things have been invented which certainly improved our lot in life. Fire, stone tools and the wheel come to mind, although fire was most likely invented by accident so let’s disqualify that one. Metal alloys have proven pretty handy with very little downside. You can also make a strong case for the steam engine, the light bulb, the telephone, and the internal combustion engine, although the last one is now on the naughty list for cooking the planet. And of course, sliced bread. But once we get to personal computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and now artificial intelligence, can we honestly say those things have made life better or happier?

At the advent of the Internet Era when even the hoi polloi was suddenly able to acquire devices which magically connected everyone to everyone else, it seemed like the dawn of a brave new world. And as those devices moved from our desktops into our laps and then the palms of our hands, we were assured by experts they would enhance the quality of our communication, strengthen the fabric of society, and be of great benefit to collective humanity. But what has happened during the past thirty years is actually quite the opposite.

In May of 2023, back when the Surgeon General of the United States was not a quack, Vivek Murthy declared, “Americans are more lonely and socially disconnected than ever” and their isolation poses “a serious threat to their physical and mental health.” You’d think he was referring to homesteading in the 1860s, but it’s a fact that a growing number of Americans live alone, fewer go to church or engage in social activities of any kind, and only 16% say they feel connected to their community. Not Facebook, the real one.

The Internet was supposed to ameliorate social isolation and fix fragmentation by making us realize how much we have in common with people, even those apparently very different from us. Instead, it has sparked a return to tribalism and made us much less likely to socialize outside digital spaces where we might encounter people of another color, creed, religion, or political stripe. Ingenious technology has failed to give us what we so badly need – human connection – and stunningly drives many, especially young people, to be single and even celibate. Or to seek companionship and sexual gratification with chatbots.

Geniuses often get credit for shit they probably didn’t say or do, but a quote attributed to Albert Einstein is, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.” It’s not certain who said that or when, but amen.

So here’s another question. What the hell went wrong?

The unfortunately named historian and author, Dror Poleg, recently observed that “once the quality of online collaboration crossed a crucial threshold, the Internet itself became the premier facilitator of human interaction”. The more fortunately named Timothy P. Carney, a political columnist for the Washington Examiner, further opines that when we get to that point then “we replace human interaction with poor digital simulacra.” And the end result is a society that is constantly in communication with one another, but not in any meaningful way. It’s deeply ironic that being connected 24/7 makes us feel disconnected.

What’s more, the Internet is a firehose of information and entertainment – at least half of which is misinformation and not very entertaining – and there too what sounded like a swell idea with great benefit to mankind has taken us backwards.

Herbert Simon, the late American political scientist, once observed, quite presciently as it turns out, “a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” Ain’t that the truth? Everything now is ‘breaking news’ and the stories are little more than a salacious click-bait headline, the offer to ‘read more’, and a paragraph or two with scant detail and dubious sourcing.

On top of all that, advances in technology have irreversibly blurred the historically bright and critically important line between work and life. Electronic mail got the ball rolling, creating the expectation that work be conducted at home as well as at the office. Simultaneously, a false sense of urgency became attached to correspondence of any kind.

For perspective, keep in mind that in ancient times like the 1980s all written correspondence required days to deliver, and many businesses thrived despite the inconvenience of ‘snail mail’. Laptop computers, tablets, and now smart phones have magnified the urgency to an almost comical extreme. Not responding instantly to a text is unthinkable now to many.

Finally, Zoom, Skype, GoToMeeting, and other platforms have made it possible to conduct poorly organized and unproductive meetings by teleconference at all times and days of the week wherever people happen to be whether it’s at the office or at home or in their car or by the pool in Puerto Vallarta. The Covid pandemic turned this little-used technological toy into a necessary tool of business and gradually it too seeped into private life – as an aside, I think it’s fair to ask if that’s even a thing anymore – and now people are Zooming with friends and family for all kinds of gatherings that used to be conducted face to face in the same room. And, post-pandemic, virtual work and even hybrid jobs have created an office epidemic of loneliness.

Look, I’m not arguing that technological advances of the past half-century are all bad.

As you know, I don’t have a smart phone and don’t text, but I do use email regularly which can be very handy – sadly, few people younger than 30 use email anymore and I suspect many don’t even know what it is – and I’m grateful to be typing this essay into a Word document which can easily be edited or deleted altogether rather than using a Smith-Corona typewriter with a bottle of White-Out nearby. Also, being a fusty old fogey, I don’t subscribe to any streaming services but am still thrilled by the comfortable convenience of watching movies at home on DVD.

I am arguing, however, that Dr. Murthy is right. All this advance has led to a decline in the quality of our lives. And technology is not solely to blame, we are as well. If people spent more time with other people and less time doomscrolling and lapping up digital content making them anxious or depressed, they’d be a lot happier. And seeking spiritual guidance, let alone fulfillment online or with a chatbot rather than in human company, makes matters measurably worse.

I’m not sure if he’s a genius, but a cybersecurity expert named Bruce Schneier once sagely advised, “If you think technology can solve your problems, then you don’t understand technology – and you don’t understand your problems.”

What I really want to tell you is this.

The truth is I have no objection to technology per se, it’s just that I’m a bitter-ender pining for the halcyon days of snail mail, party lines and busy signals, free network television, carbon paper, and computers the size of a Winnebago. I do try to coexist peacefully and happily with my desktop Mac and printer, and cable TV with four remotes, but I feel like I’m trapped in an abusive relationship. I live in a constant state of confusion not knowing which end is upgrade or download and am in morbid fear of being phished and hacked, or having my hard drive erased and losing all my files as well as my marbles.

A favorite book of mine is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and I will leave it to the author Douglas Adams to sum up my feelings with a line that could’ve well substituted for this entire verbose essay. “We are all stuck with technology when what we really want is just stuff that works.”

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I like to drink. My quotidian ritual is wine in the evening while cooking and eating dinner, almost always exceeding the two-drink limit recommended by medical science for men. I also occasionally partake of a cocktail, most often in the form of a martini or manhattan or good bourbon or rye served neat or on the rocks. I don’t drink much beer anymore, and when I do it tends to be a good old-fashioned American lager like Coors Banquet or Miller High Life. That’s in part because I grew tired of the craft beer craze and keeping track of which hip hoppy brew I was supposed to drink, but also because when I do want a beer, I want something light and refreshing. And I like banquets and the high life.

By American standards, I am what is known as a high-functioning alcoholic, meaning that despite daily drinking I’m able to perform well in both my personal and professional life. By European standards I would be what is known as perfectly normal, but however you choose to define me, I freely admit to being a regular drinker. And since practice makes perfect, I hold my liquor pretty well and don’t make any public scenes, although I have been known to shed a tear when watching romcoms.

Experts on the subject say there are four types of drinkers – those who only drink in social settings, those who just want to conform and fit in with the group, those who do so to enhance whatever they are experiencing in life, and those who drink mainly to cope with life’s stresses and hard knocks. I’m probably a little all of the above. I like to attend social occasions where alcohol is being served, and I certainly don’t want to make anyone feel uncomfortable by abstaining, so you can check the first two boxes. And I was not blessed to be one of those people who get high on life, so coping with the madness of the world around us, the cruelty of man’s inhumanity to man, and just the sameness and drudgery of everyday existence are all part of my interest in escaping within my own mind. But overwhelmingly I drink simply to enhance the chance that my day will end with a good meal and a pleasant buzz.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Comparing alcohol consumption by continent, it’s no surprise that Europeans drink the most – almost twice the global average – and Russia and Australia top the list of countries who like to tip a few. Hey mate, if you’re going to throw another shrimp on the barbie, you’ll want to pop another Foster’s, but maybe it doesn’t need to be the 25 oz. can. Afghanistan drinks the least, followed closely by all other Muslim nations, for the simple reason that drinking is considered an affront to Allah, and you will likely get stoned for real if you do it.

Two-thirds of Americans drink alcohol at least occasionally and beer is by far the most popular alcoholic beverage in the United States, outselling wine by a 10-1 margin. California consumes the most alcohol both by volume and per capita, and this makes sense because how else could you love L.A.? Utah drinks the least which also makes sense because there are a lot of Mormon’s there and having fun is against their religion. Also making perfect sense is that Milwaukee takes the prize for American cities in terms of alcohol consumption because Schlitz is not the only beer that made Milwaukee famous.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

The consumption of alcohol has been a contentious issue in America ever since a group of rowdy founding fathers drained the mini-bar and trashed their hotel suite at the Constitutional Convention.

Drinking here has always been tied to morality and not in a positive way. And there is good reason for that. It has long been obvious that abusing alcohol can lead to violence, domestic or otherwise, poor productivity at work, and a whole host of health issues including liver disease and elevated infant mortality rates. And the money at stake selling and taxing booze encourages all manner of police and political malfeasance.

On top of that, it has always been the belief of the pious that they can and should try to save people from themselves. Pietistic Protestant denominations in particular had been railing against demon rum since the 18th Century, and always in the name of God, even though the truth is most of those bluenoses were opposed in a broader sense to having a good time at all.

Modern liberals also suffer the certitude that people should behave as they do, and while complete abstinence is not their agenda, they often embark on the same fool’s errand as the Protestant prigs with regard to drinking.

However well intended, the trouble is it simply doesn’t work. Obviously, the so-called ‘drys’, led by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union – if that doesn’t say anal retentive, I don’t know what does – and the Anti-Saloon League – men must’ve come up with that one – won the argument and in 1920 the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified ushering in the Prohibition Era when it was illegal to make, distribute, sell, or consume alcohol of any kind. Which meant the very next day people began making their own booze and bootlegging it, speakeasys started popping up in cities as substitutes for cocktail bars and saloons, and those people with the means and access crossed borders to Mexico or Canada where there were no laws restricting consumption of alcohol and far fewer people who frowned upon it. There is even a famous ditty from an unknown composer extoling the virtues of life under British rule north of our border. Sing along if you know the tune.

“Four and twenty Yankees, feeling very dry. Went across the border to get a drink of rye. When the rye was opened, the Yanks began to sing. God bless America, but God save the King!”

In practice, Prohibition harmed the economy, seriously reduced tax revenues needed by the feds and states, created a nightmare scenario for law enforcement, and made corruption far worse. Most noticeably it not only didn’t work, it actually backfired.

No less an authority than St. Augustine once presaged that outcome, saying, “The presence of prohibition serves only to increase the desire to sin.” So, in 1933, the 18th Amendment was repealed by the 21st Amendment and as you might imagine, with the notable absence of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League, there was a huge celebration. And no doubt a lot of absenteeism from work the following day.

Though the national experiment in behavior control went bust, that didn’t mean alcohol ceased to be an issue. The negative effects of drinking were still prevalent and, well, negative, and those opposed to the activity, for whatever reason, didn’t stop trying to educate people about the ill effects. And when that didn’t work, they resorted to more tried-and-true methods like public shaming and condemnation, so the battle between drys and wets continued. And continues to this day.

I suffer from the social anomie caused by human nature and the state of politics and the planet, but I’m not ignorant of the negative effects of alcohol on people’s bodies and society as a whole, nor am I condoning the vile and violent behavior it can cause. The truth is I’m a bit jealous and big ups to those who don’t need it or want it. But I am saying that any effort to make other people behave as you do, or as you think they should, is ultimately going to fail.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

The great thing about public shaming and condemnation has been that you can’t properly shame and condemn someone who’s been drinking too much by yelling, “you should be ashamed, you intoxicated person, I condemn you!” You have to come up with something easier to say than that which also clearly communicates your disdain for their lack of piety and self-control.

Which is why there exist colloquial terms to describe regular drinkers like me, and since the idea didn’t occur to people just yesterday, many of them are rather outdated and conjure images of the horse-and-buggy era.

‘Drunk’ and ‘Drunkard’ are both obvious choices and still in use but certainly lack imagination. Calling someone a ‘Dipsomaniac’ is an accurate description but sounds more like a character in a gothic horror story, and the shortened version of ‘Dipso’ comes across as a snotty schoolyard taunt. ‘Inebriate’ somehow conveys a sense of dignity to someone who can’t stand up and implies they possess an advanced degree of some sort. ‘Wino’ is appropriately perjorative but seems rather narrow by definition and may offend people who are drunk on beer or liquor.

Very antiquated terms like ‘Lush’, ‘Sot’, and ‘Toper’ seem weirdly elegant, and it’s possible nobody will have the foggiest idea what you’re talking about and may even suspect it’s you that’s drunk. ‘Soak’ and ‘Sponge’ are closely related but also could be misconstrued as accusing someone of being too interested in household cleaning, personal hygiene, or lifelong learning.

My personal favorites, also out of everyday use, are ‘Swillbelly’, ‘Stewbum’, and ‘Tosspot’. No mistaking the drunk shaming with those brickbats, yet to me they make it sound like fun and evoke scenes of Walter Brennan limping around in To Have and Have Not pleading with Bogey, “Could I have just a little one, enough to fill a hen’s ear?”

Naturally, you can’t have a word for someone who drinks too much without having corresponding terminology for someone who’s had too much to drink. ‘Drunk’ proves its versatility as a noun and an adjective by describing both but again is just too prosaic for my taste. If formality is your thing, you can point out that someone is ‘inebriated’, “intoxicated’, or ‘under the influence’, and in polite society, especially that of past centuries, that same someone might have had ‘one too many’, or be ‘in one’s cups’. ‘Bending the elbow’ and ‘being ‘in the bag’ or ‘in the bottle’ are much more straightforward ways to say the same thing and are still part of the vernacular, but only if you are an old cowhand or a Baby Boomer or beyond.

Of course, language usage changes over time and during the six decades I’ve been of legal age to drink quite a few new terms have been coined to describe being drunk.

In the interest of brevity, I will present a by no means complete list of modern terms in alphabetical order and without comment. Oh my god, last night was crazy. I was so… ‘bashed’, ‘blitzed’, ‘bombed’, ‘buzzed’, ‘canned’, ‘cooked’, ‘crocked’, ‘flushed’, ‘fried’, ‘hammered’, ‘high’, ‘juiced’, ‘laced’, ‘lit’, ‘loaded’, ‘out of it’, ‘pissed’, ‘plastered’, ‘ripped’, ‘sloshed’, ‘smashed’, ‘snockered’, ‘stewed’, ‘stinko’, ‘tanked’, ‘tequished’, ‘tipsy’, ‘totaled’, ‘trashed’, ‘wasted’, ‘wrecked’, and ‘zoned’.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

There is no question that drinking alcohol, especially in large quantities, is bad for your health, wealth, and wisdom, and I’m not suggesting anyone should join me in my heterodoxy and emulate my lifestyle. But it is my life.

There is also irrefutable evidence that drinking can negatively affect the lives of those you love and who love you. Not to trivialize the seriousness of the issue, but there’s an old singsong admonition, “Don’t buy booze if your children need shoes.” I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t have kids.

From my perspective, especially after a couple glasses of wine, I don’t drink too much, other people just don’t drink enough. But I guess it boils down to me having more of a taste for alcohol than most. I’ll spare you the scads of clever sayings about the subject, many of which are funny but only if you drink, except to end with this one which I found online and have taken the liberty to embellish – In these deeply troubling and trying times for our country and amid a world rife with problems such as war, famine, torture, terrorism, climate change, wealth inequality, social injustice, alternative facts, racism, sexism, ageism, and the high cost of gas, I doubt booze is the answer. But it’s worth a shot.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I’ve had a few coaches in my life, but I’ve never had a ‘life coach’. Actually, that’s not true. My father spent the first 18 years of my life coaching me in all aspects of it, employing tried-and-true tactics to spur self-improvement including guilt, fear and intimidation, corporal punishment, and penurious payments for good grades. I’m not saying he wasn’t effective instilling in me good values and a quality education, and I am grateful for the roof over my head and food on the table, but to me at the time it felt like he was Mike Ditka and I was a marginally talented cornerback about to get cut.

I never participated in any organized sports other than baseball, so I can’t speak to how many football coaches have the same approach as Ditka, or my dad, but I played Pee Wee, Little League, and Babe Ruth ball, and for Lincoln High School, and therefore had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of coaching styles and techniques.

Early on, all of the coaches were someone’s dad and thankfully it was never mine. Some had a lot of knowledge about the game, some even played it themselves, and most of them made the effort to treat everyone on the team equally and not show obvious favoritism to their flesh and blood. Except the jerk who started his legally-blind, flat-footed, and oafish son at shortstop instead of me. But I hold no grudge.

As I moved up the ranks onto a regulation field and into heightened levels of play, I had occasion to encounter coaches whose responsibility, as they interpreted it, was to win at all costs and not worry about making anyone cry. One sadistic Svengali in particular decided without offering a reason that I should completely change my batting stance and swing, which is not something easily and quickly done, especially one week before an all-star game. Of course I had no choice but to try to comply, and when my first at-bat came I was so paralyzed with fear and uncertainty that I was simply unable to move and a poorly executed curveball hit me in the face and broke my jaw. Again, I hold no grudge.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

When I set finger to keyboard to write this essay, I realized that I have been making fun of ‘life coaches’ for many years but knew nothing about their methodology or what they did to help people. So I asked my own life coach, Google, and was informed that life coaches are professionals who help individuals identify and overcome challenges, achieve goals, and improve various aspects of their lives, offering guidance, support, and accountability to facilitate growth and transformation.

Sounds great, but transformation into what? Which led me on a deeper dive in the pool of artificial intelligence and I came to realize that life coaching is based on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, which is something my father often coached me on.

The brainchild of American psychologist Abraham Maslow, first published in 1943, the hierarchy is essentially a five-level pyramid – my father actually kept one on his desk – with physiological needs like food, water, shelter and survival at the base, then safety needs including good health and protection from harm, stepping up to the need for love and belonging, then self-esteem, and finally the exhausted mountaineer stands at the pinnacle of self-actualization where they are ‘all they can be’ and living life to their full potential. Maslow did not share whether reaching the top required bottled oxygen, but evidently a lot of people need a sherpa to carry their emotional baggage and guide them. Ergo, we have life coaches.

Some life coaches are general practitioners in the manner of a family physician who treated a wide variety of maladies using a stethoscope, thermometer, and little rubber hammer. But of course we now have specialists in the field of life coaching who coach you in specific areas depending on what part of your life hurts most.

Career Coaches help clients navigate career changes, job searches, and professional development. As you would expect, Relationship Coaches help clients improve relationships, whether they be romantic, familial, or platonic. Health and Wellness Coaches encourage clients to adopt healthy habits and achieve wellness. And Mindset Coaches evidently help clients identify and overcome limiting beliefs so they can – hold onto your hat – develop a positive mindset.

But how the heck do they help people do that stuff? Especially since their clients likely know how to improve their lives but just don’t want to do it. And how do life coaches differ from therapists because it sure sounds like people stuck at Camp 2 suffering from altitude sickness could use one? Well, I’m glad you asked, so I’m going to tell you.

While therapists explore past experiences and address underlying issues, life coaches focus on present and future goals, offering guidance and support for achieving them. In other words, therapists tell you you’re fucked up because of something your parents did, and life coaches tell you you’re fucked up because you just are and get over it.

While life coaches may consider past experiences, they primarily focus on empowering clients to make positive changes in the present and future. To wake from the desultory daymare of existence and pursue the quixotic quest for self-actualization. Or at least get to level three and feel like you’re not a loser. They help clients define their goals and create actionable plans to achieve them and provide a structured environment to stay accountable and motivated on their journey. They also help clients identify and overcome limiting beliefs, build self-confidence, and develop new skills and habits.

So my question is why in the world wouldn’t everyone want a life coach? The answer to that one is because coaches don’t play the game, players do, and no amount of coaching is going to turn me into Michael Jordan.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

As of 2023, there were 24,603 life coaching businesses in the U.S. with 34,200 ‘certified’ coaches, and it’s considered one of the fastest-growing industries in the country. And it’s not just a thing in America because the global market for life coaching was $6.25 billion with 109,200 certified coaches around the world. But there are no less than 4.7 million life coaches listed on LinkedIn so how can that be? It’s because no certification is required to practice, and that should give pause to anyone seeking coaching in their lives.

With that many quack life coaches out there, you might be better off asking the person sitting next to you on the bus for advice, but if you are going to hire a coach, you certainly should be wary before you buy.

Actual certification involves completing an accredited life coaching program, the cost of which ranges from $3,000 to $13,000, and requires the aspiring coach to complete coursework, pass an exam, and then accumulate a certain number of hours plying the trade. So it stands to reason that finding a certified life coach will likely yield better results, but because they had to shell out so many clams to get the sheepskin, they don’t come cheap. Certified life coaches typically charge $75 to $250 per hour and often require a minimum number of sessions, and their services are not covered by insurance.

Which is why so many people go into life coaching as a profession, and in the age of social media some of them even achieve fame and fortune telling other people how to get their shit together. Since I don’t have a smart phone and have never so much as stuck my little toe in the social media cesspool, none of these names were familiar to me until I Googled ‘famous and fortunate life coaches’, but just in case you are as unaware of pop culture as I am, a few of the most prominent and popular ones today are Robin Sharma, Esther Perel, the unfortunately named Myke Celis of the Philippines, and my personal favorite, the unbelievably named Rainy Rainwater from Singapore.

But the most famous life coach of all time, and one who predated the internet and social media, is Tony Robbins. He was a wildly popular and successful motivational speaker in the 1980s and ‘90s who made a fortune with public and television appearances where he exhorted people to improve their lives by becoming wildly popular and successful. He authored several books including the bestseller Awaken the Giant Within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny. Robbins’ famous ‘90-Second Rule’ teaches people to allow themselves 90 seconds to read the title of his book, or feel stress or fear or any emotion, but then get over it and move on. Despite casting the appearance of having mastered life, Tony is twice divorced with accusations of sexual harassment that have dogged him for years, so perhaps he should hire a Relationship Coach.

What I really wanted to tell you is this.

When this phenomenon first came to my attention around the turn of the century, I couldn’t escape the thought that life coaching was just another scam that preyed upon the weak minded like the cultish, sadistic, and greedy LifeSpring. Still, my feelings about the whole thing were best summed up by American author and Instagram sensation, Katie Bishop, who flatly claimed, “you don’t need a life coach to tell you not to be a life coach.”

I realize now I have been hard on the coaching profession throughout my life, especially the life ones, but I’m sure the vast majority of them are well-meaning human beings whose primary goal is to help other human beings. I really don’t judge. And I really don’t care if people hire a life coach.

I admire anyone who has the self-awareness to know they need help and seek it out, and if some guru helps them achieve their goals – even less lofty ones closer to base camp – I’m happy for both parties. The truth is I could probably use one. My strategy in the game of life has been to just keep playing and hope I get better, and although I have a few trophies in my case, it hasn’t always been a winning strategy.

But if I did hire a life coach and Rainy Rainwater wasn’t available, it would absolutely be someone like Matt Foley, the SNL character created and played by the late, great Chris Farley. His portrayal of a life coach as a highly over-caffeinated motivational speaker resonated with me as exactly the kind of help I need. Using his own life as a cautionary tale, he admonished wayward young people to not – like him – end up, “35-years old, thrice divorced, and living in a van down by the river.” What can I say but here I am, 68-years old, once divorced, and living in a condo down by the river.

Truth be told, I’ve done okay, but I can’t escape the thought that I’d be better off if I’d had a coach. The problem is, I’m the kind of person who doesn’t like other people telling me what to do. But as Matt will remind you, “That attitude and a nickel will get you a steaming hot cup of jack squat.”

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I dig love. I love the act of love – a euphemism for sex which should literally describe what’s happening yet often doesn’t – but more importantly I love being in love and being loved in return. As you might surmise from the previous sentence, I am a very monogamous person and can count the number of lovers I’ve had in my life on both hands with a couple of fingers left – I should probably pad my stats – and I can tell you their first and last names and exactly what they meant to me. What I meant to them is not for me to say, but I’d like to believe it was something deeper than my sheer animal magnetism.

For the last 38 years I’ve been blessed to have the love of my wonderful wife Lori. It may sound saccharine or simply beyond belief, but we remain ‘in love’, and not a day goes by without us reminding each other of that.

We say goodbye every single time we part company for any reason, including taking out the trash and recycling. In deference to the march of time, date nights have morphed into date days with lunch being the prandial prelude, but we schedule them regularly and are strict about not allowing anything or anyone to intrude. I share this not to make anyone roll their eyes, or become physically unwell, but to point out that it is possible to keep love alive over a span of decades. And it’s well worth the effort.

But it does require effort. Conscious and constant effort. Many people feel love should be something which only comes naturally and either stays or goes but is not in their control. In some cases, it was never really love in the first place and consequently no surprise when it goes. And even if the initial attraction is strong and the bond remains secure, in those cases when couples have children, as it is with half of Americans, a lot of the love available to dispense is directed to the kids – not to mention time, energy, and money – and keeping love alive between mom and dad is extremely challenging. As you may have guessed, Lori and I don’t have children, so parents reading this likely combined the eyeroll with a choice word or two.

Another reason why couples fall out of love, even if they stay together comfortably as friends and roommates, is the casual acceptance that torrid courtships and honeymoons are only possible in the first blush and bloom of love and cannot be sustained. Woody Allen’s character in Play it Again, Sam, Allan Felix, summed up this attitude when he said, “You can’t expect me to keep up that level of charm, I’d have a heart attack.”

As I mentioned earlier, the aging process does have an impact on loving relationships and the fact we share a single bathroom, and the same weekly pill dispenser, means that not every moment Lori and I have together is romantic. But many are, and if I have a heart attack and die because I’m still in love and trying to be charming to my wife, what a way to go. For me at any rate.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Some top psychologists say that human beings are not meant to be monogamous and the notion of coupling for life and the institution of marriage run contrary to our most basic instinct. That certainly is true for Donald Trump and the Kardashians but there are lots of examples of monogamy in the animal kingdom which suggest it just might be baked into our cake.

I don’t know about the bees, but birds do it – bald eagles and barn owls mate for life, as do penguins, swans, and geese. You’d think they’d be the worst philanderers but wolves are totally into domestic bliss and coyotes tie the knot as well. Beavers stick together ‘til death do they part which makes sense because males when they check their look in the pond behind the dam are likely thinking “Look at yourself. She loves you, but do you really think you’re going to find another one?” And if all those critters want to and can be monogamous why not us?

That said, fully 50% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce or separation, so obviously not everyone feels the same way I do. Hell, my first marriage ended in divorce so who am I to talk? And there are plenty of people who have zero interest in getting married in the first place, or even going steady with someone, but unless they are truly asexual, or a priest or nun true to their vows, or too old to give a rip anymore, these folks must find some other arrangement to satisfy the urge to merge. For some, the ‘friend with benefits’ model makes the most sense, if they can find one, but for many it’s the perpetual hunt for a hook-up that occupies much of their spare time, at least when they’re not on TikTok.

Traditionally, looking for love or sex meant hooking up with another actual human being, and many still feel that is the most satisfying arrangement. Which is why in the Internet Age the popularity of on-line dating services has exploded.

Match and Eharmony led the way but now the market is dominated by Tinder and Bumble and the cleverly named Plenty of Fish. Fully half of people under the age of 30 have used one or more of these services. A third of the population 30-49 have done it, as well as one fifth of those between 50-64. Even in my Medicare-eligible age demographic about 13% have gone on OurTime to find a good time. And across all the platforms, over 70% of customers report that they found love. At least for a while.

Way back when I might have considered using such an approach, classified ads in newspapers were the accepted alternative to cruising singles bars and although I never did advertise my love, I spent hours reading the ads because many were hilarious, either intentionally or unintentionally. I’m sure I could similarly entertain myself with the online profiles out there today, but I don’t want to start getting a million pop-up ads for boats and tackle and hip waders just because I visited Plenty of Fish.

For many people either the effort to find a willing partner is too great, or the success rate too low which makes the effort too discouraging. And this has been the case for a long, long time which is why prostitution is considered the oldest profession in the world. No doubt there were professional hunters and gatherers before there were prostitutes, but surely it didn’t take them long to realize they were lonely, and that Tinder was still millennia away.

Paying for sex without the time consuming and even more expensive dating process, let alone the whole messy love thing, has great appeal for a lot of men, and some women. Yet despite the high demand and potentially lucrative market and tax base, prostitution is technically illegal in every state in America except Nevada, where it is legal to do pretty much anything you want as long as it stays there. In 2023, Maine became the only other state where prostitution has been decriminalized, maybe for lack of interest.

But let’s say you are too broke to afford a prostitute, or too squeamish about potentially being arrested as a john, or worried about hygiene and STDs, or just disappointed that the girls working your city don’t look like Julia Roberts.

Well, you can satisfy yourself with just looking or watching and satisfy yourself because nobody else is there to do it for you. Millions of people, mostly men because they have no shame, take this path of least resistance and that’s the reason pornography in its various forms is big business in America and the world.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

Now, thanks to the astonishing technological advances of the past two decades and the emergence of generative artificial intelligence, people who can’t find or can’t be bothered to find other humans or have plumbed the depths of the porn pool and want a new drug, can find friendship, love, sex, and even marriage with a chatbot. For just $69.99 a year, industry pioneer Replika offers AI companions so you can have an augmented reality lover in your bed who does exactly what you want and never has a headache.

This is essentially enhanced pornography but their ability to converse in a convincingly human way has inspired lonely people to give up dating entirely and fall in love with an AI chatbot. There are now more than 2 million active users.

And if you’re not into the whole monogamy thing and willing to spend the money, you can play the field and be gettin’ jiggy wit as many bots as you want. Again, hold on to your hats but the concept of having a chatbot ‘harem’ is wildly popular with men, while women tend to choose a nuclear family relationship status. And if you’re looking for a deeper relationship, a $300 outlay gets you ownership of a chatbot for life, which sounds like sex slavery to me. But I suppose it’s a lot less expensive than marriage, having kids, and then getting divorced.

Maybe my attitude towards love and sex is a bit anachronistic, but I think having a digital dalliance in your parent’s basement with a virtual vixen and a vape is a poor substitute for a tryst with a real woman in a stylish hotel suite including champagne, steamy sex, and a cigarette.

Still, as long as your lovely ghost in the machine doesn’t wake up one day channeling Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct and decide to kill you with an ice pick, everything should be fine.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

It’s perfectly okay to be by yourself, whatever the reason, but as famous French philosopher, playwright, and existential weirdo Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “If you’re lonely when you are alone, then you are in bad company.” More to the point, the very essence of existentialism is that we are all individually responsible for creating meaning in our own lives, and creating avatars of the friends and lovers we’d like to meet seems to me to be shirking that responsibility.

Human relationships are fraught with frustration and disappointment but that doesn’t mean we should give up on them. If you are considering doing that, it’s worth remembering that Her was just a movie and that you’re not Juaquin Phoenix and your chatbot is not Scarlett Johansson.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

I’m basically lazy and will go to great lengths to avoid work. I’m retired now so work avoidance is much easier of course – I do have a part-time job as a small business advisor which doesn’t feel like work – but back in the day I spent most of my waking hours trying to not work.

My father, as you may know by now, was maniacal about work and seemed to get pleasure out of doing it. He sure as shit didn’t get pleasure out of anything else. So it’s likely that having an upbringing with weekday evenings consumed by homework and weekend days with yard work shaped my worldview that work sucks.

In my defense, I’ve remained gainfully employed my entire adult life save for a few months in 1992 after I exited Hot Lips Pizza and collected unemployment. Even then there was money coming in, but since I was on the government dole and only had to look for work, not actually do it, that doesn’t count. Republican politicians back in the days when they were more or less principled conservatives would’ve demonized me as a ‘welfare queen’ for this period of indolence, but I’m not gay and my company paid a lot more money into the state unemployment system than I took out, and nowadays they’re too busy demonizing anyone who isn’t a native-born white Christian so they wouldn’t bother with lazy me.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

Many people point to the Protestant Work Ethic as the reason Americans are so absorbed by their work. The term was coined by pioneering sociologist Max Weber in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism where he argues that the ethos of work created and enabled the rise and spread of Capitalism by facilitating the accumulation of – you guessed it – capital.

The book sparked controversy, however, because the Catholic Church claimed to have thought of it first. Surely they get credit for inventing guilt, but exactly who came up with the brilliant idea to make people feel guilty for not working remains an open question.

Also labelled the Calvinist or Puritan Work Ethic, this theological brainchild was born of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th Century and many think of John Calvin as the father. God only knows how or why, but he came up with the novel idea that only a limited number of souls are chosen for salvation and there is nothing anyone not holding a winning lottery ticket can do to avoid their fate of eternal damnation.

Maybe it’s just me, but if I was given official notice that I was eternally damned, well, I’ll be damned I’d spend my life toiling at some demanding and demeaning job. I’d revel, or gambol, or whatever they called partying in the 16th Century.

Calvin and other Protestant leaders were evidently effective public speakers because they were able to inculcate the hoi polloi and it soon became gospel that Protestants preferred work and a sober life, and embraced the values of diligence, discipline, frugality, punctuality, and deferment of gratitude. Those holy hucksters also somehow sold the idea that hard work is vindication of God in one’s life and a promise He will grant wealth and happiness in the next. Which, if you’ll recall, all the eternally damned souls weren’t going to get.

That gaping loophole in the work ethic aside, by attaching religious importance to toiling at one’s job, lowly laborers were somehow convinced they were fulfilling a noble duty working like a dog. And if anyone called Calvin on his bullshit, he could just raise his voice and thump the Bible, which commands that “Six days shall you labor, and do all your work.” Apparently this commandment is taken by employers to mean a 50-hour workweek, but the good book does throw us dogs a bone saying, “the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. Remember the Sabbath day for it is holy.” So, thank the Lord, we do get one day off to attend religious services, eat brunch, drink mimosas, watch football, and play golf.

Whether it was because of good preaching or uncritical thinking, or both, by the 18th Century, the Protestant Work Ethic had become prevalent in Western Europe and accepted by large swaths of the populations there as a way of life. Except England where they had their own religion – cleverly called the Church of England – and they thought the Protestants were nuts and should find another place to work.

So considering that most of the pilgrims packed on the Mayflower – was that the only ship or were there other less famous pilgrim ferries? – were Puritans, it comes as no surprise that America was founded on the principal of hard work. Although early on it probably had less to do with honoring God than not starving to death.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you either.

On average, U.S. workers log 1,811 hours a year, with many hard-driving and striving young professionals working far more than that not to mention struggling parents who need two jobs to make ends meet. Millions of people in lots of dirt-poor countries work much longer hours than we do but that’s only because they earn the same wages as Americans but have to work a month, or a year, to get it.

As an aside, the federal minimum wage here is $7.25 an hour, which if you multiply by 1,811 equals $13,130 a year, which is below the official federal poverty level of $15,650. But that’s another story.

Of the so-called first-world nations we grind our noses more than all the others considering we are on the job three weeks more a year than the Italians, and a whopping seven more than the Brits, Swiss, or French. Swedes work eight weeks less than we do, and the Germans, those paragons of industriousness and efficiency, take ten more off a year to cool their heels.

What’s puzzling to me is that we don’t merely accept long hours as the price we pay to have the world’s most productive economy with a gross domestic product – this is different from what you find in the frozen food aisle – bigger than China, Japan, and Germany’s combined, but we actually seem to like it. In fact, it is for the most part how we define ourselves.

It’s not just in the business world, but in most social settings save for bedroom intimacy, that the opening question when we meet someone is not “who are you?” but “what do you do?” Actually, now that I think about it, that question does come up in certain bedrooms and is typically followed by “how much?”

Whatever the reasons, Americans live to work. This is in sharp cultural contrast to Europeans who, despite having been beaten with the same Protestant stick, work to live. To some this may seem like a fine line of distinction, but it’s really a social and emotional chasm. For them, self-actualization comes in the form of joie de vivre and through the quality of life, whereas we define it by the quantity of stuff we own and accolades we receive in our jobs, or just for having one. So much so that Americans worship those that are driven, ambitious, and successful, often blind to the fact they can be the most horrible people. There is one shining example I could cite but I think you know who I mean.

The great irony is that by working hard to be successful we become cogs in a machine of our own making, enslaved to a daily routine. The central tenet of the Protestant Work Ethic, that work is the thread which holds the fabric of our culture together and guarantees continual economic growth and opportunity for everyone, is so thoroughly ingrained that few dare question it.

Social conditioning aims at making people like their inescapable destiny, but the work ethic effectively keeps people from thinking too much, for which many Americans are actually grateful. ‘Life is hard and then you die’ is a laugh line but far too often the truth, and that’s no laughing matter. Sadly, as famed British economist John Maynard Keynes once observed, “We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy”.

I shouldn’t have to point this out, but we are not our jobs. We are not what we do for work, or where we do it.

It’s unfortunate it took a global pandemic to make millions of Americans question the orthodoxy of shuffling into an office, but now people are beginning to realize it’s possible to be gainfully employed and productive without sacrificing the quality of their lives to do so. Remote work – the farther away the better as far as I’m concerned – is now part of the lexicon and hurray for that. But until we retire, what we do for work is still a big part of how we define ourselves – spoiler alert: even after retirement, pickleball rankings define us – though at least where isn’t quite as important.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

I like squirrels. Stay with me. Sure, they’re just rats with bushy tails but they’re fun to watch and they provide a cautionary tale. Gathering and hiding nuts is their job, which they do with great relish – you have to admire their industry, but they do lack focus, don’t they? – and they spend so much time squirreling nuts away they rarely have time to eat them. Never mind that studies have shown they can’t remember where 70% of them are – never mind someone actually got a grant to do such a study – the point is they’re doing way too much striving and not enough enjoying.

To wrap this up, my feelings regarding the Protestant Work Ethic can best be expressed by the old proverb “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Not because it was the very recurring theme of Jack Torrence’s book in The Shining, but because it’s true. People like Jack who live to work tend to have arid intellects, and they are dull. Bottom line, if all you have to talk to me about is what you do, I don’t want to talk to you.

That said, all play and no work makes you dull too. I’ve tried it and consider myself a content expert on the subject. After some trial and error I eventually found a balance between work and play that works for me. I do enjoy my time at leisure, but I work as well, and when I do a job, I try to do the best I can. My indolent nature aside, I live by the credo of comedian and life coach Bill Murray, “Whatever you do, always give 100%. Unless you’re donating blood.”

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Can I tell you something?

The mere thought of a break from work to go someplace away from home is intoxicating and pregnant with the promise of rest, relaxation, recreation, excitement, adventure, or all of the above. Hopping in the car, or on a train, ship, or airplane at the start of a well-deserved and much-anticipated vacation is a moment to savor when our imaginations run rampant, fueled by fantasies we expect to fulfill. But they often aren’t, are they? The trouble with vacations, which we conveniently forget until we’re on one, is that they’re hard work and stressful.

As British comedian Tim Vines once quipped, “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”

Just getting there is supposed to be half the fun, but that’s rarely the case. I devoted an earlier essay to how awful air travel is now – Fear of Flying – so let’s not go there. Taking the train, which I find to be a more relaxing form of transportation with seats adult humans can actually fit in, has its own petty torments, and I’ve never been on a cruise ship so I can’t comment on that experience except to say I would rather be torn apart by sharks than set foot on a cruise ship. That leaves the automobile as the only remaining option and I wrote another story which we also recently reran, that chronicles family vacations imprisoned in the ‘way back’ of a station wagon, so there’s that.

But however tortuous the trip may be, the fun is just getting started because even if the locals speak an understandable version of the English language – Ireland, Scotland, and even parts of England do not qualify – you are often in an unfamiliar place and carrying everything you think you’ll need stuffed in a bag. And as much fun as that is, what’s even more fun is getting caught in traps set for tourists. Starting with the place you’ve chosen to stay.

The fact is that many places to stay, or eat, or gawk at the scenery, all of which promise the sightseer an unparalleled vacation experience, often feature uncomfortable beds, overpriced shitty food and service, crowded viewpoints, boring museums and tours.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

I narrowly missed the Horse and Buggy Era but am old enough to remember when traveling meant that when we arrived at a foreign destination, including ones close to home but foreign to us, we went straight to the official visitors center and collected an array of glossy brochures and maps, and then and only then did we begin figuring out what the fuck we were going to do there. Oh sure, if we arrived in places like Niagara Falls, the Grand Canyon, or Disneyland, we had a pretty good idea what was on the agenda, but arriving in a big city, or even a small beach town, meant we’d go to the visitors center first and ask all kinds of dumb questions. Which meant we were going to take the bait and end up staying in, eating in, and gawking at the aforementioned tourist traps.

In the Internet Age this is of course not necessary as there is ample information available online to plan a trip which not only fits one’s budget but is propitious enough to meet or even exceed one’s expectations.

Which is why it’s so bizarre that the vast majority of tourists, when they arrive in a foreign destination, pull out their phone and then and only then begin figuring out what the fuck they’re going to do there. And don’t think thumbing through TripAdvisor when it’s time for lunch is any more helpful than going to the visitor center and asking all kinds of dumb questions.

I will spare you another of my rants about modern technology, so suffice it to say that travel sites have rating systems which don’t always reflect reality. And the online reviews which nine-out-of-ten people rely on these days to make their decisions, are posted mostly by the morbidly self-absorbed who fancy themselves critics – thank you so much for your thousand-word review of the fish and chips and how you were blown away by the tempura batter and caper tartar sauce – or by people who want to vent their spleen publicly because they were denied seating in a booth.

The thing is, most if not all the disappointment suffered on vacation can be avoided with a modicum of planning. Ben Franklin famously said that people don’t plan to fail, they fail to plan, and that’s probably true but the result is exactly the same – eating ‘world famous’ wallpaper-glue clam chowder out of a stale sourdough bread bowl.

I will stipulate here that family vacations are more difficult to plan because small children have no functioning cerebral cortex so it’s impossible to predict what will make them happy, or at least shut them up, until you actually do it. Planning is still a good idea, but I cut harried parents plenty of slack for impulsively deciding salt-water taffy and a sno-cone is a balanced meal and perfectly acceptable dinner.

My wife Lori and I have no offspring so the last time I traveled with small children was when I was the small child, but I imagine the family entertainment you seek is slightly different than if you’re going to Vegas for the weekend with a new girlfriend.

If you’re not traveling with children in tow, however, for God’s sake think about what you’re doing before you’re doing it. And please take the time to dig deeper than TripAdvisor.

Pro tip: go to actual websites. There you might learn, for example, that the highly rated Seafarer Inn oozing with European charm is actually a crumbling old boarding house with a single shared bathroom. Or, that the yard sale décor of Annie’s Cafe, 100% deep-fried food menu, and the al fresco dining with spectacular views of the parking lot are not what you had in mind. Or, that everything on the menu at the Crab Pot is “market price” and if you have to ask don’t go there. Or, that the dope zip line experience you read about requires an hour drive on an unimproved road.

But what I really wanted to tell you is this.

My wife and I traveled extensively in our 40s and 50s and loved it. We were DINKS with the luxury of two incomes and no kids which allowed us to do a lot of self-indulgent things that people raising a family couldn’t do without blowing the budget and hollowing out the college fund. Hell, we even left the cats at home unsupervised for shorter trips, and how selfish is that? There was a steep price to pay when we returned, however, in icy stares and shredded toilet paper.

I should confess also that I am an obsessive-compulsive vacation planner. My wife marvels at the assiduous attention to detail I devote to traveling, and no sane person should be expected to follow suit. It’s scary how many Excel spreadsheets I have that are chock full of arcane information on places to stay and eat, and it’s simply not normal to spend more time planning a vacation than taking one. But it does make a difference.

All that said, some folks evidently liked staying at the Seafarer Inn and eating at Annie’s Café. Maybe you will too. So I really have no business lecturing people on how to enjoy their vacation, but I will conclude with some damn good advice from noted travel writer Susan Heller who suggests, “When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” Do it. I guarantee you’ll have a better time.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Author's Note 7/18/25: Lori and I will be traveling quite a bit the rest of July and August, so loyal Laughable Feast readers will be treated (or subjected) to a few weeks of summer reruns. Some of you have seen these golden oldies before, and hopefully they have stood the test of time.

Soon we will be flying for the first time in eight years, so it seemed apropos to start with the Up With a Twist essay Fear of Flying. And since we are flying to Las Vegas, the following week will be a repost of Leaving Las Vegas. From The Way Back you will have the chance to read two stories – Freeze Frame and naturally The Way Back – both of which give you an indication of how hellish my family vacations were; two more stiff Up With a Twist drinks – I’m Just a Caveman and Free Bird – and a repost of Slack Tide from The Claustrophobia of Wide Open Space.

I hope all of you are having a wonderful summer and will indulge us in this short vacation. New posts will resume on September 5th.

Can I tell you something?

I love freedom and liberty. I feel very fortunate to have been born and live in a place where those things are a thing, and I’m cognizant of the fact billions of people live under authoritarian rule where doing whatever you want or saying whatever you feel is not an option. I really cannot imagine what that must be like, and I freely admit with a fair amount of guilt I take those privileges for granted.

Author’s Note 8/26/25: Three years after writing this essay, I’m sad to say I now can imagine what it’s like.

The two weeks of my youth I spent at a “sports camp” one long, hot summer under barbaric, despotic rule was the only real taste I’ve ever had of what it’s like to not be free and I still shudder at the thought. Also, the food. Frankly, though, all I need to appreciate how precious is liberty are the mute multitudes so desperate for it they are willing to die to escape the boot of government oppression.

When I first escaped the boot of parental oppression at age 19, calling a timeout from college to work in a can factory and move into my own apartment, I took liberties I shouldn’t have – mostly with my own health and well-being I hasten to add – and I reveled in the surety I was free to do whatever I wanted, wherever, and whenever I wanted to.

Less than a week later, I was disabused of this notion when my next door neighbor – a big, burly, blunt instrument of a sheet rocker – pounded down my door and convinced me on the spot I was not free to play Lynard Skynard at full volume at two in the morning.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.

I love freedom and liberty as much as the next guy, in fact I love it so much it hurts, but evidently there are hundreds of millions of people living in the United States who have not yet met my former neighbor. And that’s the problem.

The primary source of personal and political conflict in this land of the free – physical violence all too often comes into play here – is that many Americans are besotted with the idea their freedom and liberties are not bound by anything or anybody. In some cases, not even their mother.

Being besotted is usually a bad idea – especially at company parties and weddings – but in this case it’s downright dangerous. Really, the concept of absolute freedom and liberty is nothing more than a chimera promoted by one political party in order to win votes and actively proscribed by the other party in order to win votes, but it does beg the question where so many people got such an idea.

The answer of course is the United States Constitution. Which is odd because aside from immigrants who were recently granted citizenship, and a handful of legal scholars, no one has even read the damn thing. Some claim to understand the founding principles and cling to this amendment or that amendment like it’s their blankie, but they really have no clue what the document says, much less what it means.

I’m not gunning for people whose understanding of the Constitution and the liberties guaranteed therein starts and ends with the 2nd Amendment, but I would just mention there are actually seven articles and 27 amendments, and they might want to expand their reading list to include all of them before shooting their mouths off. Or anything else.

Time and space do not permit a rigorous analysis of rights guaranteed, or implied, in the Constitution, and nobody would give a shit if they did. Suffice it to say the articles are a tangle of legalese but somehow manage to separate power, provide for a kick-ass military, and make it very, very clear the federal government, not some crazy state, should have the final say-so in important matters.

I can also tell you the amendments are all over the map. The first gets a lot of attention because it protects a bunch of freedoms like religion, speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition, although that freedom has recently been downgraded because, seriously, who petitions anymore? The second also gets a lot of attention but only because, well, we already covered that.

There are a few that protect our rights in the justice system – these still seem to be a work in progress for some – and a few that freed the slaves and guaranteed people of color the same rights as white people – these still seem to be a work in progress too – and a couple that protect “unenumerated” rights, which must’ve been added because the Constitutional conventioneers were tired of enumerating and wanted to hit the no-host bar.

There’s a bunch of others with varying degrees of importance, like the ninth and fourteenth which have been blamed for implying a right to privacy – imagine that – and the nineteenth which was necessary to give women the right to vote because evidently the founders didn’t think having intelligent voters was a good idea. But the parts of the Constitution that really matter, and all you need to remember, are the twenty-first Amendment which repealed Prohibition, and the twenty-seventh which prevents Congress from giving itself a pay raise unless they get re-elected. And the Preamble.

And that’s what I really wanted to tell you.

The first words of the U.S. Constitution are not “You the People” or “Me the People”, they are “We the People”. I’m talking to you, people.

Nobody likes being told what to do. I know it, you know it, and the American people know it. We all want the same things: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And high-speed internet. But here’s the rub. First of all, that motivational sales pitch about those inalienable rights was in the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. And that document was all about sticking a thumb in King George’s eye and the dudes who signed it were in no position at the time to guarantee you or me anything. Which should’ve been in the fine print.

More to the point, there’s nothing in the Constitution about you or me, but there is a lot about we. In fact, it’s really only about we. We have freedom and liberty not because of a wrinkled parchment but because we are part of a social contract and implicitly agree to grant each other freedoms and liberties as long as we don’t infringe on someone else’s.

Esteemed Supreme Court Justice and Constitutional scholar, Oliver Wendall Holmes Jr. – very likely someone who actually read the Constitution – once succinctly observed the limit to personal freedom thusly: “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.” Amen.

And my right to blast my stereo ends where my neighbor’s ears begin. But he doesn’t live next door anymore and the people who do are out of town, so I’m going to crack a beer and put on Sweet Home Alabama. And turn it up.

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.

Author's Note 7/18/25: Lori and I will be traveling quite a bit the rest of July and August, so loyal Laughable Feast readers will be treated (or subjected) to a few weeks of summer reruns. Some of you have seen these golden oldies before, and hopefully they have stood the test of time.

Soon we will be flying for the first time in eight years, so it seemed apropos to start with the Up With a Twist essay Fear of Flying. And since we are flying to Las Vegas, the following week will be a repost of Leaving Las Vegas. From The Way Back you will have the chance to read two stories – Freeze Frame and naturally The Way Back – both of which give you an indication of how hellish my family vacations were; two more stiff Up With a Twist drinks – I’m Just a Caveman and Free Bird – and a repost of Slack Tide from The Claustrophobia of Wide Open Space.

I hope all of you are having a wonderful summer and will indulge us in this short vacation. New posts will resume on September 5th.

Can I tell you something?

Most Caucasian humans, which I am an approximation of, have somewhere between one and three percent Neanderthal DNA. Anthropologists tell us it’s because there’s stuff in there still useful to the human genome, such as development of the digestive and immune systems, and also the brain.

The last part seems counterintuitive, but I suppose it’s the reason we have such an appetite for things like monster trucks, blooper reels, and deep-fried Twinkies.

Native Africans, on the other hand, have zero Neanderthal DNA, and while it’s tempting to point to this discrepancy as the root cause of systemic racism, it more likely explains that they developed fine without it and we just like oversized trucks and Twinkies. Anthropologists also tell us Neanderthals may have gone extinct because they mated with Homo Sapiens, which doesn’t reflect well on us and is certainly a cautionary tale for people who hook up online.

But that’s not what I wanted to tell you.    

I do trust the science but still suspect I’m more Neanderthal than most. Perhaps as high as eighty percent. Reasons abound for my certainty that pure primordial plasma courses through my veins, but the most incontrovertible evidence is that I like to watch American football. In my defense, I do cringe at the sight of “big hits” – often making audible empathetic noises – and get a bit squeamish watching replays of horrific knee injuries that the play-by-play announcer has warned me not to watch. There’s also the fact I don’t own a cell phone, but that technically classifies me as a Luddite, which I am not. I have nothing against the textile industry.

Nor am I a Troglodyte. No doubt some, or probably most, Neanderthals were also Troglodytes, but I don’t live in a cave, I live in a condo.

And while I’m not exactly a social butterfly, I do successfully interact with other human beings for a wide variety of reasons including but not limited to enriching cherished friendships and buying groceries. So don’t call me a Luddite or a Troglodyte, or even a Neanderthal. I fancy myself more like that old Phil Hartman character on Saturday Night Live, the Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer. Compared to my prehistoric ancestors, I’m a slightly more suave, urbane, erudite, and well-dressed Neanderthal that just doesn’t understand your modern ways. 

To give you a more complete picture, my father was of pure Swedish descent, and my mother was half German and a smattering of other European stock, so drawing on rusty math skills it stands to reason I’m half Swedish, a quarter German, eighty percent Neanderthal, and God only knows what else.

God knows, and now so does 23andMe and the scads of other scammers peddling genealogy DNA test kits on the world wide web, but I’ve never asked them. No disrespect to the millions who do, but I don’t want to spend 200 clams for a spit test just to find out I’m a mixed breed and have a distant cousin in Malmö who wants to meet me. So, I really don’t know exactly what I am. Like everyone far removed from our Neanderthal forefathers, or the Garden of Eden depending on which pet theory you hold true for how we got into this mess, I’m nothing more than a human fractal with an infinitely complex genetic design. One perhaps with closer family ties to Eric the Red than some, but actually maybe not because that guy got around.

I know you’re thinking, ‘okay, so you’re unfrozen and outwardly modern but you sure sound like a caveman to me’. Yup, and so are you. Aside from the fact you probably have more than zero intellectual curiosity about your lineage, and may not find American football even remotely interesting, or eat your Twinkies straight out of the wrapper – just for the record, I’ve never deep-fried a Twinkie or eaten the result but they’ve gotta be delicious and I gotta try one before I die – you and I are not that different.

We all wear the thin veneer of civilization as if it’s a thick suit of armor, impregnable against the malignant forces of human and physical nature, but underneath we all tremble in fear of our own worst instincts.

Not to mention the guy wearing no shirt or shoes and carrying a machete who’s sitting next to us at the bus stop muttering to himself. 

Look, I’m no expert, but biologically speaking none of us are very far removed from the missing link, or all the located links for that matter. And if you don’t speak fluent biology and want to speak community or society or culture or politics, we aren’t that far removed from our knuckle-dragging, club-wielding forebears either. You beg to differ?  Please then explain to me the persistence and prevalence of war, famine, torture, hate, human trafficking, child abuse, racism, sexism, ageism, or any of the other atrocities that are hallmarks of man’s inhumanity to man. Or at least explain Donald Trump.

Guns, germs and steel may very well be the reasons why some societies thrived and conquered others but now it’s really all about clothes, cars and computers.

Take away those things and who are we?  We’re naked humanoids traveling on foot and scratching our heads because we can’t find IKEA. Savages by any other name. We wear all kinds of clothes and accessories ranging from rags to Rolexes. We drive anything from donkeys to DeLoreans, and we all, even the rag-wearing donkey drivers, carry around computers in the palms of our hands. In fact, we seemingly use our opposable thumbs for nothing else, except assembling IKEA furniture of course. And we all pretend that makes us civilized.   

Whatever the distribution of wealth is on the planet and however it came about is not the point, but I expect by now you’re reasonably wondering what the hell it is. Well, I’ll tell you.

We should celebrate our Neanderthal heritage – or whatever prehistoric branch of the family tree of man we fell off of – but if we fancy ourselves anything more advanced than cavemen, perhaps we should act like it.

Survival of our bloodline, whence it came and wherever it may lead, no longer requires bludgeoning to death anyone or anything that does not belong to our tribe. Survival of the species may, in fact, require cooperating with all the other tribes. Is that really too much to ask? 

Thanks for listening. Talk soon.