St. Patrick’s Day is one of the few remaining holidays that isn’t protested like the way human rights activists protest Columbus Day, antislavery crusaders protest President’s Day, or light sleepers protest Martin Luther King Jr.’s having a dream.
St. Patrick’s Day is the rare holiday that tries to unify everyone around an ethnicity whether they actually have it or not. Read More
Snowstorms dominate Connecticut culture. Whereas other states focus on economic competitiveness or raising residents’ quality of life, we get fired up about local weather forecasts.
The government requires all men over the age of fifty to be proficient in reading doppler radar charts with hour-by-hour precipitation breakdowns. Read More
Since I just had my first child, this week’s column features humorous bits cut from older articles to buy me another week while seeming like I’m offering fresh content. Read More
An essential truth of modern life is that people are stupider when I’m in a bad mood. This is especially true inside my local grocery store.
I’m not sure how the entire store’s behavior is calibrated to my mood, but the correlation cannot be denied. My local grocery store has the cosmic accuracy of a thousand mood rings. I can chart my emotional state by carefully watching other people’s behavior while I’m shopping. Read More
A year or two back, I started actively responding to pleasantries that people don’t really mean to offer.
Most people mindlessly say “thank you,” “excuse me,” “sorry,” or any number of other pleasantries without realizing that they’re engaging in small signs of submissiveness. We can call them micro-submissions. Read More
I’ve been full of various thoughts and anxieties leading up to my wife Jenny’s c-section scheduled for Tuesday morning.
The vast majority of them revolve around the health and well-being of my wife and daughter, which brings me some relief because that proves I’m not a narcissist. Although having that thought makes me wonder, again, if perhaps I am. Read More
The Super Bowl is the closest thing we have to a national office party. Not a classy party either with a private room in the back of a restaurant or an after-hours shindig with spouses.
The Super Bowl is more like a low-budget office party that takes place during normal business hours so that it seems like leisure time, but you really aren’t free to leave. Read More
Light bulbs always burn out faster when I’m the one who screws them in.
I know this because (despite having lived in my home for over three years) the vast majority of working light bulbs in my house were installed by the previous owners. Read More
Our society is obsessed with arguing. It didn’t always use to be this way – remember when we all agreed that Russia was our enemy and that polio vaccinations were a good thing?
Today we’re energized and consumed by confrontation wherever we find it.
Next time someone raises their voice in public, look around to see how many cell phone cameras are recording. Read More
The Craft Beer Snob is one of the most peculiar social animals to emerge during my lifetime. When I was born in 1980 there were only eight craft breweries in the United States. Today there are over six thousand and they’re all being propped up by beer snobs. Read More