I got a fortune cookie Friday night. It said: “Trouble brings experience and experience brings wisdom.” Almost sounds as if a Chinese sage could have said that; either that or Master Po (”Grasshopper, snatch the pebbles from my hand”) from the TV series Kung Fu. Either way, it’s provocative and general enough for me to [...]

The unusually warm weather earlier this week brought out the bellies among the Vandy girls on campus, often with unfortunate results. That combined with the tango-belly (see below) from the tango thing I went to has got me thinking about this fashion fad again. Dyan the tanguera had asked me that evening if I thought [...]

My faith (yes, faith) in my fellow Americans has received a nice little boost today as the results of the Dover, PA school board election were announced: the eight board members — the ignorant and arrogant ones who wanted to foist “intelligent design” on the science classes there — were all rightly ousted from their [...]

A CBS News poll in October found that 51% of Americans polled do not accept Darwin’s theory of evolution and 38% said that creationism instead of evolution should be taught in schools. What’s worse is that another 30% believe that humans evolved but that God “guided the process”. Huh? So then, only 15% believe that [...]

Inadvertantly, I had my first tango lesson last night. No, that’s not me with the belly-tango-dancer (though I wish it were — he was a smooth-steppin’ Frenchman who had most of the women swoonin’). My colleague and tango devotee, Dyan Elliott, collared me to attend a free demonstration event that Tango Nashville held at the [...]

If you are a fan of profanity, history, popular culture, and etymology, then you must read the Wikipedia entry on the word “fuck.” It’s actually very interesting and is one of the longer, more involved entries. I had occasion to look it up because in the book I’m using in my Popular Culture in Early [...]