eclectika

Christmas is often described with many extremes—the happiest time of the year, one of the most emotionally difficult days for many who suffer depression, a controversial affront to the politically correct and even a giant commercial ploy to extract cash from all of the aforementioned. My Christmas day is finally coming to a close and I’m sitting here thinking to myself, “If today isn’t the reason for being…what is?” Perhaps I should elaborate the origins of that last statement before rambling forth with incoherent drivel about The Season, Holiday cheer and other such clichés… As evidenced by my lack of activity here [on this blog], my life has been filled with many competing demands for my time. During the past few months, I’ve become very involved with an Improv comedy club called Madcap Theater , helped my wife design and establish GreatIdeasForKids.com and enjoyed watching my children grow up into precocious little challenges. It has also been a time of soul-searching. I’ve bee...

Every once in a while, as I stand in some supermarket checkout line, I’ll glance at the tabloids: The National Enquirer , The Weekly World News or The Star . Often, I’m satisfied to just laugh at the paper right there in the stand. Sometimes, the headlines catch my curiosity enough that I’ll actually purchase the rag and take it home for a few laughs. While there may be some that consider these papers to be the only true news, most (myself included) think of them as comic distractions. Every week it’s some new sensational headline about Elvis, aliens, governments, Nostradamus, the end of the world and Jesus. Sometimes, the headline manages to contain all of these things at the same time. Whatever can be said about the tabloids, no one can deny that the reporting style is designed to wow you into buying their paper. Apparently threatened by the tabloids, news agencies have decided to fight sensationalism with even more sensationalism. News items are now events complete with their o...

Victor was one of those children with an overdeveloped mean streak—if there was a fly to lose its wings or an ant to be burned, he was the chief executioner. Victor was also one of those kids always being sent to the principal’s office or running laps for the coach. Most parents had Victor’s parents on speed dial. When it was time to learn a new dirty word, we’d all go to Victor for our next lesson—the boy was the professor of profanity. Victor had the first collection of porn any of us had ever laid eyes on. He was also the one that showed us how to decipher breasts and other parts of the female body squiggling in and out on scrambled cable channels. Eventually our parents branded Victor a ‘problem child’ and his underground popularity grew like kudzu. As we got older, we saw less of Victor as his punishments began to involve authorities with a little more clout than the school principal. It was Victor who tried to shoplift some candy from the local drug store. When the school pla...

I saw this cheerful image (courtesy of the RIAA ) and found myself smiling. "When you pirate MP3s, you're downloading COMMUNISM"—the very thing erroding our fine society today. The U.S.S.R. didn't dissolve, they simply became hackers and have secretly been uploading 'communism' to the internet. What began as a 'hippie' open-source mentality was really communism striking back at our capitalist way of life. Linux was really developed in Siberia as guards with AK-47s paced above the programmer's cubicles. Use FireFox and take a bite out of that big anti-big-business pie with all yer other red friends. Remember that each time you download that pirated copy of Gigli we're one step closer to having our own 'Checkpoint Charlies' between states. Seriously though, the various industries out to protect their gifts to the world (music, film, software, etc.) are kind of going about things the wrong way aren't they? If you look at the lit...