I had a great uncle who was a legendarily huge eater. He liked to frequent the all-you-can-eat-for-$1 oyster bars that used to be common in the Norfolk, Va. area. Story has it that managers routinely offered to refund the dollar if he would just leave peacefully.

I swear that there is regional variation. I grew up on the East Coast and now live in California. Pumps out here are SOOOO slow. I go back east to visit family and I can hardly believe how quickly my car fills up at the pump. My best guess is that the vapor control systems in California slow things down.

He once read on air, verbatim, something I wrote for a national newspaper. No credit to me or the newspaper. No indication that he was doing anything but riffing from his own clever mind. The talent may have been on loan from God, but in this case, the words were shamelessly jacked from a poorly paid working…

I’m ok with the fact that we’re approaching the Chicken Sandwich Event Horizon. Chicken Sandwiches are good.

Curiously, he and Garrison Keillor are becoming almost indistinguishable. Coincidence? I wonder.

Thank you, thank you, thank you for making me feel less alone and, you know, weird and emotionally stunted for thinking that this is the worst fucking Christmas movie ever made. Maybe among the worst fucking movies of any genre. My wife, unfortunately, loves it, but I can barely stand to walk through the living room…

You know what doesn’t have any baked-in security vulnerabilities? A pencil. A goddamned pencil. Give me a good old fashioned pencil anytime (of course, playing Cyberpunk 2077 on a goddamned pencil sucks, but you get the idea).

There is a similar workaround in Origins with the roving mini-bosses who roam the countryside trying to kill you. If you nail them at extreme range with a predator bow, instead of coming to kill you, they’ll stand around trying to figure out what’s going on. Even if you stop shooting for a while, they just keep…

Oh my god, was that painful. But you know what hurts more? Listening to my doctor outline all the things that can cause a flareup - beer, pork, spinach, shellfish, soda, you know, like all the major food groups. The secret, I have found, is to drink water like it’s going out of style. That seems to keep the hell at…

The scene where General Grievous first appears in the Clone Wars cartoon and is stalking the Jedi used to scare the hell out of my kids. And me too. Too bad they ruined everything by making General Grievous into Grover in armor in the live action movie. So much wasted terror potential.

My wife was very excited to watch this because she loves Drew’s movies. We sat and watched the first episode with growing puzzlement. “I can’t watch any more of these,” my wife said. There was sort of a desperate race to be cute and endearing, kind of like Ellen having some kind of manic episode. Drew was completely…

For purely photo purposes, I swear by IrFanView. Free. Lots of add-ons and widgets. Low impact on your processor. Not entirely intuitive to use, but then again, it’s certainly no worse than Photoshop. And much cheaper.

This looks like a device tailor made to make me fall down and break my middle-aged ass, just like I do every time I look cross-eyed at a skateboard. Good thing that, at least in my limited experience, VR makes me seasick anyway.

In Washington, they use “productive” in the same way as one says “productive cough.” Meaning bits of phlegm and viruses were suspended in the air for several minutes after the meeting ended.

Sandy Duncan would be horrified.

I guess I can make allowance for Cheddar and Parmesan. The pretzel never worked for me either.

Can we please go back to the day when there was just one kind of Triscuit and one kind of Wheat Thin and one kind of Goldfish? It is extremely vexing getting home and realizing that you’ve bought a bag of Flavor Burst Goldfish or the goddamned Avocado and Cilantro Triscuit (this is a real product) instead of the plain…

Way back in the late ‘90s, I spent a couple of days in Rome, Georgia on a reporting trip. The chairman of the local Republican Party (who also happened to be vice chair of the pro-secession League of the South chapter (!)) invited me to his home for dinner. Before a delicious (and distressingly alcohol-free) dinner,…

Spam fried rice is Hawaii’s gift to cuisine. Love it.

I can testify that Biden did in fact get a little handsy with men too - I have been the recipient of an unexpected arm around the shoulder from the senator when I was covering Capitol Hill in the late ‘90s - the only time I was actually touched by a senator. Thank God he didn’t smell my hair. It was unexpected, but…