Several years ago, a guy named Mike Rowe started a show called "Dirty Jobs." The show acts as a sort of homage to workers in the skilled trades and seeks to show that there are a bunch of weird jobs out there, many of them pretty gross, and some of them surprisingly profitable. When he…
Perhaps nothing solidifies your status as a lower middle class American quite like being a connoisseur of chain restaurants. They have something of a reputation for mediocre-quality food that is lacking in imagination in an overstimulating environment that represents decades of market research and corporate optimization. But, you know, they aren't all that bad. I, for…
Editor's note: this post got pretty long, so I decided to throw baseball into it's own article...stay tuned. People like sports. They are exciting to watch, fun to follow, and offer great small talk fodder with people whom you have little in common. For a graphical view of why people like sports, consult the image…
The date was July 6, 2008. I sleepily crawled out of bed at 9 a.m. to watch the men's final of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships. If you are a tennis fan, then you probably remember this match. It is widely considered the greatest tennis match of all time. What made it great? Well, it pitted…
"Gilligan's Island" was a show that ran on CBS from 1964 to 1967. Despite being very popular, it was cancelled after 3 seasons, due partly to the CBS president's wife being a big fan of "Gunsmoke", pressuring the network to reschedule the show to the time slot of "Gilligan's Island", which caused them to cancel…
When you really look at it, the fact that gyms exist really shows how we have progressed technologically as a society, but regressed physically. If we were able to get sufficient exercise in our daily lives, then we wouldn't need gyms. But we don't get sufficient exercise (well, many of us don't, myself included), so we do,…
We've seen them in our Facebook feeds, in news stories, in YouTube comments, and even sometimes in real life. We ask ourselves, "how can someone be so stupid?" "How can someone be so ignorant?" "Why do they not see the world as I see it?" We rant about these people to our friends. We talk about how…
There are countless adages that praise hard work and determination, and for good reason. America, in particular, seems to always tout itself as a great nation of "hard working" people. There's nothing wrong with hard work, in fact it is quite a good thing to have hard working people in your life or community, but…
It's almost the end of March, and if you're like most people, then your new year's resolution is probably dead in the water. A few posts ago I talked about how I got into powerlifting over a year ago and some of the progress I had seen with it. Now, let me be clear that…
I was talking with a coworker the other day and somehow the topic of conversation came to a man he knew who had been married (and divorced) quite a few times. My coworker's comment on the subject was excellent: "at some point, after you've been divorced that many times, you have to start looking in the…