Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit: wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. This sentence is an example of a paraprosdokian. Look the word up in your dictionary: “p-a-r-a-p-r-o-s-d-o-k-i-a-n.” If you can find it, let me know where you found it. I tried, and I can’t find it in any traditional […]
Category Archives: Life in General
Ode to Doughnuts, in Infinite Variety
What is it that is so appealing about doughnuts? At their essence, doughnuts are lumps of sweet yeast dough, sometimes with holes cut into the middle [more on the doughnut hole later], usually deep fried, then rolled in sugar. They go great with coffee, but they’re also great with a cup of tea or a […]
The Gambler’s Folly
A Lowcountry Paradox
They call it “the Lowcountry” for good reason. The coastal regions of southern South Carolina and northern Georgia, roughly from Charleston, South Carolina to the north and extending to Savannah, Georgia to the south, a stretch of about 120 miles of coast–assuming it was a straight line of coast–has an average elevation of about 2 […]
Cluelessness–What We Don’t Know (Part III–Are We Hopelessly Clueless?)
At a press conference on June 6, 2002 at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, in response to a question about the quality of intelligence about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delivered his now-famous quote about “unknown unknowns:” “There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. […]
Cluelessness: What We Don’t Know (Part II–Everyday Anosognosia?)
A news story, reported by Michael A. Fuoco in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 1995, began: “ARREST IN BANK ROBBERY, SUSPECT’S TV PICTURE SPURS TIPS At 5 feet 6 inches and about 270 pounds, bank robbery suspect McArthur Wheeler isn’t the type of person who fades into the woodwork. So it was no surprise that he […]
Cluelessness: What We Don’t Know (Part I)
Philosophers spend a lot of time wondering and worrying about questions like: what CAN we know?, what DO we know?, and how do we KNOW what we know?; so much so that an entire branch of philosophy, known as epistemology, deals with these and related questions about knowledge, and what exactly knowledge might be. Epistemological philosophers have also […]
What is it About A$$holes?
You are driving down the highway, travelling with the flow of traffic as you near a construction zone where the traffic narrows from three lanes, then to two, and finally to one lane. You’ve merged into the single lane, when you see, in your side-view mirror, a black Dodge Ram pickup truck blithely cruising along the shoulder […]
Top Hats
I saw Steven Spielberg’s new movie, “Lincoln” and thought it was terrific. Daniel Day-Lewis gives a career-defining performance as Abraham Lincoln, and the supporting cast is outstanding. For slightly over two hours I felt as if I had been transported 148 years back in time, and was living through all the political turmoil at the […]
Landing in the Fog
While Albert Hammonds was almost correct in his 1972 song, It Never Rains In Southern California, that doesn’t mean the sun is always shining. We call our own special brand of fog marine layer. It’s a dense layer of fog that rolls in off the ocean in Southern California, drawn in by the warm air over the […]