We certainly have it better than our ancestors of just two or three millenia ago. Really. They lived under governments which were poorly organized and given to inconsistent policies and illogical action. We have … wait a minute. Let me start again. They lived at the mercy of the elements, risking disaster and death [...]

  The U.S government has announced the date for doomsday. It’s February 17, 2009. That’s the day that your old TV — bringer of entertainment and enlightenment — switches from planned programming to endless static. No more talk shows where the on-stage guests have IQs resembling shoe sizes; no more shows with three-letter acronyms like [...]

  People don’t like to change. They don’t want to change their religion, political party, or (in the case of adolescent males) their T-shirts. They’ll cling to their beliefs (or their ratty, stained eighties-vintage T-shirts) until their dying day. Much of human history is really about the struggle to get people to change; whether it [...]

  Pop quiz, hotshot. Gas costs a little more than four dollars a gallon. Kevin’s rattletrap minivan gets a little less than twenty miles to the gallon. The drive to work is exactly nine-point-nine miles each way. What do you do? That’s the question I’ve been wrestling with. I pay four dollars a day for [...]