Tag: thoughts

Summer Thoughts 2022

We’re not even halfway through summer yet.  OMG!  It’s hot.  I’m grouchy.  There are motorcycles.  The guy down the street still believes everyone in the neighbourhood loves classic hip-hop.  And I wish there was an Advent Calendar for the Autumn Equinox – but there isn’t.  Anyway, here are some random thoughts to occupy your mind while Mother Nature tries to broil us in our own oil — again this year.

Life is not a bowl of cherries, a river, a journey or a process – life is a ski jump.  You start off slowly, gather momentum and just when you reach maximum velocity and think you’ve got it all going on – oops! – you’re sailing fifty metres in the air, and there’s nothing underneath you.

Isn’t it totally convenient that most of the people you know — from the woman you see on the bus every morning to that best, best friend you’ve known since university — go into suspended animation when you’re not there?

That great subversive Winnie the Pooh is still banned in China.  Which proves that if you want to upset a dictator (I’m lookin’ at you Putin) laugh at him.

One of the coolest things about getting older is that, when people talk about you behind your back, you can’t hear them.  And this works on so many levels.

In fashion, sometimes the only difference between faux pas and faux posh is about $500.00.

This is the best way to explain the difference between movie audiences in Europe and North America.  In North America, people want to see Gary Oldman play Macbeth.  In Europe, people want to see Macbeth played by Gary Oldman.

In the small town of Union Bay, Canada, a 95-year-old woman, Anna Stady, chased a bear out of her kitchen.  This says a few things about wildlife in Canada and a whole bunch about Canadian women.

And speaking of …  They’ve reintroduced European Bison to Britain.  Someplace in Kent has a whole pile (herd?) of them.  They haven’t been around in the wild since the Middle Ages.  Good on ya, Brits!  Is this the short road to Jurassic Park?

And finally:

Young people spend so much time using their phones to “interact” with their friends on Social Media, one would think that teenage pregnancies would be somewhere around zero.

Some (old) Ideas

One of the cool things about calling yourself a writer is you get to do all kinds of things that everybody else calls bone-ass lazy.  Stuff like spending hours drinking coffee, taking long strolls through the Internet and staring off into space.  Wordy Wordsworth called it, “… powerful feelings: … recollected in tranquility” or something like that.  This “work” is essential for writers to hone their craft.  The serious upside is you get to discover all kinds of interesting facts, and you have time to come up with even more interesting conclusions.  Here are just a few things I’ve been pondering for a while.

There’s a town in Canada called Smithers — which means the people who live there are Smithereens.

On average, the Dutch are the tallest people in the world — even though a lot of them are standing below sea level.

Apparently, a huge bunch of people born between 1977 and 1983 are sick and tired of being lumped in with those terminally malcontent millennials.  They have decided to perform a generational Brexit (Genexit?) and want to be referred to as Xennials.  I can’t say I blame them.

In the future, people will look at their electronic devices and think “What a stupid icon for a telephone.”

Despite everybody and her friend claiming they broke the Internet – you can’t.  The truth is the Internet is no longer vulnerable to human attack: there are just too many servers scattered across the planet.  However, before you go all SkyNet/Terminator, 99.99% of all electronic devices are just dumb machines used for storage.

Humans first walked on the moon 50 years ago in 1969.  That was 2 years before women got to vote nationally in Switzerland and 8 years before France quit using the guillotine for executions.  Weird, huh?

One of the earliest and most persistent symptoms of lead poisoning is irritability, so it’s interesting that statistics show violent crime (aside from armed robbery) has been steadily decreasing since lead was banned from automobile fuel in the late 1980s.  Coincidence?  Maybe. . .

For several years, universities have been adding puppies to their “safe spaces” to combat student stress and exam anxiety.  Whatever!  The weird thing is nobody is willing to talk about what happens to the puppies when they’re no longer puppies.  Creepy!

Over 100 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.  Wow!  And, according to the last time they kept records (several years ago) it would take you approximately 93,000 years to watch everything YouTube has to offer.  That is a lot of avoidance behaviour!

In the last 10 years, restaurant revenues, movie theatre revenues and department stores revenues have all declined — whereas the revenues of home delivery companies like Uber Eats, GrubHub, Netflix, Hulu and Amazon have all dramatically increased.  If this trend continues, eventually millennials will never have a reason to leave their apartments.  And this is a bad thing?

Andy Warhol was wrong.  In the future, everybody will have 15 minutes of privacy.

And finally:

I think it’s absolutely hilarious that a generation raised on South Park and Family Guy spend so much time being eagerly offended by everything.  Irony is not dead.

Just Some Thoughts

One of the huge fringe benefits of being a writer is you get to sit around, do nothing and call it work.  Your mind can wander wherever it likes, and as long as it comes back, you’ve had a productive day.  Some stuff you use, some stuff you lose, but most stuff you just don’t remember.  Here are a few things that I do remember.

A friend will offer to help you move.  A good friend will offer to help you move the body.

You can buy a birthday cake and eat it all yourself.  Nobody checks!

How come ghosts wear clothes?  Did their shirt and pants die with them?  What about underwear?

Up and down are opposites, but whether your house burns down or your house burns up, the result is the same – you’re homeless.

Opening the refrigerator and staring in does not produce something “really nice” to eat.  It’s true.  I’ve tried it.

When a vegan comes to your house for dinner, to be polite, you serve vegan food.  But when you go to a vegan’s house, they never return the favour and cook you a steak.

Sometimes, I wonder if Vladimir Putin ever wonders, “Am I actually the bad guy?”

Daylight Savings Time is like cutting 10 centimetres (4 inches) off one end of a blanket, sewing it onto the other end and saying the blanket is longer.

The only game in the world that’s just as hard to lose as it is to win is Rock, Paper, Scissors.

When rich people play Monopoly, does it seem like work to them?

I’m absolutely certain that, in prison, murderers tease attempted murderers for not getting it right.

You have a favourite burner on your stove.  Admit it!  You know it’s true.

Adam Sandler isn’t actually funny, but he’s a nice guy and was on Saturday Night Live — so everybody gives him the benefit of the doubt.

When you throw a ball and your dog brings it back, it’s probably because they think you’re having fun throwing it.

And finally:

In the Old Norse religion, Odin (the leader of the Gods) promised to rid the world of Ice-Giants.  I’ve never seen an Ice-Giant, so that’s something to think about.