Only today, in my dotage, did I discover that Grandma Moses was white.

Odd.

Can I interest you in a nightcap?
No thanks. I don’t wear them.

The best way to sleep for me is after a late night cup of Joe.

The greatest invention of the 20th century was decaffeinated coffee.

I often spend time spilling my brain droppings (as George Carlin called them) on dead trees using dead tree-bound carbon rods. I was traveling for business not too long ago and, when traveling alone, I often write whilst having dinner. I write as was taught back in the day (probably in a one-room schoolhouse, while carrying my lunch in an actual pail. Unless that was “Little House on the Prairie.”). That is, I write longhand in cursive. The pretty young waitress complimented me on my handwriting perhaps a tad too exuberantly. An interesting trend I’ve noticed: the prettier the waitress, the more likely she is to compliment you for something. I had terrible writing in grade school. Though right-handed, I wrote almost exclusively with my left hand the first couple of years of college. I began to focus on the aesthetics of my writing only a few years ago. Since then, I have been meticulous about maintaining consistent sizes and angles throughout any piece.

Nevertheless, I know it’s not Thomas Jefferson. I’m sorry, honey, but your tip doesn’t change with flattery.

Note: despite the entire “tip” model of service work being a means of screwing both the servant-class and the consumer-class, it is an absolute requirement by current standards.

Thanks to “Dear Abby,” if I recall correctly.

I hate when I get materials ready for a project, only to spend the available time doing silly things like planning. Measure once, cut twice (at least that’s how it seems to work lately). I once built a level yard from a sloped one, complete with a three foot high, 80 foot wide brick wall. Thirteen tons of fill gravel, probably three times that much topsoil, and 560 bricks at 27 lbs each. I moved it all by hand and wheelbarrow. The first couple of weeks, it looked as if I had done nothing whatsoever. Then it seemed to explode.

I hated all the methodical planning. But I hated laying the first layer of bricks most of all.

My place of employment pushed through an upgrade to Microsoft Office 2013 recently. I spent much of the day loading, reloading, rebooting, sighing, and changing settings. During this process, something occurred to me. While some of my coworkers had real difficulties, I was merely inconvenienced. As well, many had difficulty in getting used to the new layouts and usage. I did not, since my home computer already uses Office 2013. I found myself telling them that you could get used to the new suite, and would eventually forget having disliked it.

That happens with most everything.

Except, of course, Windows 8. Windows 8 was vomited upon an unsuspecting user community before it was ready. Actually, it was as ready as it would ever be. And did I say vomit? It was expunged having been processed to its fullest extent, so I guess I chose the wrong end. Anyway, that steaming pile was left on the porch, surrounded by a flaming bag of enforced obsolescence of older OSs. But this wasn’t my first encounter with a never-to-be-useable Microsoft product.

Microsoft should have been been sued for having the audacity to label the abomination it included in its Visual Studio 2008 suite “Visual Basic.”

Only Microsoft could meld the powerful simplicity of Visual Basic 6.0 with the user unfriendliness of C, and come up with a slow, cumbersome, abortion like Visual Basic 2008.

If Microsoft were to merge human languages the way it merges computer languages: Call the new language English Plus or something similar. Incorporate languages with something to offer, like the simple grammatical rules of Chinese, the regular spelling of Russian. Discard the useful parts, and only incorporate the character writing of Chinese, the confusing cases and tenses of Russian, and remove all articles, like both languages. Keep the worst parts of English, and declare the best parts obsolete. Replace obsolete parts with things completely foreign to the native English speaker.

Declare the old language obsolete, and quit supporting it.

Laugh at the captive fools as they struggle with the sadistic joke you played on them.

Profit!