Since some readers here seem to share my appreciation for puns that require elaborate set-ups, here is one of my favorite pun strips from Pearls Before Swine that appeared back in 2009.
I wrote before about how to become more aware that you are about to say something obnoxious so that you can avoid doing so. But if you happen to be the kind of person who cannot help himself, reader flex sent me this clip from a Canadian sketch comedy show with comedian Rick Mercer about an alert system that warns people around you that you are going to give them your opinion even if it is not wanted.
One of the things that always bugs me is the waste of food. This is especially the case with grocery stores that throw out tons of food because they have reached or are approaching the ‘sell by’ or vague ‘best used by’ dates stamped on them, even though the items may be perfectly usable. So I was interested to hear on last Saturday’s episode of All Things Considered a story about how France has passed a law that requires grocery stores to donate such items to food banks or face fines.
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We all know that so-called ‘reality shows’ are anything but, that they are as spontaneous as professional wrestling. But we never get to go behind the scenes to see what actually goes on because all the contestants are required to sign extremely restrictive and punitive non-disclosure agreements. Jessie Glenn, however, can write of her experience of being a contestant on the reality cooking show Master Chef with Gordon Ramsay because she did not send back the signed contract as she was expected to before being signed on, but the producers of the show seemed to have not noticed its absence. So she spills the beans and it is pretty ugly.
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When we die, it is not like turning off a switch that shuts down everything all at once. Different parts of us fall apart at different times. In the March 2018 issue of Harper’s Magazine, Barbara Ehrenreich describes the process. (Subscription required)
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William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University, writes about the disingenuous coverage of Russian interference in US elections that portray it as an outrageous violation of the sovereign rights of a nation, when the US has been doing it for so long and in much more overt ways. Such behavior was revealed a long time ago in former CIA agent Philip Agee’s book Inside the Company: CIA Diary (1975) that detailed the things he did in Latin America after he joined the CIA in 1957. Like so many things that the US ruling class finds distasteful, this knowledge tends to be repeatedly buried.
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Donald Trump has suggested that teachers should be armed with guns to deter killers. Of course, the fact that an actual police offer (and maybe even four) was on site at the Parkland school and did not act shows that having an armed person present is not a solution when there is the ability for any person to buy a rapid-firing weapon that can kill many people in just a few seconds. Teachers are also pushing back saying that they joined the profession to teach people, not to be law enforcement officers.
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The recent spate of revelations about inappropriate behavior in the workplace has largely dealt with pretty serious offenses where the wrongdoing was obvious. But what about gray areas where people may not be sure if something is appropriate or not? To explore this NPR, in conjunction with the polling outfit Ipsos, conducted a survey to see what people thought was appropriate and what was not and reporter Danielle Kurtzleben discussed the results on last Saturday’s episode of All Things Considered.
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