These tricks do not involve skilled sleight-of-hand but are the kinds of things any one can do with friends or at parties, and are kind of fun.

My recent post on the pastor who scrawled on her meal receipt an ungracious note to the server in an Applebee’s restaurant resulted in an interesting discussion in the comments on whether the server was justified in putting a photo of the receipt on the web with the name of the customer visible but other information (the name of the restaurant, the date, and the credit card number) omitted. [Read more…]

I once had my pocket picked. It was on a bus in Sri Lanka and I never even noticed that I had lost something. But the thief made a mistake in that he mistook a case containing keys for a wallet. When he discovered his error, he threw the case away and left the bus. When I later discovered my loss I asked the conductor if he had seen my keys and he said that he had found them and gave them back to me. So I had a lucky escape. [Read more…]

The world of wrestling was stunned by the news yesterday that all categories of their beloved sport have been recommended for elimination from the 2020 Olympic games. The demise is not quite certain. Wrestling can be re-instated, but it has to now compete with baseball/softball, squash, karate, sport climbing, wakeboarding, wushu, and roller sports and the betting in wrestling’s favor is not good. [Read more…]

I have never understood the appeal of golf as a spectator sport. It seems to take forever for the players to hit the ball, and even then you can’t even see the ball’s trajectory or where it lands. But the big tournaments draw big crowds, even though you can see only a tiny bit of what is going on. At least with other slow games like cricket and baseball, you can see the entire action. I also find it hilarious that there has to be pin drop silence when a golfer is about to hit a stationary ball, when in tennis or baseball the players have to hit a ball traveling at around 100 mph with crowds screaming in their ears. [Read more…]

Neetzan Zimmerman recounts the story of Alois Bell, pastor of a St. Louis church, who took a group of her flock to her neighborhood Applebee’s for dinner. The bill included an 18% gratuity built in, which is the restaurant’s policy for groups of 8 or more people, something that is fairly common. Serving large groups is tricky (especially if they order separately and want separate bills) and unfortunately some customers try to stiff the wait staff by under-tipping. (This whole business of tipping is a complex one and I expressed my own views on it back in 2005.) [Read more…]

In my recent post on why I will not see the film Django Unchained, I gave as one reason my distaste with the fact that Quentin Tarantino seems obsessed with using the n-word as much as possible. This prompted many comments on the use of such words and one commenter noted that I should not use the euphemism. [Read more…]

It’s been some time since I put up a cute dog video so here’s one.

Today marks the eighth anniversary of this blog. My first tentative post was on January 26, 2005 at my former location on the blogging platform provided by my employer Case Western Reserve University. I moved to FreethoughtBlogs on January 10th of last year so this month also marks the first anniversary of my move. [Read more…]