The things people think up. Call me square but I think I’ll put on my pants the old-fashioned way, one leg at a time.

Wiseman is an academic and amateur magician who periodically comes up with interesting little tricks and explains how they are done.

Some readers of this blog very kindly send me links to items that they think may be of interest. I appreciate them and often use them in subsequent posts. I do have a request, though, that is triggered by the fact that there are many spam messages out there that use links and attachments as ways of transmitting various kinds of malware.

As a result, I never click on links or open attachments that I am not sure are genuinely meant for me, even if they are from people I know well. I only do so if the link or attachment is accompanied by a message that is highly unlikely to have been generated by a bot, which means that it includes something that is not generic but is specific to me and goes beyond just an opening greeting that has my name. It does not have to be a long treatise, just something that tells me that the message actually was targeted to me personally.

This is a practice that I recommend to everyone as a safety precaution.

Thanks.

The boom-bust nature of the American economy has now spawned ‘ghost tenants’, people who are essentially high-end house sitters. It works like this. Suppose you have a huge luxury house that you need to move out of and want to sell. You don’t want to leave the house empty or with a caretaker because houses are easier to sell if there is someone actually living in them. But you don’t want to rent it out either because that creates other problems.
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Some years ago, I attended a function at my daughter’s high school. These events are very well attended and parking is hard to get but I found a space and parked and was walking towards the building when a car came to a stop in the middle of the street where there was a parking space and a woman jumped out. I knew her because she was the mother of my daughter’s friend. She gave me her car keys and asked me if I would park her car for her in the space because she did not know how to parallel park.
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What is the number that is obscured by the car?

Some years ago, I gave my views on the use of pseudonyms and on sockpuppetry but I want to briefly return to it to clarify a point.
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Cleveland sports fans let out a collective sigh of relief and whooped it up when LeBron James announced that he was returning to the local basketball team the Cavaliers, four years after he infuriated his adoring fans here with his grandiose departure. This was much bigger news than that the Republican party had picked the city for its 2016 convention. The Plain Dealer celebrated his return in Saturday’s edition with a 20-page supplement full of color photographs documenting his life. This in an era when they have cut back on print issue deliveries (it now delivers just four days a week) and reduced the size of the paper and its reporting staff.
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Funerals are not fun events. One goes to them to show one’s sympathy for the loved ones of the deceased and they are usually events that have a certain solemn decorum with the body in a casket and people filing past to pay their respects. If the casket is open, the body looks composed and at rest.
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Journalist H. L. Mencken was no friend of religion or its apologists and took every opportunity to savage them with his biting wit. There is a great line of his that I have used on many occasions where he expressed his contempt for theologians, saying: “A theologian is like a blind man in a dark room searching for a black cat which isn’t there – and finding it!”
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