It's all about me

Just so no one has any doubts whatsoever about where I'm coming from, I'd like to note that The News-Sentinel has a pretty strict profanity policy. Because this blog is affiliated with The News-Sentinel, I follow that policy here. However, if I were writing completely in my own style solely on my own terms, this post would be filled with language so foul it would make a drunken sailor cover his ears. I feel like cussin.' Got that?

Sorry, have to bore you with a little insider baseball.

These excuses are OK, but I've always liked the idea of calling in well: "I'm sorry, but I just feel too good to come into work today."

I thoroughly enjoyed the two-part Bob Dylan documentary on PBS Monday and Tuesday nights, although it seems odd that all the recent Dylanmania focuses on his first few years when he's had a career lasting more than 40 years. There's a reason for such '60s wallowing, as post-boomer critic David Greenberg points out in a Slate article:

I don't care how dangerous it is. There's nothing else in the world quite like it, and anybody willing to give it up deserves whatever happens.

I tell people I have a manual PDA. I write things on scraps of paper, matchbooks, napkins, business cards, POST-IT notes, and wad them all together in my back pocket. When the wad gets too big, I go through all the scraps, throwing some away and stacking the rest neatly on my dresser. This is called archiving. Now I'm ready for an upgrade.

This article about telecommuting (or "teleworking," a new one on me) talks only about pressure from rising gas prices and telecenters that allow people to do work closer to home, thus missing completely the real revolution: The ability of more people, because of technological advances, to do all their work without even leaving home. My brother lives in Hill Country, Texas, a good four-hour drive from his office in Houston.

I always knew that one day my "coney dogs for breakfast" diet would be validated by science.

So it turns out that an active lifestyle and a healty diet will also ... what was I saying? Something about the coney dogs I have for breakfast sometimes. No, that wasn't it. Maybe about how I have everything I need piled up around the couch? No ... oh, I recall. How to improve your remembering thingy and reduce your, er, uh ... forgettering.

I should probably lament this development as another sign of civilization's decline -- see, nobody's reading anymore! But it seems like an interesting way to add interest to the magazine. I read a lot of comic books as a kid and graduated to Mad magazine and National Lampoon, checking out a few Classics Illustrated along the way. If I could find a good illustrator, I'd add a graphic novel to this blog.