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Fun Diseases
Posted on October 1, 2002 7 Comments
I’m continuing my cavalcade of science-related pieces in honor of the release of Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Through the Universe, to which I contributed a significant number of the articles contained therein. The pieces you’re reading here this week are rather similar in tone and content to the pieces you’ll find in the Uncle […]
Pheromones
Posted on September 29, 2002 1 Comment
All right! One of my books for 2002 is now out: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Plunges Into the Universe (my other book for 2002, The Rough Guide to the Universe, now looks like it’s going to be released in 2003. Which is good — too much product released at the same time is no good, […]
Musicunited.org
Posted on September 26, 2002
Here’s an interesting question for you: Considering that the music industry essentially dictates the shape of the youth culture, how can it be so thickheadedly clueless about talking to teens about file sharing? The latest music industry salvo in this direction is a Web site called MusicUnited.org, which is designed to bring home the point […]
Stinky Cheese
Posted on September 20, 2002 1 Comment
Krissy came home the other night with Who Moved My Cheese? It was pressed onto her at work by one of the managers at her new place of employment, who told her that all new hires were actively encouraged to read it (Here’s a clue to the sensible Midwestern frugality of her new place of […]
Bob Greene Redux
Posted on September 18, 2002
Interesting feedback from the Bob Greene thing the other day. Aside from the journalistic schadenfreude of watching Bob Greene fall — which is considerable, so that’s a warning to all of you who wish you had his career up until last weekend — the largest spate of e-mail I got about it came from 40-plus-year-old […]
Bob Greene Gets Canned
Posted on September 16, 2002 1 Comment
Header in my Spam box today: “Barnyard animal rapers take it to the extreme!!!” Jesus. Aren’t they there already? *** Speaking of taking it to the extreme, Chicago Tribune columnist Bob Greene resigned his position over the weekend because someone blabbed to the Tribune (in an anonymous e-mail, no less) that Ol’ Bob had a […]
Blogging Network
Posted on September 6, 2002
People have asked me when I thought that blogging would finally “pay off” — that is, that it will finally become a viable way for a writer to make money. This question comes coincidentally close to the debut of the Blogging Network, a sort of “United Artists”-model concern in which a number of bloggers have […]
Personal Things
Posted on September 3, 2002
Someone wrote in not long ago to ask me why I haven’t written about Athena recently. The short answer is that what with the books and all, I haven’t actually been writing about much of anything here, much less Athena. But the other reason is that simply that I haven’t much felt like it. As […]
Stupid Conservative Tricks
Posted on August 24, 2002
There’s nothing that makes me want to gag more than conservative white men in power who complain people are bigoted against their kind. That’s what Florida governor Jeb Bush is doing, talking specifically about Jerry Regier, a man Bush picked to run Florida’s Department of Children & Families — you know, the one that keeps […]
Moral Relativism, Scalzi Style
Posted on June 24, 2002 4 Comments
My wife is in summer school (she is 16, you see — no, not really), and among the classes she’s taking this quarter is an introduction to ethics course, one of those courses where the great moral issues of the day are plopped on the table and everybody goes back and forth on the issue […]
Mowing Life Lessons
Posted on June 20, 2002 1 Comment
Based on the immense (and frankly, somewhat inexplicable) popularity of the last Whatever, I now present All The Things I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know About Mowing My Lawn, an excerpt of my upcoming (and no doubt soon-to-be-spectacularly-successful) yard care book, Everything I Ever Knew About Mowing I Learned in Just the Last Two Weeks. […]
Cogent Childfree Arguments
Posted on April 25, 2002 1 Comment
Ahh. This time, I come not to troll alt.support.childfree members, but to praise them (one, at least). A certain J. Metz has posted a long, cogent and well-written piece on the complaints of the childfree, and I actively encourage everyone who has been enjoying the carnage of the last few days to head on over […]
Sometimes I’m Not Nice
Posted on April 23, 2002
Note to any alt.support.childfree folks still loitering around. About yesterday’s piece: You Have Been Trolled. Not only have you been trolled, but it was a cross-platform troll; I didn’t even have to go over to your newsgroups and message boards to do it. I just slipped a note to a particularly excitable member of your […]
Trolling the Childfree
Posted on April 22, 2002 13 Comments
The chum monkeys of alt.support.childfree are hooting over this Whatever, in which I admit that since becoming a parent, I find e-mail hoaxes about exploding babies less amusing than I used to. Since this particular Whatever has been loitering unnoticed in the archives for a couple of years, I was curious as to how it […]
Hints for White People
Posted on April 19, 2002
Abercrombie & Fitch just had to recall a whole bunch of shirts from its new line when it discovered, to its shock and dismay, that there are some Asian people out there who object to a t-shirt which features two slanty-eyed Chinese in coolie hats flanking a motto (“Two Wongs can make it white”) whose […]
Talkin’ ‘Bout My Demographic
Posted on April 18, 2002
I am a demographic anomaly. Since I’m essentially a yuppie geek living in farm country, the living embodiment of Green Acres (except that, given my wife’s love of the lawn tractor, I’m the one playing Eva Gabor), this isn’t exactly what one would call a surprise. Still, there’s a difference between thinking you’re a fish […]
Little Bomber Girl
Posted on April 13, 2002 3 Comments
For my money (and since I am a taxpayer and at least a ten-spot of my taxes goes to the State Department every year, it is my money), this is the picture that should utterly kill what little sympathy for the Palestinian cause remains here in the United States: The picture is of a protest […]
Being a Good Father
Posted on April 12, 2002 9 Comments
E-mail today from a correspondent who suggests that on the basis of what I wrote yesterday, I consider myself better than the “so-called deadbeat” dads that I imagine others seeing me as because I’m out alone with my kid in the middle of the afternoon — i.e., unemployed and/or seeing their children through court-ordered visitation. […]
Afternoon Dads
Posted on April 11, 2002
There is nothing more pathetic than a dad alone with his kid in the early afternoon. I don’t say this as a matter of a personal opinion, mind you. Having been out with my kid during that time, I’m here to tell you that the time is generally pleasantly spent, although it’s generally spent in […]
Blog Numbers Followup
Posted on April 9, 2002 1 Comment
Quick follow-up on yesterday’s piece, and I do mean quick, since it’s 2:30 and I have to be up in a few hours to take Athena to preschool: * Several people wrote to ask why, when I was discussing my readership here vs. my readership elsewhere, I compared circulation numbers of newspapers and magazines with […]
Whatever Everyone Else is Saying