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“He’s a joker, he’s a smoker, he’s a midnight toker,” Obama added.

When I get coffee from the break room, I try to cycle through the creamers — French Vanilla, Hazelnut and the regular Half & Half.

Today I got coffee and I couldn’t remember where I left off in the cycle. I’m in a quandary . . .

so·te·ri·ol·o·gy \suh-teer-ee-ol-uh-jee\, noun:

1. spiritual salvation, esp. by divine agency.
2. the branch of theology dealing with this.

[Editor's Note: Obviously I disagree with this egregious opinion, but I'm committed to hosting a wide range of viewpoints. -- PE]

You have mothers, you have wives who are also mothers, you have daughters who are also mothers . . . attention has to be divided and no one is satisfied with her share of the pie. As a son, husband and/or father, you can’t win, it’s just a question of how badly you’re going to lose.

Women are bitching on the run-up to Mothers Day, they’re bitching on Mothers Day, and they’re laying down ground rules regarding what they will and will not put up with on next year’s Mothers Day.

It’s a big foofaraw and nobody’s happy.

Conversely, on Fathers Day, everyone’s as happy as a lark, despite the fact that Fathers Day is commemorated, in my family at least, by absolutely nothing.

Hi Mom! It’s me, Lightning! Happy Mothers Day!

Sometimes I wonder if you’re still alive. I know you could be, even though I’m almost 70 years old myself.

Here’s a recent picture of me . . .

I’m taking a lot of naps now that I’m older. Although come to think of it, I took a lot of naps when I was younger too!

I can’t move my legs very well now — my back legs, mostly. They don’t hurt, but I can’t feel them very much and I can’t tell where they are. It’s funny that I used to be the fastest pug and now I’m the slowest.

I remember you told me that dogs teach people about two things:

1. Unconditional love, and
2. Nothing lasts forever. Everything ends so don’t take anything for granted, even for one day.

If you don’t hear from me next Mothers Day, it’s not because I forgot. If I go to heaven first, I’ll wait for you and we’ll all be together again!

Love,

Lightning

Stop one heart from breaking. Ease one life the aching or cool one pain. Or help one fainting robin unto his nest again.

What’s the billing code for that?

Lassa Witch Doctors

Alternative medicine is not a real thing. You don’t have a choice between medicine and alternative medicine. You have a choice between medicine and Things That Have Not Been Proven to Work.

Alternative medicine that works is called “medicine.”

Some people tell me that regular doctors don’t know about alternative medicine because they don’t teach it in medical schools.

They don’t teach it in medical schools? If I didn’t know anything about my job beyond what I learned in school 25 years ago, I’d be in bad shape. I’d be unemployable.

If there are any doctors out there who’ve never learned anything outside of medical school, those are not the doctors you want to be going to.

Did you hear about these three women in Cleveland who were kidnapped and held in a house for 10 years?

They were rescued on Monday of this week when one of the women screamed through a small opening in the front door, “I need help! I need help! I have been kidnapped for 10 years.” Two men in the neighborhood heard her screaming, kicked the door in and the women were able to escape.

(Why it took 10 years to think up the Scream for Help strategy, I don’t know. I wish the reporter had asked about that.)

A childhood friend of one of the women said, “I’m so thankful, God is good. I’ve been praying. Never forgot about her, ever.”

So let’s see . . . 10 years of prayer = no results. Screaming for help = instant results.

I know some wiseass is going to say that prayer did bring results because God sent someone to kick the door in, but did he have to wait 10 years to do it? It’s a good thing the guys who heard the screams didn’t take 10 years to mull over their next move . . .

Hi everybody! It’s me, Lightning!

I hate to admit it but I’m getting old. My mind is still sharp and I’m still handsome but I can’t move my legs very well anymore. I feel like pretty soon I won’t be able to move them at all and when that happens . . .

My owner promised to take care of me all the way so I’m not scared. He tells me he loves me. He never used to tell me that but I knew anyway.

He asked his wife the other day if it’s okay to say “Love you” to a dog. “It feels a little silly,” he said, “but maybe he understands it.”

I think he knows that our time together is almost over . . .

I never actually noticed it before, but the gas station where I buy sodas every morning has a sign out front showing the current jackpots for Powerball and Mega Millions.

Both of the jackpots were three digits this morning (nine digits if you add six zeros for the millions) — one a little more than 200 and one a little less. Maybe that’s why I noticed them today, because there were so many digits. Or maybe it’s my destiny to win the lottery and the hand of fate turned my eyeballs to the jackpots.

“I noticed the numbers out front,” I said to the clerk. “Give me a ticket for Powerball and Mega Millions.”

“That’s a lot of millions,” he said.

“It sure is. I’ll still stop by in the morning for sodas though.”

The taste of self-inflicted suffering, of an evening trashed in spite, brought curious satisfactions. Other people stopped being real enough to carry blame for how you felt. Only you and your refusal remained. And like self-pity, or like the blood that filled your mouth when a tooth was pulled — the salty ferric juices that you swallowed and allowed yourself to savor — refusal had a flavor for which a taste could be acquired. . . .

And if you sat at the dinner table long enough, whether in punishment or in refusal or simply in boredom, you never stopped sitting there. Some part of you sat there all your life.

— Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

It was hot here this week — in the 90s — so when my owner got home and gave me fresh water I was really thirsty!

— Lightning

I got my teeth whitened today. Ah, vanitas vanitatum!

“Have you done this before?” the esthetician asked me.

“No . . . have you?”

Most days I park on Level 5 of the office parking structure because that’s where the open spaces are at the time I arrive.¹

This morning I got a spot on Level 1! A guy was pulling out just as I was pulling in and I got the spot.

Unfortunately, when I went out for lunch, I walked up four levels out of habit and couldn’t find my car.

¹There are actually a lot of open spaces on lower levels but they’re “reserved” for people who aren’t there, which is rubbish. If you’re really that important, you should be the first person in every morning and you can have any parking space you want.

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• Parking: Tips for Finding the Best Space (allstate.com)

Edmund Gettier

What does it mean to say that you “know” something is true?

According to traditional philosophical thinking, you can be said to know that some proposition P is true if and only if:

1. P is true.
2. You believe that P is true.
3. You are justified in believing that P is true.

These three conditions jointly form the concept of justified true belief (JTB).

As an example, let’s examine my claim that I know Paris is the capital of France. Unless an edict to the contrary has come down in the last few minutes, Paris is the capital of France, I believe that Paris is the capital of France, and I’m justified in believing that based on available evidence. So according to the concept of justified true belief, I know that Paris is the capital of France.

Gettier Problems

Here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say I wake up in the morning, look at the clock (let’s make it an old-fashioned analog clock), and it shows the time as 7:30. And let’s say that the time is in fact 7:30, but that, unknown to me, the clock has stopped. Do I “know” that the time is 7:30? My belief that the time is 7:30 is correct, but is it knowledge — or is it more of a lucky guess?

Another thought experiment: Given the following scenario, do I “know” that my wife is in the house? I come home from work and see my wife in the kitchen. As it happens though, what I see in the kitchen is actually a perfectly rendered hologram. My wife is in the house though, but she’s upstairs where I can’t see her. Again, the three JTB conditions are true, but my justification for belief has nothing to do with the truth of the matter.

These types of thought experiments are called Gettier problems, named for Edmund Gettier, who in 1963 published a paper called “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”

If this kind of thing is of interest to you, Wikipedia has articles on Edmund Gettier and Gettier problems and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a more in-depth treatment.

Photogravure of Charles Alexis Henri Clérel de Tocqueville (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In democratic societies, there exists an urge to do something even when the goal is not precise, a sort of permanent fever that turns to innovations (which) are always costly.

— Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1831)

Country music legend George Jones dies at 81

— CNN.com