To have to carry your own corn far–
who likes it?
To follow the black bear through the thicket–
who likes it?
To hunt without profit, to return weary without anything–
who likes it?
You have to carry your own corn far.
You have to follow the black bear through the thicket.
You have to hunt to no profit.If not, what will you tell the little ones? What will you speak of?
For it is bad not to use the talk which God has sent us.
I am Speaks-Fluently. Of all the groups of symbols,
I am a symbol by myself.
Let the Disappointments Pass
IYKYK
What Size is Your T-Shirt?
I’m buying a T-shirt online as a gift . . . now you might say a T-shirt is a cheap-ass gift, but trust me, it’s a cool T-shirt.
The point is, it’s available in multiple sizes: S, M, L, XL, 2XL, 3XL, 4XL, 5XL. Only in America. I seem to remember a time when XXL was the largest size you could get.
What must a person look like to need a 5XL T-shirt?
YOU’RE EATING TOO MUCH FOOD! GO TO THE GYM!
Thanksgiving for Pets
Hi everybody! It’s Lightning! I’m in heaven now but I have Internet so I can still post sometimes.
My owner sent me this picture that he saw online:
Chocolate is bad for dogs but I don’t agree with the rest of the list. Dogs are animals, descended from the gray wolf, and animals don’t need to be supervised when eating.
For Thanksgiving, if you stepped away for 15 seconds, I would jump in your chair, polish off an entire plate of holiday delights and probably empty your wine glass as well.
That said, I was an alpha pug, so I can’t speak for any dogs further down the Greek alphabet.
— Lightning 
The Pen and the Sword
Unpopular opinion: The pen is NOT mightier than the sword. Does anyone want to participate in an experiment? I’ll provide you with a pen.
My Boyhood Sports Icons Are Dying: Randy Jones
Randy Jones was a local guy . . . local to Orange County. He was born in Fullerton, went to high school in Brea, then pitched at Chapman College in Orange.
As a pro, he was a good player on a terrible team. The San Diego Padres, in their first six years of existence (1969–1974), never won more than 63 games and finished each season in last place in the six-team NL West. They were just barely a major league team.
Jones had two really good seasons for the Padres. In 1975, Jones was 20–12 and led the National League with a 2.24 ERA. He had 18 complete games in 36 starts, back when complete games were an actual thing, and became the first 20-game winner in Padres history. Jones was second in wins and WAR (wins above replacement) (7.5) among pitchers, only behind the great Tom Seaver (22 wins and 7.8 WAR). Seaver finished first in the Cy Young Award voting, with 15 first place votes to Jones’s seven.
His best season was in 1976, when he went 22–14 with a 2.74 ERA. (San Diego won just 73 games that season.) Jones became the first Padre to win the Cy Young Award. From May 17 to June 22, he pitched 68 consecutive innings without allowing a base on balls, tying the 63-year-old NL record set by Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson in 1913.
At the All-Star break in July 1976, Jones’s record was 16–3, a first-half win total that set an NL record that no one has equaled since. He finished the season as the major league leader in wins, complete games (25), games started (40), and innings pitched (315.1).
During his last start of the 1976 season, he injured a nerve in his pitching arm that required surgery, and he was never able to regain his Cy Young form. He was with the Padres through 1980, when he was traded to the Mets, and retired before the 1983 season.
Jones finished his career with a win–loss record of 100–123 (.448) and a 3.42 ERA. He is the only starting pitcher to win a Cy Young Award but retire with a losing record. In 285 starts, he threw 75 complete games, including 19 shutouts.
Some of you may not remember what a doormat the Padres were in their early years. Randy Jones had two great seasons but his legacy is putting the Padres on the map in major league baseball.
RIP Randy Jones
Don’t Try That Here
A Trip to the Oral Surgeon
I had a wisdom tooth taken out the other day. The oral surgeon, the first thing she said when she came in the surgery room was “Are those your real teeth in the front?”
They are my real teeth so I said yes.
“They’re not veneers?”
“No.”
“Do you drink coffee?”
“No.”
“Tea?”
“No.”
“Soda?”
“I do drink a lot of sodas.”
“Did you have them bleached?”
“I did a number of years ago. Now I just throw some Crest whitening strips on there a couple times a year.”
“You should be in a toothpaste commercial.”
I don’t know if she was flirting with me. It’s been so long since anyone’s done that that I don’t know what it looks like anymore so I didn’t bring it up.
“What are we doing today?” she asked, while looking over my X-rays.
I think she already knew but I said “Taking out the lower left wisdom tooth.”
“Oh, that’s sad.”
“It is sad. My teeth are like a family. Brother Tooth cannot be separated from Brother Gum.”
She smiled at that . . . then took it out anyway.
You’re Never Too Old to Launch a Transnational Forgery Scheme
German police announced yesterday that they had busted a transnational scheme to sell 20 forgeries of paintings by artists including Rembrandt and Pablo Picasso. Several suspected fakes were seized during coordinated raids across Germany, Switzerland, and Liechtenstein last week.
Authorities allege that a 77-year-old German man led 10 accomplices in the scheme that priced the counterfeits between $465K and $150M.
I don’t know how to paint, unfortunately, but I do know how to use CSS DIVs. How much do you think I can get for this Starry Night forgery?
Questions and Concerns at the Dentist
After my dental appointment, the hygienist asks me, “Do you have any questions or concerns?”
I say, “Oh I’ve got a ton of questions and concerns.” Pause. “Did you mean about my teeth?”
“Those are the only ones I can help you with.”
“Well . . . no, nothing along those lines. Thanks for asking though!”
Ace Frehley, 1951-2025
It used to be that whenever a musical legend died — David Bowie or Prince, for example — I’d post something online to say “And yet all the members of Rush are still alive? How is this fair?!”
I regard Rush as the worst band in the history of music.
Then Neil Peart died and I had to switch to “all the original members of KISS are still alive.” Now that Ace Frehley has died, I’m not sure how to proceed.
Are all of the Bay City Rollers still alive?
RIP Ace Frehley
The Great Chicago Fire
On this date, Oct. 8, in 1871, the Great Chicago Fire started.
The fire came under control on October 10, leaving an estimated 300 people dead, 100,000 others homeless and more than 17,000 structures destroyed.
As major disasters go, a death toll of 300 is very low. Aren’t there about 300 people killed in Chicago every weekend now?
Did you know? The same day the Great Chicago Fire began, a fire broke out in Peshtigo, Wisconsin, in which more than 1,000 people perished.
The disaster (in Chicago, not Wisconsin) prompted an outbreak of looting and lawlessness. Some things never change.
Martial law was declared on October 11, and lifted several weeks later.
Also, Happy World Octopus Day to those who celebrate.
Einstein’s List of Marital Demands
EINSTEIN’S LIST OF MARITAL DEMANDS
These are more useful than the Theory of Relativity, which no one understands anyway.
Career Lessons: Lesson #1
Currently I do most of my work from home. Mid-afternoon, loud music started playing from somewhere nearby and I went to a window to see if I could locate the source.
What I saw was an Amazon truck parked in front of a neighbor’s home and a car stopped in the street. The driver of the car, a young woman, was standing outside the car, and the truck driver was standing near the young woman.
From the physical interaction, they seemed to be boyfriend and girlfriend. I don’t know why they happened to be in the same place at the same time, but I didn’t care about that. I cared about the music.
I couldn’t tell if the music was coming from the car or the truck until I walked out there, and then it was obviously coming from the truck.
“What are you doing?” I asked them. “People live here,” I said, gesturing at the homes. “I live here, I work here, and I can’t work with music playing at that volume.”
The truck driver walked back to the truck to turn the music off and I took the opportunity of his absence to say to the girl, “Good luck with that guy. He’s going to lose his job.”
“Why?” she asked, rather unpleasantly. “Are you going to report him?”
“No, but somebody’s going to report him if that’s the way he does business. You can’t pull up to people’s homes and blast loud music at them for no reason.”
The truck driver was back now. “Can I give you a piece of career advice?” I said. “Don’t do anything stupid. On purpose, I mean. We all screw up and do something stupid once in a while, but don’t do it on purpose.”
A Home Run Ball is Loose in the Stands
See videos below for what to do and what NOT to do when a home run ball is loose in the stands.
This is how it's done pic.twitter.com/DV3fL41DnW
— Boom? (@WeriBomb) September 6, 2025
Here is the full video of the situation in the outfield after Harrison Bader’s Home Run.
? @NBCSPhilly https://t.co/W5thuO6nhg pic.twitter.com/h9yJaPbcmX
— Phillies Tailgate (@PhilsTailgate) September 6, 2025
Unless it’s some kind of record-setter like the Shohei Ohtani 50/50 record ball that sold for millions of dollars. Then it’s every mf-er for themselves.
Moms Miss Work to Care for Kids!
It’s amazing that anyone alive still believes in work-life balance. I thought boomers already proved conclusively that it doesn’t exist.
You can have days focused on work or you can have days focused on family. You can’t have both.
My opinion is that parents should prioritize family. Kids like to grow up with a parent and moms like to spend time with their children.
Of course everyone else can do what they want to, but please stop pretending to be shocked that work-life balance is not a real thing.
The Principle of Unequal Distribution
I’ve always thought that wealth inequality should be called “wealth diversity” because then it sounds like a good thing.
But seriously, folks, you’ve probably heard of the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80-20 rule. Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) noticed that in Italy in the early 20th century, about 20% of the population owned roughly 80% of the land, a skewed distribution that appears to be true for every society ever studied, regardless of governmental form.
Pareto distributions arise naturally from systems where positive feedback loops exist—for instance, wealth begets more wealth. Or as Jesus said in Matthew 25:29: “To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken.”
The Principle of Unequal Distribution also applies, for example, to the population of cities (a very small number have almost all the people), the mass of heavenly bodies (a very small number hoard all the matter), and the frequency of words in a language (90% of communication occurs using just 500 words).
Some Things Can’t Be Improved Upon
Just for fun, I clicked the “Rewrite with AI” button on one of my LinkedIn posts. I wasn’t planning to use the AI version. I just wanted to see what it would do.
It came back exactly the same.
Some things can’t be improved upon.
Choosy Maters
Most men do not meet human female standards.
According to stats from OKCupid, women rate 85 percent of men on dating sites below average in attractiveness. That’s a frost-brewed, cold, harsh dose of reality right there!
But then they date them anyway, right? If not, there’d be a much higher percentage of people, male and female both, without partners. For example, I myself am not a top 15 percenter in attractiveness but I have managed to consensually propagate my genetic material to future generations. Of course, my intelligence and wit are off the charts so that helps, I think.
Female humans are unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterpart, in this regard. Female chimps are not choosy maters.
I Love a Good Insult
I love a good insult . . .
Tolstoy to Chekhov: “You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.”
Unfortunately, most of the insults I see directed at me and others online are just lowbrow name-calling. Can we all try to raise our insult game?
Thank you for your attention to this matter.