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The Great Debate
Happy New Year! From time to time, I wade into a controversial topic here on taxpoodle.net. Really existential questions like should you drape the loose sheet of toilet paper over or under the roll, and whether there is any real difference between catsup and ketchup. I do this not to advocate any position other than…
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This is how religions get started
Perhaps the most erudite commenter on religion of my lifetime, the late Christopher Hitchens, once said: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him will believeth in anything. – Hitchens 3:16 In 1963 at a small, liberal arts school in Northfield, Minnesota called Carleton College,…
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The Fall Classic
As today marks the first game of the 2024 World Series, I thought it a good time to share my time-tested and remarkably successful betting scheme. But before I do, can we just acknowledge the arrogance of calling a sporting contest played exclusively by American teams a “world” series? I am reliably informed that there…
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Mondegreens
The American writer Sylvia Wright, writing about how she misheard the words “laid him on the green” as “Lady Mondegreen” when her mother read her the Scottish ballad The Bonnie Earl o’ Moray as a child, created the neologism “mondegreen.” In a 1954 essay in Harper’s Magazine entitled “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” she wrote:…
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On Bathtubs and Bunkum
On December 28, 1917, American journalist and cultural critic Henry Louis Mencken, better known as H. L. Mencken, published an article in the New York Evening Mail entitled “A Neglected Anniversary.” In it, he described the history of the bathtub in America, making particular note of how people, believing bathtubs posed a health risk, were slow to…
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Selling Happiness
Awhile back, I was watching an old clip on YouTube from the Dick Cavett Show, which originally ran from 1968-1975 on ABC as a sortof thinking person’s Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, being more focused on current events and thinkers/newsmakers than entertainment and celebrities, though celebrities featured occasionally. In the clip I was watching, Cavett…
Your mileage may vary.