Behind the Ironic Column

O.K., I call it inertia, but really it's probably sheer laziness.  Just depends on whose voice I want to hear in my head while I'm discussing my failure to do something or other.  In this instance, I was reminded of it by one of the few forces that inspires me ...

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I'm not usually a big consumer of rice.  Oh, I certainly eat it at restaurants or when I get a bento box or rice bowl for lunch at one of the food carts around town.  Being at least half Scots-Irish, I grew up eating potatoes as one of the main ...

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I've been a letter writer most of my life, and I've never liked the "boring" stamps.  You know the ones, the flags in all their variations, the Presidents of various years, the plain and uninteresting ones.  I prefer the commemoratives, even the ones that make a large picture which is ...

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I've had the unfortunate experience in recent weeks of dealing with a government agency that has a long and convoluted series of voice mail menus and messages.  I'm a veteran of voice mail systems, so it only took a couple of passes for me to know which numbers led to ...

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Hi, my name is Brenda and I'm a book addict.  At least I think that's what it is.  I begin to worry if I don't have a book, or preferably books, to read.  I get anxious and my stomach tenses up at the thought of a bus ride or an ...

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I don't usually dream about high school.  It was interesting and sometimes fun, but sometimes sheer hell.  Just like everybody's memories of high school, I suppose.  Mine was a small school in a small town, but I'm not sure that made us any stranger than anybody else. Although perhaps we ...

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Lately I've run across several offers that make a "lifetime" guarantee for rates or services or whatever they happen to be offering.  And the question I want to ask is: "Whose lifetime do you mean?"  Maybe the lifetime of the company.  But, at the rate some companies are being bought, sold, ...

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It would be implausible to say that a movie star is haunting me, but he's turning up everywhere.  A few weeks ago I wouldn't have been able to tell you who Ryan Phillipe was.  He looked familiar when I saw a picture of him, but I couldn't name any movie ...

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Some of my friends might say that my life always seems to be upside-down (and who knows what strangers may say).  But I don’t tend to look at it that way.  So some things that might seem abnormal to an outsider are just business as usual to me. There is one ...

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I try to ignore these things, but it just doesn’t seem possible.  I can be drowsing along in a post-lunch, darkened-room, PowerPoint-slides-full-of-dense-text presentation when suddenly I’m wide awake.  There on the screen, buried in the middle of the text, is a misspelled word.  My mind has been running along on ...

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