- In the late nineteenth century fashionable women were taught to practice saying words that began with the letter p so that their mouths would pucker as they discussed prunes and prisms with desirable bachelors. I have tried it myself and saying “Paris” does indeed cause my mouth to pucker.
- Many doctors have made mistakes in their treatment of patients but never get sued while some highly skilled doctors are sued a lot - the reason why some get sued and others don’t is because people don’t tend to sue doctors they like.
- You should not use certain words in your blog: they tend to attract a lot of spam comments. Obviously I will not say them here but anything suggestive, such as this blog entry, is prime target.
- Over 19,000 Americans die each year in alcohol-related crashes. If a vehicle defect or food contamination caused some 50 people to die, there would be an uproar - everyone would be talking about it and criticizing everyone involved. Where is the uproar?
- Cellphones are the new cigarettes. People like to flutter their hands - it used to be cool flicking cigarettes - now it is cellphones. Think about the poses people strike with cellphones. If you aren’t using a cellphone you are probably way too stationary. Just watch people with a cellphone: first is the grand pull out from the pocket, they flip it open to see if there are any missed calls that they could have been attending to instead of the bore in front of them, the hands flutter expressively as they punch in some numbers, all eyes are on the phone scanning it for tell tale signs of owner’s status and taste, they flick the phone shut, and then they lay it down beside their drink. Uncanny similarity.
- Penguin Books experimented on a fully collaborative wiki novel, A Million Penguins. They discovered that you can’t have any sort of coherent trajectory when everyone has a different idea of how the story should develop and end. A fun experiment, I am sure. I tried something like that a few years back when I collaborated writing a witch tale with my niece, Sara. And that was just two of us writing in the same room but we had different ideas of where the story should go and just how much silliness is acceptable.
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