Every once in a while I imagine myself sitting under a large tree teaching youth about the world around them. Socrates-like. I don’t know why. The last little lesson that popped into my head was about motion. I had kicked a small stone, which had skittered along the pavement for a bit, hopped over the […]
Author Archive | weeklyrob
Headlines Now Dumber than Ever!
A headline on the front page of BBC News Online looks as though it came straight from The Onion: “Is Obama black or mixed-race? Both, says a Harvard professor” They also went a little crazy on the quotation marks: — … grant that he is “part” black (by way of his father), but assert that […]
A New World to Explore!
I’m reading The Forsaken, by Tim Tzouliadis. I never knew anything about this before. At the height of the Great Depression, thousands of Americans headed to Soviet Russia looking for a better life. The American system seemed broken and corrupt, and the Soviets were promising a heaven for the working man. Once there, these expats […]
Cliché
I would love never again to hear: 1. “a heartbeat away” from being president. Every presidential election, everyone uses that exact same phrase about the vice-president. A heartbeat away. It must have been a really powerful phrase back when it was first used. But now it’s just become the common phrase for the situation, which […]
Nice to See Ya
Today I ran into a guy who mentioned to me that he’s been reading weeklyrob. Occasionally this happens, and I invariably do the following three things, in order: 1. Feel embarrassment, shame, dread, and horror while trying to remember the latest post. 2. Go read the front page of weeklyrob, pretending that I’m new. 3. […]
Not in the Office
In Wales, all official signs must be in English and Welsh, as in the picture above. So the government wrote the English, then emailed the translator for the Welsh translation. The response came back and they printed the sign. The problem is that the email reply said, in Welsh: “I am not in the office […]
Do You Believe
Many times, I’ve argued that we can’t choose what we believe. It’s such a simple fact, but we still hear all the time that people choose this belief or that. People frequently say, “I choose to believe that people are good.” Or something like that. Nope. You may be able to choose tuna or chicken […]
Power of Prayer
I just listened to some of a How Stuff Works podcast discussing an article called Can Prayer Heal People? Apparently, people who pray experience some health benefits over people who don’t. This may be true, and can be explained without resorting to God or religion. The more contentious question is whether a group of people […]
McCain at Thirty-Seven
I’m reading John McCain’s account of his time as a POW in Vietnam. I happened to be flipping through a book I own about reporting Vietnam, and there it was. He was just out of the POW prison. Not a politician and not worried about his words or appearing perfect. For example, he used the […]
Freedom of Speech vs. Religion
Remember when those cartoons in Europe spawned a bunch of death threats and street protests from radical Muslims? And the good guys were saying, hey, don’t touch our freedom of speech. A new book about the movie, “The Last Temptation of Christ” is out. It reminds me that there were protests and death threats from […]