The Ubiquitous Grammar Cop

The creators of the "Eagle-Man" auto insurance commercial need to take advertising lessons from these folks .

There are stories like this that make me think: 1) This is part of the reason why people are afraid to fly. 2) This is a big chunk of the reason why I have issues with capitalism.

While I walked around the University of Illinois campus today, I noticed that these (and all types similar) are the latest vogue with the female student body.

I am presently sitting in the Illini Union at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. When I started attending this school almost twenty years ago, the Union and several other university-owned buildings had restaurants and diners in them. The Union had one in its basement, there was the Illini Orange, a fast-food diner in the Six Pack (a confluence of six residence halls in Champaign), and several university-owned commissaries in the residence halls. All of these places were owned by the university and its staff were state employees. If you lived in the dormitories, you could grab a meal at the Union and have it count as breakfast, lunch, or dinner if you had a meal plan through the university. If you craved a late night snack, you could purchase a bag of chips (or something similar) and have it charged to your student account if your pockets carried nothing but lint. Today there is a different scene in the Illini Union and at the Orange (I cannot verify if the residence hall ...

Conservative schadenfreude is extremely disturbing.

The three objects mentioned in the title refer to a line uttered by Dr. Niles Crane in an episode of Frasier . In that episode, the main plot involves Dr. Frasier Crane working to analyze a persistent dream he has (where he finds himself in bed with a male colleague). When Frasier relays the details of this dream to his brother (a fellow psychiatrist) Niles wryly asks, “Are there images of cigars, bananas, or short, blunt swords?” This deadpan joke about Freudian latency in my opinion describes the source of some people’s animosity and criticism of President Obama. The vitriol goes back nearly two years when Senator Obama began his run for the presidency. People all over the country during the primary season and through the general campaign expressed their concern about the possibility of someone like Obama becoming President. Once he was elected, these feelings metastasized into the Birther movement for those people whose bigotry stands out overtly. For others who congregate in Tea P...