The secret password is… Feel free to drop in some money

December 11, 2016

I just want to pay my bills. But creditors refuse to take my money. Oh, not outright. They insist on a password. When we were kids, we built blanket forts in the living room and wouldn’t allow anyone to crawl in who didn’t recite the secret password. Twenty minutes later, the fort dissolved in an argument over what the password was. None of us could remember. The leading candidates were “The spaceship flies at midnight” and “No fair!” Now I’ve reached the age where my beard has turned snow white and my memory cells have gone to bed. I’m in even less condition to ...

Cole claims credit for the mannequin craze

December 4, 2016

The latest social media craze is the mannequin challenge. That’s when a cluster of people hold poses like statues while a person with a camera weaves around the bodies to post the tableau to Twitter or other social sites. It’s sort of like a giant game of freeze tag played by grownups. The biggest difference is that when we were 7 or 8, the kids you froze might have stayed in place, but they never shut up. “Frozen” kids continued to holler warnings and scream for teammates to dash by and unfreeze them. In the mannequin challenge, a premium is placed on no movement, not even ...

Hey, Popeye, your spinach is spying on you

November 20, 2016

I always suspected health food was up to no good. It turns out it’s spying on you. MIT researchers announced a couple weeks ago that they engineered bomb-sniffing spinach plants. Researchers embedded sensors into the plants so that when the spinach roots detect chemicals used in land mines or other booby traps in the soil, it transmits the chemical analysis to the leaves, which emit a fluorescent signal picked up by an infrared camera that emails warnings. When I was a kid, we imagined what wonders the emerging electronic technology would bring. Our hopes rested in the TV show ...

I dunno, it’s nothing — why do you ask?

November 13, 2016

Is there any word lurking in the English language that’s more jam-packed, crammed and stuffed full of nuance, meaning and danger than the word “nothing”? Ask a 2-year-old what he’s up to and he will nothing you to death. You come home from work and find your spouse curled in a fetal position beneath the dining room table. Your spouse whimpers and points toward the living room. You tiptoe in and see little Jimmy sitting quietly on the floor with a coloring book and a tube of lipstick. You take a deep breath and ask, “So, Jimmy, what’s going on?” Jimmy stares up at you ...

Sock it to me with theories

November 6, 2016

Despite how it appears, it’s not a conspiracy. The mystery of the missing sock, I mean. Feel free to keep claiming conspiracies for all that other stuff. I began pondering the age-old quest for missing socks the other morning when I saw a Tweet from my buddy Ed: “I literally can find one of every sock I own, but not a matching pair. It has to be a vast conspiracy orchestrated by some shady cabal.” Shady sock-stealing cabals comprise only a small portion of missing footwear theories. Here are a few others proposed by late-for-work people frantically trying to find a lost sole ...

Feeling fancy with cuff links, tie tacks and collars

October 30, 2016

Whatever happened to cuff links? They still exist. You can pay well more than $100 for a pair. (Or a mere $55 for a pair shaped like bacon and eggs — to wear during breakfast meetings, I presume.) But no one I know wears them. And I’m not allowed because they’re “fancy.” Cuff links are fancy metal studs with a post and a toggle clasp built onto the backs. They hold your shirt sleeves together when your cuffs have no buttons. I received my first — and only — pair of cuff links when I was 4. “Mom,” I wailed, “my arms lost their buttons. I didn’t do it. I dunno ...