Science says beards boast maturity and confidence

September 11, 2016

My beard has taken it on the chin a lot over the years: “What are you supposed to be, a lumberjack?” “Is that where you store all the food you couldn’t eat at dinner?” “Hey, did a sick cat die curl up and die on your face?” Well, ha, ha, the joke’s on you, my smooth-cheeked friends. According to a number of business journals, the much-maligned beard now is a symbol of power. Inc.com and other business journals published results of a scientific study that shows that we bearded boys appear to be “more dominant, aggressive and seasoned in years” in the ...

How many words does that doggy in the window know?

September 4, 2016

You don’t have to learn animal languages like Dr. Doolittle did. Your dog understands human. One of the big news stories last week was that researchers conducted MRI scans on the brains of 13 dogs while their owners talked to them. The scan images showed that dogs processed words with the left hemisphere of the brain and intonation with the right — just like people, according to The Associated Press. Dog owners already knew their mutts mastered the meaning of words. But researchers called it a “shocker.” “Dog brains care about both what we say and how we say it,” lead ...

Annual physical like seeing Santa, only not as jolly

August 28, 2016

Is it possible to pass out from neglecting one’s minimum daily requirement of Oreos and Coca-Cola? I’m thinking yes. It’s been more than a week since I’ve started my morning with Coke and cookies and I’m feeling faint. But I’ll stick to it. For now, anyway. Because I have only four weeks left to drop a few pounds or face an unimaginable horror — a doctor-imposed diet. I mean, a nutritional wellness plan. This whole unhealthy quest for a life — well, a month, really — without Snickers bars began last week when my sweet wife scheduled my annual physical. “It’s ...

Dumbed-down definition of word ‘dumb’ isn’t smart

August 21, 2016

You know what's dumb? The definition we've created for the word "dumb." That's not what it means. It's just another example of word abuse that's, well, dumb. According to wordsmith Noah "Merriam" Webster - a guy who probably eats Alpha-Bits cereal every morning and slurps alphabet soup for lunch every day - dumb means "lacking the human power of speech" or "lacking the ability to speak." The next four definitions run along the same etymological lines. It's not until the sixth and furthest from the original definition that we find the way most of us use "dumb" - "lacking intelligence: ...

Getting schooled by dumb jokes

August 14, 2016

As we stretch and inhale deliciously warm breezes, we lazily drift into yet another long, luxurious summer ... Hold on a second. It’s what month? What happened to June and July? Did we skip them? Well, then, as we madly charge through stores, clutching shopping lists the length of term papers, we quake in panic as we realize it’s nearly time for young kids to board buses, older kids to move into dorms and parents to add up enough debt to blow out three calculators and a slide rule. I hope one of the things my grandson learns this year is why when I was kid weeks dragged on for ...

A passion for pockets becomes pain in the pants

August 7, 2016

The guy in line in front of me unzipped a small pocket of his cargo shorts and extracted a customer loyalty card. He pulled his wallet from another pocket. After he paid for his merchandise, he unzipped a long, narrow pocket at the bottom of the array of pouches on his shorts and tucked the paper against a quarter-inch or so collection of receipts already on file. It was a perfect fit. I counted a half-dozen other pockets on his cargo shorts, all of them bulging with something. The shapes looked like a notepad, pens, phone, baseball, cords, keys, glasses, a screwdriver and a water ...