Believe it or not, the answer to this question became the subject of a very heated exchange on a site devoted to fans of bodybuilding. Like all great philosophical debates it all stemmed from asking, as Socrates so often did to provoke deep thought among his pupils, a simple question that you might have felt had a straightforward answer. In this case, the question was: If you exercise every other day, how many days a week are you doing it?
The argument raged on and on and is quite hilarious.
The Peanuts comic strip started on October 12, 1950. It was considered groundbreaking because for the first time it had little children who were not lovable scamps but, as we see from the very first cartoon below, also expressed emotions like meanness and anger and even hate that people were used to seeing expressed mostly by adults. That this caused some controversy seems surprising these days when we live in an era of South Park.
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Hasan Minhaj of The Daily Show looks at how Salt Lake City Utah has addressed the problem of the homeless. Why, the idea is so crazy that it just might work.
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Satirical programs like The Daily Show that use news headlines as their raw material have difficulty dealing with tragedies like the shootings at Charlie Hebdo. How can they treat such events with humor without being perceived as grossly insensitive? On the other hand, the victims were in the same line of work as them and so they cannot blithely ignore a story that cuts so closely to home.
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The extremely brief legal deposition of Jeffrey Epstein shown below, whose sex-slave ring involving underage women has been in the news recently, is really something to see. I think it must have occurred before his plea deal in 2007.
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The journalist Steven Brill appeared on the program Fresh Air to talk about why the US health system. He said it is unsustainable and heading for a crash because there is no price control mechanism. He lays the blame squarely on the hospitals, drug companies who are allowed to price-gouge, and medical device manufacturers, all of whom rake in huge profits that enable them to pay their top executives high profits.
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It is a source of increasing concern to the establishment media that younger people are tuning in to comedy shows like The Daily Show that skewer the supposedly serious news shows and not tuning in to them, causing the demographic of their viewers to steadily inch upwards and well into retirement ages. This has naturally discomfited the people who host those shows and caused some of them to argue that this satirical attitude is making younger people more cynical about the political system and the media.
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It is well known that salmon return to their old spawning grounds, a journey that requires an arduous journey upstream, and that they somehow manage to overcome the huge hurdles involved. But what happens when human beings build dams that put that goal out of reach for even the most intrepid fish?
John Oliver says that some people are resorting to technology to help the salmon out.
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Since I am an old geezer, I welcomed the new year by being fast asleep. But I am not a total misanthrope. I will be entertaining some friends this evening. But what better way to start the new year than with some laughter?
Here’s John Oliver with advice for anyone who wants to get out of attending new year’s eve parties. This is a bit late I know but it also applies to any other parties.
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I have lived only once, for a period of eight months, in a large high-rise apartment building in a big city, and that was Philadelphia. What surprised me was that even though our apartment was at the end of a long corridor that had a large number of apartments, I never got to know a single one of my neighbors or even passed them in the hallway except near the very end when I encountered the person who lived just across the hall. He turned out to be a writer and we had a brief but interesting conversation in the hallway about the philosophy of science. I regretted getting to know him only just before we moved but there is something about apartment dwelling that seems to discourage getting to know one’s neighbors.
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