ratiocinations out of thin air and elsewhere
THIS IS THE DEFAULT CATEGORY on this blog and was previously the General Observations category. Here you’ll find articles about my wife and my cat, anecdotes and jokes—basically anything that doesn’t fit into any of the other, more specified categories.
Most of the pieces here are reasonably gentle—those essays or articles that contain any vitriol will be found in the Neal’s Rants (Really Political) category.
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AN ARTICLE ON YAHOO NEWS caught my attention. “Guy offers a drink to girl at a bar, then refuses to pay for it” was published in 2020 and quickly racked up thousands of comments. Unfortunately, the article is poorly written and incomplete but based on the title it was intended to stir up Yahoo readers. [Continue reading]
HAVE YOU READ AN ANSWER ON QUORA or a comment on Facebook or a whole damn article on someone’s blog where they assure you that “I have done the research” but somehow manage to get all the pertinent facts wrong? That is because there are different definitions for terms on the internet than everywhere else. [Continue reading]
IF YOU ARE A SUBSCRIBER TO THIS BLOG (Neal Umphred Dot Com) and you do not receive updates and other notifications via email from this blog, listen up! It appears that I initially misunderstood quite a few things in setting this blog up, including the subscription process and how emails are sent to subscribers. [Continue reading]
MOST OF THE COMMENTS that I receive on my blogs are compliments of or questions related to the article to which the comment was made. Yes, I get the occasional less-than-positive bit of feedback but they are rare, indeed. Even rarer are ones commenting on truly personal and intimate topics. [Continue reading]
WHAT IS THE STUPIDEST WAY to put a price on a record album that I ever saw? It happened forty years ago in a thrift shop in San Francisco and I still shudder thinking about it. And it didn’t involve those impossible-to-remove-without-lighter-fluid stickers that record store owners who don’t trust their customers affix to the front covers of LPs!
WHEN REQUIRED TO POST A PROFILE on the internet, I usually write, “Mystical liberal likes long walks alone at night in the dark in the city in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig.” While this bit of irony works for some readers, others want a little more in terms of personal background information. [Continue reading]
SSSHHHHHH! I’m starting a conspiracy theory here to scare people into getting masked and vaccinated. I want to spread a rumor that the coronavirus is really a conspiracy by the elite alien reptiles to pass their sperm from human to human.
They do this by using the moisture in a sneeze or a cough or a kiss or even just in speaking as their medium to impregnate people and turn “us” into “them.” [Continue reading]
A MEME MAKING THE ROUNDS on social media on the internet finally found its way to my Facebook page. The first line is, “You come from dust, you return to dust.” This is a paraphrasing of an entry from the Old Testament: “Remember you are dust and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19). [Continue reading]
YOU SHOULD HAVE HEARD ABOUT the yard sale find that is all over the internet by now. A person paid the $35 asking price for a porcelain bowl at a yard sale in Connecticut. The buyer was an “antique enthusiast” who thought the old bowl could be something special, meaning the buyer probably had considerable experience in buying and selling such things. [Continue reading]
I RECEIVED AN EMAIL FROM QUORA that read, “Quora Moderation collapsed your answer to ‘What irrefutable facts do Trump supporters need to know about Trump to change their mind?’ for violating a policy on Quora. Your answer may need improvement.” Receiving what could only be interpreted as a reprimand was a first for me—at least from Quora. [Continue reading]
NOAM CHOMSKY HAD AN INTERVIEW scheduled with Anand Giridharadas for The.Ink website. While each interview promises the potential of unique answers and even the possibility of new thoughts, depending on the interviewer, Chomsky prepared some notes to make certain he mentioned certain points. So, Noam called me and said, “Neal, here is what I am preparing to say in my interview with Anand Giridharadas: ‘The left position is you rarely support anyone. [Continue reading]
