Category: Niblet

Work to live. Don’t live to work.

What good is a really extraordinary education if one can’t use it to show off every now and again?

The left needs to stop begging, and start demanding.

Yes–coal does appear to occupy a special niche in the American imagination. It shares that niche with Camel cigarettes, beatings with belts, hot dogs, and moonshine whiskey (among other things).

Can you say: Death wish?

So Microsoft thinks it has things it can teach me, a professional writer and editor with 40 years’ experience, about writing better. Now that’s just a hoot. I suppose the next logical step would be for the Franco-American spaghetti company to offer, on its labels, cooking tips aimed at the food critics of the New York Times and Globe & Mail. . .

Far better to learn how to read your body’s signals as to foods and activities it does or doesn’t like than to live by other people’s lists of approved or forbidden foods and activities. . .

Extreme cold and extreme heat have this in common: they encourage one to lie low and do as little as possible until conditions moderate.

Innumerable stupidities and outrages have been perpetrated of late in the name of political correctness. None, perhaps, is greater than a recently-voiced objection to the term “First World Problem,” on grounds of political correctness. Excuse me? All of a sudden it is wrong to use self-deprecating irony and a bit of humour to acknowledge that our problems, while serious to us, often do not measure up compare to the problems most of the less fortunate people in the world are facing?

I always thought this phrase was a useful way to show a bit of empathy with the less fortunate in the world. Have I been missing something all these years? In any event, whether it is politically correct or not to do so, I intend to go on using it.

It’s bad enough to hear radio announcers talking about “curating” a selection of songs to get them through a three-hour program. But when I read about a major clothing store “curating” a selection of men’s wear for its winter sale, I reach for my barf bucket. . .

Certain things earn a permanent place in one’s memory because of some unusual fact attached to them. In the case of the dessert, Baked Alaska, that fact is that it’s the only dish in the entire cookbook to require an oven temperature of 500 degrees (F). I’ve been thinking about Baked Alaskas this morning, as I turned my oven up to 500 to supplement a heating system that isn’t quite up to the job of warming a house through three straight nights of -27 (C).