Conversations with preschoolers can be hilarious. Perhaps it’s because after you reach a certain age, the simplistic becomes the ridiculous. But whether by naivety or wit, Timmy put a great spin on an otherwise blasé question put to him at the end of last year: “What’s your New Year’s...
I was almost ready to be ready. It’s how most people are, when going into business for themselves, I’m told. We convince ourselves that we’ll be confident and ready to start after reading just one more advisory article, one more blog post, one more case study. It all amounts...
The game of Snakes and Ladders has a simple premise. Dice-rolling, space-moving…all while being bored at the beginning and breathless at the end as you race to the be first to space number 100, so you can throw your hands in the air and yell victoriously, “I win!” If...
I hate cooking. I hate that I have to do it every day. I hate that it takes much longer to cook it than it does to eat it. I hate that by the time I have it on plates in front of my family, I’m so sour about...
Taste is a fickle thing. It makes critics of us all. I knew a guy who’d make fun of me for talking about the different flavours I could detect across a range of coffee beans. He thought I was making it all up. But the same guy would then...
Six months ago I put the boys through the Stanford marshmallow experiment, using a biscuit. (Perhaps my recurring readers will remember it, from a post I made in June.) It seemed an appropriate time for a sequel. Not just because watching such things is fun, but because I was...
The fascination with werewolves, it seems to me, has overtaken that of vampires in modern popular culture. Werewolves are the new and exciting subject of sexual allure. (Or possibly the old and repeating one, but with a long enough reprieve behind it to push it out of living memory.)...
Would you touch a magazine that was printed with HIV+ blood? A book printed in blood sounds like the purview of the macabre. But it can also be a pretty amazing design project, and the HIV+ element naturally generated a big response. I’m late to the party in discovering...
When I saw my face falling off in the mirror, it was inevitable that I would turn it into a story. How can I not write something inspired by that? It was alarming! It was shifting even as I watched it, like I was viewing it through clear slow-moving...
If you say you have a surprise for me, but you don’t say what it is, clearly you have no idea how human psychology works, and the nature of desire. If you remember only one thing from this post, let it be this: Don’t tell someone you have a...
