When I'm bored, I like to sit in my kitchen sink and groove on its cool porcelain presence. "I sink, therefore I am," it seems to say, and who could disagree? It makes so much sense.
When I'm feeling down, I can count on my sink to be there for me. "Sink or swim," it says, and I have to laugh. Where does it get this stuff, anyway? I don't know, but it always make me feel better. That's the main thing.
When I'm sleepy, my sink sings me a lullaby. Its gurgling baritone pulls me down . . . down . . . down into the land of nod. "Sweet dreams," I hear it say, and then I'm gone. Hook, line, and sinker.
When the cupboard is bare and I'm forced to eat dirt, my sink reminds me that everyone else is poor, except me. "Let them have their diamonds, and their fancy cars," says the sink. I know that's true, but sometimes I forget. They have everything but the kitchen sink. How sad is that?
In the spirit of 
Moving forward is bright and optimistic, while the idea of going backward is leaden by comparison. Backward is heavy with defeatism, and its predictably pessimistic outlook has no place in the sun. Forward is light and happy; backward is simply not. 
Aunt Blim was confused about many things, and shouldn't have been allowed near the children. Her habit of mixing metaphors—especially in combination with her disregard for syntax—was bad enough, but when I told my classmates that Goldilocks had murdered the leprechauns because they threw cold porridge in her face, I was chased around the schoolyard until I fell down. 
It seems most people agree that inflation ought to take a large portion of the blame for overpriced goods and services. A day's wages for a loaf of bread hasn't yet become reality, although the possibility becomes a bit easier to swallow with each trip to the supermarket. For those old enough to remember—but not old enough to forget—how much they paid for their houses and cars in 1970, today's price tags are likely to induce laughter, followed by vomiting, and then death. 
Recent developments in our troubled financial system have not forced me to reconsider my investment strategy. Fortunately, my highly diversified portfolio means I'm not suffering from the high-risk lending practices that caused this fiasco in the first place. Long ago, I decided to follow the advice of a trusted friend, and invested in parsley, sage, rosemary and time instead. 
I'll never forget the day I found myself locked out of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Since then, the whole world has looked a little more decrepit. 
When I was a child, the pediatrician I was forced to visit enjoyed tormenting me with his voice, which he used for making loud, sarcastic remarks concerning the reasons for those visits. When I had athlete's foot, Dr. Blut called it "jungle rot," and reflected, loudly, on the likelihood of it spreading to other areas of my body. Everything he said was delivered at an abnormally high volume because the nurse had ruptured his eardrums. 
The venerable Venn diagram is useful for showing overlapping areas between sets of things. A traditional representation of this type of diagram—translucent colored circles are an old favorite—is on the left, but tradition doesn't amount to a hill of beans when the elements of a set, or the sets themselves, don't lend themselves to any sane comparison. 
For example, say you want to find out what would happen if you were to combine a sun, a blue moon, and a red lightning bolt. As you can see from a cursory examination of the intersecting areas in the Venn diagram on the right, the statistical likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider recreating the Big Bang is approximately that of two full moons within the same month. 
In a similar way, combining a horse, a cow, and an octopus in a Venn diagram illustrates the difficulty of achieving meaningful results in today's DNA research facilities. Clearly, had humankind been intended for the task of creating new life forms, we would have more than two legs to stand on. 
If necessity is the mother of invention, the Venn diagram is its father. Grafting common household appliances to plumbing fixtures can be a mind-numbing task, but diagramming the job beforehand keeps the numbness from ruining an otherwise sunny day. In the example on the right, the diagram tells me everything I need to know about the feasibility of combining a hair dryer, a coffeemaker, and a toilet. 
In rare instances, even a Venn diagram isn't enough to keep chaos from raining on one's so-called picnic. If the sheer madness of certain combinations—the diagram on the left is only an example—proves one thing, it's that. 
All blog and no play makes Jeff a dull boy. 
by 
Today nostalgia has befallen me, so I'm thinking thoughts of days long gone, when doctors had cell phones but no one else did, except me. I know it seems improbable now; they're so ubiquitous, and so cheap. I mean cell phones, not doctors. 
