These Times

Random thoughts for a day in May

Kirk Ericson | May 01, 20250

The organizations created for people who believe bigfoot, aliens and angels are real should form a conglomerate. Imagine the administrative overhead those organizations could eliminate and the economies of scale that would be realized.

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Name of a church garden in Lacey: “The Garden of Weedin’ ”

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Here’s someone you’ll never meet: A 2-year-old with a shady past.

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I’ve squandered every opportunity I was ever given to become a team leader.

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I was talking to a single mother at the hotel where she worked, and the mom had her 7-year-old daughter with her. After a minute or so, the 7-year-old asked me whether I’d marry her mom. I told the girl I already had a wife. The girl immediately asked me, a bit skeptical, “Is she a real wife?”

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There’s more than enough irony to go around these days. Sincerity, though, is in short supply.

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A British journalist named Ian Betteridge came up with a saying that you should keep in mind when deciding whether to read something: “With any headline with a question, the answer is likely ‘no.’ ” A headline with a question mark suggests the headline writer doesn’t know for a fact that the story’s central assertion is correct, so it’s fudged by not committing to its accuracy. Here are some examples of such headlines: “Will the world end in 2012?” “Was Darwin wrong?” and “Will AI take over the world?” Such stories tend to be so speculative they are worthless.

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Nobody is born to be a phony, but some people clearly have the ability to achieve phoniness faster than others.

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If the universe had intended us to take psychoactive drugs, it wouldn’t have given us the dreams that sleep brings.

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It was talking to a 20-year-old when I mentioned someone had it “made it in the shade.” He had never heard the phrase, but he agreed it made sense.

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A headline I got away with that was published in the Feb. Feb. 21, 2016, issue of The Olympian: “Mars crew requires heavy vetting.”

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Men generally die earlier than women, maybe because women deserve a few years of peace.

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A possible upside of the U.S. president’s tariff ideas is they could reduce Americans’ financial ability to buy so much cheap, mass-produced and manufactured crap, a development that would benefit Earth. The most effective act of environmentalism is not consuming.

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“If God dwells inside us as some people say, I sure hope he likes enchiladas, because that’s what he’s getting.” — Jack Handy

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I recently found a page I tore out many years ago from “Ball Four,” a book published in 1970 by Jim Bouton, who pitched for the Seattle Pilots in 1969: “Just before [Steve] Hovley rejoined the club we were talking about him in the bullpen,” Bouton wrote. “I count him as one of the most intelligent men, the closest to a real intellectual, I’ve ever met in baseball. So, I volunteered that he was a pretty bright fellow. ‘Yeah, but does he have any common sense?’ [Fred] Talbot said. ‘I know just what you mean about him not having any common sense,’ [John] O’Donoghue said. ‘He doesn’t.’ I asked him what he meant by that. ‘Well, one time we were sitting in a restaurant,’ O’Donoghue said, ‘and Hovley was walking down the street with a ski cap pulled down over his face as he came past the restaurant and stood outside on the sidewalk peering at us.’ … Sometimes I think that if people in this little world of baseball don’t think you a little odd, a bit weird, you’re in trouble.”