![]() Enough with the shaming and marginalization!! We’re vastly overdue for a celebration honoring all the lazy people who make the world a great place to live and play and, um, work, but only if it’s really, really necessary. For too long, the slackers of the world have labored, reluctantly, under the disdain of a go-to, take-charge, kick-butt society that values nothing more than giving 110% for your passion. Frankly, I’m exhausted from writing that paragraph and I know you’re all exhausted from reading it. That’s a good thing, though, because our shared fatigue unites us in a common cause, a cause that is so noble as to be unassailable. We need a national holiday that honors lazy people, the true heroes of America. My LinkedIn feed is overflowing with rich people who encourage energetic young folks to get a side hustle, which is the way you make your second and third jobs sound really hip and edgy. You know who doesn’t have a side hustle? Rich people. I know a few rich people who spend their free time playing golf or sailing or drinking wine in the tropics or skiing, but I don’t know any who are driving Uber on weekends as a side hustle. And that’s a good thing, because you wouldn’t want them competing for jobs with all the young up-and-comers who need to brag about how many hours they work in a week. It also means all those rich people are valiantly sacrificing their opportunity to be un-lazy in the interest of the less fortunate in our society. They’re true philanthropists, not slackers, and we should all be grateful for their sacrifice. The real problem with sloth shaming is the word ‘lazy’ itself. It’s a pejorative that’s applied to people who march (ever-so-slowly) to a different drummer. If a person works only the required amount of time at their jobs, they’re lazy. If they’d rather sit on the couch than go for a run, they’re lazy. If they don’t spend enough time living their absolutely super-best lives, they’re lazy. I prefer a kinder, gentler thesaurus, one that recognizes the nobility of this non-conforming lifestyle. When a person arrives no earlier than nine and leaves no later than five, they are punctual. When someone sits on the couch and watches Simpsons reruns, they are perpetuating our culture. When they wear the same sweatshirt nine days in a row, they’re absolutely clean-water conservationists. When we decline the opportunity to run for an hour—which adds heat into the environment and requires more food to sustain our caloric needs—we’re reducing the strain on our ecosystems. Heroes of ecology? Damned straight. Staying at home and eating whatever is already in the refrigerator? The ultimate locavore, just like a pride of lions. Speaking of which, do you know who’s really lazy? Lions, that’s who. Lions spend about 37 hours a day sleeping, or at least lion around (funny, right?) in the grass. They only get up when they have to eat and, like modern urbanites, they’re strictly locavores. They don’t go far and, often, simply wait for their food to come near enough so they can catch it without running too much and working up a sweat. And that’s just the females. The males sleep even more, wander over after the kill to ask, “What’s for dinner” and then demand the savory hind quarters of whatever eland or giraffe is on the menu. After dinner, they don’t even offer to clean the dishes before they wander back to their dens to sleep until their next meal. Or mating season. But nobody calls lions lazy, do they? Nope. We honor them as powerful hunters, apex predators, and the emblems of all kinds of successful companies. If they were people, we’d mock them as slackers and keep mocking them mercilessly until they ate us. At long last, isn’t it time we gave our own neighbors the same respect we give to a bunch of African malingerers? Shouldn’t we remove the shadow of shame from the people who represent the best of America? Aren’t we finally ready to recognize the civic contributions of our comatose comrades? Yes, yes and yes. This is the moment, this is our destiny, this is the initiative that defines our meaning as human beings. We cannot, we must not fail, and I promise to do my part. Right now, I’m off to LinkedIn to demand that some young go-getter adopt this project as a side hustle. After that, it’s nap time. Next week, we count the casualties in the war on people and pick a winner in that whole hammer-versus-nail thing. Subscribe here and you'll be the first to know.
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![]() I owe Al Capone a big apology, and I should stop mocking that woman at the slot machine, too, as I consider all my misguided actions this week... Man, over Bourdain. It’s time to retire the Anthony Bourdain memes where he’s telling us how we should live more fully. There’s just something about life advice from a guy who took his own life that is more than misguided. It’s cruel, almost like the people posting his quotes are mocking him for not taking his own counsel. Invest in hubris! The problem with humanity is that we are smart enough to know we’re smart, but we’re not smart enough to know how stupid we still are. Archimedes figured out pi roughly 2,000 years ago, without a calculator, and the people who built the observatory at Stonehenge started work 5,000 years ago without a backhoe. If anything, we’ve just gotten dumber over time, while our hubris has exploded. Never saw it coming. Speaking of which, I spotted a dead turtle on the road during a recent bike ride and I realized it had began its day like pretty much every human. It woke up and started its daily activities with no idea that it would no longer be among the survivors that night. And homo sapiens are smarter, how? Pushing the buttons. The woman at the slot machine next to me is explaining that I’m losing money because I’m pushing the buttons wrong. Then she demonstrates how she massages them and where she pushes on each button before taking her next dollar for a spin. I’d mock her for her superstitious delusions, but she’s winning too much to listen. Big props to Al Capone. Chicago hosted a big NASCAR event over Independence Day and I read a report about how much the 2023 races added to the city’s fortunes. Surprisingly, the promoters claimed $24 million of “media value,” based on all the mentions and awareness of the city generated by news reports and such. I guess we should give more thanks to all the other people creating “media value,” including gangbangers, Al Capone, and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow. Honey trap. Do waitresses get a special license to call everyone ‘honey’??? I’m not complaining about it, because I crave the kindness, but this one seems to be unique to this very special group. Nurses, plumbers, cab drivers, cops…nobody else in the world ever calls me ‘honey,’ but waitresses seem to think it’s my first name. Just one more tweak. Every time someone comes up with a good idea, the next guy in line decides to ruin it. We need more STEM in schools—science, tech, engineering, and math—but then they made it STEAM by adding arts into the mix. And too much “arts” is the reason we needed more STEM in the first place. Acts shunned. I’m a big fan of the First Amendment—in fact, I am using it right now!!—so I don’t think anyone should lose an employment opportunity because they spoke out against the treatment of civilians in Gaza. I do think, though, that people who demonstrate bad judgment make poor employees and that many, many protestors showed abysmal judgment over this spring. Whether it was the public intimidation of Jewish students, disrupting the education of others, illegal entry, or simply demonstrating a profound lack of common sense…I’m fine with consequences for that. ![]() If you can't reply in a nanosnark, it's time to catch up with your peers, among other issues plaguing me this week... That’s all you got? I got a coupon in the mail the other day for 10% off and it occurred to me that 10% is meaningless these days. First, tons of companies mark their prices up before offering the discounts, but, even more relevant, there’s always somebody offering 20-50-800% off on just about everything. Cancel Culture Club. I’m getting a ton of notices lately that this site is about to be shut down because I am plagiarizing and using other people’s images. I must be really, really evil because I’m getting warnings from dozens of people all around the world who have apparently been deputized to enforce the rules. Read this carefully, because it might be the last thing I’m able to post before I’m the victim of street justice. Say hello to my little nanosnark. As chronometers become more precise, they’ve discovered a new measure of time that is even shorter than a nanosecond. It’s a nanosnark, which is the amount of time any observation is online before someone transforms it into a political issue. Killing time. I want to take a long drive to various spots of interest around the country, so I thought I’d look for a traveling companion. As first, I figured I would check out any candidate’s online existence so I could weed out the serial killers. Then I realized that exercise would only help me avoid the serial killers who are bad at their jobs. Dexter was here. Speaking of which, it turns out there’s an IRL library at Open AI, filled with books selected by their employees. The NYTimes did a mini-photo-feature about it and, frankly, it reminded me of the trophies that serial killers keep after disposing of their victims. I’m an A-Lister now. I’m really dreading the elections in November, and not just for the riots and murders that are guaranteed to follow. Right now, I’m the most popular guy in America, with daily emails from the likes of Jimmy Kimmel and Robert DeNiro and Donald J. Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden. Yes, they all want political campaign money, but at least they’re paying attention to me, me and me. After November 5, I’m gonna be a nobody again, and maybe murdered in a riot, so I’m trying to enjoy my fame as much as possible in the meantime. Bottom shelf. Other people might think I’m old and tired, but I prefer to consider myself highly evolved, which is why I’m paying less and less attention to whatever the cool kids are doing. I’ve also increased my drinking efficiency, now that my favorite wine is “house” and my favorite vodka is “well.” Not worth the phone call. I called a woman the other day and she picked up the phone instead of letting it go to voicemail. Clearly, she isn’t very important. Of course, our subscribers are very, very important, so we encourage you to become a VIP by clicking here to join our billions of satisfied readers. ![]() You’re going to see this lie a million times in the next few days. I encourage you to ignore it. You know what I’m talking about. It will be a post with an American Flag or a bald eagle or a picture of Mt. Suribachi, or some other patriotic image, with the same false claim: Land of the free, because of the brave. It’s a shout-out to the military and, while my respect for our Armed Forces is deep and resolute, the military isn’t the reason we’re the land of the free. Almost to the contrary, this is the land of the free because of the unassuming, the quiet, the principled and the courteous, the people who preserve our system by simply by accepting and defending its basis in fairness, flexibility, and majority rule. This country is the land of the free because we all agreed to think of democracy like a sport, with rules and winners and losers…and getting together for drinks after the game. And we agreed—or at least most of us agreed—that we’d abide by the rules and accept the outcomes because that’s the way life works. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, and, of course, there’s always next year. And there has always been next year for more than two centuries, which is a truly monumental achievement; even more monumental, in fact, because we didn’t ask for help from the military. As Ben Franklin told Mrs. Powel, we have, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Somehow, across nearly 250 years of mostly civil discourse, we’ve kept it without sending in the troops. We debated our neighbors and tried to sway them to see things our way, but we accepted the will of the majority whether we won or lost. We went to the polls and cast our ballots and either rejoiced or licked our wounds when it was over, and then we went back to our lives as if there was more to this world than politics. (Pro tip: There is more to this world than politics.) It’s an incredible leap of faith and civility to accept the will of the majority when you know the majority is a raving mob of idiots. It’s a magnificent display of humanity to recognize the failings of both your opponents and your compatriots, while according them equal honor as fellow citizens. It’s also an everyday thing, a constant that has sustained our freedoms more consistently and more successfully than any military intervention. Because, it’s such an everyday thing, we can forget it’s there for us to preserve, protect and defend it as if it were our birthright and our legacy. Which, of course, it is. And it’s not the military that preserves that legacy. In fact, it’s the opposite. If we need the military to get involved, we have relinquished the treasure that was passed on to our care and must be passed on again through our love of the sport known as democratic government. Protecting our legacy is getting tougher and tougher, largely because the sportsmanship ethos is fraying under the weight of Knute Rockne acolytes. The threat to our national cohesion is obvious and constant, with seemingly little awareness of the precious gift we’re squandering. And, of course, we won’t be able to replace it when its gone. We’ve called on our military only a handful of times to truly defend our freedoms, both overseas and across the Mason-Dixon line, and we can all be grateful for their successes on our behalf. Mostly, though, this is the land of the free because of everyday people who simply decided to make it so. Wishing all of them, all of us, the awareness and commitment, maybe even the bravery, to keep making it so this year and beyond. GBA. ![]() Freedom isn't free, but neither is a free press, and wouldn't you love to be a cicada? I thought so... Free press. I’ve always insisted that everything should cost a dollar, except for an hour of my time, which should cost $200. That hasn’t always worked out for me, but it turns out I’m not alone. A new survey by Northwestern University reports that a majority of respondents think local news should be provided at no cost to readers, although it’s not clear exactly how all that free reporting would be produced. Will work for stories. Speaking of which, pretty much every news outlet I know has become a panhandler, begging for a handout every time I visit. I’m trying to be supportive, but I can’t ever remember who I gave to when or whether I’m due for a renewal. Yes, I could set up a separate account and log in every time I read a post, but I only have so many more years on this earth and that’s not how I plan to spend them. Running up the clock. I’ve always suspected that hospitals make more money on their parking lots than they do on medicine, and suddenly it all became clear to me. The doctors don’t keep you waiting forever because they’re busy. They do it so you get past the two-hour mark and have to pay $800 for parking. Uber mentions. I understand that Uber is making more money delivering food via Uber Eats than they make by delivering people on their regular rideshare, so why haven’t they branched out even further? Definitely, we need an Uber Waits for people who don’t want to camp out overnight while waiting for Black Friday sales, and definitely an Uber Weights for people who really hate working out and need a stand-in every so often. We absolutely need an Uber Alerts to warn everyone to look out for us while we’re walking into traffic while staring at our cell phones. Then there’s the Uber Saloon, which will stay in the parking lot and offer a refuge for parents while their kids are at one more party at Superduperfunfunland. Then there’s Uber Alibi, Uber Assassin, Uber Protestors…come on, people, do I have to do all the work for you? Yes, there is such a thing as bad sax. There was a guy playing the saxophone at the zoo and he was really bad, so I decided not to give him a buck because it might encourage him to continue playing. I felt a bit badly about it as I walked on, but then I heard a wife ask her husband if he heard someone playing a saxophone. “No,” he said, “If that was a sax, I’d recognize it.” And then I didn’t feel quite so bad about not encouraging the guy. Big cicada energy. I spent a few hours hanging out with the cicadas in the forest preserve and, for just a minute or two, I was jealous. They don’t have calendars, just alarm clocks, so they don’t know how long they sleep between bouts of activity. But when they ARE awake, it’s nothing but summer days, food, and sex. Could be worse. I am so seriously screwed. I finally started tossing all the spare parts from the last 200 years of home improvement projects, because I’m never gonna need any of this stuff, and then disaster struck. A repair guy lost a shelf bracket and I still had a spare in the original parts bag from four years ago. Problem solved, but now I can’t ever ever ever toss any of this crap ever again. Ever. Even more depressing than MY job. Of all the jobs created by technology, there is nothing that sounds as soul-deadening as being a prompt writer for AI LLMs. It’s essentially the same job as oiling the rollers on the conveyor belt, except that the conveyor belt never threatened to rise up and destroy the Earth. Doesn’t matter, really, because the LLMs will be writing their own prompts in a week or two and then we can look forward to the next exciting opportunity created by the tech bros. What's up next week? Click here to subscribe. ![]() The guy playing the bagpipes in the parking lot is from Bulgaria, not Scotland, and he doesn’t seem to think much of the more famous version of his chosen instrument. He tells me he met a man with Scottish bagpipes and he was unimpressed by the plastic pieces, unlike the genuine goat skin and wood that he’s playing today. It’s his lunch hour, so he comes over to the lakefront to practice, which insulates him from the people who aren’t all that fond of bagpipe music, including his wife. We talk a bit about his hobby and then he plays a Bulgarian tune and asks me what I think. I flunked music appreciation in college, but I don’t mention that little detail. Instead, I tell him is very beautiful, and then I’m on my way. It’s midweek on the lake shore and Chicago is waking up from our extended slumber. Women are sunbathing, a bunch of guys are jumping off the breakwater into the frigid waters, birders are wandering around the sanctuary at Montrose Harbor, and a small crowd is enjoying the sunshine at The Dock. This is what we live for around here, the rebirth, the season that makes it all so very worthwhile. We put up with the weather and the traffic and the slings and arrows of cable newscasters, because we know our gift is on the way. It begins in May, with a handful of days that combine sunshine, temps in the 70s, and winds that barely register on the Beaufort Scale. Much like the transformation of barren branches into shade trees, the awakening begins slowly and accelerates into the summer. The interval is shockingly brief, though, as the last of the slush melts into the sewer grates a few seconds before the solstice. The sun will cross the equator on Thursday and daylight hours will peak, marking both the start of summer and my annual day of depression. Just when the days are getting warmer, they’re also getting shorter, a gift snatched away before we get the chance to enjoy it fully. It’s a metaphor for life. We spend a lot of time, too much time, waiting for something great and there’s always a catch. Or, maybe, we only think there’s a catch because we demand more than the world will provide. The days will be longer than nights for the next three months, but I want them to keep getting longer until, until, well, I don’t know exactly when. But I don’t want them getting shorter on Friday and life isn’t fair to me. Of course, life isn’t fair to my new friend with the bagpipes, either. People will always be asking him why his instrument doesn’t look like a real one, nobody will recognize any of his favorite tunes, and he’ll be invited to practice pretty much anywhere…else. That isn’t stopping him, though. He’s out there in the parking lot, perfecting his craft while he enjoys his own moments in the sun. That’s a metaphor for life, too. Add it all up and we get only a few moments in the sun. The smart people find a way to enjoy at least some of them, even if it’s a solo act. |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
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