 Am I allowed to say I’m just feeling super-duper today, or will that violate some copyright or sacred pact or one of those secret laws they inserted in Donny’s Big Beautiful Bill when nobody was looking? I’d certainly be super bowled over to learn I had transgressed and I might spill my soup bowl while watching THE BIG GAME. That’s a lie, really. Not as bad as when I cheated on my score at the SUPER BOWLing alley on Diversey, but definitely not on the up and up. I won’t be watching THE BIG GAME today, even if it costs me some cultural-literacy points at the office water cooler tomorrow. First, there is no water cooler in the office I no longer work at and, second, everyone is working from home on Mondays and, tertiarily, almost all the culture happens around THE BIG GAME, not in it. As everyone knows, I am a football fanatic. I live and breathe the sport and spend so much time and energy on it that I even created a guide for mere mortals who need help keeping up. And yet, I really don’t need to watch THE BIG GAME to know all the critical details and plays. That’s because I am also a master of efficiency who knows—absolutely, for sure, no question—that I’ll see the most important 47 seconds of this 12-hour marathon on every site I visit between now and my trip to the water cooler. (If I had a water cooler, which careful readers know I absolutely do not.) Let’s face it. THE BIG GAME is only meaningful to people who are fans of (Note: remember to find out who’s playing before posting this.) For the rest of us, it’s a good excuse to drop in on whatever friend has the biggest mega-screen and really great wings. And beer. And nachos. You get the idea. You’ll miss most of the action while you’re noshing and sloshing, but it’s no big deal. Every play will take four seconds and you’ll see at least 27 minutes of replays from multiple camera angles. The biggest high-stakes competition of THE BIG GAME is the advertising, which is always a laughfest of immense magnitude. Some of the world’s largest companies will be spending $8 million for just 30 seconds of ad time and they’ll blow most of it trying to be cute or funny and, dang, forgetting to mention the name of their products. Granted, $8 million is less than a day’s pay for any respectable CEO, but it’s still more than I make in an entire year. We might also see some ads from self-made millionaires who think they’ve made the big time if they have a THE BIG GAME ad to brag about at the club, and those are sometimes the funniest of all. Even the losing coaches are likely to have a job on Monday, but hundreds of advertising execs might not. Introducing a new advertisement at THE BIG GAME is like opening your one-man show on Broadway; just a few steps into the danger zone. Even that drama has been marginalized, though, because we already know what the ads are going to be and we can already see them, along with commentary, on sites like Specific Edge. If you work in advertising/marketing and you haven’t bought a spot, feel free to relax and enjoy the spectacle. It might be a good idea to have AI draft a few notes of condolence to a few friends. That leaves the half-time show, which is the wild card, and you really need to watch it. That’s because you’ll never know what happened unless you see it yourself. Apparently, some furriner from the Russian (Chinese? Canadian? Mexiconian?) territory of Puerto Rico is performing instead of a good ole ‘Murican and everything you hear about this thing will be recast in politics. There’s even an alternative half-time show with some guy nobody knows outside of Magaland, plus the undeniable cuteness of the Puppy Bowl. The official half-time show is going to be the focus at the water cooler (see earlier notes) tomorrow, but every replay you’ll see after THE BIG GAME will include deep fakes, AI lyrics, and wardrobe malfunctions. The only way to know what’s what is to watch the damned thing. Still, the half-time show runs about 15 minutes, which is not a ton of time for cultural literacy. Add in 20 minutes for replays of the most critical moments in the game and another 20 to view all the ads and, voila, the 12-hour extravaganza is reduced to a single therapy session. How will you spend all the extra time I’ve freed up in your schedule? Take a nap, connect with your kids, send a few $million to Dad Writes…totally your call. Maybe you can get an early start on next year’s THE BIG GAME by buying yourself a water cooler. Dream big. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?
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 It’s been a tough start to 2026 in the land of the free. All the stocks you thought were too expensive are up another 4,000%, citizens are being pulled off the streets and loaded onto planes for Guatemala, and the weather has been so damned cold that some people are secretly hoping they can get deported, too, if only for the next few months. (Too soon? Probably.) Good news is harder and harder to find, but have no fear, dear readers. As always, the incredible jolliness team at Dad Writes is coming to the rescue. We’ve searched everywhere and we have discovered the absolute best feel-good message for you. (And only you. Millions of readers think I’m talking about them, too, but you and I know this is for you and you alone.) What message could possibly bring such joy? Only this: No, you absolutely did not do everything you could, and, no, you didn’t do it right. Don’t you feel better already? Of course, you do. How can you not? I went to a dinner a couple of weeks ago and the topic was how to comfort/console/help friends and relatives who are about to die. Yes, I could have opted for the comedy club, but this is an important topic and the situation is much more common as I stride confidently toward the Reaper. If we’re lucky to live long enough, it’s a situation we’ll all face. Unsurprisingly in a group of people over 60, everyone at the event had faced this reality or was facing it now. For those who shared their experiences with me, the stories were all similar and the after-thoughts were almost universally the same: Did I do everything I could? Did I do the right thing? Did I make a mistake about holding on or letting go or focusing on reality or building hope or…? The situations were all different, but the questions were the same. Could I have done just one more thing? Could I have said something more wise or not said something that could hurt? Could I have paid one more visit, baked one more pie, made one less comment, given one more hug? Hidden in the questions, I think, is a belief in the impossible. Even if we know with 100% certainty that there was nothing we could have done to alter the course of nature, we still wonder if there was some button we could have pushed to change the destination. Every one of the people I spoke with could have done something more or different, something smarter or warmer or more comforting. For every single one of them, though, it would not have made a difference. When it really, really counts, we all make a mistake or two or three. We all miss a beat or make the wrong joke or get sidetracked on the way to a visit. Most people, usually the ones who really do make the effort, will have some regrets. Sometimes, the regret is an indicator of how much they did right. Sometimes, the people who wonder if they did all they could are the same people with a very, very long list of the things they did. None of us can offer any real insight if we weren’t in the room where it happened, because every situation is a sample size of one. The best we can do is to listen and to reassure the mourner that they did their best. Usually, that reassurance is enough, if only for the moment at hand.  I’d like to tell you I’m the first to admit last week’s post was decidedly unfunny, but roughly 5,898,4306 subscribers beat me to it. Almost to a person, the readers who contacted me over the past week complained about the half-funny jokes and the half-witty wit that made that episode one of the worst in 2026, so far. (The year is young, though, so I’m sure to exceed your expectations very soon.)
In my defense, it’s not my fault, because I asked ChatGPT to help me, but my new bot let me down bigly. AI can understand what makes something contradictory, but misses the point when it comes to “funny.” I took pity on the tyke, though, because it’s so new and I didn’t have to pay for it and, TBH, because I wanted to squeeze at least two posts from this stupid idea. So, instead of conceding failure and coming up with something clever and original and, quite possibly, tolerable on my own, I pivoted from funny stuff about celebrities and culture to absolute gems about politics and politicians. From the days of Thomas Nast and Will Rogers, Richard Nixon (“I am not a crook,” gets me every time.) and Dick Cheney, politics has been an unending source of humor. Even better, political humor is what has and continues to bring us all together as one harmonious American family. Like my investment in dissolving umbrellas, this idea could not possibly fail. Did Sam Altman’s baby rise to the occasion? Did the chatbot come up with a steady stream of rib ticklers and knee slappers and funny boners? You bet it did. Just take a look at these predictions for the mirthful year ahead:
So, did anyone notice anything interesting about these predictions? Yes, they’re all more true than funny and, yes, they aren’t actually funny in a way that anyone with a sense of humor would appreciate, but I also noticed a distinct lack of Democrats in the forecast. Now, as much as I’d like this to blow up into a viral battle that breaks the internet, let’s consider more than one possibility, including:
I don’t know the real answer here, so feel free to adopt whatever option fits the opinion you knew you were going to have before you read a single word of this post. Taking the path of least resistance is a great way to conserve energy and maximize couch time and, frankly, I need a nap now. I’ve milked this AI thing like it’s a 22-year-old cow and the pressure’s on for me to produce something original next week. Can I do it? Stay tuned. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  Two major events converged at the end of the year, and I decided to make the most of the opportunity. First, I was tired and lazy* at exactly the same time I was scheduled to work on my 2026 Year in Review, an annual blockbuster post that generates billions of hits and convinces Dave Barry to hand over his Pulitzer in recognition of my unparalleled wit. Second, I finally got around to downloading one of those large language models all the cool kids are using when they finally get home from the dispensary. LLMs are both the apotheosis of civilization and the harbinger of our demise (Note to self: insert Schrodinger joke.) and I was at the tail end of the adoption curve. Getting ChatGPT to write my predictions seemed like the kind of no-brainer that made me the world's foremost authority on not using my brain. And so, I downloaded ChatGPT and asked it to, “Make a humorous list of 100 celebrity, entertainment or cultural events that could occur in 2026.” Within seconds, the world’s favorite LLM returned with 100 ideas that are absolutely guaranteed to slay. You want proof? Here’s a sample:
So, in addition to all the people I know who cannot tell a joke properly, I’ll add my new artificially intelligent friend. The chatbot can’t tell the difference between a normal progression in a series and the twist that has us all rolling in the aisles. Yes, it was funnier than 47 seasons of Saturday Night Live and, yes, I didn’t have to pay any writers to come up with this dreck, but I wasn’t entertained, either. I was relieved, in a way, because Sam Altman has raised more than $500 trillion for OpenAI and this is as close as his baby can come to being funny. I’m not funny for a fraction of that cost, which is not exactly the achievement I’d hoped to be trumpeting at this point in my life, but you get what you don’t pay for. It’s frightening, though, because I learned during Covid that people are much lazier than I’d thought previously and my in-box is about to get overloaded with AI-generated jokes that, to be fair, will still be funnier than 47 seasons of Saturday Night Live and, again, most of my friends. (Sorry, Harry, but it’s true.) Worse, all the jokes will be revisions of prior versions of the same jokes, because that’s what iterative models do. In fact, every time I asked ChatGPT to do a better job, it sent back mostly the same stuff with slightly different words. Did I give up after this experiment? Of course, not. Only quilters quilt, which is, fun fact, the reason they’re called quilters. The same applies to quitters, of which I am not one. Also, carrying on this nonsense gives me the chance to have AI write at least two posts for me. And so, I asked ChatGPT to come up with some humorous predictions from the political world. How did he/she/it/they/them/those do? Tune in next week for the incredibly obvious answer. (*Regular readers know I am always tired and lazy, so it might seem like this was not really a major event, but that’s the whole point. I was too tired and lazy to think of a funny major event, so I just phoned it in with that whole “tired and lazy” thing. And it worked. Right?) Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  I'm bemused, but not nonplussed, this week, as I channel my inner thesaurus.
Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here?  This is a story about romance, but probably not the kind you’d suppose.
I was wandering around Old Town Scottsdale a couple of months ago and the See’s Candies store is still operating as it has for as long as I can remember. Most likely, it’s been open much longer, since the company is almost 105 years old. I’ve never been a big fan of See’s candy, since I prefer savory over sweet and I don’t consume much in the way of candy, anyway. It’s fine, for candy, but that’s not my thing and it’s definitely not the point I was intending to make here. (Don’t you just hate it when some guy starts telling a story and runs off on a tangent and has a hard time finding his way back to the point he was trying to make? Me, too. I’d really hate to meet a guy like that.) Okay, back to my story. Seeing See’s still selling Scottsdale sweets sparked sentimental sensations. There was a time, kids, when you had to go to an actual See’s Candies store to buy their wares. If someone brought you a box of See’s Candies, it meant they not only traveled hundreds of miles from home, but thought about you while they were on their journey and made the effort to both buy a box and schlep it back for you. And that’s where the romance comes in. There was something magical about receiving a gift from a faraway locale, an item so rare that your benefactor needed to journey for days in order to find and claim it. See’s Candies sold literally tons of caramel suckers to Midwest travelers who gained panache points from friends when they returned home. (Yes, they probably could have bought candy through mail order, but that’s not how we rolled in The Time Before.) We all loved everything that was unavailable at home. We longed for a precious six-pack of Coors, which you couldn’t get east of the Mississippi, and we were ready to give a kidney to any friend who brought some back from exotic St. Louis. Coors tastes like water that somebody drank already, but we didn’t care. If we had some, we were more special than all the normies who were still getting their suds from the land of sky-blue waters. Last year, I visited a half dozen spice shops in Greece, searching for a spice blend one of my daughters and sons-in-law wanted. Eventually I found it…along with the website info for ordering it online any time of any day. I spent more time searching in the spice stores than I would have needed to find it on my phone, but it was the search that created the romance. To me, that easy access made the item less special. It wasn’t a unique product I needed to find in a bazaar. It was one of 200 billion SKUs I could buy instantly from Jeff and Lauren. Every so often, you’ll find a place in your travels that’s selling something unique, something available only at that store in that town. Whatever it is, buy one. Our world is becoming more bland, even coarse, and we can all benefit from just a bit of romance in our journeys. Subscribe? Why, yes, I'd love to, and all I need to do is click here? |
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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