February Tweets of the Month

 

• Legendary escape artist Harry Houdini could extricate himself from a straight jacket in just 4 minutes and 9 seconds. I have to imagine escaping from an LBGTQIA jacket would be much more time consuming.

• Restitution is the act of restoring ownership of something that was illegally taken. The act of restoring something that was illegally taken but doing it with island rhythms and bales of ganga is rastatution.

• How will you react if the next time some F-16 guns down a high-tech, high altitude spy balloon investigators find it leads to some rich kid with a really, really long string.

• Teaching college level anesthesiology must be a real challenge. How do you determine if a student snoozing is a lazy goofball or a real go-getter determined to truly absorb that day’s lesson?

• He has influence, a prestigious job, opportunities. In many ways he's a true role model. So what am I supposed to say when an impressionable youth comes up to me and says, "I wanna be just like George Santos." I look at his life and I look at mine and wonder, man, where did I go so wrong? I used to regret I didn't work harder. Now, I regret I didn't spend more mirror time working on my poker face.

• Middle Easterners put aside ancient differences to aid Syrian/Turkish earthquake victims, proving once again the only thing capable of bringing the world together is the world coming apart.

• For a human face to convey the same look of pure elation a dog gets when he sticks his head out the car window, I believe you'd have to time travel back to Eden and the first time Eve wondered what kind of reaction she'd get if she kissed Adam someplace besides the lips.

• I apologize for feeling the need to be so divisive here on Facebook, a forum only intellectually belligerent use for anything but food porn & cat videos, but it’s been 16 years it must be said: Just what the hell was David Chase thinking?

• Told students one of the best ways to unleash creative thinking is to immerse yourself in absurdity. The premise was discussed and I soon congratulated them on recognizing the absurdity abundant in their lives. Yes, they all parents who thought they knew all the answers.

• The very idea of writing for a living is  so inherently wussie, I at least once a week like to shout loud commands peppered with meaningless jargon -- "Tango! Alpha! Charlie! -- to confuse Tin Lizzy drinkers into thinking some real serious shit is going on up here.

• Tragic about the Florida woman, 85, killed by gator. It's all some people are talking about. I wonder what they're saying in the gator community. "I was just last week warnin' Roscoe nothin' good would come from chasin' them cougars.”

• Beleaguered Buffalo is expected to get hit with another 2 feet of snow. The population of the Greater Buffalo metro region is 889,217. If I were mayor of Buffalo I’d order every able-bodied adult to obtain at least two cigarette lighters and stand outside with both arms upraised.  The goal would be to convert every snowflake into raindrops before they hit ground.

• I hope one day I get summoned to the witness stand of some big, high-profile trial just so I can squander an hour or two of the court’s time trying to insist there has to be a little wiggle room in that bit about swearing on the Bible to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” I mean, c’mon. They can’t be serious. Can they?

• Tonight I intend to alert my students they have a historic opportunity to surpass The Greatest Generation in achievement. After all, The Greatest Generation saved the world from fascism. Today’s college students will battle climate change, cynicism, pandemic, fundamentalism and a dozen or so other isms. So today’s students won’t just be saving the mankind from fascism. They’ll be saving mankind from mankind.

• In an effort to make myself appear more hip, more cosmopolitan, I'm thinking of telling associates I'm "based in LA," which is a mere five letters from factual. Home is LA-trobe. I'm not deceitful, but guys like me just don't have time for second syllables.

• I'd like to have one night a month where we go out to dinner with another couple with the incentive that whomever talks the most pays. The social pressure to yap and be witty would vanish. We'd learn subtle new ways to communicate. Restaurants would be more peaceful. But in the end, the idea is self-defeating. The very notion of a no-talking dinner would give everyone something to really talk about.

• Getting all your news through a palm-sized screen you keep in your back pocket means most people will never even get a glimpse at what we used to call The Big Picture.

• If everyone on the planet awakens tomorrow to see in the mirror a third ear had overnight grown on their forehead, will you take it as an Almighty sign we need to start listening to one another or will you drop whatever you’re doing and dash out to buy a third noise-cancelling ear bud?

• Talking to a woman in the bar last week. Told her I was a writer. Said she loves to read. I asked her what genre. "Oh, I love murder mysteries!" she said. I told her everything I've ever written is a murder mystery. And it's true. It's a mystery why none of my books are a commercial success and the realization is killing me.