Stuff I Inherited from My Kids

Having my offspring home for the holidays got me thinking about all the things I owe them.

Your kids have a role they probably don't realize they have. They're your cultural spies. You send them off into the world and they bring back all sorts of amazing and obscure stuff you're too busy or focused or dignified to discover on your own. It's a great bequest we get from them.

Here are a dozen very cool people and things I'd probably never have run across if it hadn't been for my kids:

1. Bubble Tea 
2. Cake 
3. Jonathan Coulton
4. The Decemberists
5. Feist
6. Moxie Fruvous
7. "Office Space"
8. "Portal"
9. The Presidents of the United States of America
10. "Snatch"
11. "Spirited Away"
12. Eric Whitacre

Could you assemble such a list?

The Constitution

I think the framers would be very uncomfortable seeing that their very remarkable contribution to the history and philosophy of mankind had been used to justify the principle that your money is more sacred under the law than your life.

Individual mandate

Legally and Constitutionally, the federal government could re-impose a military draft any time it chose to. In other words, it can compel your kid to join the military and go somewhere he or she stands a good chance of being killed. No one disputes this. So to suggest the government cannot compel you to buy health insurance is miles beyond idiotic.

All in a day's work

Just another day. Go to work, come home, eat dinner, deliver a kid, sing Handel...

Suggestion

Political commercials should be 60% nasty side effect disclaimers, like drug ads.

Influential Authors

Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes...

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
Thomas Pynchon
Neal Stephenson
Jean Shepherd
Douglas Adams
Chinua Achebe
Ken Kesey
George Lakoff
Mikhael Bulgakov
Carl Sandburg
David Foster Wallace
Tom Wolfe
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Robert Graves
Jack Kerouac

Badminton

(Comment on an argument going on at Joey Novick's page...)

I was tempted to engage here, but when one side in an argument asserts that "liberal" and "fascist" are two names for the same ideology, my sense is that there is nowhere for that argument to go. It'd be like trying to play badminton with a cinder block.