The Internet is Weird

I know there’s a bit of tension between this post and a certain recent post in which I ridiculed people for having too much spare time on their hands, but let me forge ahead anyway. I know people aren’t allowed to acknowledge risks and then proceed nonetheless, but bear with me here. I think it’s [...]

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Wishing for School?

There are a wide variety of things that I care about, yet only have glimmers of threads of information about. One such thing is computer security. I find myself reading Bruce Schneier’s crypto-gram as often as possible, even if I don’t understand all of the parts. Sometimes it seems that having a passion about something, [...]

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Eating for Idiots

A few years ago, there was a string of repulsive Hardee’s commercials (are there any other kind?). The ads showed inept men bumbling through attempts to fix breakfast. One slob stood in front of an empty fridge as the narrator noted the universality of the inability of single men to acquire basic breakfast groceries. One [...]

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Murder and Doughnuts

In March 2006 Dunkin’ Donuts ($5.3 billion in annual global sales) was purchased by a private equity consortium comprised of Bain Capital, Thomas H. Lee Partners and, wait for it, … the Carlyle Group. Although I can technically be called a lawyer, I’ll spare you the mumbo jumbo about how it was purchased by a [...]

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Welcome New Readers!

Writing up reviews of City Stages was a good idea. We here at Toxic Culture have gotten quite a bit of traffic from said entries. If you haven’t seen our reports yet, check ‘em out. And if you’re new here, whether lured by the City Stages reviews or by your relentless Google searching for “big [...]

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First Things First

In the grand catalog of human endeavors ranging from the alphabet song to the zodiac, order is everything. But not just order for the sake of order; sequencing is essential to the payoffs of any number of strategies or public policy initiatives. Here, for your consideration, three guidelines that can be divined from some recent [...]

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The lineup (that’s one word, Tuscaloosa)

Well, Stephen’s off to take the bar exam. I’m happy to extend six kinds of encouragement and a five-part test for success that can be memorized using a bizarre and unwieldy acronym.
But the beat goes on while he’s holed up in some weirdo Montgomery hotel freaking out a bunch of aspiring lawyers with a series [...]

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The prosperous new year

It’s the Year of the Rat, folks. That’s year 4706, or 17, or 8, if you use the now-orthodox Santa Fe math for appropriate divination and numerological scintillation. I’ve scoured the Internet (okay, taken the first Google hit) to find the following explanation of this astrological milestone, and reproduced it below. All annotations are mine.
A [...]

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Trial Tribulations

Burning continues, but things seem to be getting a bit better. The President showed up! He gave a speech! He said that folks in D.C. aren’t going to forget about us! So, the crisis is practically resolved, and I’m sure that, Stephen’s pessimism about the insurance industry nonwithstanding, everyone will get the same kind of [...]

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