Advice

A: When life gives you lemons, sugar, filtered water, a juicer, a pitcher, ice cubes, and some glasses, make lemonade!
B: What about when life just gives me lemons?
C: When life gives you lemons, learn to like lemons...

Family raw

Is it a coincidence that Paul Ekman's daughter decided to become a Buddhist nun? What other path would be open if your father was trained in seeing through deception?

The next Olympic sport?

A: Why are you always tired? It's not like you're ever doing anything!
B: Don't you understand? It takes more effort to swim against the Zeitgeist than it does to surf with it!

urban plots

In their zeal to create a bike-friendly city, Mayor Daley's urban planners have put bike lanes on the right side of roads that are used for buses. Now many buses are reduced to bicycle speed, as they weave to and from the curb, and the bike friendly policies of city hall foster economic discrimination, as the denizens of the higher income neighborhoods that border on downtown create a situation where a single bicycle rider ends up making sixty low-income people late to work.

manners, manners

I saw the Court Theater's production of Seneca's Thyestes, and the row behind me was occupied by six drunken school-teachers having a girl's night out. As a dramatic piece, Thyestes has lain dormant for four centuries, and the gulf between the Roman appetite for cruelty and Western civilization was too wide to even imagine a staging. But now that we have reached a point in our cultural degeneration where Seneca is not only accessible, but almost passe. Do we need a reminder at performances, that, along with silencing cell phones, people should also avoid chattering among one another while watching scenes of incestuous cannibalism?