Recipe for PopSocioCultural Non-Fiction Best Seller:

Flatter Liberals by telling them that their altruistic and ethics based inclinations are by-products of their superior intelligence—but at the same time (Counter-Intuitively--By Golly!) are also the most potent assets for acquiring wealth.

Flatter Conservatives by telling them that their self interested and acquisitive inclinations are byproducts of their superior intelligence—but at the same time (Counter-Intuitively-- By Golly!) are also the most potent assets for cultivating an altruistic and ethics based life.

Flatter yourself for having amassed the requisite data and more importantly the anecdotal evidence in order to provide the basis for never before revealed insights and wisdom that have the power to change your life and provide genuine “Eureka” solutions to life’s most puzzling riddles.

In short—if you are mentally stuck between a rock and a hard place, put Malcolm in the middle.




I can't resist. I've tried to 'accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative' on this blog and steer clear of shooting fish in a barrel or skewering rotten meat on my grill, but this guy has pushed me too far. On the train, in the office, in the media, he's staring out at me and daring me to dive in and learn the special secrets that only he with his x-ray zeitgeist vision can detect and decode...and well, I just can't take it anymore..


...so I reached out to an old buddy in the hope that he could come to my aid and use his protean powers of pretense-free persuasion to clear the drain of dogmatic doodoo and stem the tide of vacuous voodoo emanating from the omnipresent frizzy headed oracle of obviousness. Take it away boys...and may the best man win....(go Homer!)



MALCOLM: “The key to good decision making is not knowledge. It is understanding. We are swimming in the former. We are desperately lacking in the latter.”

HOMER Weaseling out of things is important. It’s what separates us from the animals. Except the weasel.

MG: “Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.”

HS: If something's hard to do, then it's not worth doing

MG: “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

HS: Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, 14% of people know that.

MG: “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”

HS: I want to share something with you: The three little sentences that will get you through life.
Number 1: Cover for me.
Number 2: Oh, good idea, Boss!
Number 3: It was like that when I got here.

MG: “Achievement is talent plus preparation”

HS: All my life I've had one dream, to achieve my many goals.

MG: We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction.

HS: Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.

MG: “Emotion is contagious.”

HS: Homer no function beer well without.

MG: To achieve your goals, you don’t need to be brilliant, talented, or rich. You just need to persevere, hope for the right timing, and focus on taking one small step at a time in the direction of your dreams.

HS: That's it! You people have stood in my way long enough. I'm going to clown college!

MG: “We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all.”

HS: You'll have to speak up, I'm wearing a towel

MG::“Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from.”

HS: If you really want something in this life, you have to work for it --Now quiet, they're about to announce the lottery numbers!

MG: We all want to believe we make completely rational decisions …But even the smartest shopper is constantly manipulated in subtle psychological ways.

HS: You couldn't fool your mother on the foolingest day of your life if you had an electrified fooling machine.

MG: …S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.


HS: And I'm in no condition to drive...wait! I shouldn't listen to myself, I'm drunk! 


THANK YOU GENTLEMEN. REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED IN THE LOBBY.



"> A vague recollection confirmed -- Father Brown in the Father Brown Detective Mystery series by G.K. Chesterton and Gulley Jimson from The Trilogy (Herself Surprised, To Be A Pilgrim, The Horse’s Mouth,) by Joyce Cary –were both played by Alec Guinness in the movies. And a perfect choice for both despite the fact that Brown is gentle, sweet, level-headed, even-tempered humble, quiet…and Gulley is in almost every way the polar opposite in temperament. A testament to Sir Alec.


Must to Avoid:
In a review about a book concerning The “Freud” wars among those in the psychoanalytic community who apparently have been at each other’s throats since Sigmund smoked his first cigar , there was this excerpt regards a comment the authors make on some gaps they detect in an edition of Freud's letters: 'The result of this omission', they tell us, 'obscured the connections between these scatological hypotheses on the ontogenic recapitulation by the individual of the erotogenic zones abandoned in the course of phylogenesis and the theory of infantile sexuality put forward in the Three Essays in 1905.'

Uncle. Uncle!

Can't recall if I've posted this before, and too lazy to check so here it is...again?
A classic live performance that became legend...and it seems to get fresher every year. If you don't know it, stick with it cause the instrumental intro goes on for a bit, but the vocal and solos are worth waiting for.

1969 Montreux Jazz Festival.
On Atlantic Recording: Swiss Movement
Composed by: Eugene McDaniels

Les McCann: piano, vocals
Eddie Harris: tenor saxophone
Benny Bailey: trumpet
Leroy Vinnegar: bass
Donald Dean: drums