A mess of gooey, gluey, goodness.

I was standing behind a woman at the grocery store checkout a couple of days ago, patiently awaiting my turn, browsing the tabloid headlines and marveling at the variety of lip balms that are available to today’s consumers, when I happened to glance down at the products that were at that moment being zipped across the scanner and into the bags.

Mountain Dew. Cheetos. Ground beef (a ten-pound package). Wonder bread. Hot Pockets (six boxes). Hot dogs (four eight-packs). Microwaveable breakfast sandwiches. Little Debbie snack assortments. Potato chips. Frosted Flakes. Frozen pizza. An explosion of colors, textures and flavors that have never occurred in nature.

All told, a hundred and seventy dollars worth of groceries, with collectively less nutrition than a pound of pine bark.

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Skiing the Slippery Slope

On a whim yesterday I wasted twenty minutes on a quiz on the Christian Science Monitor website: it was a condensed version of a test that 8th graders in a Kentucky school district had to take in 1912 to determine whether they were fit to proceed to high school.

How hard could this be, right? This is test aimed at kids who are — what? Thirteen? In Kentucky, in 1912.

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Cracking the Whip.

I’ve been neglecting this blog for the past few days.

Naturally, I have plenty of excuses: a miserable bout of spring allergies, a busy Easter weekend, new clients to sort out … My creativity really shines when it comes to thinking up excuses. Unfortunately, as a teacher once pointed out to me many years ago (Mr Lambert, 7th grade), if you have to come up with more than one reason for failing to do what you’ve committed to do, then obviously none of your reasons is good enough.

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The Sun Finally Sets on Britannica

Encyclopedia Britannica, I’m going to miss you.

I’ll never forget those long, hot afternoons of my adolescence, huddled with you in the college library, dripping sweat onto overdue term papers, struggling to find words that could compare to yours (but stopping before things got out of hand and I lost a letter grade due to plagiarism.)  World Book, Encyclopedia Americana, they just didn’t compare. They didn’t have the heft, the smooth pages bound so seductively in leather and gold, the splashes of tropical color in the sections on Argentina, on Birds, on Cheese. Studying without you has never been the same.

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