Minor revelations on a Friday in January

If you have a website - ANY website - and you check the stats, you will always be amazed by how many people have visited your site. And, in a given month, about 682 of them will NOT leave comments.


Changing the design of a website with your content management system (Blogger, Wordpress, etc.) feels a bit like removing the outer core of a personal computer and discovering that all that's underneath it is an on-off switch.


Trying to teach yourself HTML for the first time in 2011 feels a bit like learning about all the little on-off switches inside the big one while knowing that you really only need the big one.


Harry S. Truman, an underrated president, said that it's a recession when it happens to your neighbor but it's a depression when it happens to you. When it comes to bed bugs, they pretty much don't exist at all unless you go to sleep at 11 and they wake you up at 1.


Andy Warhol said, "They say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself." He's right, but most of that shit is still out of your control. Sometimes you look back on shit and say to yourself, "Man, I changed things," but then take a second look back and say to yourself, "Damn... time probably would have changed that anyway." It's kinda humbling.


If there is an omnipotent god, it periodically selects certain people and says, "This person is going to learn to appreciate the value of going home alone, even if it's a holiday, you're all jazzed out on Four Loko, and that person you were making out with was really hot." For that purpose, the god created STD scares.


There are probably other people who that god wants to go home with strangers forever.


Sometimes credit card debt is a thousand times better than the alternatives. Student loans are forgiven more easily by lenders, but, if lenders were motivated by more than the statistic that college grads tend to pay back loans more often than non-grads, they'd see that buying a bureau and presentable clothes to put in it is usually a way better investment than a class.


Here's a good quote by screenwriter Frank Pierson (which contains a meta-quote by Orson Welles):


A film set, as Orson Welles was first to say, is the most wonderful electric train a boy could ever be given. What he failed to add was that most of the time it doesn't work.


I think that in life, it's probably best to stick with train sets. It is possible to do better than train sets, sure. But not that much better.


The picture at the head is the model of Grand Central Station in the New York State Museum in Albany. When I was about six, I used to stare at it and imagine that the tunnels continued out beyond what I could see. Now, I walk through the real Grand Central Station every day. It would be nice to see it from the outside as a miniature model. In any case, the model in the museum is one of those things that doesn't stop being awesome, even if you're no longer six years old.