Fire and Knowledge

Lots of great ideas on how to live greener, from turning off your computer at night to taking a shower with your spouse.

One thing they neglected to mention, which I’ve done for years now, is use handkerchiefs instead of tissues. I used to think handkerchiefs were gross. Now I think tissues are gross. Anyway, by my calculation, I’ve saved about 4,000 tissues from nose death in the last two years. That’s 30 fewer boxes of tissues.

For some reason that makes me happy.

Humor… is urgent work. It’s an attempt to say important things in a special way that regular writers aren’t getting said in a regular way—or if they are, it’s so regular that nobody is reading it.

—William Zinsser, On Writing Well, p. 209.

You mean all these vitamins I’m taking may actually shorten my life? Health science is so confusing if you try and follow it.

PZ Myers responds to four bad arguments against evolution. I wish I would have read something like this in high school — it would have saved me from many stupid debates.

I wish someone would have convinced me of this at 15. Or 20.

Even investing $50 per month, and never increasing the amount can give you a seven-figure portfolio. You just have to start early. A fifteen-year-old who invests $50 per month until age sixty-five, or a total of $30,000, will have an investment portfolio of more than $1.3 million (assuming an average annual return of 11 percent). While that may not be much help to you given your age, I’m sure you know a teenager who would benefit from this knowledge.

—Charles Carlson, Eight Steps to Seven Figures (Currency; 2000), p. 169.

Figuring out what really matters to us in life can seem difficult. But here’s an easy way: attend your own funeral.

Walk down the aisle, sit in the pew, and imagine what you want your spouse and family and friends to say and think about you. Write those things down.

Now what are you doing today to accomplish them?

I used to do this in middle school for fun, but it’s pretty funny that an adult is recommending it.

Encyclopedias are a vital part of many school libraries…. [They] represent the philosophies of present day humanists. This is obvious by the bold display of pictures that are used to illustrate paintings, art, and sculpture…. This makes it important that the materials we place before our children are free from … that which would inflame passion. [We] are not battling a plot that captivates minds but are looking for erroneous information, sensual pictures, and unchaste details…. One of the areas that needs correction is immodesty due to nakedness and posture. This can be corrected by drawing clothes on the figures or blotting out entire pictures with a magic marker. This needs to be done with care or the magic marker can be erased from the glossy paper used in printing encyclopedias. You can overcome this by taking a razor blade and lightly scraping the surface until it loses its glaze…. [Regarding evolution,] cutting out the sections is practical if the portions removed are not thick enough to cause damage to the spine of the book as it is opened and closed in normal use. When the sections needing correction are too thick, paste the pages together being careful not to smear portions of the book not needed for correction.

—Ray Martin, “Reviewing and Correcting Encyclopedias” in Christian School Builder (1983) as quoted in Michael Shermer, Why People Believe Weird Things (1997), pp. 138-9.

In a waiting room yesterday I had the pleasure of listening to these profound pontifications from a loud-mouthed fat man in an orange shirt. I find it interesting how opinionated we can be on subjects where we obviously have very little understanding.

“I just can’t see things getting any better in this country. Oil is at, what, $130 a barrel? Greed. It’s all greed.”

“The farmer’s ain’t growing any food for us anymore — they’re growing it all for fuel!”

“Why do they keep raising the price of diesel? I have a diesel motorhome. It makes everything more expensive because trucks use diesel. It’s a damn shame. It’s just uncalled for.”

“Oil ain’t ever going down. We’ve got a President who makes money off oil, and he’s not going to let the price go down.”