Each year, we give our local trash collectors a Christmas card with a small gift inside, usually $10. This year, because the guys have been exceptionally nice to our dog — throwing him doggie treats whenever he’s outside when they arrive — we decided to bump it up to $20.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up Monday morning, looked out the window, and saw that the card I’d carefully taped to the garbage-can lid was missing.

At first I thought it had blown off during the night — high winds combined with frigid temperatures would probably be enough to defeat the clear packing tape I’d used.

This year’s card was in a white envelope, which would be hard to find on our snow-covered lawn. So I recruited my wife, her brother (who’s in from Albuquerque for the holidays), and the three kids to search for…

Tags: Tags: christmas, crime, society

As Rannoch Donald said when he sent this link, “unfuckingbelievable”:

The Devil is not in league with global consumer brand Procter & Gamble, a U.S. court has ruled. P&G won a $19 million lawsuit against four distributors of rival Amway over rumors tying it to Satanism.

The court concluded a 12-year lawsuit in P&G’s favour, after it ruled that the four had spread a false accusation that P&G subsidised Satanic cults. The case is one of several unfair competition suits P&G has brought refuting the Satanism slurs.

According to P&G, the four distributors had passed on to customers the notion that its logo — featuring a bearded man looking over a field of 13 stars — was a symbol of Satan.

According to Snopes.com, the bearded-guy logo was trademarked in 1851, and the 13 stars represented the country’s original 13 colonies. I found that in five seconds. So why did it take…

Tags: Tags: society

When you meet someone new, one of the most important steps in the mating ritual is learning the new person’s stories. With my wife and me, the exchange of stories was especially crucial, since we had so much in common. We were attending the same creative-writing program, we were both Midwesterners who had graduated from journalism schools in adjacent states, and we were both coming out of relationships that had taught us exactly what we didn’t want from future partners.

The foundation stories are about family, of course. The next tier of stories is about past relationships. But because of our similar backgrounds, the work-related stories were some of the most important in establishing how we’d gotten to the place where we met.

She was impressed by fact that I was the bad guy in one of my own stories, about how I got fired from my part-time sportswriting job at the…

Tags: Tags: society

Back in high school, there was this girl named … well, I can’t remember her name, so I’ll call her Stephanie, since I’m pretty sure that wasn’t it. But more than 30 years after graduation, I can still picture the girl’s face: oval, with full lips and enormous brown eyes, framed by long, straight, blonde hair.

Since I went to a small high school in rural Missouri, there weren’t really deep social divisions in the student body. Everybody hung out with everybody else. But when it came to dating, there was one unwritten, unspoken rule: The cutest girls in our school, such as Stephanie, were out of our league.

We were in the shadows of two bigger public schools, and the prettiest girls in our little Catholic school accepted the social hierarchies of those schools, rather than the level playing field of our own. To us, it didn’t really matter who someone’s…

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New York Times reporter Sam Harris dug through the Census Bureau’s 2007 Statistical Abstract and came up with a bunch of fun facts:

We consumed more than twice as much high fructose corn syrup per person as in 1980 and remained the fattest inhabitants of the planet, although Mexicans, Australians, Greeks, New Zealanders and Britons are not too far behind. …

Americans are getting fatter, but now drink more bottled water per person than beer.

Fans of girl-on-girl action will appreciate this:

For the first time, the abstract quantifies same-sex sexual contacts (6 percent of men and 11.2 percent of women say they have had them).

Some good news for families:

More Americans were born in 2004 than in any years except 1960 and 1990. Meanwhile, the national divorce rate, 3.7 divorces per 1,000 people, was the lowest since 1970. Among the states, Nevada still claims the highest divorce rate, which slipped to 6.4 per…

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I’ve been reading a lot lately about this guy Obama, as has everyone interested in politics. And even if you don’t care about politics, you can’t escape the constant recitation of his name and speculation about his presumed presidential intentions.

As you might expect, I like him a lot. (Sue me, I’m a liberal.) And I don’t have any big opinions or insights into his personality or prospects. But I did have this weird thought the other day:

Guess how many U.S. presidents’ last names have ended in a pronounceable vowell? (Told you it was a weird thought.)

The answer is one: John F. Kennedy, who also, I think it’s safe to say, is the closest we’ve had to an “ethnic” president. (He was Irish-Catholic, and felt compelled to give a speech promising that he wouldn’t take his marching orders from the Vatican.)

If the criterion broadens to include presidents whose last…

Tags: Tags: society

A bunch of stuff that defies categorization:

Parental guidance

Andy Scharlott sent this one along from The Smoking Gun, calling attention to the age of the child and his mother:

A South Carolina boy, 12, was arrested Sunday morning after his mother called police to report that he had unwrapped a Christmas present without her permission. According to a Rock Hill Police Department report [a copy of which you'll find if you click the link above], the child opened a Nintendo Game Boy, though he had been directed not to by family members. When the boy’s mother learned that the $85 gift had been opened, she called cops, who charged the juvenile with petty larceny. In an interview with The Herald newspaper, the boy’s mother, a 27-year-old single parent, described her son as a disruptive child, noting that she hoped his arrest would serve as a corrective to disorderly behavior at…

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Here‘s a crime story you don’t see every day:

A St. Louis man was shot to death Sunday night over a warm beer, police said.

St. Louis police say a woman shot her husband, who was about 70 years old, four to five times in the chest after he tried giving her a warm can of Stag beer.

Police said the wife admitted shooting him about 5:40 p.m. in the kitchen of their home in the 5100 block of Terry Avenue. Police said the home had no electricity at the time.

My guess is that she shot him over the fact their house had no electricity. The warm beer was just incidental. And speaking of beer, this story involves Dominique Byrd, a rookie tight end with the St. Louis Rams:

Byrd is alleged to have grabbed a woman’s buttocks. When a man standing nearby challenged Byrd, police said, the Rams player grabbed a…

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I spent yesterday afternoon digging through some studies for the new book, and then, while waiting for one of them to print out, decided to look around for some blog meat for this morning. I clicked on this link, headlined “60s Are the New Middle Age,” thinking it was a story about how people in my generation are redefining midlife.

Wrong!

Cosmetic surgery is altering not just how people look but how they feel by changing perceptions of middle age, a new study shows.

Global research group AC Nielsen surveyed people in 42 countries and found 60 percent of Americans, the world’s biggest consumers of cosmetic surgery and anti-aging skincare, believe their 60′s are the new middle age.

So people my age are cutting, pasting, and liposucting to create the illusion of non-aging. What an uplifting story! What plucky pioneers we Baby Boomers are!

It’s too early in the morning for a full-on rant,…

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Have you ever seen the movie A Face in the Crowd? In it, a hillbilly singer, “Lonesome” Rhodes, played by Andy Griffith, becomes an overnight sensation, and becomes so famous and powerful that he starts to become a political figure. The people closest to him are increasingly disturbed by this, since they know he’s a really, really nasty guy behind the good-ol’-boy facade. (This isn’t Sheriff Taylor of Mayberry.) One of them finally brings him down by leaving a microphone on when the singer is joking around with his pals during a live broadcast, letting the entire nation know what a creep the singer is.

Which brings me to Michael Richards and his crazy tirade against a couple of hecklers at a comedy club. Richards isn’t anywhere near the cultural icon that the fictional Rhodes was in A Face in the Crowd, or even in the same class as…

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