You’ve been lied to…the Bookworm, a symbol of the book smart, bibliophile class, does not exist! There is no such worm or insect. What we know as the Bookworm can actually be any number of wood boring insects in the larva stage, usually a beetle.
So next time you’re called a Bookworm, because you’re occasionally seen reading a book recognize that they’re calling you a Wood Boring Beetle with no discernable trait for intelligence due to book-learning
What is wrong with the basics! There is an important truth in the unaltered, unadjusted form. I’m not saying improvement is wrong or that growth in concept or innovation is a bad thing, but what about that original concept. When people refer to the basics or the fundamentals of something it is always perceivedas a starting point, but often times, we begin something only to realize we preferred how it all began to where it is now. Human nature secretly yearns for the simplistic, but will never admit it for fear of being deemed simple.
The Arts are the best medium to make my thoughts clearer, in particular the area of music. For instance, the bongo is an instrument rooted in simplicity: someone hits it and it makes noise. It’s a hollow, barrel-shaped structure with a fiber stretched across the top. Just hit the skin or fiber and the sound echoes, do it a bunch and it builds a rhythm. Simple and effective. However, I’m sure at some point in the bongo’s history someone thought to look into complicating the bongo. I’m sure someone spent countless hours devising a proper hand position to strike the bongo and terminology to explain said position or the scale the bongo should register in or something along those lines. Ultimately, the elegance of this seemingly rudimentary instrument was lost. Now I don’t pretend that an expansion of understanding about a subject ruins it; I only mean to state that a simplification of a subject doesn’t always mean a regression.
There was a time – as science and technology slept like the proverbial dragon atop of a wealth knowledge and understanding – that Arts like literature and music were left to develop and grow without the skepticism they now face about their overall knowledge value. That time was spent over-analyzing the many art forms instead of solidifying the simple connections that aesthetics and expression have with the Human Spirit. Consequently, as technology continues to march us closer and closer to some sort of Terminator-esque Doomscapelittered with the corpses of our murdered Privacy and starved Discovery there is no foil in sight. There is no cry for the simple beautiful picture or poem or the pure sound that comes from the heroic Bongo.
I failed at baseball. I wanted to play professionally and I failed. In the process, I also failed all my family and friends. Ok – maybe I’m being harsh – I pretty much just failed myself. The odds of becoming a professional athlete is slim, but it felt possible on more than a couple of occasions. Alas, it was not meant to be and so I became what I was supposed to be: a writer. After all, if I did somehow make it, I would be an interloper, a trespasser in the game because I had neither the skills nor the natural talent to excel in it…right? Right…two-thousand seventeen Houston Astros – nudge, nudge – right???
The more I hear about this Sign-Stealing scandal and think back to the Steroid Era and then the game’s many unnamed dalliances with unfair play: corked bats, spit-balls, Black Sox debacle…Pete Rose, amphetamine abuse, drug abuse, etc etcetc. I begin to wonder if talent and skill really mattered at all. Perhaps, I simply didn’t have the moral flexibility necessary to play professional baseball (says the man raised in a housing project in Queens between the infamous Queensbridge and Astoria Projects). Or, perhaps, I lacked the the strong creative mind that was necessary to aid in the destruction of a once beautiful pastime.
Or, maybe, baseball’s indiscretions make it more American. People used to speak about the purity of baseball as well as the overall purity of sports. Competition that relied on effort and training, which highlighted the framework of the American Dream: work hard and you will be successful. It was in that purity of competition that many Americans ensconced themselves so they could ignore the history of slavery, the history of sexism and the history of social injustice that underlay this country (more so than a “Dream”). Perhaps, baseball was supposed to fail to truly succeed in actually aligning itself to the mantra of work hard while people are watching, deviate when necessary and NEVER get caught. Maybe now baseball can finally be American’s Greatest Pastime.
Strip Clubs are Sad Discos 