THESE TIMES

Random thoughts for a day in July

Kirk Ericson | Jul 06, 20230

I hate know-it-alls, but I really hate mass murderers.

We need to get to the point in our nation where we can dislike people solely for the content of their character, not the color of their skin.

My 95-year-old mother-in-law recently asked what I thought of her grandson’s girlfriend’s hairdo. “Actually,” she corrected herself, “her head is shaved, so it’s more like a head-do.”

Do you ever say something to your child that you could never have imagined coming out of your mouth? It happened to me last week when one of my boys was slouching. “Stand up straight,” I told him. “Posture is destiny!”

If you could ask pigs what attribute they’d change about their species, I bet the unanimous answer would be, “Not taste good to humans.”

The couch is the most dangerous piece of furniture in the home. The more you use it, the unhealthier you’ll be.

GOP presidential candidate Chris Christie’s candidacy can be seen as the equivalent of the prescription medications Suboxone and Methadone, substances that are used to wean people off opiates. U.S. citizens who remain intoxicated by Trump can switch to Christie because he’s kind of like Trump, boisterous, braggy and lumpy, but not nearly as nutty. Christie can help people inebriated on Trump clear the Trump out of their system without all the nasty side effects of withdrawal.

We’re calling the next dog we get “Stella” so every time we need to call Stella, we can pretend we’re rehearsing for the lead role in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”

The good thing about Juneteenth is it comes with a built-in date mnemonic device.

Saying you don’t care what people think about you shows you do care. You care that people believe that you don’t care.

Too many people are stoned on fear.

It’s upriver, downriver, upstream and downstream, but never upbrook or downbrook. And it’s up a creek, and always without a paddle.

A grammar lesson: An acronym is an abbreviation that can be pronounced, such as OSHA, NASA and OPEC. FBI is an abbreviation, but not an acronym. So, all acronyms are abbreviations, but not all abbreviations are acronyms.

If all WNBA players decided not to patronize a business, it could be called a girlcott.

If you don’t know what to say when somebody asks you how you’re doing, try saying this: “Can we please change the subject?”

I recently gave a barista a $5 bill for a coffee that cost $3.78. She said, “Perfect.” “No, it’s not perfect. What would have been perfect is if I gave you exactly $3.78. Why did you say ‘perfect’ when it’s $1.22 away from being ‘perfect?’ ” I didn’t say any of that. This particular verbal tick is burrowed so far too deep in the American vocabulary for the likes of me to excavate.

I haven’t heard much from Utah lately. Hope everything’s OK there.

The saying, “If you have your health, you have everything” is not true because here’s what you don’t have: All those things that make you find some solace in saying, “If you have your health, you have everything.”

Fifty years ago, if you would’ve seen an old fellow walking a dog around your neighborhood while he carried a plastic bag full of excrement, you would have avoided that person, and perhaps launched a neighborhood whispering campaign against him. But now it’s normal, normal, normal.