Another Man's Treasure

One year ago, I started writing about something new every day. Three hundred and sixty-six posts later, I’m calling it a wrap. There were three reasons I began the experiment: I want to improve as a writer, which won’t happen unless I write. I want to challenge myself to learn something worth writing every day. [...]

Nearly a decade ago, I dabbled a bit in the first-person-shooter game Counter Strike. (The Day of Defeat mod was far better than the original, because I’ve always had a thing for World War II.) The game was developed by a company called Valve, which I learned today is a privately held company with an [...]

It’s Mother’s Day, which is, according to my eight year old son, one of two days each year that aren’t “kids days”. We made it to church in time to have the kids sing a song, or mouth every seventh worth a syllable later than their director said it, anyway, and then I had time [...]

You won’t need Sherlock Holmes’ deductive abilities to figure out I’m reading a book about rhetoric this week. So on with the new vocabulary, shall we? Hypophora is as figure of speech in which you ask a rhetorical question, and then immediately answer it. Can it be used to mitigate your audience’s skepticism? I believe [...]

According to Aristotle, all arguments boil down to one of three issues: blame, values, or choice. Who took the cookies from the cookie jar? Blame. Should marijuana be legal? Values. Should we cook tonight or go out. Choice. Of course, the most fun arguments (when I say fun, I mean futile) are those involving truth–or [...]

I suspect that Bugs Bunny was actually a hare, not a rabbit. It’s an upsetting claim, but I have seen hundreds of bunnies these past few days in the desert, and a handful of hares, and having spent hundreds of seconds researching the differences, I feel confident enough to go public with my suspicions. Hares [...]

A syllogism is a three-part deductive argument in which each part is made explicitly clear. All humans are mortal. Socrates is human. Therefore, Socrates is mortal. There are presumably more original examples out there. If this one bores you, make up your own before reading any further. An enthymeme, as defined by Aristotle, is similar [...]

My kids hate having to shower before getting in a public pool. I don’t mind the act of showering, I just hate being told what to do by pimple-cheeked teenagers in lifeguard jackets, so I decided to find out why such a rule exists. There are two primary reasons. The for-the-good-of-the-whole reason is that chlorinated [...]

Some people are high-functioning alcoholics. I am a high-functioning idealist. I understand that reality interferes, but when someone or something is ostensibly guided by principles or ideals, dangit, I expect those principles and ideals to be consistently regarded. It’s another example of my overly analytic, logical brain creating pain for the brain that gets to live [...]

The full moon was 15,000 miles closer to earth than a typical moon, creating a marginally larger-looking moon than usual. Despite what you might read from relatives younger than 20 or older than 50, this is not a rare occurrence, happening once a year. It’s called the perigee moon, and even if it isn’t rare, [...]