Remember a few weeks ago, when I wrote about an Indiana judge who ruled that tacos were sandwiches? I was hoping that would be the worst judicial buffoonery of 2024, but I was wrong. Because those motherbuckeyes in Ohio have just ruled that boneless chicken wings are not actually boneless. According to an Associated Press story, THEE Ohio Supreme Court ruled 4–3 that consumers cannot, should not, and must not expect boneless chicken wings to be free of bones, despite the name.
 Before you come at me with your "boneless wings are just chicken nuggets" pedantry, save it. For one thing, you're ..read more

Excuse me one minute, I need to yell at some kids to get off my lawn. Thank you. Now where was I? Oh, yeah! I'm sick to death of those stupid reaction videos people are posting on TikTok and YouTube. Actually, I'm sick to death of TikTok in general, but the reaction videos are the worst of the very worst. Reaction videos are when someone records themselves watching another video and laughing, screaming, or over-emoting harder than a high school theatre group doing the musical version of All My Children. They do something called "duetting," which means filming a side-by-side shot of themse ..read more

Lord, protect us from the bureaucrats and paper pushers. Save us from the HOAs and the school administrators. Save us from the good-time grumblers and the no-fun fundamentalists. Too often, people appoint themselves as arbiters of things that are safe, innocuous, and "suitable." And they see it as their mission to make life miserable for everyone else. Like the preacher from Footloose who hated dancing. Or Baby's father from "Dirty Dancing" who hated Johnny. Or the micro-brains who try to ban books because they don't like reading. Or, most recently, like the Las Vegas Police Department, who ..read more

"Good evening and welcome. Do you gentlemen have a reservation?" said Kurt, the bartender and manager of First Editions, as we entered our favorite literary-themed bar. "Kurt, it's us," said my friend, Karl. "The only thing I have reservations about is the chicken parm." "Very good, sir," said Kurt. "Very droll." Kurt, what's the deal? I asked. We come in here once a week, and we've never needed reservations before. Kurt leaned forward, "The owner has decided he wants to change things up." "Why would he want to change things up?" said Karl. "He binged on The Bear a couple months ago, and ..read more

Maybe it's my age, but I like things to be neat and tidy. I like my office to be cleaned up, and everything put away. I like when my workbench is cleared off and the tools are put away. This is a far cry from when I was a kid. Back then, I loved the chaos of having everything I owned out on display for everyone to see. Things got so bad that rather than my mom bugging me to clean my room every day, just shut the door and refused to let me keep it open. The stories about the deadly stench of teenage boys are grossly under-exaggerated. But I didn't keep it messy all the time. I would actually ..read more

Gone are the days of Helicopter Parents, when parents hovered nervously over their children, swooping in at the first sign of distress. They have been replaced by the Snowplow Parents whose sole mission is to clear a path for their children, no matter the long-term harm it causes. Case in point: A recent survey found that 26% of Gen Z job applicants will involve their parents in their interview process, like reading your cover letter or helping coach you for your interview. That's OK because you should get help from people who know more than you. Of those applicants, 31% will have a parent a ..read more

Tech bros are ruining everything. Not only are they trying to screw everyone else on the planet by grabbing as much money as they can, they're working hard to "optimize" their "productivity" so they can operate at peak jerkiness at all times. Case in point, the tech bro mentality ruined the Silicon Valley housing market. That and a failure to build enough housing for the employment explosion as more and more tech bros swarmed on San Francisco. They drove San Francisco housing prices up to some of the most expensive in the world, which increased the number of homeless people in the city and m ..read more

It's the time of year when America's nerdiest word nerds all descend on Washington DC to determine the king or queen of word nerds with the Scripps Spelling Bee. To celebrate the spelling season, Google has once again compiled its list of words that each state has trouble spelling, based on the most searches in each state that start with "How to spell..." This is my fifth year writing about the list, and it's now one of my favorites of the year. To kick things off, both Arizona and North Carolina had trouble with "colonel," which I get. There's not a single 'r' in the word, even though it's ..read more

British humorist Miles Kington once said, "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit, wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." When you tell people tomato is fruit, they scoff and laugh at you, pretending to actually know what scoffing is.  But it's true. Botanically, not culinarily (which is a real word; I checked), a tomato is considered a fruit because it contains seeds and they grow from the flower of a plant. So botanically, a pepper is a fruit as well. But don't put it in a fruit salad. Or in a regular salad. Or in your mouth. People who scoff at this are the same people who ..read more

When we were growing up, there were kids who followed the rules. They did what they were told, happy to do whatever the adults told them. They were the ones who avoided getting into trouble because they did what they were supposed to. Then there's me. Well, me, and millions of kids like me. We were the troublemakers, the mischief-makers, the rule-breakers. We're the ones who, when you tell us not to do something, will do it anyway. Or we'll do a variation of the thing you told us not to do so we can still follow the letter of the law. But despite what our teachers and parents predicted, we ..read more