Try to remember

So, I don't know who Nat Gertler is, and I can't get to his (her?) page on Facebook (if you can, don't hold it against me — I have it on good authority I'm technologically cursed).

I'm reasonably confident, however, that she (he?) is responsible for this little goody about the late, great Kathryn Joosten, which, given I just attended a mega double-digit high school reunion, seemed particularly apropos as well as worth sharing.

that's Latin for...

You know when you're arguing with someone, and you know you're right and they're wrong—but all of a sudden you're defending yourself for something wrong that you did? And you're sitting in jail, thinking to yourself, "Wait. How did this happen? Tiffany's the one who said she could hot-wire the car in under 4 seconds. How come we're fighting about the time last year when I forgot to dope the doberman?"

It's a nasty bit of argumentative "tactics"—and it even has a name. "Tu quoque," Latin for "you, also."

Turns out there's a whole host of related argument derailers to be on the look-out, grouped under "ad hominem," which means (those Latin—busy, busy) "against the man."

There's the abusive ad hom way to go: "when an attack on the character or other irrelevant personal qualities of the opposition—such as appearance—is offered as evidence against her position." Often called the "red herring" argument.

Then you've got the circumstantial route: "in which some irrelevant personal circumstance surrounding the opponent is offered as evidence against the opponent's position.... The fallacy claims that the only reason why he argues as he does is because of personal circumstances, such as standing to gain from the argument's acceptance. "

If that's not enough, you can go with the ole reliable, Poisoning the Well:

To poison the well is to commit a pre-emptive ad hominem strike against an argumentative opponent. As with regular ad hominems, the well may be poisoned in either an abusive or circumstantial way.... Poisoning the Well is not, strictly speaking, a logical fallacy since it is not a type of argument. Rather, it is a logical boobytrap set by the poisoner to tempt the unwary audience into committing an ad hominem fallacy...

The underlying fallacy here is that the counter-arguments against the original topic are based on everything but actual arguments (past acts, circumstances, character)—when, as everyone knows, arguments and counter-arguments must stand on their own merit, regardless of the person advancing them (even if she did forget to dope the doberman).

It's not me, it's them

You gotta love an article like this: "Why The Smartest People Have The Toughest Time Dating." Except that Amherst made the author's list of exemplar institutes of higher learning and my alma mater didn't, either signifying that my school's alumni are so smart we're just S.O.L. because, in the immortal words of M.C. Hammer (himself an alum of my institute of not as high learning—how does one refer to high school anyway?), "you can't touch this," OR the author himself went to Amherst and thus suffers from due jealousy and could not bear to include my clearly superior school in the list. Sidebar over.

The author makes five points, but in my opinion it's his fifth and final point that is the most salient: "By virtue (or vice) of being smart, you eliminate most of the planet's inhabitants as a dating prospect." He goes on to say "you've just eliminated 95% of the world's population as a potential mate, Mr or Ms Smartypants."

See, it's not really my fault I can't get a date. I'm only working with 5% of the population—not even, considering I'm only interested in men, and I have some age (you know, over 18 and under 80) and height requirements. I'm actually probably looking at like, 1% of the population of any given area. Maybe. Damn, I knew I should've gotten a cat.

Drunk dialing? You're on your own, but...

Drunk emailing—the scourge of the rejected, the disappointed, the hopeless, the feckless, the stupid-beyond-belief—has a new enemy in town. Mail Goggles.

That's right. Google is moving out of your back yard and into your id.

Turn on this Gmail feature and when you hit "send," nothing will happen unless and until you answer a few questions along the lines of 69-38=? and 2x5=?

According to the Official Gmail Blog (what? you didn't know?), "by default, Mail Goggles is only active late night on the weekend as that is the time you're most likely to need it. Once enabled, you can adjust when it's active in the General settings." So if you're a lunchtime reckless romeo, no worries.

As illustrated, this early version of Mail Goggles will not help us all. Here's hoping that in the next version, we'll not only be able to adjust the activity time, but also enter a list of target recipients—"are you sure you want to send that email to Jennifer, Brad?" Not to mention, your own bete noir subjects (I'm thinking they should partner up with the makers of Trivial Pursuit); you know, if you're not going to be stumped by "63-28," perhaps "what year was the Magna Carta signed?" might get you, or "who directed Chinatown?" will. If you watch a lot of Jeopardy, all I can say is—don't do it, man!

This is how you get from A to someplace that's just not B

So, I start to blog about mint chocolate chip ice cream because, well, because.

And I go searching for the right image, which you may or may not realize is something into which I put a fair amount of time and energy. I want that image to sing to you, fair reader. To catch your eye and speak to you, even before my well chosen and witty words. And lo and behold, I find the perfect image—a marriage of my favorite ice cream flavor with my favorite ice cream brand (see fig. A at left).

But, when I go to source the image, I stumble on something even better—a blog post entitled "Forget Milk—Got Xanax?" It reads as follows:

(Scene: SC, MW, and JS are lunching at a restuarant with an outdoor patio)

JS: Do you know what I wanna do?

(SC and MW are afraid to ask)

JS: I want to get a whole bunch of Xanax and crush it all up and put it in people's drinks so that they can calm the f* down.

Forget the milk—let's just dump it in the water supply.

Sometimes life just gets you

"The blues are because you're getting fat or it's been raining too long. You're just sad, that's all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you're afraid, and you don't know what you're afraid of."

The thing about the mean reds—you can't talk them away. You can't even cry them away. You just have to wait them out.

Sometimes you think they're going to beat you, but they never do. You'll always win. You just have to wait long enough.