It's a well-known and oft-used strategy in the dating world: when you get a girl's (or a guy's) phone number, you really shouldn't make the call for at least 48 hours. Nobody wants to go out with someone who comes across as desperate. So you wait, play a little hard...

It's always interesting to me to see the different ways pop culture products reflect their times. Here's an article from the Times last week about the resurgence of sit-coms during the bad economy (people want to laugh); during the post-nuclear years, science...

Finally, John Lennon can truly rest in peace. The Vatican has forgiven him, and his fellow Beatles.

In what could well be the worst attempt ever to change the subject, the Catholic Church has decided now is the time to declare that the Fab Four really were kinda fab, and...

My twin boys are eight-years-old, and I've realized lately an interesting aspect of being a parent of children who are older than, say, six; namely, that what they're experiencing now in their lives now is well within the reach my own memory of what was going on in my life...

Remember when going back to your wife after an affair with an unstable woman could get your kids' bunny boiled? Now you get billboards and websites. Crazy revenge love, like everything else, has gotten media-savvy.

Of course, "Fatal Attraction," the movie where the spurned lover commits rabbit-cide, was fiction. This...

Congratulations to Chris Christie, newly-inaugurated governor of the great state of New Jersey. I wish him well. I also wouldn't trade places with him for anything.

In fact, I can think of nine-billion reasons I wouldn't want his job, not-so-coincidentally the approximate dollar amount of the state budget deficit,...

It happened again over the weekend. At JFK, a Haitian man and part time NYC resident, perhaps understandably disoriented leaving his earthquake-ravaged country a few hours earlier, walked into a restricted area at the airport after not seeing a sign barring access. You know what happened then: Terminal 8 went...

Yes, a back spasm. Hit me a week ago. Lower back, right side. The details aren't important. I get one or two a year. They come out of nowhere, unrelated to any physical activity I'm doing at the time, and, man, they make their presence felt for a few days....

In an incredibly brief amount of time, the story of the so-called Balloon Boy morphed from drama to farce. I'm not saying that just because it turned out the little boy, Falcon Heene, was never even on that runaway weather balloon the world was watching for two hours Thursday....

I had a bit of a revelation a couple of days ago, about the nature of national television news as it stands today, at least as it concerns political/public policy stories. Lots of you have probably had this revelation already, but, hey, I work in the media, and sometimes can't...

Years ago, as I was starting out my TV news career in Kingsport, Tennessee, I was interviewing the district's veteran congressman, Rep. James "Jimmy" Quillen. (Quite the character was he; he served 17-terms, and yet managed to sponsor only three pieces of original legislation. Once when I was interviewing him...

Well, they were right, all those folks who said President Obama's education speech would be an exercise in mass indoctrination if not downright mass hypnosis of our nation's children. They warned us that this was step one in creating legions of liberal zombies -- Ozomabies -- ready to do the...

Listening to the people showing up at town hall meetings across the country to scream their opposition to President Obama's health care reform proposals, you would think this is a concept that was sprung on them after last November's election. It isn't. Barack Obama ran on a platform heavily invested...

"Over the Limit, Under Arrest."

"Friends Don't Let Friends Drive Drunk."

"Buzzed Driving IS Drunk Driving."

All the slogans we've heard over the years in countless media campaigns against driving under the influence. All of them dwarfed in meaning and power on this day, when one of the...

There are physicists who believe that all quantum possibilities -- every point on what they call the "wave function" -- actually come true in some universe, somewhere. Right now, guys, at some point in the cosmos a parallel you could be in a hot tub, sipping champagne with your longtime...

It appears the movement to convince people that President Obama was born overseas is petering out. There's more conclusive evidence this week--and there was never a shortage of it--that he was, in fact, born in the good old U.S. of A.. Once again, officials in Hawaii have confirmed the...

I've been called many things, especially since I began blogging. But I've never been called a prude. So my choice of a topic today surprises even me a little bit, but it's something that bugs me more and more. I'm talking about the increasing, indiscriminate, and casual use of loud...

Last week, just before taking my 7-year-old twin boys to my hometown of Cincinnati for a family reunion, I took care of something that's a rite of passage for little boys everywhere: I got them their first wallets. They recently "discovered" money, (actually, they've quickly become frighteningly obsessed with it),...

1) Insurance executives are people, too. Ha-ha! Just kidding!

2) Just about everybody is against health care reform, except for the 85% of Americans who polls show are for it.

3) We should let Canada be better than us in something.

4) Cutting Pfizer's profits sounds fine and...

When one discusses "moving violations" on Manhattan's busy streets, it's assumed the reference is to traffic offenses by drivers of cars, trucks, and other internal combustion-type vehicles. But it's time to expand this definition to include another entire group of "moving" offenders: errant pedestrians.

I came up with this...