Ever since British New Wavers Ian Dury and the Blockheads scored with their 1979 single Reasons To Be Cheerful (Part 3) -- which celebrated people like Elvis and the Marx Brothers and pleasures like Ploughman's sandwiches (cheddar cheese and a pickle) and "coming out of chokey" (solitary confinement)...

"Do You Believe In Magic?"
--Lovin' Spoonful

A little magic never hurt anyone. I don't mean the delusional "spiritual therapy" practiced by Lynn, one of the first women I met after moving to L.A. 25 years ago. She claimed to have removed a client's malignant tumor during a...

The U.S. is the best country in the history of the world, Americans like to say, because here any child can grow up to become president.

But now that our 24/7 cable/Internet news culture has opened a window on how thankless a job the Presidency can be if you...

In the media/entertainment business these days, so many qualified applicants are chasing so few good jobs it's enough to drive you into selling real estate. Oh, wait, there aren't any jobs there, either. This week the New York Times laid off more than a hundred editorial staffers, Conde Nast --...

CDs. Ardi. Gourmet. Vooks.

It's a digital, astonishing, sad, hilarious time to be alive.

The CD, which just celebrated its twenty-seventh anniversary, continues its path toward extinction. Sound Scan reports that even this year's multi-million-unit Michael Jackson and Beatles bonanzas haven't stopped album sales from dropping 13.9 percent from...

A close friend of Los Angeles-based clinical psychologist Jennifer Kromberg -- let's call her Jane -- recently fell into a depression after losing her job as an academic researcher at a major university. Jane, also going through a painful divorce, couldn't afford even the bargain-basement rates her psychotherapist was charging,...

"Republicans have been accused of abandoning the poor. It's the other way around. They never vote for us." -- Dan Quayle

I admit it. I like the late Bono -- Sonny, that is -- better than the current one. The U2 front man is a certified rock god and globetrotting...

Politics has gotten so expensive. It takes a lot of money just to get beat!
--Will Rogers

When Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton implausibly claimed during his 1992 presidential quest that he'd tried marijuana but never inhaled, Johnny Carson quipped that Jerry Brown, Clinton's quirky rival, appeared never to have...

When I worked at LA Weekly in the early '80s, our demographic research showed that not only did most of our readers not have kids, they didn't even like kids. Ten years later, when we started OC Weekly, we were advised by "community leaders" that it would never fly because...

How long does it last?
Can love be measured by the hours in a day?

September 24th is the centennial birthday of my late father, the songwriter
Carl Sigman (1909-2000), who wrote nearly a thousand songs, including "It's
All In The Game," "(Where Do...

Many a tear has to fall but it's all in the game...

September 24th is the centennial birthday of my late father, the songwriter Carl Sigman (1909-2000), who wrote nearly a thousand songs, including "It's All In The Game," "(Where Do I Begin) Love Story," "Ebb Tide," "What Now, My...

Please play that lovely wrong note
Because that wrong note
Just makes me doo doo doot, doo doo doot, wah
Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Leonard Bernstein, "Wrong Note Rag"

The Inverted Jenny isn't a porn movie or a yoga pose. It's a rare 1918 U.S. postage stamp...

"Oh, when there's too much of nothing,
No one has control"
--Bob Dylan

During those invariable grade school "what I did on my summer vacation" exercises, I'd often tune out classmates' monotone narratives of macrame dramas or baseball-card flipping showdowns and fantasize that when my turn came I'd...

Speak when you are angry and you'll make the best speech you'll ever regret.
-- Dr. Laurence J. Peter, author of The Peter Principle

My new part-time job as an unlicensed email therapist features sporadic hours, no pay and tons of satisfaction.

Here's how it works. A friend...

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes, bathe, and not make messes in the house.
-- Robert Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Twenty years ago, the all-around scientific genius Douglas Hofstadter coined the...

"Oh, he RSVPs 'yes' for everything, just in case he decides to go."
-- Movie star's aide, explaining why said star didn't honor his promise to attend a dinner party.

Most "creatives" -- what entertainment-industry suits call musicians, writers, actors and other artists (sometimes they're called "talent," but...

The first thing I remember, I was lying in my bed
I couldn't've been no more than one or two
And I remember there's a radio, coming from the room next door
...Well it's late in the evening, and the music's seeping through.
--...

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words."
-- Philip K. Dick

As part of my executive training, a former boss once shared a chilling image...

Have skipp'd from sixteen years of age to sixty
--William Shakespeare, Cymbeline

I just turned 60, and the last thing I want to do is add to the navel-gazing from the hordes of '49ers celebrating that birthday. On the other hand, the number 60 itself is...

In every affair consider what precedes and what follows...
-- Epictetus

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford isn't a man's man, nor is he a ladies' man. He's a very strange man, to be sure. But basically he's a selfish man.

Everyone now knows that Sanford betrayed his wife...