Swine before pearls. Well, diamonds, actually. Rihanna, a chanteuse of renown, wore two megabucks worth of jewelry to the Grammy awards, including 100 carats on her bracelet, 30 carats on  her earrings, and who knows how much on the various rings that covered her fingers. (A side note: “grammy”is derived from “gramophone,” an early brand […]

The quality of early childhood education is in free fall. No more do we initiate our children to the sublimities of the English language with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” which uses words that are actually used by adults. In fact, we barely use words at all. The decline can be traced […]

Pre-civilization, we all lived in packs and helped each other. But as civilization advanced, we learned better, and for many years screwed each other over in a ferocious Darwinian duel which led to vastly improved living standards. Unfortunately, the last generation or two has attempted to undo this important social advance. We are now enjoined […]

We have reversed the once inexorable advance from primitive scribblings to precise written communication, and are descending into an inarticulate pit. You doubt me? Fools! Around fifty-thousand years ago, the Australian Aborigines (Yeah, yeah, yeah, native peoples. Actually, not native: they arrived from Africa by way of Asia.) carved petroglyphic images onto rocks for purposes […]

A village is the antithesis of a civilized society. Why did the world urbanize? Because people wanted to leave the village environment in which everybody knew everybody else’s business. But as early as the 1970’s, Marshall McLuhan predicted that, thanks to modern mass media, we would all soon live in a global village. He was […]