by Mark O'Brien | Jan 30, 2017
With no fanfare of any sort, the venerable Harvard Business Review (HBR) has published the first in a series of brain teasers, word puzzles designed to look like articles, containing syntactical dead ends, grammatical errors, and logical non sequiturs. The purpose of...
by Mark O'Brien | Jan 3, 2017
I was in a chi-chi shop during the Holidays that had a display of handbags fashioned from something called vegan leather. My first thought was that vegan leather must come from cows fed only on corn-fed grass that had been humanely slaughtered by filing down the teeth...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 27, 2016
I didn’t receive any formal notice of his demise, but it appears the Nigerian Prince who was, at one time, so notorious for his spam emails, as blatant as they were transparent, has bought the farm. I suspect this because I recently received the following email...
by Mark O'Brien | Dec 19, 2016
Already reeling and darn near senseless, language is still taking body shots, kids. This post showed up in my LinkedIn feed after attracting some recent comments. It contains this nugget: Frustration and even anger are common, understandable reactions to new ways of...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 21, 2016
Sincerity is everything. Once you learn to fake that, you’ve got it made. (Variously attributed.) As I get older, I continually wonder about reality, about the nature of reality, about our ability to perceive reality, and whether there is any objective reality...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 17, 2016
Are you ready for this? The venerable Hartford Courant (“the country’s oldest newspaper in continuous publication”) ran an article about Aetna’s trimming its workforce (another Obamacare casualty), in which it published this: As it scales back...