They Also Ran Good: Michael Dukakis

This is the second installment of a series on losing presidential candidates of the last 50 years.  As always, I will try to indicate [citation needed] when I start making shit up.  But I promise nothing.

Michael Dukakis was the governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts when, in 1988, he won the Democratic nomination for president.  He outlasted such political luminaries as Jesse Jackson, Gary Hart, Joe Biden and Al Gore (who will have his own story in these pages despite actually winning the 2000 election) and faced then Vice-President George Herbert Walker Bush in a battle for the White House.
Dukakis was the first major party nominee from Massachusetts since John F. Kennedy in 1960; like Kennedy, Dukakis chose a senator from Texas, in this case the estimable Lloyd Bentsen, as his running mate.

The 6 Survival Instincts You’ll Need To Ignore When Disaster Strikes

Over the millennia, we humans have evolved a number of instincts, automatic responses to dangerous situations that, in our primitive past, helped us achieve the laudable goals of survival and reproduction. Problem is, these instincts were never infallible (a slight advantage is enough for natural selection to retain them), they don’t work in every situation, and we have altered our environment much too fast for evolution to keep up. In fact, given the nature of many of our modern disaster scenarios, these instincts can be not only entirely useless but inappropriate and counter-productive.

Cooking Without Food

I wrote this in 1983. Somehow, after all these years, it's as silly as the day I wrote it.


With food being the target of an ever-increasing variety of studies, and with its being connected to a growing list of diseases (obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, food poisioning, cancer, choking, malnutrition, starvation) the demand for recipes of this sort has grown tremendously over the last few years.

Helpful Hints: Courtroom Art

I wanted to share the benefits of my experience in doing those wonderful, tastefully colorized sketches we know as courtroom art, the pictures you see on TV when they can't bring cameras into the courtroom. Here are a few helpful hints I can give you for some of the more challenging situations.

Rejected by Cracked.com, Episode 3

Once again Cracked.com has seen fit to reject another of my articles in favor of "Eight Utter Wusses That Could Kick Your Ass."  Okay, I made that up.  But it has enough grains of truth to make a few gallons of beer.
This time, my article was to be entitled "Six Wonderful Things The Atomic Age Was Going To Bring Us (circa 1945). 
It would have presented a list of the common, optimistic, utopian and dangerously inaccurate predictions of wonderful things that atomic energy was going to give us following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. In trying to find the silver lining in that dark mushroom cloud, journalists, public officials, and others who probably should have known better competed with each other to present the rosiest possible future that would be powered by this incredible new energy source. These people were imagining a Jetsons world in the face of technology that, at the time, was only suited to bombing people back to the Flintstones.

They Also Ran Good: George McGovern

This is part one in a series delving into American history.  This series will examine the spectacular losers in American presidential politics, the guys who almost reached the top before disaster struck and hilarious pratfalls ensued.  Here, my fascination with failure will merge with my interest in history and only occaisionally will my tendency to start making shit up be a factor.  I try to use proper [citation needed] markers to note when this happens.

7 Exciting Ways To Die In Grand Canyon

This is the first in a seven-part series, an attempt at conveying a sense of danger in a humorous manner. And no, I have no idea if I can pull that off.

Evolving Mousetrap: Irreducible Complexity Reduced

I will leave it to others to show how to evolve an ordinary mousetrap through a step-by-step process that gradually improves its function at every step. That’s for less ambitious, less creative science-types who don’t like to play with toys nearly as much as I do. No, I will take a much more complicated gizmo with many more interacting parts and show you how even it could be built step-by-step as evolution by natural selection would do. I will tackle the question of how Mousetrap, the game, could evolve.

The Manson Family Circus

Back to Killed By Fish

The Manson Family Circus

Back to Killed By Fish

The Manson Family Circus

Back to Killed By Fish

The Manson Family Circus

Back to Killed By Fish