Rick Nier...Woo!

I was recently summoned to jury duty. I know, groan. Except I didn't. I had never experienced it before and was curious to see what it was like.   When the day to report arrives, they separate you into groups, asking various questions to decide if you will be selected to serve. Do you know the accused? Do you have conflicts that would keep you from serving? Can you stay focused?  I wanted to answer well, if only because my kids kept wishing me luck the day before, telling me they hoped I made the team. After all, who wants to be rejected? It occurred to me that there are things you probably shouldn’t say right away if you’re wanting to serve on a jury. I know, I know, people don’t typically want to serve on a jury. But that list didn’t seem nearly as humorous to me. Here are the things you probably shouldn’t say if you want to be selected for jury. I hold myself in contempt. You can’t handle the truth. We find the defendant guilty. I believe the judge looks pretty in his ...

I'd like to think I am above the fray. I'd like to think that I am not attracted to the drivel that is like a magnet for the faceless and nameless group of morons (none of whom are people in my family, church, work, etc... and surely not in your circles either). Unlike others who appear to be evolutionary steps behind us, I am not sucked into links that promise to make me weep for hours, laugh uncontrollably or spontaneously wet myself. Yeah, I'd like to think that. Then I find myself clicking on a link. Curiosity and all that, right? What cracks me up is that many of these links are good stories, some are old jokes and the rest are...well, you know. But I realize that the internet is like a metropolis, where the signs have to be bigger, brighter, and bolder to get our attention. All of this got me wondering what would happen if Biblical stories were presented like articles I see on Facebook. Here's my list. What would you add? God sent His Son to Earth. What happened ...

I was recently given a review copy of Stuff You Should Know About Stuff: How to Properly Behave in Certain Situations . I was selected to be part of the launch team by my friends Tripp and Tyler, though referring to people I've never met as friends is one of the things I learned not to do while reading their book. I guess application comes next. Nevertheless, Tripp and Tyler have come up with what I would call the Seinfeld  series of books. They are saying future anthropologists will call it the Rosetta Stone of how to handle the mundane in life. They might be right. It's a comical look at how people behave everywhere from bathrooms to airplanes, though I might have missed any comments about airplane bathrooms. Mostly clean, I might have shared this with my children, except for the unnecessary foul language which cropped up randomly and meaninglessly. (Seriously, I feel like a broken record when it comes to this issue in books.) Sometimes mean, mostly sarcastic, I would...

The truth of this video is that men and women communicate differently. Of course, I think the first time I showed it to my wife, I used it as an opportunity to point out that I'm normally right about stuff. That probably wasn't the way to go.

I'm going to go ahead and put this idea out there, knowing it will make someone else rich. I have no protection or patent on this idea. I just want to help people. That's what I do. Allow me to paint you a picture. You're in your vehicle and you have a reason to get somebody's attention. Wouldn't it be nice if you had some way of doing so? Before you mock and assume your superiority, please know I am not talking of simply a car horn. I am talking about a Vehicle Voice Magnifying System. Think about this...we have thousands of words in the English language to display our thoughts and emotions. One does not have to settle for saying they feel good or sad or ' grunt '.  So why limit ourselves to a mere honk while on the road? We're not geese and, aside from that whole teamwork-flying-V thing they have going, there's nothing about geese for us to be jealous. It's annoying when people honk their car horns. You have no idea who they are hon...

Conventional wisdom isn't always that smart. There are many things my parents spoon-fed me as a child that I now know the truth about. For instance, eating cookies before a meal does not ruin my appetite. But, in case my mom reads this, they also taught me to question logic that makes no sense. And that brings me to a comic-writing blog I would like to share with you, my readership. You can find this, and many more like it over at  http://xkcd.com Woo!