Category: Prawn Salad, Ltd.

Here are some apparent facts: A human being is dead. The US Government killed Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden is incapable of personally causing any more harm. A human being who was directly or indirectly responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people has been punished for his deeds. People in the United…

Last night, our 18-month-old kidlet was in the mood to have me play a video game. I know this because he handed me an Xbox 360 controller and pointed emphatically at the television. Since I wasn’t doing anything else and it was a welcome break from the near-constant barrage of Scooby-Doo! episodes, I decided to…

Or, “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” Spanish has two verbs which are translated into English as “is”: estar and ser. These verbs are, importantly, not synonyms in Spanish. Generally speaking, estar is used to refer to temporary conditions and ser to intrinsic qualities: Estar: La manzana está verde. The apple is green, i.e., not ripe….

In the wake of recent high-profile suicides of young adults over sexual orientation, the media has been buzzing with words like “surge” and “buzz.” I was curious about whether such a phenomenon was really occurring. First off, it’s very important to keep in mind that, sadly, about 4000 young people (15-24) choose to end their…

I was just commenting to my wife that I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the media has suddenly noticed a “surge” in gay teen suicides about the same time that certain gay rights organizations are pressuring Congress to push the Safe Schools Improvement Act, which “would require schools receiving federal funds to implement bullying…

I think we may be losing sight, in the wake of incidents such as the Tyler Clementi suicide, of what “bullying” really is. For instance, I’ve been seeing reality TV being blamed as a major cause of the perceived increase in bullying: Reality TV communicates that humiliation is an acceptable form of entertainment, says the…

The national media’s attention is currently on the plight of young gay men who choose to commit suicide, and the social forces that encourage that decision. One of the recurrent themes in this media attention is that we need to communicate that “it gets better.” It’s easy to assume that there’s some moment, upon graduation…

This weekend, I noticed that I hadn’t noticed something. For years, climbing hills was a source of great anxiety for me. When I approached a hill by foot, I would be nervous of twisting my ankle and not having the ability to go up. Even in a car, I was anxious that the engine would…

… being some thoughts on today’s moment of enlightenment … Let us accept for the sake of this discussion the broader atheist premise that there is no god, no supernatural force, no afterlife, no transcendent soul, no extrinsic purpose to life whatsoever. We are, in this perspective, highly evolved ants going about our time on…