Field notes on the things that drive everybody up the wall.
You don’t actually hate people. You hate what people do, all day long, in public, often loudly. There’s a difference, and it matters, because one is a personality flaw and the other is a reasonable response to the person on speakerphone in the pharmacy line. If you’ve caught yourself typing “why do I hate people…
The middle finger might be the most efficient piece of communication people have ever come up with. It needs no translation, no words and no Wi-Fi. It’s also very old, far older than the story you’ve probably heard about English archers. Ancient Greece: the first recorded bird The earliest written reference we have comes from…
Short answer: in the United States, flipping off a police officer is not a crime by itself. Federal courts have said so more than once, in plain language. The longer answer is more interesting, and it’s worth knowing before you test it at a traffic stop. The middle finger is speech The First Amendment protects…
There are thousands of photographs of Johnny Cash. One of them shows him leaning toward the camera with his jaw set and his middle finger out, and that’s the one people put on their walls, their shirts and their skin. It wasn’t staged for an album cover, and he wasn’t playing a character. It was…
