On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

"...if you wish to know what a man really is give him power." - Robert G. Ingersoll - 1883 The origin of "retail workers" is well documented. In 1969, a stale potato chip that people in Chicago thought was the spitting image of the Virgin Mary turned out to be a petrified slice of scalloped potato that an Internet expert dated as being from 198,7890,765 A.D. and was actually an excerpt from the Lost Gospel Of Murgatroyd, Chapter 3, paragraph 14. [Citation needed: The writer admits the "A.D." is an autocorrect error and should read "B.C." but says if not editing any work of genius was good enough for Kerouac, it's good enough for the AI bot he claims generated this blog entry. Besides, the increase in historical accuracy would be minimal even if corrected] The excerpt relates that the great Babylonian King Hammaruby MacLaughin The Awesomely Dishy One asked the wise men of his council, "How do we create a class of people who will free us ...

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too..." -George Orwell Each generation produces a coterie of rebels and forward thinkers who may or may not edge our culture forward, but will at least add ideas to the mainstream. Very few age groups develop an ability to look inward and see their own flaws in real time. That tends to be the task of the next generation. There were writers such as Voltaire, H. L. Mencken, Paul Krassner, or Tom Wolfe who could see that human nature was really a constant, that is to say, could see the irony in a generation criticizing another, and who turned their sharp eye on their peers' foibles and failings. But most societal critics and lampooners end up becoming, as George Orwell called it, "licensed jesters" who can coast along as honored sages if they stick to approved targets, but the early feminist writers, the ones who stubbornly kept to the core issue of equality, broke that mold, as as a result faced of...