Ghost Signs

Preservationists call those faded 19th century ads on buildings ghost signs.

They evoke more civil times.

No matter its power, marketers would never have sought to shock 19th century audiences with tasteless imagery (such as this in an outdoor ad for the film Kill Bill):

A child psychologist might argue we should return to 19th century civility.

Not a ghost of a chance.

Entitled

Politico has outed Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price for using high-priced charter flights at taxpayers' expense.

His flacks say Price is entitled to use private luxury planes, because he has to "meet with the American people."

I just hope he schedules me in, so I can share with him my thoughts on the morality of using public office to enrich yourself.

Entitled is a storied word.

Its Latin root intitulare meant "to give a title to." 

English first adopted the word to mean "to bestow a rank on;" and then, in the 15th century, to mean "to award a property title to."

Philosopher Robert Nozick was the first person to associate the word with welfare, in 1974.

A Libertarian, Nozick thought you were only "entitled" to things you made with your own tools and materials.

Anything else—like your public schooling, your polio shots, and your pension—you receive as the result of wealth redistribution, a kind of "forced labor." You don't really deserve those things, Nozick said, because you didn't create them; but you tell yourself they're entitlements, to feel better about robbing the rich.

The same year Nozick's book appeared, Richard Nixon used the word entitlements in his federal budget to mean "government payments."

Eight years later, Ronald Reagan used entitlements in a speech to mean "Social Security"—and the name stuck.

So, if Nozick is right, please tell me: why should Tom Price get welfare?

The Guaranteed Cure for Writer's Block

Writing about a writer's block is better than not writing at all.

― Charles Bukowski

A Freudian psychoanalyst, Edmund Bergler, dreamed up the term "writer's block" in the late 1940s. His remedy, naturally, was the "talking cure." At today's prices, that costs $300 a session.

Fine, if you can afford it.

A fiction writer like Stephen King cures writer's block less expensively.

King simply goes for a three-mile stroll, and conjures up another unhinged politico, demonic pet, or zombie retiree, to move a gridlocked story forward.

B2B writers can't use that trick (although walking is good for everyone).

You'll find lots of nutty advice (climb into a sleeping bag, or listen to pink noise, or down a martini), but the best cure for writer's block, in my experience, is a three-step technique I learned from copywriter Bob Bly:

• Locate a project you wrote that's similar to the current project
• Make a copy of the file and open it
• Start rewriting your own copy

You'll not only avoid writer's block, you'll quick-start the new project. Don't have a similar project? Then swipe another writer's and start to rewrite that.

Try it. Don't wait til writer's block besets you.

7 Signs You're Mediocre

The general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind.

— John Stuart Mill

Nobody dazzles safely.

Nobody dazzles accidentally.

Nobody dazzles lackadaisically.

Nobody dazzles cost-efficiently.

Nobody dazzles by copying.

Nobody dazzles by committee.

Nobody dazzles by appeasement.

So why keep claiming you do?

Maybe you weren't designed to dazzle.

The Sure-Fire, Can't-Lose, 100% Guaranteed Way to Troubleshoot Every Computer Problem You'll Ever Encounter

Computer problems are maddening; troubleshooting them, more so.

Googling for solutions merely heightens your frustration, spewing masses of inscrutable and useless results.

But my hack lets you cut through the palaver straightaway, to get to the answer you need.

Here it is:

Type a description of the problem—no matter what—and add to it, inside quotation marks, the phrase "piece of shit."

I assure you the solution to your problem will appear in the top one, two or three Google results.

For example:

Excel will not print odd-numbered pages "piece of shit"

or

Lightroom freezes when I save file "piece of shit"

I guarantee my hack works, every time.

By the way, where does hack come from?

The word, meaning "a tool for chopping," dates back to the 14th century and derives from the German Hacke, meaning "hatchet."

But the sense in which we now use the word originated at MIT in the 1950s. Students called any practical joke that employed technology (like welding a public trolley car to the tracks) a hack.