The man was in no shape to drive, so he wisely left his car parked and walked home. As he was walking unsteadily along, a policeman stopped him.

“What are you doing out here at 2 A.M.?”

“I’m going to a lecture,” the man replied.

“And just who is going to give a lecture at this hour?” the cop asked.

“My wife,” answered the man.

Now that I’m back from staying at home (There are no truth to the rumors that Archpundit and I ran off together, or that I was stuck for weeks in Forest Park at the St. Louis ’04 Eve debacle), I’m keeping with the blogosphere trend and offering my own predictions for 2004.

1. My blog posting will be light with intermittent dropouts.

2. Celebrities will continue to engage in shocking behavior to attract attention. Every year the behavior has to be worse to remain shocking, but still no limit will be discovered.

3. There will be no peace in the Middle East.

4. Politicians and various activities will be compared to Hitler and various Nazi atrocities without any basis whatsoever other than the comparer doesn’t like them.

5. People will be the most passionate about the things that really matter the least.

6. Intellectuals will decry the faults of the common man with great vigor while the common man by and large ignores intellectuals.

7. I will busier than a one armed cashier at Wal-Mart.

8. Elites won’t live up to their billing.

9. What we worry the most about won’t happen but what we didn’t give a thought to will.

10. There will be no really good 5 cent cigar for sale in America.

In other words, why should we expect something different if we keep doing the same stuff?

The truth can no be revealed – Barney (you know, the giant green/purple creature that liked kids to have fun and sing a lot) isn’t really a dinosaur, but instead a Pretendosaurus according to three titans of science. Their startling conclusion is based both on a mass of mundane empirical observations and some truly intrepid fieldwork.

I know many of you are shaking your heads and wondering just who this Barney character is, but for those of us who had young children in the 1990’s, Barney was central to our kids’ (and thus ours) very existances. I won’t forget that when my daughter was in the hospital how every TV was tuned to Barney and every kid was watching when he came on. The only thing you could hear was the sound of goofy kid songs and the sighs of the parents and nurses.

Who says science doesn’t provide answers for everyday conundrums? For instance, the latest research shows that in fact, the chicken came before the egg. This has far reaching implications, although I for one would like to see the results repeated before I conclude that the data is solid and unassailable. But next time the guy from accounting tries to confuse me by asking which came first, the chicken or the egg, I’ll have an answer for him. Then will see who gets fullly reimbursed for travel expenses!

And geologists have measured, analyzed, and confirmed that in fact, Kansas is flatter than a pancake. I for one am glad that my tax dollars go to support such cutting edge science, and I wait for additional topological comparisons between state and breakfast food – how about which is rougher, Missouri or scrambled eggs?

I suppose it all started for me at the age of three when I won a tiddlywinks “tournament” at a friend’s birthday party. I have been an avid player of non-sporting games ever since. I find them both relaxing and stimulating, a combination hard to find. Now Professor James Paul Gee claims that the oft maligned video games can be a great way for kids to learn.

“I was 53 when I began and was blown away by how long, challenging, and complex games like Deus Ex were. Yet millions of people pay a lot of money to buy them and they learn them very well, including kids who wouldn’t spend twelve concentrated minutes really learning algebra in school. It dawned on me that good games were learning machines. Built into their very designs were good learning principles, principles supported, in fact, by cutting-edge research in cognitive science, the science that studies human thinking and learning. Many of these principles could be used in schools to get kids to learn things like science, but, too often today schools are returning to skill-and-drill and multiple-choice tests that kill deep learning. Games are good at getting themselves learned for good old Darwinian reasons, namely, the ones that can’t get learned, don’t get bought and the companies that produce them go broke (Suikoden III is a good example of a very good game that does a poor job helping the player learn how to play it). What makes the situation interesting is that game designers can’t make games easier to learn by dumbing them down, since players want ever longer, more challenging, more open-ended games.

Yes, Virginia, he has a book out about it.

Ben Domenech links to a delightful article about a trio of eigth graders who teach FBI agents how to act like 12 year old girls online to catch pedophiles. I’m sorry to hear that Led Zeppelin isn’t cool anymore, despite they have the number one album in the US again, after only 24 years.