This is your blog too!

As [both of?] [all three of?] [do I hear "four"?] my faithful readers know, I decided to launch this blog without a specific theme or pet subject matter. Although that gives me carte blanche to write about anything and everything (wouldn't "everything" encompass "anything"?), I'm finding the lack of restrictions to be surprisingly limiting. My solution, you ask? I'm soliciting your input; feel free to suggest topics on which you'd enjoy hearing - or at least reading - my world view.

Anything goes - with the sort of caveats you'd expect. Although I am not easily offended, I know that not everyone has the same threshold for what they might find off-putting. So I need to keep it clean. And, while I have some interesting views on a number of controversial topics and can defend them well, or at least coherently, I have to remember that my words are accessible by all, including potential employers. I don't mean to imply that I would ever claim a point of view that doesn't reflect my true beliefs; instead, it simply means that this is not the forum in which to address anything and everything. There's that phrase again.

Switching gears entirely, let's test the power of internet. I would like to be a guest on Oprah. Rather than appearing above text that reads "Has 15 wives in 14 states" or "Space aliens stole his wallet", I'd like 20,000,000 of my closest friends to see me appear on television above the words "Regular guy who just wanted to be on Oprah". (I know that "regular" may not apply to me, but all things are relative.) Let's see if we can make this happen, shall we? With 71 LinkedIn connections, surely I must know someone who knows someone who knows Oprah. Or her hairdresser. Or Gayle. I think we can actually pull this off without involving Kevin Bacon. Who's with me?

Out of the mouths of babes. . . While watching an episode of Spongebob Squarepants recently, my six year old daughter noted that there really aren't any squirrels in the sea. To which one of my five year old daughters (of which there are two) replied "Unless someone throws one into the sea". Sometimes life really is that simple. Incidentally, Spongebob (or anything else for that matter) can be used as a valuable teaching tool. I ask my oldest to read the title of each episode as it appears on the screen and I discuss plot development with the twins.

I just saw the following headline appear on the CNN news page: "Men see bikini-clad women as objects, psychologists say" (http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/02/19/women.bikinis.objects/index.html?iref=newssearch) And so, I ask you the following: Is this really news? Will someone win a Nobel Prize for defending this groundbreaking conclusion?

With that, I bid you - in the words of the pioneer broadcast journalist, George Clooney - good night and good luck.