June 19th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
Why don’t people just call me? I’ll never understand. I wonder that quite often when something that would have been evident to a blindman wearing a blindfold is presented as something revelatory or epiphanic. The latest case in point is a piece from LinkedIn news called, “When office brainstorms go bust”. Here’s the gist: It […]
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June 15th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
A popular expression says, “Everybody’s got a story.” I’m luckier than most, I have many. This is a collection of them. It’s necessarily incomplete because I’m still on the planet. As long as that remains true, I’ll always have more stories. I hope you enjoy these. CLICK HERE TO GRAB YOUR PERSONAL COPY Originally Published […]
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June 12th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
In the Friendship Bench conversation that took place on Thursday, June 1st, JoAnna Baanana and Kamla Dasrath facilitated an engaging discussion of astrology. During the session, Roger Martin asked how it was that the placement of the sun, the moon, and other celestial bodies at the moments of our births could influence the human beings […]
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June 5th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
Author’s Note: In digging through my archives recently, as I recounted here, I came across another piece I’d written many moons ago. My sons were born in 1983 and 1986, respectively. The elder was going to basketball camp every summer, starting at age nine. The younger started playing soccer before the age of nine and […]
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May 29th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
As I’ve written previously, I have a very difficult time separating hate from ignorance. I take hate to be a subset or a symptom of ignorance. Ignorance can scale, of course. It can be as small as one Hibernophobe burning down my house. It can be as large as one power-mongering lunatic attempting to create […]
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May 29th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
Author’s Note: As I was creating the video that appears at the end of this post, I was recalling a piece I’d written some years ago, inspired by something I’d witnessed in a gym. Thanks to a portable floppy-disc drive and my pack-rat compulsion to hang on to my old floppy discs, I was able […]
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May 22nd, 2023
Mark O'Brien
After seeing the phrase, toxic narcissism, for about the two-millionth time, I did a search on signs of a narcissist. Since the browser I use is Brave, and since Brave doesn’t use Google, I don’t know how many hits I got. But I did learn this: Depending on the source you choose, there are between […]
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May 15th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
Notwithstanding the myriad of political diatribes I occasionally author in this column, it isn’t my intent to comment on politics particularly or exclusively. Politics is part of a larger discourse — even an inseparable part — but it is no more than a part. Because of my curiosity about all things behavioral and linguistic (and […]
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May 8th, 2023
Mark O'Brien
Given our seemingly endless fascination with UFOs — and because I was up for a research project anyway — I did some digging into records from the Director of National Intelligence, the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense’s Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force, the Pentagon, Project Blue Book, Project Condign, Area 51, and Roswell, […]
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May 1st, 2023
Mark O'Brien
I don’t know what we’re doing. I truly don’t. Illegal aliens are streaming across the southern border, accompanied by thugs, drugs, and bugs, of which the coronavirus is likely the least. We do nothing. And we couldn’t care less. Please don’t tell me it’s a humanitarian issue. It’s not. There’s nothing humanitarian or humane about […]
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