This is, like... crazy!

The smoking gun of our nation’s mounting illiteracy is the ever-increasing use of the word “like.”

Now I’m not saying I don’t use it from time to time, but some folks - yes, you small fry mostly - can’t get through a sentence without it.

Why “like” as opposed to, say, “defoliant?” It’s because one is trying to express oneself but is incapable of doing so, so they instead describe not what something “is” but rather what it is “like.”

Kinda scary. (Yes, “kinda” is a word….)

BILL

"Even a Broken Clock is Right Twice A Day"

I simply do not “get” this oft-quoted expression. And I’ll have you know I even own a broken clock, both hands of which fell completely off some time ago.

BILL

Your Guide to Better Movies

Few aspects of filmmaking are as critically important as casting. Think “Braveheart” starring Gilbert Gottfried.

BILL

My Favorite Stupid Moment From a Movie

In the film “Jurassic Park,” when the T-Rex attacks the car, one of the two children trapped alone inside frantically – and I mean frantically – searches about for a flashlight, yes, a flashlight, because it goes without saying that, when attacked by a T-Rex, it most certainly helps to have one handy.

Upon finding it, the girl hurriedly turns it on and points it directly into the ornery beast’s massive eye, surely filmdom’s equivalent of clanging the triangle on a cattle drive and yelling “Come and get yer grub, fellas!!!” As it dawns upon their feeble minds that they are in fact drawing attention to themselves, the boy – lesser idiot of the two – repeatedly implores her to turn the light off, an act which, while involving the same simple flicking of a switch, is evidently rendered infinitely more difficult than was turning it on, as the girl simply cannot turn the flashlight off.

It is with only the wispiest guilt that I confess: Never have I wanted to see two children devoured whole as I did in that moment. Alas, only the lawyer was downed like a toothpick-skewered olive, ignominiously perched as he was atop the porcelain throne.

BILL

"Monday, Monday"

It’s a little known fact that record producer Lou Adler fought long and hard with songwriter John Phillips over the lyrics to The Mamas and The Papas hit “Monday, Monday,” insisting that the words “Monday, Monday, so good to me” be changed to “Monday, Monday, boy that day sucks” on the basis of, in Adler’s words, “if we don’t they’ll think you’re a bunch of idiots.”

In the end, as in so many cases, a compromise was reached with the addition of the line: “Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day.”

BILL

Sloganeering 101

I coined the phrase “the horses have already fled the barn” in 1968, responding to Ma’s inquiry “Billy Paul! What in tarnation happened to all the horses!?”

BILL

Wacko Jacko Pt. Deux

Five years ago, I correctly predicted - mere hours after its woefully insincere debut - that the phrase “wardrobe malfunction” would infuse its way into the American lexicon.

I was wrong, however, in my similar prediction regarding “hamburger tray insertion apparatus.”

BILL

Ah what an innocent time it was...

In the 1983 film “War Games,” the computer controlling the launching of all of our nuclear missiles was hacked by a teenager who correctly deduced that the system’s designer might well have used as his password the name of his deceased child, Joshua.

Not: Joshua1 or joshU1a or josh#Ua1 Just plain old simple… Joshua.

Now my passwords are mandatory alphanumeric, mix upper and lower case, contain some wacky symbol, and must be changed every 45 days. And if I don’t do this, I am taken out and shot. (OK, I lied about that last part but you get my point….)

BILL

Honest, Officer, It Just WENT OFF!

I’m noticing a pattern. Whenever a gun just happens to “go off,” two things tend to occur at the exact same moment. One: the person holding the gun is in a fit of spitting, blind rage. And two, of the 6.77 billion inhabitants of the planet Earth, the one at whose head the gun is directly pointed just happens to be the very same person fueling that rage.

What are the odds? (I know in one regard they’re approximately 6,770,000,000 to 1.)

BILL