To our beloved Cassie [for example] — you would have been 16 years old today. Daddy and I miss you so much and we carry you in our hearts every day. We love you!

Hmm. I take it something happened.

I am not making light of anyone’s tragedy. Truly — the thought of losing a child is horrifying to me and I don’t even have any children. But being a person who suffers from a degree of social awkwardness, I have a masochistic fascination with this kind of social cul-de-sac. The person who posted about this loss obviously did so in the knowledge that those close to her would know what she was talking about. I have not spoken to her in person in twenty years, and barely even pass the time with her on Facebook, and so I have no idea what she’s talking about, apart from what I can infer. The dilemma, obviously, is this:

Is it appropriate to ask for more details when a distant Facebook friend refers to a personal tragedy you know nothing about?

On the one hand, the simple answer appears to be, why not? If they posted it to Facebook of their own accord, it would seem they are capable of engaging with the subject on at least a limited basis. Imagine the corollary real-world experience: you are making the rounds at your high school reunion. Having already met and greeted this friend earlier in the evening, you find yourself near her in a quiet corner where you can exchange words. And she says to you, My daughter would have been 16 years old today. I still think about her all the time. In this situation, it is obviously completely appropriate to ask for more information — indeed, it would be rude not to, and your friend certainly wants to be able to share with you the pain and loss that she has carried with her.

But Facebook is not real life, and it is really not even close to real life. There is nothing in the real world that maps to Facebook’s strange social stew of acquaintances, ex-boyfriends, bosses, grade-school friends, parents and that really nice gal you met at Subway all bobbing around in the same virtual medium. Unless you take the time to stratify these people into castes and direct certain posts only at certain groups — which, judging by my personal experience, virtually no Facebook user knows how to do — your tragic outpouring is hitting every pair of eyeballs with the same force. It seems crazy to think that someone would compose a reflection on the death of her own child that is equally suitable for both her mother and for a schoolmate she hasn’t seen since Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em came out. Therefore, I think she can’t be doing it on purpose: the Facebook settings that would allow her to target her post to a select group of readers must either be too opaque to figure out or she just doesn’t know about them. Which leaves me thinking, again, that I really ought to not say anything.

I don’t know. I really have no clue what is the appropriate thing to do. But I can tell you this: if you came to this post through a link on my Facebook wall, it’s because I wanted you, and you specifically, to see it. I think I’ve had all the social ambiguity I can take for a while.

As for the experience of singing or watching karaoke, I realized this: karaoke is like jet-skiing, in that it is an enjoyable pastime for those actually doing it and a grating annoyance for everyone else. I have jet-skied and thought it was a blast. Yet watching jet-skiers roar across the placid surface of a lake, frightening wildlife and disturbing everyone’s peace, makes me angrily denounce the steady decline of civilization itself.

I have never sang karaoke. It’s bad enough I like jet-skiing.

Breastfeeding – particularly after two or three months – is regarded in France as something akin to drinking your own urine. Strange foreigners may do it, but that is no reason a nation brought up to idolise Liberté in the form of Marianne’s perfect breasts should. As a gynaecologist reminded a friend of mine the day she confirmed her pregnancy: “Your breasts are for your husband, not your baby.”

Apologies to those for whom this is old news, but I was incredulous that a First World, 21st-century nation would hold such ideas — so incredulous that the story’s April 1 pub date had me suspecting that I had been punked. (Those Brits and their, um, dry sense of humor.) I would be relieved if that were the case. Do French anthropologists believe that women evolved breasts as a tool to lure potential males, and that their ability to lactate is just a happy biological accident? For whom are, say, a cow’s udders intended, if not her calf? What if you’re a Frenchman who happens to be an ass man? Is your wife’s bottom likewise assumed to be for your pleasure, rather than an evolutionary adaptation to help her walk upright?

Anyway, I have nothing insightful to say about this. Just read the article and be lightly astonished.

(*Honest, that’s me.)

I wonder if you could kill a guy with this?

Perhaps it’s a guy thing. I just have a peculiar fascination with the inherent deadliness of non-lethal objects. I may be rare, but I know I’m not alone. George Carlin once mused that you could kill someone with the Sunday New York Times, if you were sufficiently motivated. I’m actually not convinced; Jason Bourne may be able to do remarkable things with a rolled-up magazine, but the Sunday Times is too hard to roll up and would be too soft and yielding to deliver a killing blow. Now, a frozen newspaper is a different story. Anyone who’s had a paper delivered to their home in winter knows that a newspaper frozen to your front step is like a slab of rock. Hell, I’d wager you could kill someone with a daily Times if the weather were cold and icy enough. Of course, many objects become deadlier once frozen, particularly food items, so perhaps the point is redundant.

Another way to amplify the deadliness of ordinary things is to put a bunch of them together. A potato, for instance, isn’t much of a threat by itself. Put a dozen or more in a sack, and you could do some serious harm before they all turned to mush. A sack of frozen potatoes would pretty much make you a one-man killing machine.

Some household objects that used to be deadly are now no longer so. Telephones used to be made of bakelite and contained metal bells and wiring and rotary mechanisms; a few swift applications of one of those suckers and you’d have someone on the ground in no time. Now phones are all circuit boards and light plastic, no guts to them at all; it’d be like trying to hit someone with a plastic mug.

Anyway, here is a partial list of single, common, non-frozen benign objects small enough to be easily wielded by hand and which can be turned into lethal weapons with a little determination.

• A Chia Pet.
• A laptop computer. (Think of it: you can beat someone to death with technology that, a generation ago, would have taken up an entire room!)
• A bridal magazine. (Jason Bourne could fight his way out of a Turkish prison with one of these.)
• A tub of Oxi-Clean.
• One of those “executive” bookshelf stereos. (Anyone owning one of these, of course, might well deserve to be killed anyway.)
• A flute. (A clarinet, being made of wood, would probably crack under repeated blows.)
• A pepper mill.
• A Lladro figurine. (“Happy anniversary, sweetie.” Thwack.)
• A child’s car seat. (Pretty intense irony, huh? You know it.)
• A toilet plunger.
• A piggy bank. (You’d probably need to kill with the first shot, but at least you’d get some money out of the affair.)
• A jar candle.
• A wet-floor sign. (The irony! It’s too much!)

So next time you’re out shopping, and find yourself hefting a particularly large cantaloupe or a nice anniversary clock for someone’s mantel, ask yourself: what would it take? How would I have to grip this thing? Are there any edges or points I could use to my advantage? How many blows could I get in before the job was done or the object itself fell apart?

Makes the time in Pottery Barn or Pier 1 Imports a lot more fun.

It reminded me of this article I read years ago in Slate, about how a 2000 bust by the DEA basically wiped out LSD as a recreational drug. It is evidently very difficult to make — no bargain-basement LSD labs in the small towns of Middle America à la the ones that grace us with crystal meth — and these two fellows in Kansas were the only ones left with the means and the know-how to do it, at least on such a scale. Not to rhapsodize about an illicit chemical that does some seriously hazardous shit to your head, but the idea of LSD disappearing because it’s too difficult to make can’t help but put me in mind of other products of craft and ingenuity rendered obsolete by quicker, cheaper or baser alternatives.

I am old enough to have actually studied penmanship in school, though not old enough to have retained much of it; I can only recall cursive letters with great effort, and my hand balks at shaping them. I don’t know of any grammar-school age child who studies handwriting the way my classmates and I used to; in today’s world, it would be like teaching a child to shoe a horse. Why spend the time learning to write well when no one writes letters and every other document we touch is created electronically?

So LSD, which some genuinely intelligent people once believed might actually change the way people live, is vanishing; researchers rarely study it, and cheaper, easier and more lucrative substitutes have crowded it off the map. I wonder if Dr. Hoffman imagined he would live long enough to witness it, the slow passing of his “problem child.”

Can anyone argue convincingly that The Big Word Project is anything different? I wonder who’s buying sucker?

I’m not criticizing, actually. I’d love to come up with a gimmick to get people to pay me for doing no work.