Conroyisms – Part 5

• A “near miss” is actually a hit.

• Defining oneself by the type and brand of alcohol consumed is an example of effective marketing meeting low self-esteem.

• Everyone I follow on Facebook that is a runner eventually gets a serious injury–do they not notice the correlation?

• Atoms do not actually touch each other as their electrons repel each other and this force increases exponentially as the distance between them decreases. So when you sit in a chair you actually levitating above it- just not very high.

• It is your ability to transform your dreams into goals, and your focus on them, that will determine your happiness in life.

Symbiotic

I was picking up license plates for a new car in Adel, IA and noticed a sign on a building across the street. The sign was for a bar with the prosaic name Hideaway Lounge. It was a bar, i.e., a business where people make a profit off other people’s chemical dependency.

But it was the other business that really caught my eye, a 24 hour crisis center. How ironic that a bar and a crisis center are co-located.

It is an obvious symbiotic relationship but is it mutualism, commensalism or parasitism?  An additional irony is the address: 911.

Conroyisms – Part 4

Some of the things that make me stop and think “Really”:

• License plates with stickers in multiple places besides the lower left corner.

• People that refuse to get a computer or use the Internet.

• Parents with children with more alcohol than food in their cart.

• Graffiti.

• Broke people driving new cars and living in big houses.

• Sports fanatics that can recite sports score and stats but couldn’t name a single person in the Cabinet, their U. S. Congressman, state legislator or state senator.

• Rap music with profane and violent lyrics.

• Computer viruses.

• People that say, “Don’t judge” since good judgment is what keeps us safe.

• Why it is called Happy Hour?

• “Reality TV” since it is anything but real.

• National Public Radio.

• People that define themselves by a brand of beer or a sports team.

• Real estate developers that go broke to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars in little old Des Moines.

• Rekha Basu and the Des Moines Register in general.

• Professional Sports

• People that don’t vote.

• The attempt to require equal outcomes regardless of talent or effort.

• High heels on snow boots.

• Dog parks.

• Housing projects that are meant to help people but instead put them in unsafe neighborhoods.

• Adjustable rate mortgages when the fixed rate is below 3%.

• Aged liberals – I give them a pass until 35.

• Brittney Spears, Lindsey Lohan, and Paris Hilton as role models.

• Maintaining 80,000+ U.S. troops in Europe.

• Save the environment bumper stickers on Escalades.

• Smart cars.

• Automated answering systems that lead to nowhere that I want to go.

Conroyisms – Part 3

Some just have to be told.

Here are my current offerings in a continuing effort to come up with an original thought that might be quotable hundreds of years in the future: 

• The hardest thing to endure is an obvious truth that others have decided to ignore.

•  Beyond “Fight or Flight”, when faced with more options, a person tends to freeze.

• Dust and smoke in the atmosphere create beautiful sunsets and then attack your lungs while you sleep.

• A well-timed kind word is a precious gift.

• Just when you have things figured out, it doesn’t matter.

• Time spent with grandchildren is the big payoff.

• In a rational world, the self-treatment of depression and anxiety by abusing drugs would only appear in fiction novels and the movies.

• We build truths out of the bones of those that defy conventional wisdom.

• Suicide is the ultimate method of reducing one’s carbon footprint, anything short of that is some degree of grandstanding or self-delusion.

• Ignorance can be replaced with knowledge and eventually, knowledge can become wisdom.

• I offset my carbon footprint by not attending professional sporting events.

Conroyisms – Part 2

• The size of the universe is limited only by our ability to perceive it.

•  A coat of paint can hide an interesting story or two.

• The hypotenuse of a right triangle is occasionally very handy.

• Your green light is an impediment to others.

• Multiplying two imaginary numbers together always results in a negative number and that is fine by me.

• A word can convey complex concepts but it is made up of letters that individually mean nothing.

• Debt is a tool only used by a fool.

• In measuring a bargain it is not what you “saved” but what you spent that counts.

• Sometimes motorcycle maintenance is just motorcycle maintenance. 

• The antidote to a riddle is earned knowledge. 

• If only the good die young there are a lot of bad people in Florida.

• It is easy to adjust a goal to match the results – politicians do it all the time.

• It is the exceptions that define a process.