How to Create a New Business

Actually, they could probably market spa services to guys if they themed it like a garage, or a NASCAR pit crew. The attendants would wear matching jumpsuits and work as fast as possible, swarming the customer all at once. The furniture would all look industrial. The clippers and files would make loud noises to give the impression they are pneumatically powered. Any dermal peels, facials, or exfoliation treatments would be renamed and described to play up the similarity to chemical stripping and sand-blasting.

Hmm. Looking back at the previous paragraph, it occurs to me that in an effort to make spas more manly I’ve removed everything even remotely relaxing from them.

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How to Talk to Someone on a Third Party's Behalf

Once, in junior high school, a friend of mine decided to explain to me how he knew when a girl is interested in him. He said, “If I notice that she’s looking at me, she’s probably into me. Or, also, if you see that she’s not looking at me, like every time I look she’s looking away from me, then I KNOW she’s into me.”

I pointed out that if any girl looking at him was into him, and any girl who wasn’t looking at him was into him, that meant that every girl on the planet was into him. To his credit, he laughed and admitted that wasn’t possible. Then he said that in addition to the looking/not looking thing, he knew when a girl was interested because he “could just kinda tell.”

I decided his advice was not likely to be helpful.

Also, in case you’re wondering, no, he was not popular with the ladies.

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How to Align Your Goals

Floating in slime would be great for your back. The Movie Minority Report predicted the future of office work, but it wasn’t the hand-wavy Tom Cruise computer interface, it was the precog’s vat-based workspace.

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How to Explain Your Profound Personal Triumph

The only details I left out of the meal plan described above are that I would cut open the box and turn it inside out so that the hot pizza wasn’t resting on the waxed, potentially dirty outer surface of the box, and that I timed the cooking so that the pizza would be ready for me to eat as I watched the nightly Simpsons rerun.

I’ll describe my home at the time so you can get the full picture of an evening at twenty-something Scott Meyer’s bachelor pad. We’re talking about a one-bedroom apartment with bare walls, a rickety desk, a single white resin chair, a TV on a small stand, a futon used as a couch, and in the bedroom, a slightly newer futon used as a bed.

Missy described my apartment as “spartan.”

I think she married me in an effort to rescue me. All in all, it wasn’t a bad strategy on my part.

Note from Missy: As they say on the home improvement shows, he had good bones. I don’t think Scott was a total gut job, but the pink tile and peeling wallpaper had to go. 🤣

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How to Discuss a TV Show When You Haven't Seen All the Episodes

If memory serves, this was inspired by a conversation with a coworker about the game Uncharted 3. I had just started playing the game, while he had completed it.

I said, “Please don’t tell me anything. I don’t want any part of the game spoiled.”

He said. “Of course. I wouldn’t do that. Oh man, it’s such a great game. Have you gotten to the place where you get drugged and the world goes all weird?”

A work-appropriate amount of yelling and insults ensued.

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How to Keep Track of Your Ideas

Here’s how punchy I get writing these comments. I read this comic, read the insult about stink-rings in the final panel, and for a few seconds thought, “Ooh, it’s a shame I never used that one.”

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How to Write a Contest Winner Into Your Comic Strip, Like You Promised

It never occurred to me that a teenage girl might win the contest. I made a point of contacting her parents to make sure they knew what was going on and why some guy (who lived in Florida at the time; that can’t have helped) wanted pictures of their daughter.

I ended up asking for pictures of her father as well . . . which, in retrospect, didn’t make it any less weird.

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How to React When Someone's Beliefs Sound Crazy to You

The world and the observable universe around it are so amazing, surprising, and mind-bendingly weird that any set of beliefs that tries explain how it all works can be made to sound crazy, simply by stating those beliefs simply.

To prove it, I will now state something that I believe in such a way that they will sound crazy:

Solid matter is mostly empty space.

See? If you know how the atom is constructed, and the scale of the protons, neutrons, and electrons, then you know what I said is true. But to someone who doesn’t know those things, or doesn’t believe in atoms, telling them a solid chunk of granite mostly isn’t there at all will get you written off as a nut.

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How to Help a Friend Answer Deep, Troubling Questions

I don’t have a plan for Ric’s remains, or his funeral in general. I do have one for my own that involves Ric. For years I joked that I was going to be cremated in secret, then have my ashes caked into a giant, vaudeville-sized powder puff. Then, as a stipulation of my will, Ric would made to say “Make-up!” and hilarity would ensue.

I’m not going to do that.  I am thinking about requesting that in place of a eulogy, someone (Ric, if available) read, as if it were a poem, this slightly reworded version of the lyrics to the theme from Thunderball:

He’d always run while others walked;

He’d act while other men just talked.

They called him the winner who took all;

And he’d strike like Thunderball

He knew the meaning of success;

His needs were more so he gave less.

He’d look at this world and want it all;

Then he’d strike like Thunderball

Any woman he’d want, he'd get;

He’d break any heart without regret

His days of asking are all gone;

His fight goes on, and on, and on.

But he thought that the fight was worth it all;

So he strikes like Thunderball

Extra points if whoever reads it cries at the last line.

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How to Tell a Tale of Suspense

The only difference between the story as presented and the story as it happened is that I’m the one who spilled the grease, forgot I had a screen protector, and gouged it with a razor blade.

The only reason I can think of that I would have switched it to Ric is that I was embarrassed, which was clearly more than reason enough.

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