You cannot make this stuff up: the FBI is looking for “The Chameleon Beard Bandit,”1 a bank robber who has robbed six banks, including two in Virginia, using the clever ruse of changing the color of his beard. If you feel your wife (bearded or not — we’re not judging) has essentially robbed you by cleaning out your bank accounts, ...
Shakespeare thought little of names. Why else did he have Juliet Capulet say, “What's in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet ...” For The Bard, the substance of a person or object was found in its essence, not its name. You may not feel so gracious if your ex-wife is continuing ...
Pixar’s Finding Nemo came out in 2003 and we will bet that 14 years later you did not notice it recreates Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s “Five Stages of Grief” hypothesis. The movie adds support to the running theme of Pixar films: they are all little psychological test cases. The emotional buffet of Inside Out, Up, Brave and others has been well explored ...
Take a good look at your brothers and sisters; for most of us, family is an oasis of affection amid a sea of indifference. Your brothers and sisters are probably typical Virginians; not the homeliest creatures to walk the earth, but not glamour-model good looking, either. They probably have their share of troubles and bad habits, too. Families are nature’s ...
O! How lucky we are to live in a world that gave us Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs singing their weird little pop song1, “Oh That’s Good, No That’s Bad.” In the Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ (we'll truncate them to StSatP — you're welcome) song, every seemingly good thing turns out to be bad, while every bad thing leads ...
We turn now to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for some advice on negotiating a favorable divorce settlement. Who better to know how to hoard and leverage a little knowledge than our nation’s spymasters? The heart of any negotiation is, after all, information — information your adversary does not know you have, and information your adversary inadvertently shares. To win ...
We know you are really, really busy (boy, have we heard that a lot), but if you have a few minutes maybe you could sit down and read this. Or not. We don’t suppose it really matters. It’s just about your kids, and some post-divorce issues you may face as a Virginia man. Things like your kids, and your ex-wife’s passive-aggressive ...
Which of your relatives is lactose intolerant? Know anybody with a kid allergic to peanuts? Many diagnoses are casually tossed around in our information-rich society. Few people have celiac disease, but many people claim to need gluten-free foods. Some fastidious people joke they are OCD, but true obsessive-compulsive sufferers do not find the actual condition very funny at all. As ...
For many reasons, amateur psychology is prominent these days. Armchair practitioners feel comfortable assigning diagnoses to public figures, politicians, and celebrities. A common term tossed around these days is narcissist, which has a clinical definition but is casually used to describe a self-absorbed adult. Divorcing a narcissist can be wearing on the spouse. Find some relief with these tips. Narcissism ...