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Fifth Friday footnotes, follow-ups and far-flung fripperies:

• Beginning with storm clean-up and ending with expected and unexpected basketball successes, have we ever had a March together with more Madness?
• (Maybe the 2016 Pussy Hat Parade, but that was a different sort of march.)
• During the storms, I wished I was back in school — just so I wouldn’t have to go.
• Judging from my Facebook feed from a month ago, we really like our electricity.
• I went to a bad circus. It featured a couple balancing their checkbook, two untamed cats, and a swordfish swallower.
• If people believe you’ve done something on purpose, you’ll get away with it. Every time.
• Change never comes easily. “How things are” uses its status to keep its quo.
• Remind me again how a coin laundry differs from money laundering.
• When was the last time you saw anything wreak anything but havoc or revenge? (I’ll wait.)
• When you’ve tried everything and there are no good answers, what you’re probably looking at is a bad question.
• Chronological bigotry is still bigotry. We may know better now, but we must not conspire to erase those times when we didn’t.
• Helpful hint: If they didn’t charge you for the product or service you’re using, you’re not the customer. You’re the product.
• We wanted freedom (from constraints, consequences, and other people), but what we got was loneliness.
• I’ll die knowing God loves me if I never have to do a book tour. (I’m bettering my chances by not writing a book.)
• Patriarchal marriage and animal husbandry: compare and contrast. Go.
• It sounds strange to say it, but pacifists are often activists.
• “Low aims are worse than failures.”
• When we made a verb out of “money,” we started monetizing everything in sight. Now that we’ve begun using “adult” as a verb, is that good?
• The shorthand for the upcoming 5th Generation wireless connection makes the improvement seem incremental. 5G should be only 25 percent better than 4G, right? Not true.
• All things being equal, it’s good to remember they never are.
• If the 2020 campaign becomes “I’m mad” (on the right) versus “I’m sorry” (on the left), those who are mad are gonna win. (I’m sorry.)
• Near-boiling pots fascinate me.
• Has history relied on war and famine to flush its social toxins, like fires maintain a healthy forest?
• “Hate doesn’t hurt who you think it does.”
• British pollsters use better words. A recent survey about one Brexit solution found 60 percent of liberals delighted, 8 percent pleased and 14 percent relieved. Conservatives: 58 percent betrayed, 15 percent angry and 6 percent disappointed.
• Make your world a little bit better. The world will get better only in little bits.
• Spring is here. “Hoist the Moist!”
• “Semi-retired” now seems to mean you have no job and you’re living in your truck.
• Writers will give you the quote off their back.
• We should have recognized that subdivisions might lead to loneliness. Who would choose to be divided and then subdivided?
• Everyone knows that darkness comes earlier in the winter, but did you know it also gets dark quicker? It takes less time in winter to go from light to dark, and vice versa.
• I thought I caught my blender and garbage disposal conspiring, but it was just a big mix-up.
• Now that we’re knitting or buying sweaters for our dogs in winter, how long before we decide it’s inhumane to make them walk barefoot?
• I can’t help it. Whenever I see somebody renting a DVD from a Redbox kiosk, I look at them a little longer than I should, hoping to divine the meaning of their retro ways.
• We sell stuff on craigslist so we can meet people we wouldn’t otherwise.
• When robots come for us, first they’ll take control of our money.
• Whenever I’m beside myself, the room feels suddenly crowded.
• Anything that purrs seems female to me. Barking always seems male. Am I alone on this?
• Every society has relied on two things to take care of its elders: family and pneumonia.
• The future would be brighter if we didn’t have to wait for it.
• Confession: I don’t know the protocol concerning bathroom stalls for the handicapped. Are they reserved for exclusive use, like parking spaces, or available to all?
• Next time life seems too ordinary (it happens to all of us), I have two suggestions. Discover a new use for baking soda — that miraculous powder hiding in your kitchen. And replace your bed pillow.
• Who took the pepper out of my salt-and-pepper beard?
• I can’t even. (Finish a sentence, apparently….)
• We all share the same primal fear: To be forgotten, but not gone.
• Sadness is undervalued. Sadness puts the world in slow motion so you can see more of it, or see it more deeply.
• Making a mark is harder than making a remark.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs at www.dksez.com.

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