Listening to this week’s encore presentation of This American Life, I found myself once again enraptured by the story of “the Psychopath Test” as discussed in this book by Jon Ronson. When the show first aired almost a year ago I was taken aback by its story of how the test was created, has been used, and has been abused, over the decades. But in light of recent revelations I found myself with a different thought running through my head …

I’ve been re-living my misspent youth in a variety of ways the past week. For one thing, a number of recent conversations have involved the old role playing game Dungeons and Dragons, or at least the old Second Edition that I played. For another, I found a Yahtzee app for my iPhone and have been playing it obsessively. My mother taught me to play Yahtzee (or, I guess, since we played a variation and weren’t using the official Hasbro rules …

(By the way: for the Comcast hacks who are reading this, hello. This is Chat ID #EDF3552A-BD69-4B8C-93C3-49857AC2D365 I am talking about if you want to confirm that I’m not the one lying here.) On March 5, 2012 when my cable bill more than doubled overnight, I went into a webchat with some operators at Comcast. Eventually I wound up with a supervisor allegedly named “June.” I had the foresight to print out the webchat so I had a permanent record …

I have a long history with Comcast. (Just look at the “Comcast is evil” tag on blog posts here.) For too long they’ve been allowed to get away with monopolistic practices and harassment. Now it’s time to fight back. The next open meeting of the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities is April 27th in Trenton at the State House Annex, Committee Room 11. The meeting will convene at 10 AM then go into closed door executive session until 11:15 …