What is "Free Time"?

Over the last ten years or so, friends of mine would occasionally find an email from me in their Inbox, with an attachment. The attachment was a carefully researched short essay on some random topic – Eli Manning’s passing stats, why the British tend to produce great bands and Americans great solo performers, a comparison of John Adams’ and Thomas Jefferson’s place in history.

One day a friend of mine, a frequent recipient of the sports essays, called me up.

“You know those emails you send, with the essays attached?” he asked.

“Yes?” I said, expecting some kind words about them.

“Can you stop doing that?”

So I did. But I didn’t stop writing them. Eventually I figured I might as well start a blog. And here it is.

Is there any theme to this blog? The primary topics are fairly mainstream things – sports, music, politics, literature, history. But the thing that tends to get me started on a topic is when everybody is thinking one way, and ignoring all of the evidence that they could be wrong. I then get interested in the contrarian view.

My mission statement is to provoke a "Huh". Not the interrogatory "Huh?", which roughly translates to "What the hell are you talking about?"; but the exclamatory "Huh", which means (and think Dana Carvey as Johnny Carson here), "I did not know that."