There was a time when all were agreed that Dog Bites Man did not qualify as news; we required Man Bites Dog in order to spend some of our precious attention.

In the Age of Cheap Irony, Man Bites Dog is every bit as banal as Dog Bites Man. Even Man and Dog Lie Down Together and Have Octuplets that Dance With the Stars is pretty much a ho-hum.

Whether or not you’ve ever taken a course in formal logic, you know what a syllogism is, and you doubtless use syllogisms all the time. The syllogism may be the simplest form of logical argument. It consists of two statements, or premises, and a conclusion that is drawn from the interaction of those statements.

People use the Missing Premise trick to lead their listeners into accepting conclusions that may or may not be strictly true but that they might be reluctant to accept if the entire argument were spelled out.

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Honestly, I’m getting tired of people making promises they don’t keep.

I can’t count the times we’ve been promised a Communist takeover, a Fascist revolution, nuclear warfare “toe to toe with the Russkies,” Armageddon, softening of our brains through fluoridation, gigantic storms, killer asteroids, decimation of the population by AIDS, more than decimation of the population by starvation, killer bees, a new Ice Age….

What is the dumbest question that you have ever heard? How about: Who wore it best?

I mean, when we see side-by-side photo images of two impossibly attractive, often alarmingly thin, undeniably fashionable female celebrities wearing the exact same outfit on different occasions and then are asked to rate who looks better, isn’t that a dumb question?

Am I just over-reacting, or does the cultural practice of rating women’s bodies and promoting a nothing-less-than-perfect standard of attractiveness, even among the naturally beautiful, lead to increased self-dissatisfaction and body image preoccupation?

I find that the information age is making me more focussed. But it’s an inside job.

I’ve been living with massive amounts of information coming at me since I began working on the web in its earliest days. I’m a performer, an extrovert and a fairly geeky person. I love stimulation and ideas and people. My mind loves to flow between different ideas. So for me the increase in stuff to do and the mode of surfing was nothing but a lot of fun for a long time.

And the info flow will only move faster. So if you want it to serve you, rather than serve it, then you need to have a compass, and you need to read it.

Is the discourse about multitasking falling into the fallacy of the excluded middle?

Could it be that instead of a stark choice between the frantic pursuit of getting more done in less time at one extreme or demonizing multitasking at the other end of the spectrum that there is an as-yet undocumented literacy in the relatively unexplored middle?

We owe it to ourselves to consider this and not to close the door prematurely on new ways to use our mind’s best tools.

Multitasking—remember when that was something computers did? They were supposed to do it for our benefit, to make our lives easier, but somehow it hasn’t quite worked out that way. With fast computers, the Internet, and smart phones in our pockets, today we’re always tethered to The Network, and sometimes it seems we’re doing its bidding instead of it doing ours.

Next Monday we’ll begin a week-long forum on the subject of multitasking—what it’s doing to us and how we can cope with it—with Maggie Jackson, Nicholas Carr, Howard Rheingold, and Heather Gold. New media guru Michael Wesch will join in with comments throughout the week.

Your comments and insights are welcome, too.

Obama goes to China seeking second mortgage on the country.

To repay the American public for their billions in support, GM will throw in the mats.

China steps up its critique of the exiled Tibetan spiritual leader in a series of “Yo Lamas!”

Republican health care proposal to only cover abortions of Democrats.

When my son came home from work he immediately asked me what news there was of “the kid.” “What kid?” I said. “The one in the balloon, of course!”

And so he told me the tale from out of Colorado.

In my delusional state – which one of these days, I have no doubt, will be noted in an edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and given a Latin name meaning something like “psychosis resulting from prolonged disconnection from media” – in that pitiable state I had missed the story that, I afterwards learned, had gripped a nation, even the world.