“Yes, I know he can be annoying to you. All right, really annoying. But some day when you’re both older, you’re going to be good friends. Really. He’s even going to stand for you in your wedding. You’ll see. You might not believe it, but Aunt Lorie? She was really mean to me. Really mean. And she was older than me, and bigger, and mean. See how well we get along now? So you need to overlook what he does sometimes. No, I haven’t forgotten her meanness, but still, we get along. So some day you and your little brother will be good friends. You’ll see. Really. But in the meantime, while the escalating pitch of your voice yelling at him is having no impact on him, it is doing something else:  It’s driving me crazy. So please stop.”

I just woke up my 19-year-old, who’s been home from college for Thanksgiving.

“Aren’t you leaving at noon?” I said. (It’s 10:30.)

His reply:  “Ostensibly.”

You don’t need to speak German to understand how this delightful game works. I want one of these for my desk.

Forget the news; if you can’t trust your own eyes, what can you believe? But, just as with a lot of what purports to be news, sometimes what you believe you’re seeing is an illusion. Here’s a great one I found online today, with a handy notification to hit pause in the middle if you don’t want the trick revealed. I figured out right away how this was done, and you can too if you watch closely.

The Pew Research Center has put out a brief survey that looks at just what Americans know about the  news. I would say the ignorance is shocking… except sadly it isn’t. I don’t want to tell you specifically where people were wrong, because I think you’ll want to take the test first. But in a nutshell, lots of Americans are wrong about:  the unemployment rate, the degree to which the TARP “bailout” has been paid back, the results of the mid-term elections, where government expenditures go, and so forth. The quiz covers what I think (hope) most of us would think are the basics of the current (non-celebrity) news cycle. And the results explain a lot.

Here’s where to take the quiz.

I tried Stevia. It tastes bad. More like crystallized urine than sugar. Wikipedia mentions its “bitter aftertaste.” You bet.

This is Arcade Fire’s “The Suburbs,” adapted (?) to video by Spike Jonze. It mines the same territory as the Wallace Shawn play “The Designated Mourner” — that our obliviousness to the freedoms we take so casually endangers them — but more believably. That’s saying something for a music video, over the work of perhaps our greatest living playwright.

Today over lunch a friend and I were sharing our disappointment about John McCain. Today’s John McCain bears no resemblance to the one we believed we knew 10 years ago.

Then I came home tonight and saw this.

Somehow or other, the LA Times recently finagled a phone interview with the reclusive R. Crumb, whom I got to see, once, at a comic-book convention in either Philadelphia or New York, 25 or 30 years ago. Opportunities since then have been just as limited.

I’ve enjoyed Crumb’s work for more than 30 years now. I admire his talents, his frankness, and his artistic scruples.  But Crumb the man is getting left further and further behind. Which is fine for him. For me, it’s different. What he sees as relentless commercialism, I see as an offshoot of a web of possibility that almost all of us were utterly closed off from until the past 20 years. Thanks to the Internet, we can connect with almost anyone. We can self-publish — instantly. We can self-produce goods and services. We can record and upload and share and sell digital music. Artists in particular should cheer the new age. It isn’t for Crumb — but it’s great for the rest of us.

Oh, if only Ikea made instructions for everything. Here’s how much more easily things could work.