Halloween without candy is like Christmas without presents or Easter without bunnies and colored eggs.

That said, sticky treats, brightly wrapped trinkets and hard-boiled eggs are nothing more than modern add-ons to age-old celebrations rooted in paganism and co-opted by the rise of Western religion.

Trick-or-treating, possibly the most pointless pursuit of all, is what most if not all American (and Mexicali) children dream about most, next to Christmas morning.

And adults like myself share in the fun as we wait for the monsters to pass out so we can raid their goodie bags.

Inevitably, though, Halloween brings out of the doom and gloom of dental dramatics. Parents will harangue their children about the perils of tooth decay from an evening of self-inflicted Snickers wounds and enamel-damning Laffy Taffy tugs-o’-war, and dentists will be laying in wait, wringing their minty hands...

“Did you meet mom on an online dating website?”

What!? She asked it. I’m not sure why, but she did. And then she immediately started to giggle as if it were the funniest thing in the world.

Had online dating been a thing when I was young and single, I might have been quite the catch. Maybe not.

I came from one of the last dark times on earth just before the proliferation of social media, before catfishing became a thing, before a person could hide behind keystrokes and Photoshop, a time before selfies were taken from complimentary angles in which necks become thinner, lips fuller and front butts and beer guts a thing of legend.

I came from the pre-digital dawning of trumped-up online profiles and resumes of gently massaged truths where tripping over a curb and landing on your face can be spun into scaling Mount Kilimanjaro and then hang-gliding to a studly-soft landing, or playing...

The history of the world and humanity, the record of all things spiritual, terrestrial and extraterrestrial, is contained within the walls of our libraries, the repositories of knowledge … and now the single-largest health threat in modern times.

I’d rather live in ignorance than ever step foot in another library again until every last librarian is held to account for his or her role in the spread of Ebola virus, a disease the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is comparing to a modern-day plague, according to the Internet and a couple people on Facebook.

Several schools closed their doors Thursday for fear of Ebola, including a temporary scare at Southwestern College in Chula Vista. It seems the infection and cross-country jaunt of Dallas nurse Amber Vinson, the second American to be diagnosed with the disease, has exposed half of the Western Hemisphere, from the catering...

I don’t want the Ebola virus. And God help me if I get it.

I don’t want AIDS, or swine flu, or bird flu. I don’t want tuberculosis. I don’t want malaria.

Maybe a tapeworm, as it would work wonders on my waistline. But other than that, I’m not having it.

Miraculously, though, I’ve been able to make it this far without contracting any of these communicable diseases that have at one time or another been classified as a global health crisis or a pandemic.

God help me if I get Ebola, because chances are I’ve taken part in a long, wet make-out session with a Liberian fresh off the African continent. Like most of the deadly contagions in the world, they are fluid-borne and you’d need some very intimate contact or live in some strange and strangely unsanitary, Third World conditions to make that happen.

Does a Dallas hospital count? Probably not.

As a rational human being who isn’t prone...

“The pursuit of happiness”; it’s the final right in a list of the three inalienable rights that arguably defines and justifies the point and desire for the Declaration of Independence.

It is not difficult to understand why the “preservation of life and liberty” are the first two — they aspire to man’s wants for safety, protection, freedom from persecution, independence of thought and worship, those tangible and intangible needs that can be fulfilled by the structure of a guiding set of principles and laws, of even the most loosely defined government.

But what about happiness? What does that have to do with government, policy or laying out a roadmap for a fledgling nation? Why does a term that is all about emotion, mental disposition and the language of the heart find its way into a blueprint for nation-building?

Maybe it has no place, or maybe happiness is a concept so difficult to...

Thousands of Imperial County middle school and high school students over the past several days have taken part in Higher Education Week, the all-out push to increase college-going rates and awareness of the importance of post-secondary education.

Hey, no complaints here. It is a vital function of local educators to get that message out.

A bachelor’s degree is about as ubiquitous as a high school diploma once was, just ask many of your favorite baristas at coffee bars across America.

It’s a difficult time to be a college graduate in the United States. Many twenty-somethings are mired in seemingly insurmountable student loan debt, degrees that are proving useless in some cases and a whole middle-income range of jobs that college was once the golden ticket to that are practically nonexistent today.

Maybe “difficult time” isn’t quite the term. How about “scary”?

And really, no one —...

NFL Commissioner Roger Goddell is a ghost, a man who has dissipated in thin air, dodging the critical mass of negative publicity over the league’s recent rash of high-profile player arrests and incidents of domestic violence.

The irony of his disappearing act is that Goddell has successfully cultivated an image of being a super cop, a zero-tolerance enforcer of league rules and potential knocks to the brand’s image. It’s been about putting his stamp and a protective covering on a league that makes an estimated $6 billion in revenue a year through sponsorships, advertising, TV and radio contracts, licensing and, lastly, actual attendance.

This wave of backlash has to be particularly troubling for a league that has set a goal of achieving $25 billion in annual revenue by 2027 as corporate benefactors revolt against Goddell, threatening to pull their sponsorships and advertising dollars...

The institution of American professional sports is showing its limitations and flaws in the way that the great and powerful Oz was revealed.

Oz lorded over the land as the omnipotent benefactor of a world of brick and mortar built on a flimsy foundation of illusion, pulling the levers and throwing the switches, directing the ultimate show.

Under the cover of an economic juggernaut that directly contributes to 456,000 jobs and earns $14.3 billion a year, a lot of indiscretions for a lot of years have been hidden in plain sight, shrouded beneath Nike sponsorships, Pepsi endorsements and television contracts that have as many zeros as the GDPs of first-world nations.

Compounded by an indirect economic benefit driven by various other industries tied to the consumption of sports entertainment, it’s easy for society as a whole to turn a blind eye to the rotting underpinnings of an industry...

Has there ever been a more disappointing band in this whole wide world than Weezer?

The post-grunge popsters seemed destined to save the world with three-minute blasts of perfection that helped ease morose, brooding teenage Gen-Xers hooked on the depressed dirges of the flannel-clad Northwest into a more sunny brand of angst.

Twenty years ago, Weezer’s self-titled “Blue Album” was the antidote for what ailed the gloomy teen-turned-twenty-something who just seemed a little tired of the gravity of Nirvana and the fun-free Seattle copycats who took slow, bellowed and bleak to its inevitable end.

The depression wasn’t gone, mind you. Those typical teenage feelings of isolation and longing were still there. Chicks were still giving the meatheads all the play and banning the arty introspective freaks into the friend zone. But this time around, the outcasts were no longer cutting in a dark...

Are you over the Robin Williams saga yet? I was.

Not from any place of cruelty, callousness or even media oversaturation, but from the desire to let this man rest in peace and to see his family spared an unending number of inauthentic tributes from people who had no idea what he was going through, or tales of his damned soul from religious nuts talking the sins of suicide.

I was over it, and then I went to Trader Joe’s last week.

I nearly spit out my Starbucks when I laid eyes on a hand-drawn advertisement from a San Diego-area beer company with Robin Williams holding a mug of suds, smiling from behind his iconic ‘70s shag and rainbow suspenders.

It incensed me so much that I snapped a photo and uploaded it to Facebook, a classic 21st century passive-aggressive protest, that is, I let social media judge the worth of what Trader Joe’s did but did nothing myself to voice my anger with...