Hi, I'd like you to meet my blog.

Hi. Welcome to yet another blog. Yeah, I know. Like we need another one of those clogging the internet with passionate pontifications on a wide array of subjects of often dubious worth. But here it is, my humble attempt to help a few searching souls help themselves.

And how exactly do I plan to accomplish this nifty little feat?

I’m not going to do it by offering a weekly rant on what’s wrong with the world and what we all ought to do to fix it. That would require a lot of writing on my part and a lot of reading on yours, and do any of us have that much spare time on our hands? I mean, I’ve got so much Facebooking to do I don’t even have time to Tweet.

I’m also not going to help folks help themselves by providing useful how-to essays on such topics as “How-to make purses out of discarded potato chip bags,” or “How-to win the lottery in three easy steps.” While such discussions would undoubtedly be helpful, I just don’t know how-to do very many things, at least not very many practical things, so in the end, I wouldn’t actually be helping anyone to do anything, not even myself to help others help themselves. And that’s just not very helpful.

So, what does that leave, you ask? It leaves this.

I’m going to teach you how to fish. Figuratively, not literally, of course, because I’ve never actually touched a pole – fishing, pole that is – and I don’t plan to. Not that I have anything against fishing. I just don’t…okay, so I’ve got something against fishing, but that’s beside the point.

The point is most blogs give you fish in the form of useful or useless opinion and/or facts. No matter how hearty or exquisitely prepared those fact-fish are, they will only feed you for a day – they’ll help you for that one particular issue, but not for anything else.

For example, you can read a blog that provides thorough and well-researched facts on vaccinations. But how is that going to help you get a handle on stem cell research or more importantly, on whether Tom Cruise actually is gay. And how can you be sure that the blog you’ve read got their facts straight? You can’t, unless you know how to fish, and by ‘fish’ I mean, ‘think.’ And by ‘think’ I mean ‘ask questions.’ And by ‘questions’ I mean ‘question,’ singular. Here’s the question.

I’m going to get you to always ask, “How do you know?”

This question has the power to make us smarter, to make us more savvy and less prone to getting swindled. But we don’t ask it often enough. That’s what we are going to do here. We are going to take the issues of the day, everyday concerns, advertising claims, conspiracy theories, you name it, and we are going to pose that question to them. Furthermore, we are going to figure out how to get the answer, or at least how to recognize a good one. Thus equipped, we’ll be able to negotiate the treacherous waters of media mayhem through which we must daily sail and beach ourselves on the shores of truth.

And as an added bonus, you can probably also use the question to drive your opinionated loved ones crazy. Wouldn’t that alone make this worth the read?

So stay tuned, my friends. I promise to keep my posts brief, funny, and to the point. Well, at least brief. And weekly. I hope. Wish me luck.

See you next Thursday.