A friend of mine who teaches high school English lately had a small meltdown over a school administrator who, among other ineptitudes, insists on peppering curricular meetings with demands for "brain-based research."

Run into much non-brain-based research out there? How's it working for you?

I knew Samuel Johnson could toss a cogent remark into this conversation, and here he is, orating to us from The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749). When it comes to smart-ass, unanswerable commentary, nothing beats an eighteenth-century rhymed couplet (except maybe a Mark Twain diatribe).

Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate,

Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?

Yes, he must.

Dinner tonight: Pot-au-feu, sourdough bread, mixed-lettuce salad with (if they fattened up during the "hurricane") diced kohlrabi, pear flan, cheap Portuguese wine, followed by a Netflix screening of Olivia de Havilland descending into histrionic madness in The Snakepit (unless I fall asleep on the couch, in which case she'll descend tomorrow night).