Prologue: The program Stan Now Considers All Things was on Reno cable television in the 1990s.
The 30-minute programs appeared weekly.
Each program consisted of 3–5 minute segments chosen from 15 different areas of human knowledge:
1. What it means to be well-educated
2. Philosophy
3. Science
4. History
5. Economics
6. Literature
7. Health
8. English language
9. Bible
10. Statistics
11. Death
12. Political Science
13. Art
14. Poetry
15. Sociology
I wrote the scripts,
designed the costumes,
did the acting,
took the videos, and
edited the programs.
When I was a philosopher, I wore a robe.
When I discussed art history, I wore an old ragged paint shirt.
When I talked about health, I was in bed with my doll Opus.
The following programs have been digitized from the original program
tapes.
Click on each Episode number to view it.
.......One life. So short.
.......A piece of leather that’s more important than any politician who has ever lived
.......Rollo May
.......It Is Not Death to Die
.......If I Can Stop One Heart from Breaking
.......The joy of puttering
.......A second use of quotation marks
.......Why do the righteous suffer?
.......Governments more dangerous than wars between countries
.......Can you name the values/ideas of Western culture?
.......Exposure to Nagasaki radiation
.......Grass
.......Being touched and health
.......The Book: an expression created in the thirteen century
.......Mode average
.......Congress needs more land?
.......Working hard, regardless of what group you belong to
.......Philosophy and a major in food preparation
.......Size of our solar system
.......Copycat artists
.......Writing to my sweetie—lists of adjectives
.......El Greco
......What It Means to Be Well-Educated: The real important questions
.......Science: The opponent across the chess board
.......Economics: Printing blue money
.......Literature: The Children’s Hour
.......Health: Goethe wrote, "Whatever you can do, or dream you can—begin it.”
.......Art: Arnolfini was an Italian banker.
.......What universities used to be
.......Under my toga: a 45 semi-automatic
.......Using sic
.......The Bible and being a business success
.......Concatenation does not imply causation.
.......John Singer Sargent
.......The Psalm of Life
.......What It Means to Be Well-Educated: Berkeley campus
.......Economics: Industrial revolution
.......Health: Premature death
.......Political Science: The only interview on StanCAT
.......Art: What does today's art have to say about today's
world?
.......What It Means to Be Well-Educated: Richard Wagner or Stevie Wonder?
.......Science: Ideology dressed up in a white lab smock.
.......Economics: Why the government won’t let me hire
.......Literature: Like a workshop or a kitchen
.......Health: Four basic food groups: fat, sugar, salt & caffeine
.......English: Who dies of a minor heart attack?
.......Invigorating or numbing your life?
.......What It Means to Be Well-Educated: Scottish convention in Santa Rosa
.......Philosophy: The Fish-bowl theory
.......History: Joan
.......Literature: Why books? Eight Reasons
.......Health: A dumb way to die
.......The Book: The human condition: many different descriptions
.......Statistics: IQ and the bell curve
.......What college graduates often don’t know
.......Greek philosophy in three minutes
.......Government to pay for everything
.......Six percent read
.......350,000 unnecessary American deaths
.......Quotation marks and commas
.......An ox on the way to be slaughtered
.......Coincidences
.......The Night Has a Thousand Eyes
.......A liberal education vs. a technical education
.......Logic
.......Radiation from coal-fired power plants
.......Nature is dangerous.
.......My poem vs. Milton’s
.......The first nine chapters of 1 Chronicles
.......Distinguishing modern art from the work of mentally ill
.......A nightmare: Just me to pass on 3,000 years of human experience
.......The nature of the universe, society, and us
.......Politics and AIDS
.......Freedom and competition
.......First rule for picking a good book to read
.......Writing to my sweetie—lists of things
.......Five ways for government to make a decision
.......L’Envoi
.......What It Means to Be Well-Educated: Education is measured in your change.
.......Philosophy: The third date with Pat
.......Science: Environment: There are no solutions, only tradeoffs.
.......Literature: Good books, the best books
.......Health: I use my body to carry around my brain.
.......Statistics: The bell curve has nothing to do with Alexander Graham Bell.
.......More than knowing a lot of stuff
.......Goldilocks
.......How the Great War began
.......In Flanders Fields
.......The great books contradict each other.
.......God in a holy flirtation
.......Mr. Average American
.......The Little Boy Blue
.......Taking your life up mountain trails with no guardrails
.......The question of evil
.......Diapers . . . cloth or disposable?
.......Universities need competition
.......Third rule for picking a good book to read
.......I Would Not Live Alway; I Ask Not to Stay
.......Love and work
.......Bad arguments for good causes
.......Looking into the Face of Death
.......To Harvard . . . with all expenses paid
.......Acting as if tomorrow will come
.......The pleasures of studying philosophy
.......What is our human nature?
.......Not meat and eggs, but sugar
.......Not telling the truth: He lied in bed.
.......Ghost houses in the Sudan
.......Spending every dime
.......The three world empires before the U.S.A.
.......Calling to the best in us
.......Lots of talk about lust
.......They are only thinking of you.
.......The mammal with the longest life span
.......From mimeographs to laser printers
.......The real reason we sent American Japanese into concentration camps
.......Three kinds of laughter
.......The gifts of Western civilization
.......The Bible, Evolution, and my wife’s love letter
.......Hold elections on April 15th
...............Getting beyond party talk
...............History has a use
...............Many colleges today are abandoning great literature
...............Intelligent computers?
...............English as it's (mis)used on television
...............Poetry of Christina Rossetti
.......Not discussing baseball
.......Before I die, I want to. . . .
.......15.1% sales tax
.......Tearing the heart out of a novel
.......The entrance to Plato’s Academy
.......A woman who became dog food
.......More than just naming things
.......Asbestos into gold
.......Condemning Columbus . . . a racist act?
.......Glorifying the human anthill
.......Using a Q-tip for a dumbbell
.......Using math on dates
.......Statues, paintings, articles, and magazines
.......Big buck universities
.......Forrest Gump
.......The religion of environmentalism
.......Except for technology . . . then was better than now
.......Budging a cliff
.......No brain surgery in the mid-afternoon
.......“A lot,” “allot,” but not “alot”
.......Gilding plastic fruit
.......Rewriting history . . . kwanza a first fruits celebration from Africa?
.......The effect of increased taxation
.......STD’s
.......Anxious to serve?
.......Evidence of sexism?
.......How to predict and not be found wrong
.......Incredulity (state of disbelief)
.......A university should be an appetizer for the banquet to follow.
.......Type I, Type II, and Type III civilizations
.......Allergy or cold or flu?
.......Laptops . . . an image of Jesus
.......A coin has no memory.
.......You smoke and your breath smells. . . . Predictable consequences
.......Beyond Birkenstocks and beer parties
.......Really hot
.......Bird droppings to find the value of pi
.......Slavery = not enjoying the fruits of your own labor
.......99% of my ancestors were savages.
.......Frank Drake’s equation . . . How many intelligent life forms?
.......Crack babies
.......Rock music from Moses
.......How much government does not equal how well we live.
.......The School of Athens
.......Different labor laws: Different unemployment rates
.......Cholesterol
.......Tic Tac Toe prayer
.......Truth in paradox: “Haste Not, Rest Not”
.......The death states
.......Most of what’s offered in universities is in books.
.......The Global Warming welfare system
.......Already and all ready
.......More Bible baseball
.......Deer rifles more powerful than most “assault” weapons
.......Crime rate dropped during the Depression.
.......Do university administrations have a vision of what is important?
.......We are not running out of lumber.
.......Bacon, Balzac, Boswell, Cellini, and Checkhov
.......Why a woman takes her husband’s name
.......All right, but not alright
.......An algebra puzzle
.......Grade inflation. Content deflation.
.......Sure-fire escape from poverty
.......The great books: not textbooks of virtue
.......Boys without dads
.......Finding the monthly mortgage payment
.......The battle that most people are losing
.......Frosting on an elephant
.......Don’t “Do Your Best”
.......What college freshman English should look like
.......Understanding does not automatically mean appreciating.
.......The book most often quoted
.......The influence of family, church, and community re drug abuse
.......Every citizen a child forever
.......We like trees with horizontal branches
.......A cup of coffee doubles rate of spontaneous abortion?
.......Is there a prohibition against eating fat?
.......More government or less?
.......University administrators who seek the kingdom, the power, and the glory
.......The search for beauty
.......Being wastefully clean
.......If your body dies, you die.
.......My canary and Thud
.......“Like cold water to a thirsty soul”
.......I want you to pay my bills.
.......Your kid . . . a rock star?
.......Our net nest eggs
.......Great books that kids shouldn’t read
.......In case you are using “In case”
.......$4B spent on baseball. Religious given is 14 times as much.
.......Her back extensively branded
.......Civilization is not inherited.
.......Printing more money
.......All men die uneducated.
.......My wordy-birdy
.......Jesus’s spotty genealogy
.......Art and family photos
.......Classrooms where teachers just spout facts
.......Americans and ancient scourges
.......Minimum wage of $100/hour
.......Three javelins into the heart
.......A dude in a canary yellow costume
.......Being a rich, but unfulfilled, fork lift operator
.......Aristotle didn’t ask, “Don’t you think my toga is chic?”
.......If you can touch it, they have put a tax on it.
.......Schools more dangerous than asbestos
.......The silver necklace
.......Education in order to find great heros
.......Greg Louganis bled
.......Living on 228 acres
.......The tree never fell.
.......My pet leopard eats a healthy breakfast, but I can’t.
.......Half of the country fills up the government ATM for the other half.
.......Spontaneity in paintings
.......The voices in our culture
.......Who needs philosophy
.......Early geometry
.......Reality as experienced by the artist
.......The great conversation: music, drama, art, science
.......Metaphysics, epistemology, ethics
.......The bombs of distress
.......Irenology
.......Government-run schools . . . a laugh
.......Is the goal to have a good job and a big house?
.......What is this world, and how do I know about it?
.......Detecting phony science
.......When I get a little money
.......Euclid’s geometry as dazzling as first love
.......One of the five essential books every truly educated person should read
.......Minimal effort, minimal pain, minimal vision
.......Amherst doesn’t seem to know.
.......Parallels in history
.......Wants, needs, and desires
.......Bloated, inefficient American government schools
.......Traffic is slowing up. [sic]
.......Describe and predict
.......The thinness of American culture
.......What Florence Nightingale gave to womenkind
.......AIDS
.......Mean average
.......Irish potato famine
.......The reality that contemporary art reflects
.......My fantasy: founding a university
.......Thucydides or Danielle Steele?
.......Steps to happiness
.......7 a.m. in the morning. [sic]
.......Spanish flu of 1918–1919
.......The nihilistic art of Dada
.......My university will be different
.......Not all cultures are equally good
.......The most influential person of this century
.......Happiness and health
.......Our use of language mirrors our thought.
.......Median average
.......$155,300 to say prayers
.......To be blind with Oedipus, to die with Sir Thomas More
.......Learning ventriloquism
.......Your values conflict with each other.
.......Maximum wage law
.......What it means to be fully human
.......Everyone looking up.
.......Institutions of higher . . . tuition
.......100% honest or 99% honest
.......The Constitution prohibits Congress from supporting
the arts
.......What is the good life?
.......Foreign languages
.......The dash
.......Stuffing kids like sausages
.......The important things to learn
.......A cup of coffee: 10 mg of carcinogens
.......Like to lucubrate?
.......The West was the first civilization to turn against slavery.
.......Scarcity and price
.......A hunger not satisfied by amusement
.......Why you die—it isn’t because you are sick.
.......Federal laws—200 pages/day in fine print
.......What me teach? I’m a professor.
.......A cancer in philosophy: deconstructionism
.......Every line of every book ever written
.......Rubens and the female nude
.......The Fool’s Prayer
Episode 29
.......You want to hear the best arguments against what you believe.
.......Second rule for picking a good book to read
.......An Improbable History of math