EXPERT TEXPERT

They really loved me on March 8.

I'm not the smartest guy on the block. If I were, I wouldn't be writing a blog that most of my "readers" likely send straight to the trash. But I am smart enough to know that the sudden spike of hits that my blog receives at 3:00 a.m. is from bots rather than 225 insomniacs.

Yet somehow, I'm smarter than the professional newspaper columnists and former military folks -- the people who are paid to give their opinions because they know more than you -- who never thought Russia would invade Ukraine. 

Maybe they thought it was a parking lot.

This, despite the thousands of tanks moseying up to the border over the course of at least two months. 

What do you think these scribblers for well-respected magazines and the like -- the people who said You're misconstruing Putin's words! -- would have thought if they spent half the winter watching Russian tanks approach their neighborhood? It's not like Russia has enough rubles to waste on what these smarty-pants swore was just an off-season vacation for the military. What part of military build-up on the Ukranian border didn't they understand? 

I get the idea Dr. D'Arenzio
spends more time on his hair
than his patients.

It isn't just politics that catch "experts" by surprise. A shrink named Dr. Justin D'Arienzo went on the highly regarded therapeutic site TikTok to warn us  
of the five warnings that your relationship is in trouble: 

• A lack of desire for physical and emotional intimacy 
• Preferring to be alone
• Conversations always lead to conflict
• You judge everything your partner does
• You don't care about your partner or what they do.

God almighty! You need a "professional" to tell you that these things spell doom to your relationship? Hey, come to me with your problems! I'll charge half of what this quack does, and even throw in coffee. Maybe a danish, too. By the way, if you're listening to a psychiatrist who has a website known for teenagers inhaling cinnamon then you deserve to drop $200 an hour every week.

Is this what they thought was going on in these places?

Closer to home, I recently saw a headline referring to my neighborhood: Secret Brothels Run Out of Upper East Side Spas. My first thought was, If I caught hookers in my place of business, I'd run them out of there, too.

It was only on second look I realized what the headline really meant. And that when I mentally screamed, How the hell was this a secret?  Johnny Carson was getting cheap laughs out of the phrase "massage parlors" in 1967. When these spas' websites promise HOT BODY 2 BODY, they're not talking saunas. 

My advice to people trying to figure out problems: Skip the experts and go for the obvious answers. They tend to be the right ones.

(On third reading of the massage parlor headline, it could also mean brothels were running out of places to set up shop. This is why copy editors are more important than we realize.)

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