For a good while now I have been on a mission to find the perfect question to add a little profundity to small talk. Maybe this is not possible, but it would be really great not to have to spend all that time talking about what do you do and where are you from, as nine times out of 10, I could care less about your job and your home town. I want to know something more interesting about you, something a bit more than that. First impressions are everything right? Let us get to the good stuff, and not talk about what I do for a living.

My latest musing on the cut-the-crap question revolves around the Simpson's. It is, "What is your favorate Simpson's line?" I, for one, have a couple of Homer lessons that I think about far more frequently than I would like to admit. And hands down, the best Simpson's line is "Beer the cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." To me, this is something I do not even have to think about.

However, in field testing, this has question has been a dud. I end up with a lot of hmms, D'ohs and I don't knows. Seems that the real lesson from this is that I think about the Simpson's too much. Who knows where the rest of the world is getting their life lessons, but it certainly is not from Spider Pig.

I will keep looking for that perfect question, but until that point, I plan to speed though the basics as quickly as possible.