Oatmeal Tips

Welcome once again to our hit feature "Oatmeal Tips." You know how I like a good obituary headline. It would be nice to have the phrase "rowed across oceans" in your obituary headline, the way this guy does in the New York Times today. Select lines from the obit (written by Margalit Fox) include "A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor" and "At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol... At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate" and "Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus." Jerry Lewis is back in the New York Times too - finally! - as Dave Kehr reviews three new video releases. He makes some of those big Jerry-based pronouncements I always love, calling the break-up with Dean, for example, "a national trauma in the 1950s, as well as a personal one." Elsewhere in the paper, A.O. Scott calls Bob Hope "hip" (!) and "paradigmatic" (!!) and Manohla Dargis mocks him for it. Oh, I suppose you are waiting for the oatmeal tip. Well, when that guy rowed across the ocean, his provisions included "Spam, oatmeal, brandy." Oatmeal! It will help you row across an ocean.