Monocles, Bullets, and Cigarettes

Like the world at large, I have completely forgotten about the book I wrote about cigarette lighters. But yesterday I was watching Erich von Stroheim's version of THE MERRY WIDOW, that's right, a silent operetta, what could be more fun? Lots of things. And let's say Erich von Stroheim doesn't exactly have the Lubitsch touch, as I wittily texted to Megan Abbott, and oh how she must have chuckled at my waggish observation. For example, it takes Stroheim an hour and a half to get to the point where Lubitsch's movie STARTS! To be fair, the stories are pretty different. But why should I be fair? Who is reading this? You? You don't exist! Anyhow, I guess you, if you did exist, would be wondering what this has to do with my cigarette lighter book. Fine! I'll tell you. In THE MERRY WIDOW, as undertaken by Stroheim, there are a man and woman with cigarettes in their mouths, and they are standing so that the tips of their cigarettes touch. It might be that one is giving a light to the other, a process described in my book, in which I thoroughly explore the obscene slang term for such an action. I tried to search the "blog" to see if I had mentioned it here before, but I don't see how I could have, except by such euphemistic means as I have employed above. If you want to read dirty talk like that, you'll just have to buy the book! Anyway, so these two are standing there with the tips of their cigarettes touching and the bad guy, who is across the room, and in a hilarious mood, takes out his little gun and shoots off the ends of both of their cigarettes with a single bullet. Then he shoots the eyes out of a statue, which has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. He is, however, wearing a monocle, and monocles figure heavily in my cigarette lighter book for reasons I would tell you if we weren't both asleep by now. But! The relationship of guns to cigarettes and lighters is another theme of the book, so you can see clearly that when you tabulate all the various themes and subthemes and so on of my book you've never heard of and will have forgotten by the end of this "post," I am obliged to add THE MERRY WIDOW (1925) to my appendix of stuff that really should have gone into my cigarette lighter book but didn't. You know what else has a lot of monocle action? NIGHTWOOD! What pie and ice cream were to Kerouac, monocles are to Djuna Barnes. There's one chapter where a guy fiddles with his monocle in every conceivable way. You should take a drink every time Djuna Barnes uses the word "monocle"! (The surgeon general advises against it.) In a movie, the actor playing Felix, the guy with the monocle, would be like one of the pipe-smokers I have observed in at at least three movies "letting the pipe do most of the acting," except with a monocle instead of a pipe. And in an earlier chapter, Felix's monocle pops out, I believe, the way your monocle is always popping out when you're shocked. You may recall that I also found a person whose monocle pops out emotionally in Fitzgerald's TENDER IS THE NIGHT. You know what else had lots of monocles? That Erich von Stroheim bio we read in the Million Dollar Book Club! (Did you know Anita Loos affectionately called him "Von"?)

Didn't Mean to Be So Hilarious All the Time

Hey, remember when I said I was going to "go out on a limb" and call something a "viola da gamba"? You were probably chuckling wisely that I had spouted a real mouthful, like something right out of a Frasier script! Because, of course, as the OED tells us, "viola da gamba" means "literally, 'leg viol.'" Yes, I left the final "a" off on purpose, just like the makers of the OED. Hey, man, if you don't know what a viol is, I just feel sorry for you. Anyway, as I am sure you put together long before I did (just minutes ago), a leg is a "limb" of the body. Ha ha ha, wonderful. Mine is such a waggish wit. It hurts! This reminds me, in a roundabout fashion, of the time Kent asked if I wanted to see the stoop from SEX AND THE CITY and I replied with an astonishing swiftness worthy of Churchill, "That's no way to talk about Sarah Jessica Parker!" My witticism in that case, while demonstrably unfair to Ms. Parker, was based on the word "stupe," as I am sure you will recall will fondness, which I felt called for explanation at the time, thus ruining the joke, such as it was. The OED tells us that "stupe" goes back as far as 1722, and provides this example: "Leaving this Old Stupe, the Keeper conducted me to a Gentleman, who was not so far advanc'd in Years," proving that ageism, among other things, was alive and well in 1722! I think my wonderful twinkling humor has taught us a thing or two today. POSTSCRIPT: My records reveal that it was Tom Herpich, not Kent Osborne, who offered to show us the stoop from SEX AND THE CITY. And here I was just yesterday, getting on McNeil's case for misplacing a bellhop. We're still learning and growing as people! And it's all thanks to the miracle of jesting and humorousness which is such a balm in our trying times of nowadays we've been enjoying lately.

Ghost Nap

Well, I decided to take a nap. And I was like, "I sure wish I had something to read while I drift off to sleep." You see, I'm reading a biography of Tom Stoppard right now, but it is too bulky for napping purposes. There is no way to get comfortable with it. Also, the last thing I read in it was the phrase "Her poems are moist and pulsating," which I suppose was meant to be a compliment, but filled me with a Cronenbergian sense of horror no doubt unintended by the author. So I checked out the bookcase next to my side of the bed and found an academic treatise on ghost sightings, which provided just what I was looking for, filled as it was with deadpan sentences of the type I enjoy, such as, "The obvious explanation for headless ghosts is that they represent those who had their heads chopped off." A few pages later, there is a quotation from an 18th-century man who thought he saw a ghost: "I perceived my hair to heave my hat from my head, and my teeth to chatter in my mouth." That gave me a chuckle! A hat popping off a head in fright was something I might have associated with the capering of Stan Laurel, but I never before read a claim that it had happened to an actual person in real life. Soothed by such imagery, I fell into a dreamless slumber.

Ha Comma Ha Comma Ha

One of the things I've been doing during the pandemic is finally reading a nonfiction book about the CIA that Lee Durkee loaned me, oh, five or six years ago. Yesterday I came across a quotation that fascinated me. "'The general was in fine form this morning, wasn't he? Ha, ha, ha!' Dulles would chuckle." Was Dulles laughing? Or was he speaking the word "ha" three times in succession? The dialogue tag "Dulles would chuckle" seems to indicate actual laughter... or at least chuckling. But encasing the "Ha, ha, ha!" in quotation marks, and carefully separating them by commas, as if indicating their individual distinction... hmm. It seemed to me (and a check of the endnotes proved me right) that this "Ha, ha, ha!" business was lifted from a secondary source. So another author had originally recorded Allen Dulles going around saying, "The general was in fine form this morning, wasn't he? Ha, ha, ha!" Then, I suppose, the author of the current volume, the one I am reading, had to make a decision. But if he really thought that Dulles was chuckling, why didn't he write "'The general was in fine form this morning, wasn't he?' Dulles would say with a chuckle"? That would not have violated the original author's "Ha, ha, ha!" (which, honestly, when standing alone like that, looks - thanks, in part, to the exclamation point - much more like forceful barking than a chuckle). Maybe he was hedging his bets. All right, I am done with this subject. I mean, I have other thoughts about the typographical representation of laughter as it has stylistically evolved, and what part that plays in my perception of the... eh... but... forget it. [Postscript, added after some hours of brooding consideration: I neglected to touch on the "would," that is, the fact, as reported, that Dulles "would" chuckle, implying numerous instances of the general being in "fine form," and so, perhaps, the accompanying chuckle became habitual, insincere, formal, rote, in which case, spelling it out as "Ha, ha, ha!" seems perfectly reasonable.]

Movie Theater Pizza

About a month ago, when DIRTY GRANDPA opened, I mentioned in an ADVENTURE TIME meeting (in which I regularly participate from Oxford, Mississippi, while everyone else is in Burbank), that I wished Kent were in town so we could go see DIRTY GRANDPA together. Kent reminded me that he was coming here for a visit soon. I said I wasn't sure whether DIRTY GRANDPA would be playing, and Kent predicted it would still be "the number one movie in the country, like TITANIC." We shared a chuckle, you may be sure! So Kent finally got to town, and DIRTY GRANDPA was still playing, and we went to see it, accompanied by Bill Boyle, a De Niro expert and completist. Kent and I arrived at the movie theater an hour early, ha ha! But it is not a joke, despite my ha ha. Kent ordered himself a little cheese pizza from the movie theater's kitchen. I prayed to God he would consume it before Bill arrived. Bill, as you know, makes the best pizza in town, and such a movie theater cheese pizza would be an affront to him!

So Bill arrived and we all stepped into the movie theater to watch DIRTY GRANDPA, on practically the one-year anniversary of when Kent and I went to see 50 SHADES OF GREY in Silver Lake. Bill and Kent and I had the whole place to ourselves for DIRTY GRANDPA! But just before the movie started (or was it just after?) an earnest young couple came in to test the boundaries of their tender new love by going to see DIRTY GRANDPA. The credit sequence was striking, as you may see above. "It's like a Godard movie!" I kept screaming into the emptiness. I was also proud to notice that Dirty Grandpa wore a hat just like a hat I wore when I was twenty. Here you can see it on the movie poster Kent photographed right outside the theater. I think a bird has pooped on the Plexiglas, just under the "n" in "Grandpa."

Or that may be the designer's flourish, emphasizing the dirtiness of the Dirty Grandpa. After the movie, Bill and Kent and I adjourned to the City Grocery Bar to discuss many aspects of DIRTY GRANDPA.

"I Am Only Billy Hunt"

Robert Hughes died. I read his history of Australia THE FATAL SHORE a long time ago and the thing I recall most is the brave ingenuity of the convicts' escape attempts. Here's one that sticks in my head for its ironic (I guess) and tragicomic (maybe) qualities: "One prisoner, a former actor named William Hunt, 'who in his younger days had belonged to a company of strolling mountebanks,' disguised himself as an enormous 'boomer' or male kangaroo. He nearly got across to Forestier's Peninsula before two picket-guards, thinking he really was a kangaroo, spotted him and gave chase, leveling their muskets. 'Don't shoot, I am only Billy Hunt,' the nervous marsupial squeaked, to their consternation." The chuckle dies in the throat. It's a sad story, really, when you consider how terrible life was and the crazy brilliance of the idea and the hard work that must have gone into creating such a realistic kangaroo suit in complete secrecy, and the acting skills Billy Hunt put into so very convincingly becoming that kangaroo. Yes, I'm pretty sure there's some irony there: the excellence of his disguise his undoing! Now that Mr. Hughes is dead, I'm not sure I should have quoted that dialogue tag "the nervous marsupial squeaked," which is not my favorite kind of dialogue tag, but there it is.

Hay Opera

I was listening to Purcell's KING ARTHUR and there came this part where the chorus seemed to be chuckling bawdily I suppose and it sounded like the kind of song where there should be some tankards clanking together though I didn't hear any, but I thought it deserved further investigation and the name of the air turns out to be "Your hay it is mow'd" so there's an opera song about hay for you, I thought you'd want to know. Another in our investigative series on cultural representations of hay. Libretto by Dryden! "For prating so long like a book-learn'd sot,/ Till pudding and dumplin burn to pot." Ha ha, take that book-learn'd sots, I guess. Gets 5.8 out of 10 on something called "poem hunter.com." That strikes me as hilarious for some reason - the idea of angry people on their computers voting against it. Like, "I give this seventeenth-century opera hay song two stars!" Also contains corn.

Frightful Paroxysm

Speaking of UFOs, a while back Dr. Theresa and I were watching a 1956 documentary called U.F.O. on TCM. It featured lots of recreations of "actual events." The hero was a man named Al Chop, a reporter, who was played in the film by some other reporter. Why not an actor? That's a great question. For some reason the name Al Chop tickled us and we had a chuckle whenever he strode into a room and said stiffly, "I'm Al Chop." I assumed he was some sort of composite character, but it turns out there was a real Al Chop. "Click" here if you don't believe me! Also, there is AN ENTIRE "BLOG" JUST ABOUT THAT MOVIE. Oh, "internet"! You have everything on you. In one portion of the movie, they talk about a LIFE magazine article that blows the lid off the big government UFO cover-up. So, you know how they have those bound copies of old magazines in the library, right? I went to the library today and thumbed through the actual LIFE magazine (April 7, 1952). There was a picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover, natch! (See the headline in the upper right corner.) The article had a charmingly formal and polite title: "Have We Visitors From Space?" It was illustrated with "a scrupulously accurate eyewitness painting of a mysterious green fireball rushing through the night sky over New Mexico." Ha ha! I love the idea of an "eyewitness painting." Beautiful! The article had wonderful phrases in it like "whirling doughnuts" and "frightful paroxysm of light." I also looked for the November 30, 1959, issue of LIFE because this Kerouac bio says that some mean jerk wrote a snotty article about Kerouac in it: "The journalist's bitterness was evident," according to the bio. The title of the article - much less polite than "Have We Visitors From Space?" - is "Beats: Sad But Noisy Rebels." That volume was missing.

All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up

Welcome once again dear friends to "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up," your one spot on the "internet" for all the latest fabulous celebrity news of fabulous celebrities in the news. The great American filmmakers John Sayles and Maggie Renzi were in Oxford last night. Mr. Sayles appeared at Off Square Books to read from his new novel A MOMENT IN THE SUN. (The government now requires "bloggers" to mention things like this, so I will say that A MOMENT IN THE SUN is published by McSweeney's, where I also do some work, and they sent me a copy.) After the reading, practically the whole audience headed over to the City Grocery Bar, and so did Mr. Sayles and Ms. Renzi. Yes, since you asked, somehow I managed to bring up Jerry Lewis. Mr. Sayles did not react with horror. He said of Jerry, "He did it all." I was comparing the structure of Mr. Sayles's book THINKING IN PICTURES with that of Lewis's THE TOTAL FILM-MAKER. (The fact that they both "do it all" accounts for the similarity, I think.) Mr. Sayles politely pretended that he might get himself a copy of THE TOTAL FILM-MAKER someday. Dr. Theresa and John Sayles discussed 19th-century illustrators and Lizzie Borden! Ms. Renzi and I spoke of our shared affection for Doris Day. It was funny and interesting to hear John Sayles and Maggie Renzi very knowledgeably discuss WITH SIX YOU GET EGGROLL (pictured). Many things were spoken of by many people in many combinations! Then we went home. Dr. Theresa and I were awakened at 3 in the morning by the sound of some animals attacking one another maybe. I'd like to pretend there is some chance it was an animal party, but who am I kidding? There was some cooing or whimpering, some screeching, and a third unidentifiable noise - as many as four or five animals involved from the horrific sound of it. We did something stupid. We went outside with what turned out to be an extremely weak flashlight to see if we could help whatever animal needed help. Luckily (for us, I guess), we never found the source of the terrible sounds (which kept going on and on), although at one point Dr. Theresa swore they were coming from the top of a tree. Well, I couldn't get back to sleep after that. I watched several episodes of THE LARRY SANDERS SHOW that happened to be on, and in between chuckling, I contemplated the abyss. I am glad we were not devoured by angry raccoons or what have you. Step outside your nice little house in the middle of the night and you suddenly find yourself in hell. So that's something to think about! As Lillian Gish says in NIGHT OF THE HUNTER, "It's a hard world for little things." That's it for this edition of "All-Star Entertainment Wrap-Up." Until next time, stay away from wild animals that are fighting, remember that only the thinnest of dreamy membranes protects you from the nightmarish wilderness that secretly surrounds us all, and keep "reaching" for the "stars"!

Literary Matters

Oh no! It is time once again for "Literary Matters," just what everybody hates. With good reason! But these particular literary matters are pretty nice for a change and there are just two of them so shut up. 1) A wonderful time at Off Square Books yesterday: master of the short story Jim Shepard - who both in visage and temperament somewhat resembles the great Groucho Marx - read from his new book YOU THINK THAT'S BAD. (He was a handsome man, Groucho was. Just yesterday on TCM I saw a snippet of an interview with Maureen O'Sullivan [pictured] in which she said "I could have been in love with him." But she also said something weird, which was that she told him, "I don't like funny men" and made him stop telling jokes when he was around her.) Jim Shepard was reading from his short story "Minotaur" (which contained a reference to sad clown Emmett Kelly!) and we were all bobbing our heads and nodding and chuckling with pleasure when suddenly - BOOM! - there was a revelation that socked us in the gut and the whole audience sort of went "oof." The audience made a noise! I think this is a sign of a good reading. Most readings are terrible, as we know. But if you literally get the wind knocked out of you, that's a good one. I heard something similar happen - a gasp - a few years ago when my friend Pia Z. Erhardt read her short story "The Man." We were "on tour" together and the gasp occurred each time she read it! 2) I took PARROTS OF THE WORLD off of my recommendation shelf at Square Books and replaced it with CROW PLANET, the volume from which I extract much of this "blog's" crow information. Nothing against PARROTS OF THE WORLD! They are very colorful! But I believe my decision was the right one. When I left the store yesterday, I saw Michael Bible leafing through CROW PLANET with what appeared to be great interest. The shelf does its job! Oh! Somebody put a bunch of books ON TOP of my recommendation shelf but I DO NOT ENDORSE THOSE! Michael kindly drew some arrows pointing downward on my recommendation sign to help alert you to that fact. I cannot speak for the books above the sign!

A Good Beep

Storm's a-brewin'. The emergency weathermen were back on the air last night with their FUTURETRON! It was the old weatherman and the young weatherman, but I didn't see them squabbling this time. And it's called the FUTURECAST, not the FUTURETRON. But isn't there already a word for FUTURECAST? Isn't it "forecast"? The old weatherman was complaining that the FUTURECAST was actually showing the past, so that part was amusing. Then the young weatherman was worried because they "got a beep" from one of their weather machines. Then he said, "Wait, it was a good beep." The old weatherman said, "I like it when they do that." They chuckled with relief. They seem to be getting along much better.

$

McNeil sent me a youtube video of the kind I will NEVER "click" on. This time it turns out U.S. money has secret conspiracies printed on it in clever ways. Dr. Theresa says he also left me a phone message asking me to join the illuminati, but McNeil claims that she always puts a "spin" on his phone messages, so I don't know. See also. Also, see also. Ha! That dollar sign makes me think of an interview Eric Spitznagel did with the performer Ke$ha for VANITY FAIR. She explains how she has singlehandedly changed the meaning of the dollar sign! She says, "Whenever I’m walking by a bank and I see a big dollar sign, I just have to laugh to myself." Then Spitznagel makes me laugh by asking, "What banks have big dollar signs outside? Do you have an account with Scrooge McDuck?" And Ke$ha replies: "You know what I’m saying. A dollar sign isn’t just about money anymore. It’s also about glitter guns and whiskey." Hold on, people. We've seen how often flamboyant performers like Britney Spears are involved with the big conspiracies - every time, that's how often! - so maybe that chuckle should catch in your throat. Ke$ha is flaunting it! Right there in the middle of her name! What does she REALLY mean by "a dollar sign isn't just about money anymore"? I need to check that message from McNeil... UNLESS IT HAS BEEN ERASED.

Chuckles

I was reading a restaurant review in the New York Times. A squab tastes like "illicit rides in late-night cabs." Watch your back, it's the Travis Bickle of squabs! In the same paragraph, a lamb loin "is low-whistle-and-chuckles food." Both descriptions are positive in context, very positive, in fact. I have not been so excited since the "explosive percussive burst that has the glistening texture of sunlight on a snowfield."

The Bird Correspondent Was No Help At All

Last night at a bar, Tom Franklin chastised me for what he perceived as my timid and ambivalent relationship with Goldie the Wasp. Wasps, he declared, are the personification of evil, and cited an article by Stephen Jay Gould to back up his claim. I should swat them with a badminton racket, he suggested, bunting them onto the roof, where they would bake in the sun. He laughed off my suggestion that his method might be considered harsh. "They came down from the attic and stung me on my neck! In my own home!" he bellowed. I quoted the Godfather Part II back at him, "In MY HOUSE! Where my CHILDREN play with THEIR TOYS!" and oh the jolly warm chuckles we shared at our mutual shenanigans. When I got home, I had an email from the bird correspondent, who had the nerve to suggest that we put our cats in harm's way by training them to kill and eat wasps! She refused to give me the name of a bird that could do the trick - so protective of her precious birds, though their tough beaks are much more suited to the task than the soft pads of a cat. I appear to be alone on the wasp matter. I believe I shall next consult Aristophanes (pictured), who wrote a play about wasps, and I am sure it contains a lot of good tips on getting rid of them.

Stardust

The FBIL is here. This morning he chuckled warmly as he leafed through our copy of I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS! (exclamation point not mine), which I had placed on the coffee table for purposes of just such entertainment. Later we went to our new neighborhood bookstore (see the "links" sidebar to the right) and found out that the author of I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS!, Fletcher Hanks, is the subject of an article in the new BELIEVER magazine. As faithful readers - who may or may not exist - know, I am now okay with my favorite secret things being disseminated to the public at large (anxiety over that kind of occurrence is coincidentally the subject of a letter to THE BELIEVER this month), so I have no problem with everyone enjoying the work of Fletcher Hanks, even though the depressing coda to I SHALL DESTROY ALL THE CIVILIZED PLANETS! explains that he was a terribly mean man. Let me just add that while reading Mr. Hanks' comic book stories of a superhero named Stardust, I couldn't help but notice a few details which put me in mind of my upcoming novel. For example, at one point Stardust gathers everyone on the planet (they have all unwillingly flown off into space for reasons that you need to find out for yourself) and returns them to the exact locations from which they were expelled into the ether. The narrator of my novel does not do that but - SPOILER ALERT! - he does do something else with all the people of the earth. Also, Stardust can grow his hand to an amazing size - or so it appears in the drawings - and clobber people. On his wedding day, my narrator turns his hands into the size of bulldozer scoops. I can say no more. But this is just a weird coincidence. And anyway, it is not for clobbering purposes. Plus the novel was finished long before I discovered Fletcher Hanks. Still, I feel a strange tingle of kinship (professionally but not personally, I hope, with such a nasty fellow) and my old familiar jitters about treading a worn path.

Party Mustache

Who did I spy at last night's shindig but Jamie Allen? I pretended not to recognize him! Oh, how we chuckled warmly over that example of my crystalline wit. For you see, there is a whole long story about another time that Jamie thought I did not recognize him! The reason for my supposed snub, in Jamie's febrile brain, was the mustache he has recently grown, and which, he seems to believe, has given him the power of Lamont Cranston to cloud men's minds. It must be admitted that his mustache seemed to have "morphed" since the last time I saw it, growing two tiny muttonchops of its own. I know I am using the term "muttonchops" incorrectly, but I'm painting a verbal picture, okay, a verbal picture that has worn me out and rendered me incapable of typing for the moment. More shortly.

Jeff McNeil's Candyland Tips for Struggling Parents

As longtime "blog" readers will concede with a knowing chuckle, we at the Pendarvis Building have always held up Jeff McNeil as a paragon of gamesmanship. He proves himself again today, with this little nugget we found slipped under the door: "Here's a Candyland tip for the novice parent...Listen up, Whorton! The red cards and orange cards are VERY similar in color, and a six-year old is easily talked into a double red actually being a double orange if it suits your purpose at a certain juncture of the game. It's not cheating!! Just think of it as a 'lawyer training seminar' or something...it's what those guys get rich doing all day long."

I See Celebrity People

It's been too long, friends! But now I'm back from "Tinseltown" and ready to spread trivia throughout the universe, wherever people have "computing" machines in their homes, businesses, and places of worship. One exciting thing about going to the Los Angeles area is wondering what celebrities you will see. You will almost always see at least one! It is never the celebrity you would ever imagine seeing, were you asked to imagine seeing a celebrity. For example, many years ago I witnessed Tim Kazurinsky picking up a bag of breakfast to go. I wonder what Tim Kazurinsky eats for breakfast! I didn't have the nerve to ask. And now I guess I'll never know. Last year, when I was about to do a reading in a bookstore, I saw Vanessa Redgrave buying an atlas! A classy choice, Ms. Redgrave! On this most recent trip, however, I had begun to fear that I would have no celebrity sightings. And I almost didn't! It took all the way until I was getting on the elevator to leave the hotel. Who should get on the elevator with me but Barry Sonnenfeld, the former Coen Brothers D.P. turned director. I overheard him telling his elevator chum that his wife was from Ft. Worth! This is not the kind of information you can get just anywhere. Then he began talking about shooting BLOOD SIMPLE in Austin. He and his elevator chum began praising Austin. "GOOD CHEAP FOOD!" I screamed, to get into the conversation. They agreed that there was good cheap food in Austin. Then we almost got out on the 2nd floor rather than the lobby. Oh, how we chuckled inwardly at that! Just three regular fellows on an elevator! Which reminds me, a few years ago (1999, I'm fairly sure) I scared Marvin Hamlisch on an elevator. I wanted to talk about all the many things we had in common! But that was back in 1999, when I used to be stupid. Believe it or not, I actually had one more celebrity sighting TODAY, before I got on my airplane, but my goodness this "post" is getting long, so perhaps I should keep you in suspense until tomorrow. (Pictured, Marvin Hamlisch.)

Molasses Caveat

Having just now read the link provided by Lisa, I would like to make it clear for sensitive "blog" readers (as I hope one and all are!) that the molasses disaster is upsetting in some regards, so don't expect to "click" on it for a simple chuckle. It's horrible, actually. I expected something lighter, I suppose. Just letting you know!

"Blog" Celebrates 200th "Post"

It seems as if the 200th "post" of this venerable "blog" almost passed unnoticed. The honor belongs to a modest little number entitled "Miracle Cure". It's a fine little "post" and we're all very proud of it. But we can't honestly say that we don't wish the 200th had been one with a lilting, elliptical monicker like "Anonymous Department Store Imbroglio," which sounds as if it could be the title of a Bob Dylan song. Anyhow, it's time to look back at some of the "posts" that have given us such joy lo these many years. Who can forget the time I was too tired to read the newspaper? Or when Jeff got a special donut? We'll not soon see a donut like that again. How we chuckled together as a nation when the cat played with the rubber band. And mourned when I cut my finger. And there were moments of soaring artistry, too, like the time we all learned to read Donald Barthelme stories on the "internet." Truly, is there anything we can't do together? Here is to the next 100 "posts." No. Here is to YOU.