Swimming Upstream One of my prized possessions from my mother is an odd poem in a silly little gilded frame that goes: Most any poor old fish can float And drift along and dream: But it takes a regular LIVE ONE To swim against the stream It is attributed to a Maurine Hathaway, a woman nicknamed The Poetess of the Pines. She was one of the contributors of these little ditties to a guy by…
Thursdays Suck I suspect that many people, probably the same ones who invented Thank God It’s Friday (TGIF), have felt that Mondays are the day of the week that sucks the most. Needless to say, this likely has mostly to do with the need to go back to work or school come Monday, and the fact that that represents an obligation rather than a desire. There are plenty of songs and accolades to Saturday and…
Crazy Is As Crazy Does Today was spent driving from the middle of Minnesota, from the little town of Austin, which I picked randomly when planning this trip. As I was checking out of the Holiday Inn I noticed a display case in the lobby. It was filled with every manner of promotional item for Spam one could think of. It seems that Austin is the home of that favorite pink canned meat we all…
Back at the Breakfast Bar Sleep patterns are an interesting beast. They certainly set the tone for the night and they can wreck havoc with your day as well. I wish I could tell you what normal is in general or even to me, but I can’t. There is a new normal at every turn when you get to my age. My consistent gold standard is to get from six to eight hours of actual…
Joining the Moose Lodge We have just completed out first day of our return cross-country trek. According to Roadtrippers, we went 523 miles today in a little more than eight hours. Neither Kim nor I am all that keen on slow-playing parts of the country that we have crossed a lot over our lives. The span between Ithaca and Indiana is a zone we have each crossed innumerable times, so we were inclined to just…
The Prince and the Pea You all know the story of the princess and the pea. It’s about this young princess that is so very delicate that she must be given a bed that has an extra soft mattress in order to be able to sleep at night. She tells this to her prince and while he wants to believe she is a real princess, his queen mother wants proof so she decides to put…
Arresting Development Back one summer in the mid-1990’s, I spent the Fourth of July weekend in Utah. Joining us that year was my nephew Alex, who must have been in high school at the time. We had taken a side trip to Fort Bridger, Wyoming where I had stopped at a roadside fireworks emporium and bought some seemingly harmless fireworks to shoot off in celebration of Independence Day. When the day came and it was…
Let ‘Em All Go To Hell Except Cave 76 Do you remember comedy albums? I guess they have been replaced by Comedy Podcasts or Sirius Comedy Radio or maybe the regular Comedy Central not-so-special Specials. Like a good cartoon in my youth that got played over and over again to our glee (Beep! Beep!), where the themes were simple and easy to grasp and the key to most of the humor came in the repetition…
Paging Doctor Cohen with an Assist by Cliff Davis We are spending the weekend at Camp Davis on Lake Ariel in the Poconos, the lovely vacation home of our dear friends Cliff and Linda. I met Cliff and Linda fifty-one years ago on the second floor of University Halls Dormitory number Four (called U-Hall 4 by its denizens). The greatest difference between this U-Hall and the other five identical cinderblock post-WWII buildings was that unlike…
Ten-Digit Dialing I got an interesting notice yesterday from my mobile phone service provider, which happens to be Spectrum (since they offer the Verizon system without the added Verizon cost structure and smarmy, cheating ways as documented in previous stories). The notice was intended for their customers to inform them that from now on there is no such thing as “local calling” and that all calls must heretofore be placed with a full ten-digit number…