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Excerpts from the forthcoming
The Bureaucrat of Bedtime
"Just looking at the caveats to many medications is enough to put you on a gurney--- or the abstinence bandwagon.
Even proven male enhancement drugs such as Viagra are suspect. ‘For erections lasting longer than four hours, consult
your physician.’ Better you should consult a tree surgeon."
| - from Up Periscope, It’s Male Enhancement Time |
"Dogs can do everything from catching a Frisbee to sniffing out a hemp sandal a mile away to leading the blind. Can you
imagine a seeing-eye cat? Towing the person up a tree, across the top of a fence, then abandoning them in a crosswalk
the minute they spotted a bird or rodent."
"I sometimes wonder what the penalty for trashing the environment is in Canada. Do they publicly shame litterbugs, as
Puritans in Massachusetts once made miscreants wear a scarlet likeness of George Steinbrenner and root for the Yankees?"
| - from Clearly, Er, Cleanly Canadian |
"Winter is unhealthy enough to begin with. It’s like a purser shows up at your stateroom door every November with a menu;
only, instead of entrees it contains diseases. ‘What’ll it be this time, sir? Intestinal flu? A little chronic fatigue
syndrome? How about a nice sinus infection? You haven’t had one of those in a while."
"Try as I might, I can’t help having some increasingly outdated notions of youthful femininity. My idea of a ten year-old
girl still conjures someone in a frilly smock seated on a swing reading Charlotte’s Web, not Little Ms. Bowflex breaking
someone’s nose with a karate kick or pummeling her in the mire."
| - from The Cuteness Factor |
"It’s funny how your slant on the practical changes as you get older. As an English major in college having my laundry done
at home, I thought the most beautiful thing in the world was lines of verse such as Keats’s ‘…on a half-reaped furrow sound
asleep,/ Drowsed with the fume of poppies.’ Now my idea of the sublime is contained in a single haiku-like phrase: Tumble Dry Low."
"As time goes by in a relationship, lines start to blur like those Ingrid Bergman wrote to Rick in Casablanca. Familiarity breeds,
if not contempt, then casualness. It’s fine and dandy to say you should be able to let your hair down around your spouse. The
problem is that he or she may wind up with a fuzzy toothbrush if you do so in the sink."
"There’s nothing inherently wrong with secondhand goods, provided they still have useful life. With appliances, this means that
lights will not flash and sparks fly, as in a depth-charged submarine, when they’re plugged in. Unfortunately, whatever my parents
lugged home resembled Das Boot."
"During part of our trip to the sceptered isle we lived in one room at a B & B in Stratford-Upon-Avon. Our host called it ‘the
family room,’ presumably because after several days in it you feel as murderous as Charles Manson’s Family. Though barely larger
than a Mongolian ger, it contained three beds, two nightstands, an armoire, and two makeup tables with chairs. The floor space
between could be navigated only if you applied enough grease to your shins for a Channel swim. We now know how a torpedo feels
in its tube."
| - from Still Dating After All These Years |
