All That's Missing

I think maybe this rental house is where Boogie Nights was filmed - not the sex parts or Roller Girl’s scenes or the one in the men’s room when Mark Wahlberg looks down inside his underpants but the part where this drug lord in his bathrobe is brandishing an automatic weapon and there’s loud discordant music that just won’t STOP.

Yup, this stucco palace high in the desert hills feels like that scene.

The living room is the size of a hotel lobby, which is nice but the basement wall is kicked in and the fridge’s ice and water delivery system is broken with the wires all hanging down.

The dead moths are still dropping on our food from the busted ceiling panel and also: the fuse box in the basement is yanked apart and the pool’s heater is broken so the pool is so cold it makes your legs go eggplant-purple the minute you try to step into it. There are no clocks, and no blankets and not a single table lamp either so no reading in bed but only lying there waiting for the thugs to pull up outside.

The ceramic “decorations” have all been broken, then badly repaired with fat blobs of glue coming out the cracks (see?)

Plus there’s an electric piano that keeps playing “Winter Wonderland” and a bullet hole in the front hall mirror and finally a secret room in the basement that the kids are calling “Gimps’ room” but that’s another movie, that’s “Pulp Fiction.” And now all I can say is Where is Samuel L Jackson when you need him?

happy vacation. Incoming! (bullet hole, living room mirror)

Some Cialis Please - Supersized for the Fat Girl

You know you got fat when your rings, your bikini undies AND ALL YOUR BRAS are suddenly too tight. You know it when you look at yourself in the mirror from the back and think “Michelin Man.”My question is What happened to that SYLPH from five years ago? Plus, where’s my black hair? What’s with this dry-mop the color of battery acid? and what’s with the mustache action all a sudden?If I’m gonna like TURN INTO A MAN all I can say is, I want some Cialis. Now! And oh yeah, a wife to wash my giant clothes and do all my bending over.Failing that, I'm off to Weight Watcher to liberate this poor girl (She's under here somewhere!)

New and Hot (Lonely Smiley Girl)

Just got another email from my many friends in cyberspace, Natasha this time, shy pretty girl at internet café  lonely smiley please to write me so we can meet.... (Oh Natasha! Where would I be without you and your spiritual sisters with your daily offer of love?)

Where would I be without the offer of commerce either come to think of it, because here’s what came two minutes later from one Mr. Alwin who is 'pleased to establish Long-term & Solid Trading relation with you, our factory has been dealing in producing all different kinds of Fashion Jewelry for many years, our Idiomatical, Multigrade & Charming Jewelry and Ornaments Series, as follows: very New & Hot Fashion Necklace, Elegant Diamond Ring, Exquisite Workmanship Bracelet & Bangle, Beautiful Hair Ornaments, Brooch, Keychain, Extremely Pattern Earring....'

Well who doesn't love an idiom? Three strikes and you're out! Deaf as a haddock! Shove it! Bite me! And I’ve been a fan of extremely pattern all my life as haven’t we all am I right. Like when you throw up after eating too much of your pizza–with-the-works. I just look at that throw-up and think Watch out Jackson Pollock!  Plus Alwin is inviting me over, see? 'Besides we make sure the Excellent Quality, the Reasonable Price and the First Class after-Sale Service, if necessary, welcome to our factory and have coffee in our office, so that you are very satisfied to accept our items. If necessary, I will choose our jewelry attached price list and send you then, you will confirm whether we can cooperate with you then, thanks! Wish our Enjoyable & Successful Cooperation! Very looking forward to your prompt reply!!

Hey I'm answering the guy right now because you know I LOVE bangles.  I LOVE idiomatical, multigrade and charming jewelry and ornaments series!  And come to think of it I'M a pretty, lonely girl here skippin' church here and going on the Internets! Please to write me so I can hand you off to my boss who will steal your identity and clobber you with spam until you die!:-)

Viva Veritas!

The graphic seen on all Exit signs here in Italy is of a little green guy running like hell for his very life, but let’s tell they truth here: when it comes to actual languages, some are a lot prettier than others:

Here’s the English on the plastic bag the typical hotel provides for your dirty laundry: “Linen to be washed and ironed,” it says. Then there's the French phrase for the same thing: “Linge à laver ou à repasser,” It's OK but it's nothing great, right? And forget the message in German: “Schmutz-oder bügelwäsche. ””Schmuz? Oder?” I mean how unpretty is that?

But in Italian? In Italian the message is just plain sublime. Dirty clothes or not you just can’t argue with “Biancheria da lavare o stirare.”It makes you want to break into song, am I wrong? And it almost- ALMOST - makes you forget how very frank and practical Europeans really are, because not only do the Exit signs tell it like it is and even though I myself just used it to wash my socks in, this little dandy gizmo which we have seen in four of our last four hotels really IS what Mick Dundee called it in that cute first movie that bears his name!

Short Fat Slut

Where’s Waldo? Well he’s the guy in the blue shirt, see him? My old man?  Anyone who had been with us these last four days would spot him right away because he's been wearing the same shirt since Sunday morning, seeing as Alitalia lost his luggage.

When MY luggage got lost last May and our cruise ship sailed without it I was wearing the same outfit for three days, along with one or two cheesy supplemental get-ups which was all I could find in the ship’s one clothes shop. I was like Goldie Hawn in “Overboard” where she plays this rich spoiled thing who hits her head and gets amnesia and simple workin’ guy Kurt Russell who’s trying to raise his three kids all alone convinces her she’s actually HIS wife, sure she is, doesn't she remember their romantic past, how they had sex on their first date in the front seat of his car? He even goes and gets a muu-muu that once belonged to his real wife, now departed, and has her put it on.

“So I was short?! And .....fat?! I was a short, fat slut?” she asks, looking in the mirror at herself. See that’s how I felt in the cruise line’s skimpy tank tops and shorts: like a short fat slut who you could hear whining all over the Caribbean. Way farther way than that even since I blogged about it here.

But this man of mine? This man of mine hasn’t whined ONCE, even as he has kept on rinsing out his one blue polo shirt and drying it with a hairdryer... He was fully prepared to do that with his undies even until I revealed that in my deceitful wifely way I had sent away for some special meshy briefs, famous for their washablity and guaranteed to dry in less than two hours. I knew better than to give them to him before we left home, though; I knew he'd  disdain and refuse them then, these girly-seeming things made out of what, old Swiffer cloths? So I put 'em in my own suitcase and did not produce them until the morning of our first day here.

And was he grateful? Are you kidding, was he ever!  I mean how ELSE would a person feel in the land of wonderful light and the fine wines and the sobbing viloins? How ELSE would he feel toward the short fat slut who saved the day?!

Your Unit is Ready

“Hi” began the breathless email I just got. “This is Brian! I ordered your new unit and need to hear from you for confirmation on delivery date!”  So ‘Brian’ here clearly wants me to think that not only are we such pals that he needs no last name but also that I will smack my head and say “Oh my UNIT! I totally forgot I ordered it!"  Pretty cute using the word “unit” too, a generic term that applies to so many things, your conditioner, your apartment, your toupee.

Speaking of 'rugs', I had a six-foot-three, 230-pound hair-stylist friend I’ll call Huey. By night he wore leather chaps and chains and participated in various tableaux in which he dressed like a giant painted woman but by day he made things pretty. In the salon he was all you could ask for: he fitted wigs on hair-loss people like nobody's business, he cried when you cried and he could do anyone’s hair living AND dead and send them to the party looking better.

Since he was bald himself  he talked a lot about his own unit. I'd go see him and ask about his day and he would treat me to such vivid descriptions of his morning rituals I felt as if I was sitting right next to him at the dressing table in his apartment - and naturally there was lots of talk about his unit, which was strictly top drawer and got more attention than most people’s pets.

I sigh to think of him. Maybe someday I’ll have a unit too and yes I DO know the word has another meaning and no I don’t contemplate sexual reassignment surgery QUITE yet BUT IF I DID – or if I were bald, hot or needed an apartment why I’d write right back to Brian here lickety-split and say “My UNIT? It’s ready for shipment? Well here’s my home address, bank account numbers and Social honey! Now you send that thing right on out, I’ll be waitin’ by the door!”

Viva Viagra?

OK, you want to know why we resent you guys? We resent you because all the best creativity gets directed to your needs instead of ours. Take the names of the various sexual aids: YOU get a name like ‘Viagra’, which sounds like vitality with a little agriculture thrown to help sow those life-givin’ oats of yours. You get ‘Levitra,’ a name deriving from the Latin word for ‘rise’. I see the Levitra ads and all I can think of is the ladder on a fire truck cranking slowly and sturdily upward. You get ‘Cialis’ which sounds like “See Alice,” because there's just no TELLING what Alice might be moved to do in the face of your powerful display of manhood!

Now look at the names of the products they have for us. Is there a ‘Honey Blossom’? Or a 'Heaven’s Gate’? Or a ‘Nectar of the Goddess”? No way babe. What they have for us is something called  ‘Vagifem’, a sipping straw-size syringe-like thingy that carries at its tip a tiny payload of estrogen to be catapulted boink! against the cervix and left there to do what it can do.

Vagifem, Gad! Can there BE a worse word?

Plus men also get perky jingles like the “Viva Viagra!” one. They get romantic commercials where chicks soaking in hot tubs reach out to link pinkies with these about-to-be-proven-tireless partners, commercials where some pliant gal with shoulder-length hair swoons prettily in the arms of her big strong man, EVEN THOUGH HE’S IN THE  POWDER-BLUE TUX HE WORE TO HIS PROM 30 YEARS AGO HAR-DE-HAR-HAR. Even at that he still seems not at all dorky but cool and fun and ironic, a life-of-the- party guy who's not about to let a little e.d. get him down!

All this do guys get, and we get .......Vagifem -  and why? Because they think we’re lightweights? Sissies? Fems ourselves?  Just a bunch of fems with vaginas? And who named THAT body part you ask? Who but the men of Ancient Rome and guess what it means in Latin? It means “scabbard,” as in the sheath for a sword.

Yep, sheaths to their swords are our bodies to them, holsters to their little pistols, this part of us that is most complex and intricate through which all must travel to get here, this wondrous part named and defined strictly in relation to the male, walk-ins welcome,  step right up, open 24 hours a day, we’re here to serve ya.

I say we rename THEIR products with the same unromanticized bluntness and how's this for starters:  How’s  ‘Penissimus Maximus’ and the slogan can be “It’s Scrotally Awesome”?

Revolt of the Powerless

Little kids are so sweet the way they repeat their parents’ phrases. A while ago I was sitting with a little girl two who really REALLY wanted the toy that this seven-month-old beside her was clutching, maybe because it wasn't even a toy so much as totally delightful AID TO RELAXATION, a sort of wee vibrating robot that looks like this:

She just WANTED this gizmo. Bad. And so said “I’m sure the baby would be happy to share that with me.” She'd heard this phrase from her parents evidently and decided to give it a try -  and just like that the thing was buzzing away in her hand and she was smilin' to beat the band.

The trick in life, children,  is to manipulate reality with words, just like she did: say a thing and hope that the saying will make it so. I know it's a scam I personally have been tryin' to run for like 50 years now.

But what would happen if little kids turned the tables and used those powerful suggestions on us their keepers? We say to them “Shall I check your hair now?" meaning 'Shall I drag this painful metal-toothed comb through your tender scalp looking for nits?' We NEVER say "Would you like a bath tonight or should we just say the hell with it?", NEVER ask “Would you LIKE me to find the tenderest hairs at the  nape of your neck and rake my fingers through them?” Oh no. It's all false choices we offer them, like those personality tests that ask if you’d rather have your nostril hairs pulled out one by one or be thrown from a third floor window.  “Should we take the lice-comb to you first or start the evening's activities by scouring your bottom with infernally stinging baby wipes WHILE GRASPING YOUR TINY ANKLES AND HOISTING THEM HIGH ABOVE YOUR HEAD? “

What I worry about is when the tables turn at which point “Will that be paper or plastic?" won't exactly be the choice that they're offering us.  More like “Mom? Dad? Will that be the pillow over your face or an overdose of Nyquil?" when we’re all 110 and they’re 80 and sick to death of us.

In fact what I think is we should fork over all our foot massagers, head ticklers and heating pads RIGHT NOW - and  maybe, just maybe, they’ll let us live.

Hide-a-Key

I love my post office, not just because it’s so neat and compact, so Neo-classically civic in that built-in-the-1930s way, but because it’s such a beehive of activity. Outside this place it I have had my fender bumped, been bitten by a swan and seen an elegantly dressed lady pull back her head like a snake and spit! into the bushes. Once I even got propositioned there by a man 20 years my junior. (It happens, ask any woman who smiles a lot. It says nothing about us and everything about Testosterone and the bald truth that Nookie-Hope Springs Eternal in the breasts of those roiling with it.)

I live in the Aleutian Islands, of course. I say that so you won't try going to Post Office and wrecking things for the cheery 50-something man I’m going to tell you about now: He was bounding up the steps just as I was bounding down when I ran into a woman I know who stopped me mid-bound on the third step. As I stood talking with her and facing back up the steps in the direction of the Post office’s broad façade, I saw this man suddenly shoot straight up in the air, sweep his hand long the lintel over one of the windows and land with a look of immense satisfaction on his face.

“What did you just do?” I asked him.

“I keep my the key to my Post Office Box up there. This way I never have to worry about forgetting it!”

Now how adorable is that ? Just when you’re thinking everyone is lost in cynicism and mistrust along comes a sweet Jack-in-the-Box of a guy like this. It's what I love about life on this earth.

And now if you'll promise to respect his privacy and not swipe his key and steal all his mail I’ll show you a picture of my Post Office, which I harvested just now by Image-Googling the name of my town in the Aleutians and the word “Neo-classical.”

And Whoops! what do you think came up as well? A Neo-classical picture of ME in the tub after a long day’s writing, where hey I mean you can totally SEE why the young guy hit on me, eh? A babe all right, even WITHOUT my Wonder Bra on!

The Grouchy and the Hurt and the Kids All Going to Proms

Kind of a cold rainy darn day here. I had my session with John at Fitness Together where the motto is One Client One Trainer One Goal, the goal being to separate you from your money as fast as possible, JUST KIDDING GUYS, John is wonderful! I have a messed-up neck because I jumped out of bed during a leg cramp six years ago, fainted, fell to the floor like a tray full of dishes, woke after a bit, got up and thought I'd better go to the bathroom and see if my head was still attached, lurched toward the john and fainted THERE, this time smashing the corner of my skull on the pointy Corian vanity top, bouncing off the tile floor and coming to rest at last, out cold. I have scant memory of that tumble to be honest and not much more about the one before it and only really KNOW that I had these two falls because when the lovely people hosting me at this gracious home saw me in the morning they said “Um, how did you sleep?” and when I said “Great!” they said “Then WHAT IN HELL were those two loud crashes five minutes apart at 1am?!"

Anyway it yanked my neck into a state of permanent weirdness and then I got the arthuritis in it so I have to be careful is the best I can say. Oh and plus (how boring is this?) now I have scoliosis too and a rib cage that’s trying to screw itself into my pelvis, rotating down and down to collapse entirely onto my hips (and do what? send my internal organs out through my mouth? ) So John stretches me and we strengthen the weak parts and note the places where movement is constricted etc… He is very kind and also funny and smart and he can really “see” structure.

Some bad things happened in the last 24 hours: I got into a very uncomfortable situation with a guy who I was slow to realize has HATED ME FOR YEARS plus I’m still bleary with fatigue and now I've burned the onions I was making to bring to Uncle Ed along with the pork tenderloin I made him and the fresh corn and all but some good things have happened too: David was supposed to go to Kentucky for three days yesterday but they cancelled his flight and he basically decided 'Screw Kentucky' and came home to his nice wife instead and we went to be early, and he’s coming home to me AGAIN TONIGHT and we’ll make a fire and drink wine and read our books and how great is that to be a married lady? They HAVE to come home to you every night! And then there’s this awesome gizmo at the top here that I saw in a catalogue and so maybe I'll send away for that and stretch my little neck daily while going to see John too of course. I haven’t leapt out of bed with leg cramps since my doctor told me to embrace the pain instead so maybe all’s right with the world after all and let’s bring that food to Uncle Ed and then come home and get COZY!

The young people in our town have their senior prom tonight so maybe if he finds a minute God could look in on them and keep them safe, and all children and even stupid Bill Clinton who broke our hearts and his poor exhausted amazing wife too and really all of us, the ones we love and the pains in our ass and even the ones who hate us Amen.

Even Jesus Loves a Pizza

LAST YEAR'S FUN

Here it is Tuesday night and I’m STILL not back to normal after the big retreat weekend, a dirty-sock, shower-free sleepover extravaganza that’s not normally held right in church. Last year it took place at the Marotta’s summer house and here on the left is an example of the fun we adults had sealing the faces of the kids up in cement to keep them off their cell phones (kidding!) Masks and Why We Wear Them" was the theme of that particular weekend. The part here pictured was just the making of the masks which the kids then decorated and talked about on a metaphorical level as they say, then later spilled ketchup on or else wore as crash helmets or codpieces or who knows what when the old folks were out of sight.

All that was last year though…THIS year we had the big retreat weekend really late, and we had it right at church and here’s how the whole thing went down as best as I can recall:

On Friday at 6pm: 15 teenagers and four adults gather in the designated Youth Room, a basement ‘bunker’ redolent for as long as I can remember of that chicken soup-smelling-kind of human sweat.

At 7 we begin tackling the retreat’s theme, Making Time for God When You’re Almost Too Busy to Shower and at 7:30 curl up to watch The Golden Compass , which the religious right thinks exalts Satan though these kids don’t see it that way. They see a strong girl-child who does not wish to become a lady, and the search for a father, they see the quest for meaning, yadda yadda and so forth. In other words what they see mostly is a craftily concocted and slightly cynical amalgam of a half dozen other blockbuster films from Star Wars to The Mummy to Harry Potter and his many his cinematic offspring. Kids are sharp: they don’t just understand movies; they ingest them, like food pellets.

Then at 11 Judy tells her little flock that it’s time for Taps and they can sleep anywhere on this level or else one flight up in the cozy pinkness of tiny Ripley Chapel. If they don’t want to sleep but talk instead that’s fine too only no going up into the sanctuary and no going outside.

On Saturday it becomes clear that they have NOT slept that much but they are young and clear-eyed still and begin the day by going outside to look for God in a blade of grass so to speak. Then they return to talk about what they saw, then we eat lunch and do some physical stuff, then talk about forgiveness: when do you let a thing go and when do you not? Some kids counsel others that it is never worth it to carry a grudge, even against that lazy and unkind teacher who doesn’t even read what he makes you write but glances at it and gives you the check-plus or the check or the check-minus strictly on the basis of length.

At 4 I do a little journaling seminar with an assignment attached and off they go to write for 40 minutes the darlings, each one finding a place alone to scribble for 40 minutes, later sharing what it felt like do this but not necessarily sharing what was written, because that is personal.

For supper Judy announces that she has bought steak tips of all things plus a big green salad plus some lovely hot rolls and they all smile at her because they love her so much but she knows what it means and says “OK how many would eat pizza if we got pizza?” and 15 hands go up so we order four giant pizzas and they eat them all and the steak tips too and the salad and everything from last night along with six or eight bags of cookies and chips.

Then a stab at meditation as a way to call God closer. Then the drawing of names as we use tissue paper and cardboard and glue and bits of Scripture to make something for our person and that’s it for Saturday. The grownups all sleep and the kids just keep on talkin’ - all night long I suppose - and darned of they STILL don’t look great Sunday morning. And Judy has on her clerical garb and looks super-great. And even the two guy chaperones look good if slightly more bearded than they did Friday night whereas I myself look like some deranged old dust mop if a dust mop can be said to look deranged and I realize that I am in fact deranged when, having nipped home to shower and dress in Sunday-Go-to-Meetin’ clothes I return to church and am just ascending the big stone steps TO SEE MY WHOLE SKIRT FALL TO MY ANKLES BECAUSE IN MY EXHAUSTED STATE I NEVER EVEN ZIPPED IT NEVER MIND BUTTONED IT.

But so what? I was pretty much alone out there and in any case as my 11-year-old once said to me “Nobody’s looking at YOU Mom!” - but how about we all look at the kids now in these two imperfect snapshots and you try telling me they don’t look ecstatically happy, even three-quarters of the way into the comfort of the slow-moving Sunday morning service!

Disgruntled Would-Be Memoirist Bitten on Fanny

Hey who wouldn’t want to write a disgruntled memoir about all the shady stuff they we're forced to live with? Back when it was Howdy Doody Time for all us early Boomers how frequently did I myself want to set down in black and white the abuses I suffered as a toddler when mothers would routinely shut their wee ones up in the ingenious Gitmo-style restraint knows as the "Snuggle Ducky,” a sort of zippered cotton envelope which prevented a person from sucking on his fingers or toes, forced him to lie as if crucified, unable even to scratch his nose - I choke back old tears writing this - able only to do what my three-year-old self bravely, gamely, spoke of as ‘making cookies ‘ which meant using the only thing I had, my little rosebud of a baby mouth to suck little circles of moisture onto the cloth as the only source of sleepytime fun. ~ SOB! ~

Plus, I was also given enemas, right in front of three, sometimes four wildly smiling older women. (What was it with the enema and the woman of former times, can somebody tell me?) Also, my sister and I were taken out on leashes, in public! Also tied to the maple tree out front so we wouldn’t wander off.

In other words I can totally identify with this Scott McClellan dude and his exposé of life in the White House. And the only thing that stops me from taking pen in hand and writing up my own book of Humphs and Grievance is the sad fact that I myself live in fear now: of my very own cats of all things who I can just tell in the twilight of their careers have totally forgotten the meaning of loyalty and are poised to start talking to the media. And I know what they’ll cite: The tuna-flavored lip balm designed to bring up hairballs; the odd thermometer addressed to their nether parts when such a thing proved needful; the cry of genital mutilation from our boycat, just because he got his pee-pee cut off this spring BUT NONE OF THESE WERE MY IDEA, they were the vet’s, and the vet is my superior and nothing is my fault ever and all right so I won’t write my memoirs but continue instead to hold my tongue and lick my wounds poor me, poor sainted, sainted me.

Sex and the Ninth Grade Ninny

The column I wrote for this weekend is a tribute to my middle school teacher who just last week departed this life at the ripe old age of 102. You can see it at right now by clicking here.

In it I told of the English class we had her for and her sweet vexed utterances at all our hi-jinks. (“What AILS you people?” she was always saying to us.) I did not tell how naughty we really were, especially my best friend Kathy and I. For example we had a music teacher named Miss Priest, a maiden lady, young and pale in a cashmere sweater and pearls who disapproved of the two of us, perhaps because we held our violins under our chins in Orchestra and those instruments just shook with our laughter the whole time we were rehearsing up under the sweltering roof of that Civil War-era schoolhouse. Kathy always got assigned the cool complicated part with many curlicues and arpeggios, while I was always given the dumb part that no matter what the tune was went basically “Uh uh, UH uh, uh uh, UH uh..." - just the two sounds, just what you could saw out for the low notes without doing too much violence to the melody. A monkey could have played my part and this was what we found so killingly funny. We laughed all through "Scenes from Carmen" and even, preparing for graduation, through the grave and weighty bars of "Pomp and Circumstance" itself

We thought we didn’t like Miss Priest; probably we had crushes on her. Anyway we found a greeting card designed for an ordination, tore out the real message inside, wrote a new message in a demented-looking scrawl and slipped it under her door. “Thou Art a Priest Forever” the real part of the card said, then in our writing on the inside, “That is, until I crush you in my arms my little PASSION FLOWER ha HAH!” We didn’t get suspended but we sure-enough got caught and so set out to compose a long and earnestly over-the-top letter of apology that made us feel wonderful connected to the side of the angels, just wonderfully forgiven if only by ourselves.

And that wasn’t half as bad as what we did when we found out the youngest male teacher in the school was getting married: We put a jar of Vaseline on his desk which carried the strong implication that of all things he would need in his new conjugal state Vaseline was uppermost – just as if we actually knew Thing One about the marital act, which, uh, we didn’t.

Back in the late-90’s, thirty years and three kids into my own marriage I remember a youth group leader telling the high school kids we both worked with that they really and truly would be a lot better off postponing sex until much later because it was, well… it was just too complicated.

“Complicated?” said one of these sweet kids, looking truly puzzled. “Why complicated?”

“Let’s just say it involves a lot of towels,” she said with a meaningful look.

Dave! I rushed right home and said to my husband, “I think we’re doing it wrong!”

Ah dear…Our old English teacher was great all right but how could she answer the pressing questions of her middle-schoolers? How could anyone have answered them when what we really wondered about was sex which of all things in this wide world is STILL the most mysterious?

Our Dumb World

So it turns out cheering yourself up by listening to people call each other names on the Internet works, but only for a while. I got sad again last night but then did I get lucky! Around 10:00 I got a ladder out and began checking out the top shelf of my bedroom closet - I smelled dead mouse, I know I did - and instead found a copy of an "atlas" called Our Dumb World written by those merry online jokesters at The Onion. I'd bought it to give to one of our kids, then lost it, then forgot about it, hey HEY! here it was now, right next to this cute little sparkly nightlight still in the package.

The book has two pages for every one of the world’s countries, one with funny comments and one with a map - like their map for Greenland, which shows all kinds of key areas. (My favorites: “Mt. Enormous," “God-It’s-Cold,” and a large area up by the northwest coast labeled “Shitload of Fiords”

Pretty funny stuff for a tame country like Greenland, right? But the stuff they have about France is even better. At the top of France’s page it says, in boldface, “One Nation Above God” and then launches in: “Located directly in the heart of the universe around which everything else revolves, the nation of France is the sole beacon of life in an otherwise black and empty void… The French have produced every great achievement in every field of endeavor in the history of mankind including the sculptures of Michelangelo, the symphonies of Beethoven and the writings of William Shakespeare …The people of France are extremely proud of their cultural achievements and offer no apologies for giving the world such things as self-indulgent cinema, the awkward ménage à trios or the Frenchman.” Then the map shows places like “Toplèsse,” "Whine Country” and “Sole Acre of Country That Has Never Been Surrendered to a Foreign Power.”

Egad! And I thought seeing people make fun of individuals on the internet was amusing! I know the world will never improve if we start mocking whole countries; but I used to be a high school teacher and it seems to me the writers at The Onion are like that witty kid in the back of the back of the room: you were grateful for his energy, even if you did sometimes have to send him to the principal's office.