Cut the Guys Some Slack

Everywhere you went this last week you saw them: desperate guys hoping to stay out of trouble with their ladies. I think of the one I saw a year ago at the supermarket checkout at 9 at night, clutching a bouquet of flowers so wilted it seemed like week-old romaine.We both looked down at it when he placed it on the belt. “Hey it’s the thought that counts!” he said defensively.My own man Old Dave is never defensive when he presents such gifts.  He felt GOOD about the can of WD-40 he gave me one year. Ditto the jumper cables I got the next year. When our kids were little, what I did was to make a huge deal of Valentine’s Day, with food coloring even. (Pink milk! Mashed potatoes the color of Strawberry Shortcake’s petticoats!)What he did was bring us one small square box of fudge.One year anyway. Oh and one year he bought me a card, though he didn't bother signing it.It must have been the following year that I got some 'marriage revenge' by washing his underpants with my dark-red sweater. But I had less understanding then. And the world was very different.I think of the old jokes male stand-up comics used to make, like ”My wife: Can’t live with her, can’t live without her.“ And “My wife: She’s so big that when she sits around the house she sits AROUND the house.” You don’t hear those anymore. Things shifted somewhere along the line and now nobody DARES make fun of women. Rather, we show how evolved we are by making fun of men.Think about it: All over the media men are now portrayed as louts or goofballs, or well-meaning doofuses, like the Phil Dunphy character on ABC’s Modern Family.Only that’s not what men are like at all, at least not in my experience.I say this because in my line of work I get to talk to a lot of strangers. I also receive a lot of e-mails, a surprising amount of them from men.One man wrote to say that when he moved to his new town and began reading my column in his local paper he thought of me as his first friend in the area. I found that an extremely sensitive and generous thing to say.Another wrote to tell about a cat he drove past that morning as the poor thing lay by the side of the road, just as his neighbor sped going in the other direction. He stopped his car. He saw the blood.  “I think my neighbor hit her without realizing it,” he wrote in this email that I still have.  “My first thought was to knock frantically on doors, but instead I called Animal Control because the cat was still alive. “I hope I made the right decision,” he added, “but I can’t stop thinking about it.”And a third man wrote once to describe how kind and sensitive his young sons were when his best friend died. “Joseph is having fun in Heaven,’” one told him. “Someday you’ll make a new friend,” said the other gently.Men are louts and dopes and goofballs? I don’t think so. Men are our partners in adulthood, our allies, who find themselves living in a culture that paradoxically still feels free to mock signs of tenderness in them.So what do I care if my man doesn’t ‘deliver’ on this shamelessly commercial shakedown of a day? When for me, secretly, it’s been enough to have a good set of jumper cables, and that fresh can of WD-40 when I need it.So thanks Dave for all the fun. It was those veiny forearms that caught me but all the fun we've had since then that has kept me by you. (Arms so famous they're on display in the world's coolest art gallery!  :-) ) 

Kick in the Pants

I got sore at Old Dave on our recent flight west; he always tries to hold my boarding pass and he did that again the other day."I can hold my own boarding pass!" I hissed when he tried to take it from me at the ticket counter.Then he said to take my plastic bag of toiletries out of my carry-on as we went through Security, which made me equally wild. Did I need to be told that?He always fishes around in MY seat pocket before we deplane too, to see if I've forgotten and left anything in there he says. Grrrr!The other day, with my having twice acted so indignant, he decided to keep mum and try not to worry about what I might be leaving behind as we changed planes in Dallas.The result of all this? I (temporarily) lost my boarding pass, I forgot to take my cosmetics out of my carry-on for proper scrutiny and I left my i-Pad on the first plane from Boston during the layover and had to do some mighty fast acting to put THOSE three problems aright!Sometimes life just gives you a good kick in the pants I guess. And sometimes that's just what you deserve.

Serves Me Right

I wrote this at 5pm Sunday just before beginning my 18-hour journey homeward.  I guess I though if I wished for two good flights, I’d get them. Hah! Here's what I said, evidently thinking I could predict the future:

 "I feel lucky right now because I flew all night and nothing bad happened. I didn’t get stuck next to a huge guy or hemmed in by large unconscious persons such that I couldn't get up and go to the bathroom..."

Let me stop right there.. I mean, maybe there were things to feel grateful for, like the nice great salad at one airport and the glazed salmon and broccoli at the next one; like that friendly waiters and the couple kissing at the table next to mine, a good omen always....BUT!I did in fact  get stuck next to two unconscious snorers, and they were on the six-hour leg of the flight  and me pinned in a window seat. I did in fact get stuck to a giant of a guy who looked exactly like Kahl Drogo from Game of Thrones.Only he weighed 400 pounds such that I was sort of tucked in under his chest the whole time.And he smelled like cheese.A good lesson for me never to write about stuff that hasn't happened yet.

Now Boarding

Six hours in one airport, four hours in the next and the waiter at Chili's Too here in LA just tried to Talk me into a second glass of wine."I really shouldn't," I said. "I mean I have to fly in an hour."He smiled."Well, but I'm not the pilot of course."And then he said, "Ever see the movie Flight?""Denzell's new movie! Not yet!""You should see it," he said.Here's the trailer and me about to board the red-eye to Boston... I should see it, no doubt Just maybe not tonight. ;-)Take a look! [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlFMZ5D8FNc]

Missing It

I'm not yet back in Boston because 3,500 flights got cancelled in the blizzard, mine among them.I can only rely on photos like this gorgeous one of the mall on Commonwealth Avenue, as darkness fell last night. (Charles Krupa of the Associated Press took it.)The city looks beautiful, from this distance, but how it will look to me when I get back?  I'm way out west in Arizona, with four members of my family. Their flights, set for tomorrow, will likely go out as scheduled, but because I was supposed to come back early for a long-scheduled event planned for February 8th, my flight has been rebooked, not getting me back into Boston until Monday morning after a total of ten hours waiting in two airports, one of them even farther away from Boston than Tucson is.I'll be alone with my suitcase and my crooked back, my carry-on and the food I always seem to travel with. And darned if I didn't forget to bring my awesome 'Sky Rest' pillow that even the flight attendants laugh at, even though I ordered it from one of the Sky Mall magazines that they themselves provide, in the same seat pockets that hold the emesis bags. Huh!Sigh. I guess you can't blame them. They ARE pretty funny-looking.This was me last year ha ha. By now I've shaved off my beard at least. ;-)Anxious as I go in to this long day's journey...I should have all the fun I can today, before packing my things at 9am tomorrow and bidding this sweet sheltering hotel room goodbye.

Let's Talk About This

Let's talk about all the stupid warning labels out there, like this one on the left.  Or, "Do not take internally,” it will say on your spray deodorant, just in case you thought you’d start using the stuff as mouthwash.You see these ‘Don’t Take Internally warnings everywhere: On your sunscreen. (Really? You don’t want to try swallowing it for a nicely bronzed set of lungs?) On your cleaning products... It seems so crazy – though come to think of it, my neighbor did just report to me in a text message that she recently sprayed some those famous foaming bubbles into her face, instead of the toilet.  “You know the kind that sprays blue and turns white when everything is cleaned?" she texted me. Well I’m here to tell you it really does spray blue.. even on your eyes, face and teeth!”You see it on hair coloring. - though come to think of it again, I did almost tint my insides a trendy Autumn Glory once in a dyeing mishap so comically awful even a shameless revealer such as I am cannot tell the story..... Well, maybe if you got me drunk.  And if I were on my deathbed.And you were dying too.I made cookies last week from the kind of frozen kit school kids are always hawking door-to-door.

1. “Preheat oven to 325,” the instructions read. OK, easy enough.
2. “Bake 10 – 12 minutes.” Got it.
3. “Do not burn cookies.”

‘Do not burn cookies?’ It might as well say “Listen, just stop now. Baking is beyond you.”That one seemed to me the most insulting set of instructions yet – that is until last Saturday when the mail brought from my sister Nan in Florida an envelope.It contained no letter but only the instructions that come with one of the many electric appliances  we ladies use on our hair.“Keep cord away from heated surfaces,” it said about this curling iron.OK, fair enough.“Do not touch hot surface of the appliance,” it said, which seems, you know, kind of obvious.“Never drop or insert any object into any opening” it went on, and I’ll admit that one struck me as a little strange. Don’t try using this curling iron as a what, a piggy bank?But the instruction Nan had highlighted with yellow marker was the best one of all.Regarding this red-hot electric-cattle-prod of an appliance it actually said, “Do not use while sleeping.” How would you manage that even if you wanted to? is what I wonder. So do manufacturers include all these warnings because care for us? Because they worry about us, more than a roomful of brand-new parents? No, ladies and gents. It is because they don’t want to end up in court  here in frontier-town America, where instead of the six-gun the latest weapon is - can anyone doubt it? - the lawsuit.

All's Right with the World

I THINK I'm finally starting to feel better after this long siege of sickness... I got on a plane over the weekend to visit my awesome sister Nan, WITH my two daughters and my grandbaby.It was just like the old days sitting around with Nan, funny as she is, smart as she is.She's a real catalog girl and it was in a catalog that she managed to find a perfume our mom used to love, not that she could afford to keep herself in perfume or had anywhere to go where she could wear it – I mean the bottle we both remember was 20 years old when we first came upon it and tried putting it on that mean old cat Impy with the hitch in his hip.. It was called Nuit de Noel and Nan found it somewhere on the old "Inert-Net" and now I have it, along with a wonderful note she wrote that just brought back those early years together when we were little.Mostly though her catalog finds are not sentimental. She has a T-shirt she found in one that riffs off the great old song from the musical Hair. To get the joke you have to remember "This is the Dawning 0f the Age of Aquarius." The T-shirt's wry commentary on what the advancing years does to a girl? It says "This is the Dawning of the Age of a Scary Ass." Hah! How could I not feel better having spent the weekend with Nan AND my two girls AND that little female coming along behind them? Here they are now, first Carrie holding our baby and then Annie in the shades.and finally Nan in a boat back when we were younger even than these two.Oh and here’s me. My nice salon do from last week fell apart since last Friday when I looked so awesome but I‘ve got my wig on now and all’s right with the world. ;-)

On the Mend?

Just getting to where I can climb our of the the bed and look around a little.Still feel pretty crummy though. (This winter cold is killing me!)BUT! they do say "Feed a cold, starve a fever" so….here's me without my wig searching in the fridge for a snack . :-)

My Man is Tough

My man is tough, no doubt about it. When the flu hit me a few days ago I told everyone I could think of and kept looking at my tongue in the mirror to see if it had fallen out yet.But the bug hit him first and he still has it... Yet he met his tennis pals Monday night just the same because... well, you can’t let three people down who are expecting to play double, can you? Then Tuesday night he let Annie and me take him out to dinner - again after a full day's work. (Yes he's going to work every day.) Then Wednesday night he had a business dinner at The Capital Grille when I know very well that the thought of downing red meat made his gorge rise. And finally last night he had the fellas over for bridge and those three guests were drinkin' and hollerin' about the state of the world ‘til way past midnight.I don't know how he did it. All I could manage was writing every day and getting my hair dyed - and that last thing nearly killed me."My god what an ordeal!" I cried, on coming back home after three hours in the salon. "No more roots though! Here, take a picture with my phone!"And he did and here it is:If only HE wrote a blog I often think, because for sure you're only gettin' half the story from me.

Here's Who We're Like

It finally came to me who Old Dave and I are like here in sickbay. Remember Charlie's four grandparents in Willy Wonka? We're like them. It even SEEMS like there are four of us in the bed, we've been in it so long.Yup. Were just here in the bed. I'm normally up at 5:00 but right now it's 7:30 and I'm just surfacing. Then I know I'll be back in the bed by 3:00 with aches all over.David actually did a business dinner last night, but then when he came home at 9pm he shed clothes like a snake sheds skin and was on his back and passed out cold five minutes after climbing in beside me. Also, the poor thing seems to have eaten something at lunch that has made his upper lip go straight out like Daffy Duck's.As for me, I'm still coughing like the Little Engine That Could in the part where everyone was pretty sure it Couldn't. Between 7pm and 8pm last night I wept copious tears while watching my recorded version of last Sunday night's Downton Abby and so my nasal passages were doubly stuffed.I thought about reader Paxi's advice about the Jamison with lemon and honey.I thought about hitting myself with the green velvet hammer that is NyQuil.In the end I decided to just 'go commando' as teen males seem to call it when they go without underwear. I decided to do without any meds in other words. 60 mile-an-hour winds tore and screeched around the house all night and here I am now in a new day, as here we all are.It's kind of pretty out right now with the branches all wet with raindrops, and  they say we might even have a bit 'o sun by noontime. I guess I'm just happy to be alive, to sum up - and to be honest, staying in bed is actually kind of fun when the company's good. :-) [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29_uSlEEPSk]

Karma

I'm sick now too. First it was a tickle in my throat and then a rumble in my chest, like the sound from the engine room on the Queen Mary. This id what I get for making light of my man's illness.I went to bed the other night feeling as bleak as bleak can be, sleeping next to my dead Pope of a husband who had not uttered more than 12 words to me in 24 hours. (That extended whine is here.) But then, the next morning I woke to glory all around me: this sunlight in this room at January’s end. (David's reclining body in the foreground.)If only I had not, over the last few nights, curled up in the same small nest of bedding as a person who lay spouting like a whale – every cough and sneeze flying straight up into the air and settling in a fine mist all around me.By evening I had the headache too, and in spite of the 16 kinds of cold medications I took, it was excruciating. In the night I was sure that some evil force had got hold of the plastic-bag-like membrane in which the brain is suspended and was trying to pull the whole thing out through my ear.This is what I get for making Weekend at Bernie’s style jokes about poor David. It's my ‘goin’ around comin’ on around for sure.I had a flu shot back in October so whatever this is it’s presumably not the flu. David, however, did NOT have a flu shot and so presumably does have the flu.Anyway he’s still pretty miserable. I fetch him tea and toast, but he doesn't care about eating. Last night we tried to grab a meal out with our girl Annie but he couldn't even bring himself to have a drink. (what, no alcohol?!) He’s still got that thousand-yard stare, though and now it’s morning again too.And now we're home again our workday world with the Poop-Doggy-Dog-Walkers filing past outside our windows, sigh.I wish we had the view above that we had Sunday morning when we were up north. It sure did raise our spirits, sick or no. But the world these last few days is wrapped in fog and rain - and we're just here exchanging droplets. :-(

Sickbay

You tend to find it sort of funny when OTHER people get sick, perversely enough. When my man got sick the other day I felt so entertained by the sight of his coat just thrown on the newel post when I got back from the store, his dress shirt thrown on the bureau, a puddle of socks beside the bed. "He never leaves his clothes like this! What a rascal!" I thought.But then there he was in the bed, still wearing his pants, and his belt, still clinking with pocket-change though under the covers. He had that Walking Dead look like the zombies in the gory AMC series. (Well, he lacked the missing lower jaw and the bloody drool - but he sure had that 1000-yard stare.)I took his temp: 102.3. "You have to take something!" I cried and ran to the bathroom and ransacked the cabinets. Nothing in there of a helpful nature, not a single thing but eye shadow and mustache bleach. Then I ran to the other bathroom where six months ago I found a bottle of Children's Tylenol. that had expired in 1989. 1989! I did finally manage to locate a lone packet of Theraflu."But this is no good," I said, reading the fine print. "It expired in 2003!”"Close enough!" he said and I thought that was wonderfully funny. He drank the mixture down - and slept all that night and the whole next morning – right up until the time we had planned to drive north to find out if our place by the lake had turned into a solid cube of ice with this last cold snap.We shouldn’t go,” I said.“It’ll be fine,” he said."Ok but I’m driving," I said and I did drive the hour and 45 minutes while he lay in the front seat like the dead guy in Weekend At Bernie's.Once there he got right in the bed again, this time still wearing his coat. (Couldn't blame him; the house was freezing.) I took his temp. 102.1. I thought we had other meds here that maybe didn’t go back to 1989 and so we did. I got some of them into him. As I approached the bed he held one hand out."Death of a Pope," was all I could think. He looked like Pope John XXII always looked, one hand out, blessing everything in sight the way he did - only of course David looks nothing like that short fat saint of a man. (Except he's half Italian so actually there IS a slight resemblance. See? )It was so sad being up there at that joyful family place there with him sick. He spoke not a word for 48 hours. This is widowhood I thought, and felt so bleak watching stupid Friday night TV and trying to keep my spirits up . It was a frank relief when ten o'clock came and I could sneak into bed beside him.I killed the last light and darkness leaped into the room and encircled us. Strangely, I felt better then, there in the woods, in winter, the cloaking night all around us, the two of us and the deer and the trundling possum."Let go,” i told myself and for once in my life I did, and was instantly asleep and dreaming.

SO Cold!

How cold was it this week in my part of the world? So cold the flashers were describing themselves.So cold the posts of your earrings were turning your ears into something resembling two frozen apricots stuck to the side of your head. It was so cold it the fillings in your teeth stabbed you with an iron pain the second you opened your mouth. So cold the tiny hairs in your nose grew tiny icicles.I didn’t leave the house for a full 36 hours during the worst of it.I needed to buy milk. “Forget the milk,” David said. I needed to go to the Apple store and have one of those nice One-to-One sessions with my new Mac. “Forget the Apple store!” I told myself and rescheduled for next week.I needed to work out at the Y, which sits on a windy hilltop 100 yards from where I would have to park my car. “The heck with the Y for now," I also thought and went to the third floor and made myself get on that treadmill that Dave's pal Frank talked him into buying 15 years ago.Being inside did have a few good effects: I cleaned. I sorted stuff. I made and hung new curtains for the living room windows which up until now looked like a face with no eyebrows.See? This is Before: Pretty blah, right?And this is After: pop!Anyway ....We could only bear to stay downstairs until around 4pm when everything on that floor grows arctic. (It’s an old house, what can I say, with a three-story hall that carries the heat RIGHT out through the roof.)We ate supper every night on the bed and were under the covers by 7:00.It actually wasn’t a bad week, take it all around, and today they say the temperatures will moderate.Sigh. I hope so. Tell you the truth my ears are still kind of a funny color.But at least the spider webs over the windows are gone.And running on the treadmill was sort of OK but the truth is I can't wait to get back up on that window hilltop for Zumba's particular brand of torture

Scattered

Sunday morning I sat with a group of people at a round table as we talked about the wise and foolish decisions we have made in our lives; how you don’t always know at the time which kind you are making. (This was at church and we were parsing the parable about the builder who builds upon rock as against the builder who builds upon sand.)Because we didn’t all know each other some small talk entered into our discussion and it was revealed that one of our number had moved here recently from the south. Somebody asked him if people in New England where we all live really are standoffish.I can’t tell because I was born here. Also I’m pretty sure I am not standoffish myself.But most of the people at the table were not New England born and they said right away that we were prickly – prickly! - but once you got to know us we would be your friend for life. Your real friend, they said, not a surface friend, which I took to mean a friend you can relax around; a friend to whom you can admit how sad and screwed up you sometimes feel.I know I love people who freely admit they don’t have it all together. The effort of presenting that perfect façade otherwise is so, so…. immense, you know? Think of how you agonized as a teen about whether you fell within the bounds of normal. Think how you worried about your clothes. I had only one pair of hosiery the fall of my 10th grade year and along about October they got a run in them. I stopped it run with clear nail polish but you could still see it when I sat down and my skirt rode up, so I spent the two months - from October until Christmas vacation - pointing to the run and saying "Darn! Look at this run! My desk must have done it when I went to get up!” Exhausting stuff all that subterfuge!Maybe all this is just my way of saying to you guys that I'm sorry for all the mistakes in my copy last Friday (since corrected.)  I must have been in one of those waking sleeps when I posted that flawed version for a better edited version. It’s like I was in one of those Ambien trances you hear about where people get up and mow the lawn at 3 in the morning and remember nothing about it the next day. Anyhow my blogger pal Brian let me know right away with his signature “Dude! Typos!” alert in the subject line of his email. What I would do without Brian I do not know.I accomplish a lot in the course of a day but I’m often sort of scattered. As I looked at picture of Inaugural gowns for yesterday’s post I had to smile at this one below, showing the wardrobe of Frances Cleveland, old Grover's wife: One full gown and then two gowns that are only half gowns. That'll be me any day now: stepping out into the thoroughfare minus my skirt.

It's the Dress

I've been watching the Inaugural Day festivities every year since Camelot. Sometimes I was rooting for the man of the hour, sometimes just hoping things would go well under him. Reagan seemed so jaunty and familiar; it made me believe all would be well in his term of office. (Pity the air traffic controllers who he soon fired! Pity those early victims of AIDS! Little did they sense what was coming - or in the second case wasn't coming. (Attention. Help. Federal dollars.)I felt the same with George Bush the younger, though I did wonder why Dick Cheney wouldn't sing along to the national anthem. 'What's the deal with this guy?' I remember wondering, long before the man's ways and beliefs became familiar to us all.I do enjoy watching it all. And like millions of us, I just love seeing the gowns.The gown of Barbara Bush's alone, worn by Bush Senior's first lady, a lavish velvet edifice that is so '80s' you expect Molly Ringwald to open a little door  in the skirt area and step out of it!  That's it up top. And how about Mary Todd Lincoln's, immediately below? What I wouldn't give to have that in our attic closet with 30 years of clothing and dress-up accessories!These deep rich blues seem like a popular color for January when the world is gone to shades of white and pigeon-grey. Hillary never looked lovelier in hers, from '93.But how gorgeous are the pales ones too. Like Lady Bird Johnson'sAnd  Rosalynn Carter's, speaking of Camelot. I had a bathrobe in the '70s that looked just like this - or wait, maybe it was my wedding gown - but how cool is it that this was the SECOND time she wore this dress. Those Carters! Way ahead of the rest of us!Of course our current First Lady had one a real stunner four years ago, a dress that only a woman so obviously lean and toned could get away with wearing :I can't wait to see what she has on tonight!And now for some Inauguration Day trivia, who is this First Lady, who wore birthday-cake pink for her gown? Way to go with that hunky date too!

Hobbit-y Fun

I guess this Arts & Entertainment week here for me. I saw The Hobbit at the I-Max last night. All 186 minutes of it and I have to say: What a lot of slicing and dicing with hatchets and swords!The little Hobbit Bilbo Baggins misses his cozy cottage and I missed it too. The larder alone stuffed with cheeses and fruits, bread and barrels of mead, or whatever it was that people drink back in the days of Middle Earth.The whole thing reminded me of the many times I have read The Rainbow Goblins out loud to a child. (Those are the little imps from that book up top.)The trolls in the movie are funny. So dimwitted ha ha! (We all love to see dopey people in action. (Well, as long as they’re not like trying to operate on us or fix our cars, that is.))The elves are vegetarians and that's funny too; the scene when one of the dwarfs is offered a bit of lettuce by an elf made me laugh right out loud. "I don’t eat green food,” he says with a haughty look.Gandalf is like God, saving everyone at the last minute all the time.And Gollum?Gollum is just amazing. He looks like Steve Buscemi, with these liquid blue eyes that reveal his humanity. He's the one I really identity with, quarreling with himself and shuttling between kindly and cruel. He's how I'm going to look when I'm 100 I know it. Willard Scott I'm ready for my closeup!Here's the trailer. Well worth watching :-)[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=9PSXjr1gbjc]

Forecasts You Can Count On

I've just spent hours poring over The Old Farmer’s Almanac, trying to figure out what side of my OWN personal trunk the moss will have grown on by winter’s end ha ha.Certainly January lends itself to such porings-over but anyone can pore over the Almanac’s wisdom at anytime, just by picking up the 2013 issue of this periodical, founded by one Robert Thomas in 1792, and published every year ever since.I love the thing. its signature advice, its woodland lore and its tart observations about human nature especially, a selection of which I found in a book published 60 years ago called The Old Farmer’s Almanac Sampler, a kind of candybox collection of some of the best quips and tips gathered up from all those previous issues.In the 1804 issue, for example, said

It is with narrow-souled people as it is with narrow-necked bottles – the less they have in them, the more noise they make in pouring it out.

Who can’t sense the truth of that epigram even today? Then there was this even plainer truth, which appeared in the 1795 issue:

He that makes an ass of himself must not take it ill if men ride him.

But pity the poor jackass! How unfair it is that he, along with the sloth and the dodo, should be such a perennial target! But I guess foolish behavior is foolish behavior, whatever the era. It seems human nature does not change very much, even here in Reinvent-yourself America.The country itself has certainly changed though: As the Sampler reports, the year The Old Farmer’s Almanac first came out, there were just six cities or towns containing more than 8,000 inhabitants and the number of post offices was a meager 75. Fifty years later, in the 1840s, it goes on to say, many articles of domestic use were still unheard of: "There were friction matches, no electric no waterproof clothing, no gaslight or electric light, no coil, oil or kerosene."What an image that passage conjures, of a whole nation of people in damp pants and soggy footwear huddled in the dark! Yet still folks made merry, as we see in this January wish for all:

‘Tis an old custom at this season to wish our friends a Happy New year. I wish mine many, in comfortable fires without smoky chimneys, sleigh rides without overturning, heavy purses with a liberal hand, full tables with generous hearts, and social enjoyments without contention.

The without contention part is what makes me smile, calling up as it does the picture of family gatherings where a few of the men end up leaping to their feet and offering to punch each other’s lights out.I guess folks are bound to get testy when cooped up in interiors lit by smelly whale oil. Lucky for them, there was this compendium of sense and sauciness.For example I like this one so much I may even make in my mantra!

If wisdom’s ways you wisely seek,                                                                                             Five things observe with care:                                                                                                    Of whom you speak, to whom you speak,                                                                           And how and why and where.

Two Cool Videos

Boy have a misspent my time on this planet! I just looked and saw that almost 26,000 people have looked at this one silly video I made in 2010 about what a real Boston accent supposedly sounds like.The thing makes me blush every time I come upon it.It embarrasses me AND sometimes hurts my feelings, as when one guy wrote “Nice Boston accent, you old bag.”I guess if you’re in the business of sharing your thoughts with the world this is the kind of thing you have to expect.One person sent me a request in the ‘comment' section. She said she was acting in a play supposedly set in Boston and so needed help in coming up with a good Boston accent. It was a bad week and I didn’t ever get back to her, sorry as I am to admit it.I made a lot of videos when I had that little Flip camera, but then it malfunctioned and the manufacturers were no longer supporting the product so that was the end of that – until I was told you can make great videos just with your smart phone.That’s how I got this footage of a street singer in Italy that still brings tears to my eyes to watch. I’ll put that one immediately under here:[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjaN9hI9ZRc]and then under that let's have the video of this young guy who, in an 8-minute tour de force, talks in no fewer than 24 regions accents as heard all over the English-speaking world . Don’t watch it if crass language bothers you. Otherwise watch and be amazed. 25 million viewings for him! That's what REAL talent will win you![youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&v=dABo_DCIdpM&NR=1]

No Swelled Head Yet

The people at Wordpress, who host this blog: they try to give us bloggers a boost. They wrote me a report on Exit Only for 2012 saying that - get this:

"9,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform and this blog was viewed about 110,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it!"

Well, they try to buck you up . But I know very well that

most of the visitors to my posts were probably only here looking for all my pictures of near-naked people.

Like this photo I once posted of Susan Sarandon, showing what 60 can look like if the ligaments hold up:

Or this nice one, of Marilyn, that I found for one of the times I wrote about her.Or this great shot where Sophia Loren is seen looking over at Jayne Mansfield.

Or even this one of.... well, I don't know just WHO these two are but you could have a lot of fun thinking up a caption for this pic:

But really what brings them here, according to their analysis ? Searches for the word "Speedo," the term "wardrobe malfunction" and fascinating phrase "the head of Jeremy Bentham," that particular item being on display in a museum in London

(The head on the dummy is fake; the one under 'his' chair is real.)

.

So there it is.Like I say, no swelled head yet!

The Old Girl & The New One

A hard thing it is to trade in your ride.  My old girl! She was the best of cars, she was the worst of cars.  In her youth how wondrous she was! The way she would slide her rear doors open at the touch of a button! The way she would slide them shut that way too!In her youth how wondrous was her hatchback that opened and shut the same way! Touch the icon and  - whirrr! - she was open and ready to load.  Touch it again, hear  another whirrr and the great door shut as tight as a mobster’s lips.She did everything for me:

• Told me what direction I was driving in.
• Told me what the outside temperature was.
• Told me how much farther I could go with the amount of gas in her tank.

And then there were those Stow ‘n Go seats, which no one but Chrysler has been able to come near to. You want to take six people to the movies? They’ll all fit, no problem.  You then want to carry a giant desk and a six- foot bookcase from your house to the apartment of one of your kids? Tug here, touch there and the seats kneel right down like trained circus animals and then – more magic! - disappear under the floorboards!Added to all this, she was lipstick-red with pale grey seats of leather. She was the best deal they had for me when I was looking so she was the car I bought back in spring of 2005.But…. Eventually…. Time began having its way with her. Four years in, her doors began flying back open after you had closed them. They would nearly shut and then – whoosh! pop back open again, sometimes well after you’d walked away from her. Many’s the time I came out of some store to find her whole interior laid open as if under the surgeon’s knife. I began to worry that squirrels would set up a condo association inside her.And so it happened that last month I went to look for her replacement, as different from the old red lady as she could be.This new girl is Midnight Blue. Her seats are made of a humble cloth fuzz instead of leather.

• She won’t open or close her doors at the touch of a button. She likes to see you bring a little effort of your own to the task.
• She won't slide her seats forward and back at a button’s touch. You want the seat closer, you reach under for the metal bar and heave yourself forward, the way we all had to do in the old days.
• Unlike her sister, she won’t tell you what direction you’re driving in.
• She’s mute when it comes to the outside temperature.
• She won’t even tell you it’s time to look for a gas station. If you’re such a dope that you let your tank run clear down to droplets ‘til you stall, well, she figures, let that be a lesson to you.

And the funny thing is, I really like all this, in part because with fancy features come fancy glitches.Also, she fits what I see as the emerging spirit of the age. “Simplify!” said Henry Thoreau and I am  doing that now with my new car that cost  a full $5,000 less than her predecessor did almost eight years back.But! I should add that she is a Chrysler minivan as well and so has those fabulous seats, whose magic-circus trick can go on for years making my kids kneel down, in gratitude, for all that dandy, custom-delivered furniture. :-)