I used to be a competent gift wrapper who created neatly wrapped gifts and bows. But as I aged, I lost patience and my wrapping skills took a bad rap.
Today, my gifts look like they were wrapped by vandals on crack.
I don’t understand why we invest so much time and effort to wrap a gift when it is going to be torn apart by the giftee.
It’s like making my bed each morning. Why do it if I’m just going to mess it up at night?
I’m trying to recapture the gift-wrapping spirit
Do kids dance anymore?
When I was a kid, schools and churches held teenage dances almost every weekend, featuring live bands, chaperones and underage kids puking from drinking Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine.
If you are a Boomer, you remember Boone’s Farm wines, or maybe not, because Boone’s Farm wines contained formaldehyde, for real. If you drank it, you’re lucky if you can remember your name.
Fortunately, I only drank enough to forget my las
Oh goodie! We now have another number to add to our long and growing list of numbers and passwords needed to survive in our electronically connected world.
As of October 24, when you make a local call in the 607-area code you must include the area code when dialing. The reason: officials don’t want people mistakenly dialing the newly created 988 national Suicide Prevention Lifeline.
I’m all for reducing suicides, but I can’t deal with adding another number to my swirling sea of digits,
Here’s a great way to make dining out exciting, fun and aaah-inspiring: do it with year-old identical twin bonus grandsons.
My wife, Shelley, and I recently had a restaurant lunch with the twins, Remy and Leo, and their parents, Allie and Matt. (For the record, I still can’t tell the boys apart. The look identical to me, thus I will refer to them as Remy/Leo in both the singular and plural).
Everyone knows that it’s a common curtesy of civilized society, that anytime toddlers are out i
Christmas season is a time of unending parties, celebrations and social gatherings.
It’s a perfect time for me to try and do something I’ve wanted to do for most of my adult life.
Become a socialite.
It goes back to 2004, when I watched a no-talent, marginal-IQ Paris “Hotel” Hilton become mad wealthy and insanely famous by just standing around and looking good, toting a tiny yapping dog and over-using the phrase “that’s hot” to describe anything that’s cool (she actually copyright
It’s interesting how our changing culture dictates what body part is the sexually attractive appendage de jour, from implanted breasts and collagen-filled Donald Duck lips to six-pack abs, protruding pecs and thigh masters.
There is one body part, shared by both genders, which has always been a sex symbol: the two large fleshy halves of the posterior known as the buttocks. Fashion culture decided that it’s time for Americans to shake their booties and enlarge them with cosmetic surgery call
I’ve always been curious. That’s why I became a newspaper reporter, chasing after the five W questions of life. It’s also why I’ve been punched a lot.
I have some feline curiosity in me. I also have a lot of stupidity in me. That’s why I’ve burned eight of my nine lives. I’m trying to temper that ignorance by learning and asking “how” and “why” about things that we don’t think twice (or even once). Here are my top ten.
1. Telling someone to “Bite me.” If you are angry at someone, wh
Aging slows me down. Everything takes longer, especially my body’s plumbing. It’s leaky, no longer up to code, and a hassle to prime the pump, especially in the middle of the night, when it wakes me up to play “red light green light” at the toilet.
Many guys my age have the same problem and will try most anything to be able to pee at will. Some of them talk to it, trying to coax it into action. (Not me. Not my style. Besides, it wouldn’t listen to a word I say.) I imagine that one of those
“These rock! I can’t believe how great they sound.”
I said that after trying on my Bose audio sunglasses that played music from my smartphone. The glasses were a birthday gift from my thoughtful little sister, Pat. The microscopic speakers in the frames produce a clear and deep sound that rivals any full-size stereo system, and they don’t need an extension cord.
How we listen to music has changed drastically since my high school and college years in the ‘70s. Back then, stereo systems
Several months ago, my wife, Shelley, and I lost our best friend and soul mate. Her name was Sammy. She was our pet dog of a dozen years. She had cancer and we had to end her suffering. I’m still grieving the loss.
I’ve had pet dogs all my life and I’ve had to decide when to end the lives of five of them. It never gets easier. I’m never sure if I’ve made the right decision. Did I end their lives too soon, when they still had many “good days” ahead of them; or did I wait too long, because I
“Rain, rain go away.”
“I don’t want to friggin’ mow my lawn again today!”
I’ve been uttering that ditty all summer and fall because of all the !@^%$! MOWING I’m doing because of all the !@^%$! RAIN. (Editor’s note: Upper case letters and exclamation points signify that the writer is really @^%$! PISSED OFF!!!!!)
My lawn has more mow lines then the outfield at Fenway, and they are deep enough to grow corn.
My life revolves around a series of repeated lawn aggravations: Mow. Wa
My kitchen throw-rug stinks of pickle juice and “squishes” when I walk on it.
Got that way because I tried to do one of the most difficult tasks of modern life: open a jar with my bare hands.
I tried both hands. No luck. Got miffed. Ran it under hot water. Nada. Got pissed. Pried it with a spoon handle. Still stuck. Got furious. Got my pliers, clamped them around the lid, clasped the far ends of the handles for max leverage, took a sturdy feet-apart stance and twisted with
I’m glad that vinyl record albums are regaining popularity. I grew up listening to music on records. They were an essential a part of my life, like family, education, sports and reform school.
Records are simple to operate. No moving parts. No rewinding. No batteries. No apps or subscriptions. You set the needle in the groove and soon you’re groovin’ between 33 1/3 and 45 rpms.
Unfortunately, vinyl records are fragile and easily damaged. You can ruin the acoustics with fingerprints,
Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer grilling season, so I decided to grill the old-fashioned way – with charcoal briquettes. It’s one of the few times that I can play with fire and accelerants and not get yelled at.
I normally use my cheap Wal-Mart gas grill. It’s fast, convenient and relatively easy to use. But it doesn’t give my steaks that tasty, smoky flavor that comes from cooking over charcoal. The gas grill makes my strip steaks taste like, well, Wal- Mart. Ick.
That’s why
When I was young New Year’s Eve was a big event, celebrated with gusto, daring stunts, mischievous capers and too much alcohol – and that was before I left the house.
Not now. I’ve circled the sun 67 times and each time I make the trip there is less drinking and partying, and I’m glad of it.
That’s because I’m old. My mind may want to Wang Chung tonight, but my body wants to go to bed tonight. The last time I saw 12 a.m. on New Year’s Day, phones had dials and cords.
Now, when the
Age plays mean on the mind. It makes me more forgetful and scatter-brained. I’ve lost the use of the area of the brain that remembers where the hell I left stuff, like my truck keys, my phone, my wallet and my way home.
It’s a three-fold problem.
First fold: I forget where I put things, because my mind doesn’t pay attention to what I’m doing and make a note of it.
Second fold: Ummm. . . it’s when I . . . ummm . . . what was it I was writing about?
Third fold: What’s with all
Don’t you hate it when you have something simple to do and you think “No sweat. It’ll take but a few minutes,” but it doesn’t because, like everything else, it’s become more complicated?
(That wasn’t a rhetorical question. So, if you really don’t “hate it,” you might as well stop reading).
My latest “thought it would be easy” task is buying new bedsheets.
I discovered that sheets have greatly evolved from the standard white, sorta-scratchy, non-fitted twin bed sheets of my younger
I see that Kanye West legally changed his name again, this time to “Ye,” with no middle or last name.
For real. He said he did it because Ye is the most common word in the Bible, as in “Yo Ye. Thou art a narcissist.”
Most rap and hip-hop entertainers change their birth names, like J-Z, Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Eminem and my main man Snoop Dogg, whose many monikers helped him go from rap star to Martha Stewart to the pinnacle of stardom, TV beer commercials.
Snoop was born Calvin Broadus
A year ago, this weekend, I began posting this weekly humor column.
It’s been a fun ride, after retiring from writing a twice-weekly humor column for the Elmira Star-Gazette (Motto: “Yes, our news is two days old, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s wrong.”)
I hope you have enjoyed my musings. If not, that’s cool. Not everyone shares my disturbed sense of laughter. I hold no ill regard for people who think that my writing “bites the big one.” But, if I run into you in public, I’m going
Technology is great, but I long for the days when I was smarter than my truck.
I bought a new 4WD Toyota Tacoma pickup truck two years ago, and I’m still trying to learn the purpose of the scores of switches, buttons, knobs, levers, dials, gauges, meters, lights, vents and portals. The truck’s dashboard is called an “instrument cluster” (sounds like a candy bar, to me), and bristles with more electronics than the Space Shuttle. It overwhelms with flashing lights, buzzers, bells, multi-infor
When is technology going to invent an easy-to-use garden hose? I’ve tried them all: flat, round, expandable, indestructible, flexible, steel-coil, rubber, polyurethane and even pantyhose. They’re all difficult to use, heavy, stiff, cumbersome, kinky and a big pain in the grass.
A hose full of water is heavy and stubborn. It fights me like an angry anaconda, wrapping its coils around my ankles and tripping me. I have to tug, lug and slug it around the yard to water my spring-planted grass se
Summertime means fishing time on the Chemung River. Mark Twain spent many summers in Elmira writing about Huck and Tom, and most likely fishing the river when he needed to clear his mind of writer’s block. If Huck and Tom were here today, I bet we would witness something like this:
The scene: Huck and Tom are sitting on a grassy bank on the Chemung River, the sun warming their backs, long stems of grass dangling from their mouths, straw hats on their heads and cane poles in their hands.
As we stumble into a third year of COVID we are more confused, uncertain, worn out and frustrated than ever. We think we’re beating the virus, then we’re not, then we are and then a new one comes along and we’re back to square one, we don’t pass Go and we don’t collect $200. We’re living our own “Groundhog Day” movie.
As for helpful COVID information and advice, we might as well use a Ouija Board or Magic 8 Ball, instead of listening to the alleged experts.
Who do we believe? Should I
Russia is at it again, threatening to invade another country. This time its Ukraine.
This happens whenever Russian “President-for-eternity” Vladimir V. Putin, feels that the world doesn’t fear him enough. He threatens to invade and take over some smalltime third world country that you and I couldn’t find on a map.
Vladi (that’s what all his friends call him, both of them) likes to shoot selfies of him going bare-chested and riding around on a horse or engaging in other manly activities
As you probably know by now, this year is the 50th anniversary of the devastating flood of ’72. You know this because the media loves over-reporting on the anniversaries of historically terrible events, like natural disasters, wars and the Jerry Springer show.
Not everything flood-related was bad. It helped me get a job as a bartender and
bouncer.
The bar was the Pub, located at the site of today’s Southport Town Hall in Bulkhead. It was owned by a sweetheart of a woman, the late Ann
