“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
Here is a generational trivia question:
“What is the name of a sandwich made of peanut butter and marshmallow spread?
If you answered “Fluffernutter,” you are likely a Boomer reminiscing about your favorite childhood food. The Fluffernutter is a gooey, sweet marshmallow spread layered atop peanut butter between two slices of white bread to produce a “roof-of-the-mouth” sticking treat.
Fluffernutter is finally getting the recognition it deserves, as it was recently included in the
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
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,
Bitcoins are the latest trendy investment opportunity, thanks to viral stories about people becoming overnight Bitcoin millionaires.
Bitcoins are one of more than 1,500 cryptocurrencies on the market, with names like Dogecoin, Solana and Ethereum (which sounds like a radioactive element used to make A-bombs or it’s a part of the human body.)
You’re probably wondering if you should get in on this speculative mania and invest in cryptocurrency. Well wonder no more. I will explain c
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
Raising kids is difficult for parents.
Raising eight Pfiffer kids is hell for parents. That’s why Mom and Dad have free-first-class-no-questions-asked-front-of-the-line-all-expenses-paid passes to heaven.
Nothing, not even a housefly, can keep their eyes on that many kids at once. Hell, it’s hard to just keep track of all of our names. That’s why Mom relied on all her natural senses as well as ESP and eyes in the back of her head to keep tabs on us.
I was most impressed with her l
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
Look at this photo of me, at 6- or 7-years old Protruding forehead. Widespread nose. Ears so big they looked like dish antennas sticking out of the sides of my head.
I looked like BoBo The Monkeyboy.
The doctor didn’t slap me when I was born. He gave me a banana.
My head was large it got stuck during birth. The doctor had never seen anything like it. He couldn’t believe my mom endured it without sedation. I can’t believe she still talks to me.
But she got her revenge. She cut
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
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
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
It’s the slap felt ‘round the world and discussed ‘round the clock.
Will Smith’s roundhouse smack of Chris Rock during the Oscars reveals one of the hazards of being a humorist.
What Will did was wrong and inexcusable. Yes, Chris cracked a bad joke, but it didn’t deserve him being sucker smacked on live TV. I worry that this incident will encourage others to go slap-happy on comedians and humorists if they don’t like the words they say or write. I don’t want to have to wear a mouthguar
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
Tis the season to praise the pine.
I love Christmas trees. We bring the outdoors indoors to fill a home with Christmas cheer and spirit. I love to come downstairs in the morning to the refreshing scent of pine.
The Christmas tree is the holiday icon, like the turkey at Thanksgiving, the Easter Bunny at Easter and the blown off fingers on July 4th.
I have a forest full of childhood memories of going out and cutting down our family
Congratulations. You have survived another Christmas.
Now, your only holiday responsibility is to start shopping for next year’s presents.
As a kid, I enjoyed the day after, when I did important things:
1. Assemble, play with and become acquainted with all my neat presents.
2. Get one of my seven sibs to trade me one of their neat presents (two if they were an easy mark) for a sucky pair of white ring-top socks from Grandma, who gave me socks every year since my first C
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
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
When it comes to sports, we want more of everything – speed, scoring, tackles, slam dunks and car crashes. Major league baseball has few if any of these. The game is slow, boring and loses fans every day.
Baseball is like us Baby Boomers, the older we get the slower we get. If the game gets any slower, it will go backwards. Games will end in negative scores.
Today’s average nine-inning Major League Baseball game takes three hours and 10 minutes, and only 18 minutes of that is actual pl
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
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
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
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
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,
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
