A high-school classmate posted a picture to Facebook of a rather strange garden utility, imported from Japan. It’s a kind of meshwork with vertical prongs of metal, designed to keep cats from wandering around on your garden. You set it down over your seedlings, and the plants grow through the holes in the mesh. The prongs aren’t sharp enough to ( Read more... )

I haven’t done one of these in a long time. The following vignettes go back all the way to April.

There are lots of people who consider themselves “old” who yet were born in the age of microwave popcorn. I maintain you can’t really consider yourself old unless you’ve cooked Jiffy Pop on the stove. It was a solemn ritual: the parents would ( Read more... )

One perk of being a faculty member is that I sometimes get to eat at a fancy restaurant with a visiting speaker or faculty candidate ( Read more... )

Extrapolating from current trends, in four or five millennia the Oscars ceremony will be more than a year long. One year’s Oscars will start before the previous year’s have finished. Nobody in America will have time for making movies anymore ( Read more... )

Some time ago I wrote about naming various sitting cat postures when I was kindergarten age. I’m getting back into it.

Come to think of it, I had one from a few years ago, for our former cat Math. She’d lie on her back with her legs pointing straight up, but relaxed, like a dog playing dead. I called that “the Funny Cat.” Occasionally, her ( Read more... )

I’d intended to write in a letter, “We ran the risk of annoying our cats, with ruinous effect,” but instead of ruinous, I accidentally wrote urinous. And I realized that urinous actually described the potential consequences much more precisely. As any cat owner can tell you, it is unwise to give your pets any justification for peevishness. Come ( Read more... )

You know what I really like? Those factory reject green olives sold under the euphemistic label “salad olives.” They’re cheap; they taste just as good as the fancy, Platonic ideal ones; they come with extra, freelance pimentos; and they’re entertaining. When was the last time you saw an olive pitted sideways?

Dear Tropical Juice Co.: Shame on ( Read more... )

For the next couple of weeks we’ll have quite a menagerie of planets in the evening sky. Venus is slowly converging on the closely-spaced Mars and Saturn, which currently form a dim colon (the punctuation mark, and not the internal organ) above the western horizon after sunset. Mercury may also be spied, at least in the tropics, somewhat below. ( Read more... )

Kathy went to NYC, not too long ago, to see some friends. She and her friend Eric stood around Central Park all of one day to score tickets to Shakespeare in the Park. A college-age dude standing in line just behind them was singing the Narwhals song under his breath. When he finished the line “They’re the Jedi of the sea”, Kathy turned around, ( Read more... )

Dear Concerned Citizen: Yes, I am aware that drinking this big-ass Mr. Pibb will increase my risk of type II diabetes by some infinitesimal fraction. I’m also aware that the two biggest risk factors for type II diabetes, by far, are obesity and family history, and I’m encumbered with neither. You have also failed to take into account a competing ( Read more... )