Talking Points

Phrasing does matter

Remember the Alamo.

OR

Don't forget the Alamo.

Thank any god in the vicinity for caller ID

No more "mercy chats." From the firm (est. 1947) of Mean-tho-tru Thoughts, Inc.

Maintenance is life

I had a reaction to my flu shot ...

... (and that was) I pumped up the tires on my mountain bicycle and went for a one-hour fat-shearing ride, my first of the 2009 season. Felt good. Walking taller.

We have run out of...

...space inside for art. Now we're using the outside clapboards. The states are baby rattles. The stripes are submachine guns, attack helicopters, grenades, and RPGs. You want to survive and maybe even win, a book on Korean War combat tells me, you want A LOT of grenades, you want A LOT of ammunition for those submachine guns, you want helicopter gunships overhead, and you want on your shoulder RPGs, the bazooka of the post-MTV battlefield.

 

Micro-novels

I'd love to be the kind of disciplined person who could write one of these every day, year round. But I'm not. I wrote three instead.

Simone's solution

Simone was always a books VERSUS exercise girl up 'til last year, when she became an exercise fiend (and now can wear the same embroidered jeans she flaunted in college). Her solution? Books AND exercise. Here, doing leg pulls on the Bowflex, absorbed in a romance hardcover.

R u 1 of these parents?

This is the real answering message at a very frustrated public school Down Under. The students, you should note, approved this message. It will play when you click. Please enjoy. Do I know where it originated? No; sorry. Somebody sent it; don't recall who exactly, though I have my suspicions.

Signs

Stopped at a country farm stand to buy lettuce and corn. The cashier, clearly the owner since everyone else stood back, said as she rang me up, "I took 10% off." Thank you, I said. Then, "What did I do?"

"You've lived a good life," she stipulated. She had black hair, field-wrinkled skin. I left wondering sardonically, "How did she know?"

More seriously, "By any published standard," certainly the Catholic one I was glued to growing up, "I wouldn't call it a good life." I'm trying to get the seesaw balanced. It takes time.

Sure, I know: she'd uttered her standard deflection. Her mind had then sped off to the next customer, the next problem. At the end of the day, in her mental inventory, our exchange wasn't a weed in her daily field.

Thanks again, though: today it turned out that I needed your blessing. It sent me home in a golden chariot.

Airborne cassoulet

Question: Can we take factory-canned French-made cassoulet aboard an airliner in our carry-on luggage?

Answer: (1) It screens like a land mine. (2) It has the consistency of C4 plastic explosive.