I found it funny this morning to be walking through Kohl’s with a meat thermometer in my right hand and two toilet seats tucked under my left arm. There are some moments in life that are just serendipitous.
Boy The Elder and Wifey Poo are indirectly responsible for this little portrait you now have in your mind. The meat thermometer was a gift for Wifey Poo — one of those “just because” gifts that was needed because amateur-chef Boy The Elder absconded to his new apartment with our old meat thermometer. BTE was not supposed to buy her a new meat thermometer for a belated birthday gift. We had discussed that he was going to get her replacement salt-and-pepper shakers, the old ones falling victim to his newfound living situation as well, and that I would give her the meat thermometer because I love her and a family evidently cannot live without a meat thermometer.
Alas, the plans of 19-year-olds often change and sometimes do so without notice to Dear Old Dad. Our family is a lot of things, but one thing it is not ever going to be is the owner of two extremely similar digital meat thermometers. On this principle I plant my flag and am willing to die.
The toilet seats were a different matter. To say that I gave Boy The Younger a new toilet seat for achieving a personal best in cross country, without giving some context as to why that led to him screaming, “Yes! Awesome!,” would be to invite serious questions about how our little family operates. Come to think of it, the context might still leave those questions, but for what it’s worth, when we moved into New Home in August, BTY made it clear he did not like the wood one that was left behind in what he calls “his” bathroom. I can’t say I blame him. I don’t recall one situation in which I sat down on wood and thought, “Well now that’s comfortable.”
BTY is a big fan of those slow-closing toilets, and, truthfully, so am I. What I am not a fan of is sudden loud noises, and boys aren’t real good about gently doing anything, lowering a toilet seat included.
So I did what Good Dads do: I went on Amazon and ordered him a slow-close toilet seat, where I was immediately faced with a choice between round and elongated. Seriously, people. I know we can’t agree on much as Americans, but can we at least come together around the shape of our toilet seats? If anything in this country should be standard, I’d put forward the toilet seat shape is it.
Anywho, this uncertainty led to a trip into the bathroom, where, if you’d walked in at that moment, you would have seen me staring at the open bowl, tilting my head this way and that, trying to determine which type of toilet seat to buy. And yes, I know I could have solved this dilemma with a tape measure, but the toolbox was in the family room, a good 20 feet away and I can be incredibly lazy when I want to be.
Eventually, I determined our toilet seats are of the round family, which caused me to immediately start thinking of those with elongated toilet seats as pretentious snobs. So I ordered BTY a toilet seat and, while I was at it, I upped the quantity to “2” so I could replace the one in the master bathroom, as well. After all, I am a boy, too, and have no problem startling myself.
Plus, here’s the thing: It’s not a good idea to have a slow-close toilet seat on some of your toilets. If you’re going slow-close, you’ve gotta be all-in. Otherwise, you’ll end up forgetting which kind of toilet seat is where and just willy-nilly dropping the lid on a regular-close toilet, which leads to the sudden loud noises of which I was speaking.
Fast forward. Amazon gets me my toilet seats in 12 minutes, we give BTY his run-like-hell award, and then the seats sit there, awaiting a free moment for me to install them because, apparently, I’m The Toilet Seat Installer of the family. I’m not complaining about this de-facto designation. Wifey Poo is The Vomit Cleaner of our tribe, so we have a good thing going that I’m not going to mess with.
This morning while I was getting going with my morning ritual of contacts/vitamins/shave/shower, Wifey Poo sauntered (yes, sauntered) into the bathroom and casually said, “What color are our toilets?”
Marriage is a funny thing. There are a million things that I would have put higher on the list of “Things My Wife Will Ask While I’m Getting Ready For The Day” than “What color are our toilets.” And here’s the reality: I didn’t even know there were colors of toilets. My assumption, much like my assumption on the shape of toilet seats, was the color of toilets in America was something we as a nation had determined sometime in the past by a vote in Congress or act of the President or something. Never once in my 47 years of life have I ever stopped and actually looked at a toilet to ponder its color, and I think it’s incredibly arrogant of Americans to actually have different-colored toilets. In my world, toilets were one color: White.
Don’t get on my ass about home decorating options and color matching White goes with everything so just shut up. And if you’re too good to sit your ass down on a white toilet with a round toilet seat, well, go shit in the woods.
So I replied: “I dunno… white?” thinking that this might be her version of Quiz Show and if I nailed the answer I would win a new car or a trip to Australia.
Not only was I wrong about the intentions of the question, I was wrong about its answer.
“I don’t think they’re white,” she replied. “I think they’re more almond.”
I still wasn’t catching where she was going with this in-depth examination of our toilet color, and besides, if she knew what color our toilets were and weren’t, why was she asking me if I knew what they were? So I casually replied, “Oh. Cool” and actually thought that would be the end of it.
Oh, John, you fool.
“Well then the toilet seats you got are the wrong color,” she continued.
“The toilet seats are the wrong color? What do you mean the toilet seats are the wrong color?” I said, suddenly finding myself defensive about my carefully chosen toilet seats. Sitting here now, that I was defensive about toilet seats is probably a new low for me.
“I mean the wrong color,” she said. “As in, the lids won’t match the bowls.”
“And the lids matching the bowls is something we want?” I said, but since you’re reading this and not hearing how I actually said it, know this: You probably want to make that question mark kinda small and certainly changeable to a period because I was doing the Husband Trick of giving myself an out if what really was a question painted me as the stupidest human being alive.
“Exactly,” she replied.
“Yeah, exactly,” I said confidently, as if I knew all along that toilets were different colors and that lids and seats are definitely supposed to match bowls in every circumstance always and forever amen.
So I did what I do. I went to Amazon and searched for toilet seats that were the color almond. Now, I’ve seen almonds. And I’ve seen our toilets. And the former’s color does not match the latter’s. But who am I to quibble with the namers of colors?
No one. That’s who.
I was shocked when, in 0.0128 seconds, Jeff Bezos returned for me a list of a 5 bazillion toilet seats that were not white.
So there we were, Wifey Poo and I, with my phone, standing over the bowl, scrolling through pictures of toilet seats of different hues, trying to figure out which one would match our obnoxiously not-white toilets. As best we could determine in the poor lighting of the master bathroom pooping palace, the color was, as Wifey Poo had postulated, almond. Premium almond, to be more precise.
“Seventy-five bucks!” I screamed.
“What?”
“This toilet seat costs seventy-five bucks!”
“Well how much did the wrong-colored ones cost?” she asked, trying to get me to unwittingly concede that the ones I purchased were, indeed, “wrong” instead of just “different.”
“The ones I purchased cost twenty-seven dollars,” I replied.
“Oh. Well then I don’t think they’re almond,” she said.
And right there, I learned something. I learned, at the age of 47, that the color of an object can change based on its cost.
“What’s that color cost?” she asked, pointing to a shade called “Biscuit/Linen.”
Now the answer was $35, which is much more reasonable than $75 though still not low enough for the thing that cradles your ass while you’re pooping, but that’s not where I was at that point. Where I was, was in deep thought over how “biscuit” and “linen” got thrown together with just a mere / between them to denote a shade close to almond but more than 50% cheaper. And here’s the kicker: I’ve never seen a biscuit or any linen that’s that shade!
By this time, I was falling behind in my morning schedule, which was leading me up to an 8 a.m. Zoom call with a guy named Marshall to discuss a live chat and chatbot feature on my team’s website. So instead of furthering the discussion about shades of toilet seats, I simply said, “That’ll do.”
Two new slow-closing, round, Biscuit/Linen toilet seats will be here tomorrow.
So that’s what necessitated my walk through Kohl’s — which, in case you were unaware, takes returns for Amazon for just about any reason you could possibly conjure up on your most imaginative day — with a meat thermometer and two toilet seats in tow.
And you damn well better believe that, when I got to the counter and deposited the stuff in front of the kind be-masked woman, I said, “Yeah, my wife bought the wrong color toilet seat. Pshhhh. I mean, really? She couldn’t just look at the bowl and see we needed Biscuit/Linen and not white? But hey. I married her before I knew that about her, so whatryougonna do?”
Chimney Sweep Guy
There are three types of people associated with top hats:
- Magicians
- Abe Lincoln impersonators
- Chimney sweepers
I totally understand the first one. You’re not goin to pull a rabbit out of, say, a beret. And Abe Lincoln impersonators gotta do what Abe Lincoln done did.
Chimney sweepers, though? It seems an entirely inconvenient choice of headwear if your main task is to stick your head in a fireplace.
When we moved into New House, we knew the fireplace hadn’t been used in five years or more. FIL just got tired of hauling in firewood, I guess. We, however, are People of the Fireplace. I’ll make a fire in the middle of summer if I need a little comfort. We actually went to Old House on the day before it was officially sold and jammed my car trunk full of firewood we’d stacked there while it still was technically ours. Hey, shut up. Firewood ain’t cheap.
Before cold weather sets in, I wanted to make sure the fireplace was, ya know, safe, and seeing as how I am not going to be the one to stick anything up a chimney, I figured this was a job for someone with a bit more training and possibly better equipment.
Well, for the low-low price of $289, MadHatter Chimney Sweeps came out this morning and shoved a camera up there. And of course they found something wrong. Apparently, there are a few cracks in the tiles on the way up Santa’s passageway. “Don’t use it until you get that fixed,” said the chimney sweep guy, who was, sadly, not wearing a top hat. “It’s not that we’re the chimney police and are gonna come out and arrest you, but creosote can build up in the crack.”
“And we don’t want that to happen?” See above item about the question mark that’s really a pseudo-period.
“Exactly,” he replied.
“And how much would fixing a thing like that cost?” I asked.
“Oh, we’ll have to get a proposal together and send that to you,” he replied.
Here’s something I know: In the history of the world, nothing requiring a proposal has ever been cheap.
So I’m faced with three options:
- Not using the fireplace, thereby diminishing my level of home enjoyment.
- Getting the chimney fixed with whatever this pending proposal recommends.
- Pretending that the chimney sweep guy gave me a “You’re good to go” and hoping that creosote buildup, whatever that might be, isn’t going to kill me and my family with poisonous fumes or incinerate us in a massive blaze.
What would you do?
The ‘Don’t Blame Me, I Didn’t Say It’ of the Day
‘Dumboriss Smith has lips the size of michellin tires.’
JOn Gruden, 2011 email
Yikes, dude.
I Miss Baseball
My New York Yankees went out with a wimper Tuesday night — against the Red Sox, no less. My new-hometown team, the Cardinals, lost in a walk-off the next night. I’m already missing baseball that matters to me. There’s something about baseball the other sports don’t have. It’s a game meant to be savored, to be shared. Wifey Poo and I went to the Cardinals last regular game Sunday afternoon. We talked as we haven’t talked in years. I don’t remember much about the game, except for the fact that the Cards lost 3-2. But I’ll always remember it as the time Wifey Poo and I were at our best. There’s no time for that in hockey, in basketball… even in football, with its 35 seconds or so between plays. Baseball unveils itself slowly, like a leisurely drive through the countryside. I suppose I can jump on the bandwagon of a different team and jump in the deep end with its fans. But it’s just not the same.
Today’s Reasons to Keep Living.
- I have a whole weekend with zero responsibilities, and the mandate is to unwind and enjoy myself. So I will.
- Rediscovering old music that once was my favorite. It’s like catching up with an old friend.
- Maker’s Mark. I’m technically supposed to drink only dry red wine to stave off inflammation and the hell that is Longhaul COVID, but every once in awhile, it hits the spot.
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🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Jesus Wept 😥Good Mom, Bad Mom 👩Baseball Success ⚾ In 1990, just 7 percent of Muricans considered themselves non-religious. Today, that number has quadrupled. Depending on whom you ask, this is either a sign of our descent into earthly hell or a great awakening to the sins of the institution most…
Slog — May 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Life Right Now 😥Classmate’s Death 😥TUP 😠 I long ago lost any semblance of the notion that life could be easy. To the best of my recollection, this shattering of innocence occurred for good somewhere in the third grade, when I was dealt my first really shitty teacher (I imagine Mrs.…
Sad vs. Depressed — May 4, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Scratchy Sweater 😥Birthday Boy 🎂Fucking Facebook 😠 I think there’s a big difference between being depressed and being sad. And I think I’m qualified to talk about that difference because I’ve been both. Some say that depression is sadness that lasts, which I think discounts the true power of sadness. True…
Porn — May 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩One in Two? ✌️Isolation 😥Really, HR? 😠 OK ladies, look to your left. Now look to your right. If you’re flanked by two men, one of them likely has been on Pornhub today. I used math today to figure that out. (Proud of me, aren’t ya, Wifey Poo?) I read a…
Iowa Visit — May 2, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Relays Weekend 🏃♀️Janelle 🤗No Steve 😥 Want to experience something trippy without the benefit of hallucinogens? Return to the place you met your spouse more than 30 years ago with your 20-year-old and 13-year-old sons. The Core Four took a long weekend minus My Favorite African, who was wonderfully cared for…
Listening Right — April 25, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Drive to Work 🚗Drive to Home 🚗Broken System 💔 I was thinking a lot on the drive to work this morning, which isn’t necessarily anything new. I think a lot, well, a lot. Long drives are usually prime time for me to tap into my intuition and listen to what’s being…
Baseball Bookend — April 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Sweet Single ⚾Car Delivery 🚗Back/Neck Fixers💆♂️ On the one-year anniversary of that time a jackass piece of crap Little League “coach” did the most un-adultlike thing I have ever seen, Boy The Younger took the field for his new team in the spring’s first tournament. He batted second and started at…
3:32 a.m. Thoughts — April 19, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Garbage Can 🗑️Food Insecurity 🍲Poop Smell 💩 The level of significance of a particular task varies based on the time of day. This is something I realized this morning when I hauled my ass out of bed at 5:09 a.m. because of a thought that popped into my brain at 3:32…
Living — April 19, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Alive vs. Living 😔Dental Thoughts 🦷Pronouns 🧑🤝🧑 I am 48 years old, and I realized something today: I have no idea how to live life. This isn’t to suggest I don’t know how to stay alive. I’m OK at that. But the finer points of relationships and communication and working my…
Team Thanos — April 18, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Awww, Snap 😏Office Flood 🌊Potty Mouth 🚽 Boy The Younger is like his old man in a lot of ways. One is that, if we experience something cool, we have a pathological need to have others experience its awesomeness as well. It wounds my soul when I share my music or…
Falling Down — April 17, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Fuck Carvana 🚗Stupid Tooth 🦷Cave Woman 😠 I am a huge fan of the 1993 movie Falling Down. The movie stars Michael Douglas. Interesting side note: I once umpired a Little League baseball game for his son and called him out on strikes, which led to a crying temper tantrum. His,…
Toxic Positivity — April 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Stop Being So (Fake) Happy 😊The Better Choice ✔️Checkmate, Motherfucker ♛ I’m not exactly what anyone would call an optimist. Perhaps it’s because I see the world too clearly these days to think that we’re headed anywhere close to the right direction. Some would call me a pessimist, and I’m OK…
Nickname Need — April 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Brown Stockings ⚾I’m A Dentist 🦷Quick Hitters 🐅🦎 If all had gone according to plan, I’d be well into retirement and diving into my money Scrooge McDuck-style after a success career pitching for the New York Yankees. Alas, I’m sitting at my desk in Maryland Heights, Missourah, munching on carrot sticks…
Dental Malpractice — April 5, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Crowned 👑MFA Moment 😥AI Danger 💻 I remember as a kid getting a filling and hearing that it was real silver being put in my mouth. I figured if times ever really got tough, I could just yank out my tooth, melt the filling and buy food. Yes, these were thoughts…
Not Snot — April 4, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Nose Woes 👃African in School 🚌Trumpster Fire 👮 The human body has a way of keeping us humble, especially as we get older. We lose hair where we want it and grow it in abundance where we don’t, we produce ear wax and eye boogers, and 99% of us should never…
WTF is a Tiguan? — April 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Tiger-Iguana 🐅🦎Cornhole Crushing 🌽Poison M&Ms ☠️ The first time I saw a commercial for the Volkswagen Tiguan, I thought it was a parody. As a marketing guy, I couldn’t fathom how an entire department of highly paid professionals could sit down at a table and decide the best name for a…
The Difficult Thing — April 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Closing the Door 🚪Car Shopping🚙Fake Kid-Hater 🧒 Over the course of my life, I’ve gotten used to doing the difficult thing. This often hasn’t been by choice, and it’s never been easy. It’s simply what I’ve had to do. Whether it was facing a pregnancy in which we knew our child…
African Arrival — March 31, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Changes and Similarities ✈️Family Drama Update 🎭Close Encounters 🤼♂️ My Favorite African (MFA) has arrived. His plane landed at Lambert International at around 1:15 yesterday, and about 15 minutes later, a kind TSA person allowed us and the woman who accompanied MFA on the flight to violate all sorts of Homeland…
African Eve — March 29, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Little D Nears ✈️Familiar Familial Drama 🎭Van O’ Canadians 🍁 My favorite African returns to us tomorrow afternoon. Dieudonne will board a plane from Philly with an escort (not THAT kind … I think, anyway), and land in the STL around 1:15. For the next three or four months, we’ll take…
Tech Hatred — March 24, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩TikTok Stupidity 😠Back Woes 😧Improv Friends 🎭 There are increasing number of hours each week in which I have a strong desire to throw every piece of connected technology into the nearest lake and move to wherever I have to go to be as far away from any modern gadget as…
Exit Ramp — March 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Anniversary Changes 💍Near Death Experience 💀Dreamcatcher Drama 😳 All relationships change over time. Friendships, parent-child, boss-employee, husband-wife … no matter the relationship, the only constant thing is change. My marriage has changed mightily since it began. When Wifey Poo and I said our vows on March 22, 1997, we were –…
Blah — March 22, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Why The Blahs? 😷Anniversary Plans 💍Unpleasant Warnings 🐍 Feeling blah is complicated when you have my medical history. For many people, feeling blah as I’m feeling right now is a clear indication that some sort of illness or infection has invaded the body. But for me — and for many others…
Floss Shaming — March 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dentist Visit 🦷Basketball Sucks 🏀Found Husband 👨 No one truly likes going to the dentist. I’ve had people push back on me when I’ve said this before, but when I lay out the following scenario, well, it’s pretty much checkmate: “You just had the most well-respected doctor in the world tell…
The Lunchable Deal — March 18, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dumb Gubment 🦅Dawg Party 🐶Flying African ✈️ We as modern Muricans tend to just accept that it’s the gubment’s job to educate our children. Of course, when other countries that aren’t our friends do that, we call it “indoctrination,” but that’s a topic for another day. The topic for today is…
Death Cometh — March 17, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Costly Mortality ☠️Crazies, Unite 🤪Defining ‘Appointment’ 🦷 I’m getting ready to die. Sounds ominous, right? Dramatic? Scary? It’s not. Oh yes, in a certain light, it’s depressing as hell. But what it really involved was a meeting with an attorney that Wifey Poo and I had yesterday to figure out exactly…
Finishing — March 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Books and Stories 📚SVB Lessons 🏦Basketball Party 🏀 Holy crap, you guys! I actually finished something I wrote! In fact, I finished two somethings I wrote! As my regular readers (hey you three!) know, I’ve been stunk in a funk of starting to write books and short stories with gusto and…
Sorry, Please Continue — March 9, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Podcast Appearance 🎙️The Birth Control Pill Story 🐶Good Tired 🥱 If you would have asked me a few years ago whether I could ever envision myself on a stage in the back room of a dive bar sharing a story about how my dog ate six months of birth control pills…
Peaking — March 8, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Pee Mate 🚽Game Maker 🎲Dumb Muricans 🦅 I have been thinking about death a lot lately, not because I’m particularly eager for it to happen or because I’m particularly not eager for it to happen. I guess it’s because I’m a few months shy of my 49th birthday and please-for-the-love-of-God let…
The Return of the African— March 6, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Dieudonne 🌍Hoops Win🏀Cornhole Roll ✔️ In 2021, during some of the darkest and most difficult times in our lives as individuals and couple, Wifey Poo and I did a thing. It was a big thing. It was a challenging thing. It was an amazing thing. But to say it was just…
Tribe — March 3, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩’Full Stop’ 🛑Needles 💉Business Lessons 🧑💼 Here’s something I learned about myself today: One way to ensure that I will debate you on a topic until I give my last breath or until you are huddled in a corner in a fetal position is to end the statement of your opinion…
Mindful Commute — March 2, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Mindfulness 🧘Mullet Prez 👩🦳Murder Family 🔪 Our brains are amazing things. So adept are they at routines that they can essentially run on autopilot and let you do the everyday stuff like operating a multi-ton object advancing at 70+ mph among lots of other multi-top objects advancing at 70+ mph without…
After Life — March 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Bloody Hell 💂Circus Moments 🤡Silence 🤫 OK, people: I’ve got a bone to pick with you. But first, a little digression. What in the bloody hell does that phrase mean? “A bone to pick with you?” That sounds absolutely disgusting. And if you’re wondering why I said “bloody hell,” well, that…
Angry Marketing Guy— Feb. 28, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩24 Hour Video 😡Rubik’s Kid 🧊Dilbert Doofus 🤪 There are two things I cannot stand in the working world — and in life, in general. The first is people whose lack of preparedness turns ordinary stuff into emergencies. The second is when people criticize the result of something they previous approved.…
Corruption, Penis Sizes and Bird Drones — Feb. 23, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Mormon Billionaires 💰Bigger Packages 🍌Birds Really Aren’t Real 🐦 Can we just get on with blowing the tits off the world with nuclear weapons or something and end this stupid thing we call the human race? Yeah, I know that’s a little dramatic, but when I take a look at the…
Home of the Hypocrite — Feb. 21, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Muricah The Evil 🦅You Buy You 💰Big-Ass Van 🚚 I find it rather humorous that Muricah warned China not to send arms to one side of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine … and that we issued this warning with a straight face. I’m quite sure most Muricahns believe their country…
Wal-Mart — Feb. 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Salve 🩹Car Wash 🚗💧Light Removal 🎄 I try not to venture too often into a Wal-Mart, especially on the weekend. I cling to slim hope for this nation as it is, and I find Wal-Mart trips do not help my grip. Alas, this weekend, Boy The Younger was under the weather…
Shit People — Feb. 17, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩CC, BCC, FU 📧Basketball Poll 🏀Andy Rooney 🎙️ This week has largely been a Shit Week marred by Shit People. What are Shit People? They aren’t exactly easy to define, but one hallmark of a Shit Person is his rampant use of the CC function at work to passive-aggressively play power…
Brain Rest — Feb. 13, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Chill Day 🛋️Busy Weekend ⚾Halftime 🏈 I’m not working today. Not only am I not working at my day job, I’m not doing any work for my side gig today. I’m not planning on doing much of anything, actually. And I don’t feel guilty about that. This weekend was insanely busy.…
Drugs — Feb. 10, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Big Pharma Sucks 💊Work Rules 🧑💼Big Weekend 🏈 Spend any time in front of the television and you’ll see ads touting the latest drugs that you shouldn’t take if you’re allergic to and that you most definitely need to ask your doctor about. Now comes a study showing that the people…
Missourah and the Spy Balloon — Feb. 7, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Top 5 🎈Symphony 🎻Living Eulogies 💗 Top 5 things overheard in Missourah last week as a purported Chinese spy balloon made its way over the state en route to its rendezvous with an F22’s missile: Despite my high-brow upbringing in Suburbia, New York, I’m not what anyone would call A Symphony…
Pokey Joe — Feb. 2, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Space Walk 🧑🚀Bye-Bye Brady 🏈Failure Rate 🐿️ When Boy The Elder was just Boy and devoid of a younger brother, we had a nickname for him: Pokey Joe. BTE didn’t do anything fast, but more than anything, what he did incredibly slow was get out of a car. That would suck…
Stuck Balls — Feb. 1, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Raccoons 🦝February 💘Man Nips 🕺 Today I bring you the story of a raccoon who got his balls stuck to railroad tracks. But the reason you think I’m bringing you this story is not the reason I’m bringing you this story. You think I’m bringing the story of the raccoon Neil…
‘Fuck Tha Police’ — Jan. 28, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Tyre Nichols 😔Tattoo Day ✒️Nephew Hoops🏀 I was a white kid in suburbia, New York, in 1988 when the gangsta rap group N.W.A. came out with its album Straight Outta Compton, featuring the song Fuck Tha Police. It was scandalous, at the time, to suggest that the police would be anything…
Snow — Jan. 25, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Car Concert 🎵Sick Wife🤒People Suck 🖕 Within the 24 hours in the run-up to Snowpocalypse 2023, the estimates on the Weather Channel app for our snowfall total ranged from 1 to 10 inches. That’s like going to the doctor and being told you have anything from a splinter to terminal cancer.…
STUPID Goals — Jan. 20, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Mission: Failed 👎Ho 🤣Handy Family 👍 It has to suck to work at the Missouri Department of Transportation. Why? It took exactly 75 minutes for all of 2023 to be a failure. Let me explain. Those of you unfortunate enough to have been involved in any sort of corporate planning process…
Writing Retreat — Jan. 15, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Houston 🖊️Sad clown 🤡Taco Seasoning 🌮 Houston, Missourah, is not unlike a lot of other rural Missourah towns through which I’ve driven and bears a resemblance to the Small Town USA in which Boy The Elder did a lot of his early growing up and to which Boy The Younger came…
Ceilings — Jan. 14, 2023
🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩Definitions 📖Missing Bourbon 🥃Mysterious Knocks 😵 I generally abhor any writing that starts with, “Webster’s dictionary defines …” Webster’s dictionary defines “ceiling” as a noun meaning “the overhead inside lining of a room.” The implication is that it’s a limitation, a max, a point of demarcation between what’s out there and…