Some mirth

[Rach3]

More Boebrtisms:

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/rep ... 54432.html

[Rach3]

The jury is in on Trump in MAGA World (hope not behind a paywall?):

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/dail ... =TNY_Humor

[Rach3]

From "Men Yell At Me" , June 2:

"Listen up, Target is a corporation. They exist to do one thing and one thing only: Squeeze dollars from your pockets. And they don’t care if your pockets are gay or straight, they just want your money. If a little rainbow on a onesie sells, by the gods of Good and Gather, they will sell it.

Also, this is capitalism, baby. And the invisible hand of the free market decided it was gay.

Also, what is “trans gear for children”? Like what is that? Is it a fake mustache sold in the toy section? Is it the fact that they don’t try to stop girls from buying boys’ clothes and vice versa? I am thinking about the gear that my trans friends own and here is a list of some things that they have that you can buy at Target:

Food
Water
Water bottles
A variety of sparkling waters
Cool sneakers
Hair gel
Really cute tops from Wild Fable, the Target-brand Madewell knock-off
Is it the trans agenda to eat Market Pantry chips and stay hydrated while looking really amazing? Apparently.

And Target did not ever sell “Satan respects your pronouns” apparel, that is a hoax. But also, I think everyone respects pronouns because they are a literal part of speech. I’m curious about which parts of speech we should be respecting instead of pronouns. Adjectives? Adverbs? Verbs? Conjunctions? Do you think Satan really actually disrespects prepositions?

Also, a rainbow is in the Bible as God’s promise not to flood the earth again. Not many people know this, but according to the original Hebrew that promise literally translates to “not to flood the earth with heterosexuals again” and that’s why everyone is gay now, Nancy. It’s what Jesus wants.

Also, speaking of Jesus…in the New Testament, Jesus, gets twelve men to leave their wives and families to hang out with him. TWELVE MEN! I can’t even get one single guy to text me back. Twelve married men? That’s the gay power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And you know Jesus was gay because he looked incredible — toned, tanned, and hair touseled just so — even while hanging from a cross. I know this because I spent a lot of time in churches growing up.

(And shout out to my sister, Cat. On our trip to Poland, Cat was gaping at some Catholic art and said, “When did Jesus get so hot?” And I had to tell her he’s always been that way. And then, when our sister Beka objected, I got to pull rank and tell them both about the time I wrote about hot Jesus.)

But whatever, stay out of Target it just means that the line to get my iced Americano at Starbucks will be shorter.

But also, Target literally took Pride merchandise off their shelves! They aren’t that gay. Meanwhile, Walmart was like “Gay rights, y’all” and kept their shelves full of the cheapest rainbows around. And Cheap Rainbow better be someone’s drag name now. "

[Rach3]

Back-to-office mandates:

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/dail ... =TNY_Humor

[Rach3]

Restroom signage at Mar -A-Lago:

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/dail ... =TNY_Humor

[jserraglio]

The Laugh-Out-Loud Funniest—and Sh*t-Your-Pants Scariest—Details of the Case Against Donald Trump. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06 ... -trump/amp

[Rach3]

The Laugh-Out-Loud Funniest—and Sh*t-Your-Pants Scariest—Details of the Case Against Donald Trump. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06 ... -trump/amp

Priceless: Q: "Was that a good look for the former president to have boxes in a bathroom?"

Kevin McCarthy: "I don't know. Is it a good picture to have boxes in a garage that opens up all the time? A bathroom door locks."

[maestrob]

The Laugh-Out-Loud Funniest—and Sh*t-Your-Pants Scariest—Details of the Case Against Donald Trump. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06 ... -trump/amp

Priceless: Q: "Was that a good look for the former president to have boxes in a bathroom?"

Kevin McCarthy: "I don't know. Is it a good picture to have boxes in a garage that opens up all the time? A bathroom door locks."

Yes, but it locks from the inside. Not the industry standard for protecting valuables.

[jserraglio]

Yes, but it locks from the inside. Not the industry standard for protecting valuables.

LOL! Speaking Indictment McCarthy is cretinous.

[Rach3]

Yes, but it locks from the inside. Not the industry standard for protecting valuables.

LOL! Speaking Indictment McCarthy is cretinous.

Sometimes best to keep ones mouth shut at the risk of people thinking you might be a moron, rather than to speak and remove all such doubts.

Expert commentary on Trump's bathroom's bathroom's dirty secrets, from WAPO:

"Last week, former president Donald Trump was indicted on charges that he mishandled classified documents, allegedly storing them in, among other places, a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. A photo of the scene included in the indictment depicted stacks of boxes under a large crystal chandelier that was somehow simultaneously decadent and drab, the light fixture equivalent of Miss Havisham.


Despite the implications of this indictment for national security, the 2024 presidential race and American democracy, it was the chandelier (and the smaller, adjacent crystal sconce) that generated significant reaction from the public in the following days. Its silent witness to the (alleged) crimes unfolding below offered a different sort of indictment — of wealth and the things to which we, the middle-class masses who grew up with one or two chandelier-free bathrooms, were taught to aspire. And it raised questions, both of design and hygiene. Chief among them: Are toilet chandeliers even a thing?

According to interior designer Lacy Keller, who owns a design firm in Portland, Ore., chandeliers in bathrooms aren’t that unusual. She’s had several installed for high-end clients. When choosing a style, Keller takes into account several factors, including whether the fixture can resist heat and moisture.
Would she ever install something like this?

“I wouldn’t put that chandelier in any bathroom,” Keller says. It’s far too big and elaborate, and it hangs too low — anyone trying to use the shower would immediately hit their head.
“It’s overwhelming,” she says. “It’s an example of what not to do.”


Keller suspects that the bathroom is used rarely, if at all. She puts the style as late or even early ’90s, and “overly traditional.” The toilet, she notes, is far from the wall, and might not be plumbed. Additional file boxes stowed in the shower, behind a flimsy beige curtain hanging from a tension rod, further suggest the bathroom was out of order. This suggests a reality that is almost impossible to fathom in its banality: that the former president, like so many of us, has an outdated bathroom in disrepair.

Ruth M’rav-Jankelowitz, an interior designer based in Vancouver and owner of Janks Design Group, has also put the occasional chandelier in a bathroom, but nothing so ornate as what’s in Mar-a-Lago.
“It’s very odd,” she says.

Chandeliers are used to create focal points, M’rav-Jankelowitz explains. They bring a warm, soft aura of light, so she tends to use them in foyers or dining rooms. But something like the one at Mar-a-Lago is over the top, she says.
“It’s the focal piece. It draws your attention away from everything else.”
This feels useful when “everything else” could be 36 boxes of incriminating evidence.


Which prompts another urgent question: Is a chandelier in the loo even hygienic? M’rav-Jankelowicz explains that probably isn’t a concern for Trump — he has people who clean for him. But what about regular folks who want crystals suspended from the ceiling in intricate formation above their toilet, in hopes that it might draw a visitor’s eye away from a dated countertop or boxes of classified documents?

I asked Aaron Wendelboe, professor of epidemiology at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center in Oklahoma City, about the implications of having unexpected items in a bathroom, whether they be a large crystal chandelier or stacks of papers containing proof of alien life, and he didn’t immediately hang up on me, which was nice.

Wendelboe said that when you flush a toilet, fecal material can get aerosolized and “will pretty much go everywhere,” even in distant corners and door jambs.

Did this mean the boxes in Trump’s bathroom were potentially covered in poo particles?
“Yes, theoretically,” he said. “If someone’s using the bathroom, your items are going to get contaminated. If no one’s using the bathroom, they’re probably not contaminated.”

There are a number of factors that can influence how much bacteria is spread, including how contaminated someone’s feces was to begin with, whether the toilet lid is up or down and proximity to the bowl. The boxes adjacent to the commode would have higher levels of bacteria. But the boxes probably protected the documents inside.

Was the chandelier — with its prime position in the fecal blast zone — an area of concern?
“Honestly, not really,” Wendelboe said. “People aren’t going to be touching it. It’s not going to be a source of fecal matter.”

This is the nature of bathrooms: They are inherently intimate and embarrassing places. I have always regarded the human acts that occur behind their doors to be the great equalizer, a moment of parity for our species. There, every king and queen, every president, every rock star, every billionaire who has been to space and the rest of us mere mortals behave in the exact same, unspeakably disgusting human way. They are one of the places we are most vulnerable; this is why so many of them have locks. The chandelier hanging in Trump’s toilet was his dynasty in a microcosm: something opulent and gaudy, a caricature of wealth that screamed for our attention, while hoping we would not notice any potentially dirty deeds happening below."

[barney]

Thanks Steve, lovely piece of writing.

[jserraglio]

Donald von Scheisskopf’s chandelier — a fecal point that ties the room together.

[Rach3]

MIAMI (The Borowitz Report)—June 15

Miami police are looking for a defendant with seventy-one felony counts who skipped out on a check at a local Cuban restaurant on Tuesday.

According to the police, the man, who has been indicted for crimes in New York and Florida and could soon face arrest in Georgia, offered to pay for everyone in the restaurant before beating the check.


Harland Dorrinson, a spokesman for the Miami police, said that the suspect had been on a “multistate crime spree” and should be considered “extremely dangerous.”

“He is not believed to be carrying a weapon, but he could be carrying documents indicating the location of weapons,” the spokesman said. He revealed that the police are searching for the suspect throughout Miami, with special emphasis on the city’s bathrooms. “He appears to believe that those are highly secure locations,” Dorrinson noted.

[maestrob]

[Rach3]

Published in the July 10 & 17, 2023 Issue of New Yorker

Not a lot of good sounds could be heard on our street. Police sirens and ambulances. Next door, a man often yelled, his shouts sometimes quickly followed by a soft thump. On our television, a movie played: a building being blown up, gunfire, and flames. We weren’t supposed to watch things like that, but my brother and I were home alone. I was ten years old and he was eight.

Our parents had told us to keep the television loud so that it would sound as if there were an adult with us. They’d shown us the places we could hide together, if we felt scared. In the bathtub with the shower curtain drawn. In the closet beneath a pile of clothes. Under the kitchen sink with some pots and pans. When they were not at home, we weren’t allowed to go outside. We couldn’t ride our bikes or look for pretty marbles on the ground.

It was summer. There was no school to go to, and it cost too much to hire a babysitter to cover the time my parents worked, even just a teen-ager saving up for a prom dress. We didn’t live near grandparents. There were no cousins next door, no aunts or uncles in the neighborhood to go to. So it was just the two of us.

“You hear that?” my brother asked me.

“What?” I said.

“The ice-cream truck.”

I listened. And there it was. That tinny little sound twinkling somewhere nearby.

When you hear an ice-cream truck on your street, it means that someone has thought of you. It means that someone thinks you deserve something good in the world, and you don’t have to imagine that for yourself all by yourself.

That day, the ice-cream truck came to our street.

I slid the chain off the door and unlocked it. I grabbed my brother and we ran outside to the curb. The sound of the ice-cream truck was so loud, so close. My brother and I waved it down.

The ice-cream truck stopped for us.

We were frantic in our joy, screaming out what we wanted to eat, and for some reason the man in the truck made it for us. We got what we asked for and ate quickly, trying not to let the summer heat take it away from us. We licked our fingers, hands, wrists. And we laughed for no reason other than that we could.

We hadn’t noticed the ice-cream truck leaving. We hadn’t noticed its loud music pulling away, growing distant.

My brother looked over at me with sudden worry, and said, “I forgot to pay. Did you?”

I forgot, too.

I understood then why ice-cream trucks maybe didn’t come to our street. Why, when we’d heard the ice-cream truck before, it was always a street over, where there were brick houses with front lawns and sprinklers and bright flowers.


We promised each other that we wouldn’t tell our parents. We wouldn’t tell them that we’d gone outside. That we’d eaten ice cream. That we hadn’t paid. We spent the rest of the afternoon watching cartoons about small blue people who lived inside mushrooms.

I am forty-four years old now. I will be forty-five this summer. I hadn’t heard an ice-cream truck in my neighborhood in years, but a few weeks ago there it was. Faint, twinkling. There was no one to ask, “You hear that?” I could go outside now without having to tell someone. I grabbed some cash and ran.

I didn’t know exactly where the ice-cream truck was, but I moved to where its music felt loudest. I closed my eyes and followed what I felt.

When I opened my eyes, I saw someone who looked like my brother. A little boy, running. I knew he wasn’t my brother. I reminded myself that my brother had grown up, and that he had died just last year. Whoever this little boy was, he knew where he was going. So I ran in the same direction.

And there it was, the ice-cream truck, in a parking lot. I got in line like everyone else. When it was my turn to pay, I gave the man in the ice-cream truck everything I had, a twenty-dollar bill, and I told him to keep the change. The man gave me a standing ovation.

I took my ice cream with me and ate it in the sunshine. I deserve this joy, I said. I deserve it all. ♦



Published in the print edition of the July 10 & 17, 2023, issue.
Souvankham Thammavongsa has written four poetry books and the short-story collection “How to Pronounce Knife,” which received the 2020 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

[jserraglio]

The Trump mugshots have leaked out.

[Rach3]

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/blit ... =TNY_Humor

[Rach3]

FLORENCE, COLORADO (The Borowitz Report)

In a withering takedown of the Department of Justice, the former drug lord Joaquín (El Chapo) Guzmán has claimed that the D.O.J. has been weaponized against him.

Speaking from his cell at a supermax prison in Colorado, El Chapo called his prosecution and incarceration “the greatest witch hunt in the history of witch hunts.”

“This should never be allowed to happen in our country,” he added.

Questioning the D.O.J.’s motives, El Chapo claimed that he has been imprisoned because of his consistently high poll numbers.

“You look at my polls, and they’re unbelievable,” the former narco kingpin said. “I’m doing better than Biden. I’m doing better than DeSantis. And, of course, I’m doing better than Doug Burgum, who no one has heard of and who shouldn’t even be allowed to run, quite frankly.”

[Rach3]

From The New Yorker today:

Following Florida’s recent ban on certain courses that were deemed “too woke,” school curricula statewide are starting to look very different from those in the rest of the country. Luckily, these Florida classes provide a more than sufficient education for real Americans, and offer instruction in a broad variety of subjects.

Psychology

Now that A.P. psychology courses have been banned, Florida schools will provide an alternative, teaching students how to recognize various disorders such as Queerness, Being Trans, the Woke-Mind Virus, or the mental illness that affects millions: General Liberalism Disorder.

African American Studies

In Florida’s new African American-studies class, students will learn how, after agreeing to enjoy the benefits of working on Southern plantations for their benevolent bosses, enslaved people were able to cheerfully luxuriate and engage in a variety of fulfilling outdoor activities, eventually becoming so prosperous that they took over, and came to rule the South with an iron fist.

Math

As certain math textbooks needed to be banned last year owing to their references to critical race theory and multicultural learning, Florida students can now finally take a math course without any ideological bias, memorizing the order of operations with the helpful acronym pemdas: Patriots Each Must Defend American Society.

Biology

Want to study things like Punnett squares, photosynthesis, and taxonomy? Well, that’s unfortunate, because Florida’s new biology classes exclusively teach two immutable facts: that there are only two genders, and that some races are predisposed to being superior to others. The final project for this course requires students to present their own research on the covid vaccine.

English

Florida’s new English classes offer students a comprehensive education in American literature as they read, discuss, and write essays on the only two remaining books that haven’t been banned: “Atlas Shrugged” and Ron DeSantis’s autobiography.

History

This course is just chanting “U.S.A!” for an hour straight.

Spanish

With Florida’s updated curriculum, students are welcome to take Spanish, but any student who receives an A in this class will be immediately reported to ice.

Public Speaking

There are no “safe spaces” in this crash course on how to straight-up tell it like it is, no matter who gets offended. Whether they’re raving about trans people, roasting snowflakes for liking oat milk, or engaging in the classic discourse of making fun of women, students will finally be able to own the libs. Don’t get triggered, and leave your pronouns at the door.

Environmental Science

This class is famously easy, as it’s graded pass-fail and the only requirement for passing is agreeing that everything is totally fine with the environment and asserting that anyone who believes differently is being paid by the deep state. (Sponsored by ExxonMobil.)

Journalism

Teachers will instruct on the malleability of “facts” and how to manipulate truth to garner the greatest possible outrage. Find out how to incite moral panic over otherwise inconsequential morsels of pop culture, such as which movie characters are Black and which brands are too woke. Grades will be administered based on students’ ability to perpetuate xenophobia while keeping all hate speech subtextual.



Geography

Students will learn the capitals of all the Confederate states, and will be educated on which of the countries inferior to America should be categorized as Good Countries, Bad Countries, and Countries That Deserved What We Did. Graduates of this course will have the ability to draw the United States’ strong borders.

Philosophy

Learn to debate like a pro, through techniques employed by the great philosophers of our era Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson: circular arguments, miscontextualized data, and, in a pinch, outright lying. Students will hone the ability to logically deny the existence of racism, and even argue the pros and cons of genocide.

Civics

This course is designed to help students become model, law-abiding citizens in today’s society. Key chapters from the textbook include “Strongly Worded E-mails and Other Alternatives to Protesting,” “Choosing How to Vote Between the Republican Party and the Bad Guys,” “Why the Supreme Court Should Have Even More Power,” and “How to Sacrifice Yourself and Others for the Needs of the Economy.”

Physical Education

Students will learn the value of staying active as they train on outdoor obstacle courses. (This class is a prerequisite for mandatory conscription into the official school militia.)

Home Economics

Only female students are allowed to take this course, in which they are educated in how to cook, clean, and be demure for their future husbands. They will also learn methods of child-rearing by pretending that a sack of flour is their baby—feeding it, changing its diaper, and teaching it how to shoot a gun.

Drama

Students will train in acting, movement, and dance as they prepare to perform scripted pieces such as “The Birth of a Nation.” They will also be offered the opportunity to explore their imaginations through writing and improv, reënacting key moments of the Civil War if the South had won.

Sex Education

Just kidding! Obviously there is none. ♦

[jserraglio]

Sex Education:
Just kidding! Obviously there is none.

And a very good thing that is too. The kids’ll figure it out all by their twosomes.

[Rach3]

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a2792 ... new-yorker

[Belle]

[jserraglio]

These two men could not be more different. Joe Biden, institutionalist. Donald Trump, institutionalized.

[Rach3]

"Start every day off with a smile and get it over with."

W. C. Fields
Timely.

[Belle]

We've all had a good laugh about this today (we're with family in Perth, WA)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9GoQLBfom0

[Rach3]

TEXAS (The Borowitz Report Sept.18)

Thousands of hardened criminals poured into Texas over the weekend after learning how easy it is to secure an acquittal there.

Interstate freeways were reportedly backed up for miles as acquittal-seeking perpetrators sought to put down roots in soft-on-crime Texas.


Harland Dorrinson, a self-styled recidivist who has been convicted in Ohio, Missouri, and Wisconsin, said that he was heading to the Lone Star state because, “in Texas, no one is below the law.”

“An acquittal is yours for the asking if you’re white, male, and nefarious,” he said. “I check all the boxes.”

When told that one must also be elected as a Republican in order to qualify for Texas’s special “conviction exemption,” the career criminal was unfazed, noting that “even Greg Abbott” managed to do that.

[jserraglio]

[Rach3]

X Users to Require Elon Musk to Pay Them to Keep Using It
September 19, 2023

THE XVERSE (The Borowitz Report)—Users of X, the social-media platform formerly known as Twitter, are about to roll out a plan that would require Elon Musk to pay them a monthly fee to keep using the site.

Tracy Klugian, a user who masterminded the plan, said that a monthly fee of $10.99 would compensate users for the toxic experience of being on X.

Additionally, Klugian said, X users will demand that Musk set aside billions of dollars to compensate them for any psychiatric or other medical expenses that they incur as a result of their exposure to the platform.

The proposal drew a harsh response from a legion of bots, who argued that Musk must also compensate them for their continued presence on the site.

“Any plan that pays a monthly fee to X users but not to bots is deeply hurtful,” @TrumpBoebert2024 wrote. “Bots made X what it is today.”

[Rach3]

1 for the road in 2024:

https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios ... are#story7

[Belle]

Who's the spiv holding the cape??

[jserraglio]

THAT WAS THEN …

President Trump Aces his Cognitive Test


THIS IS NOW …

[barney]

THAT WAS THEN …

President Trump Aces his Cognitive Test


THIS IS NOW …

Magnificent.

[Belle]

More projections from the Left!!

What about the soy boys that pass for Democrats these days!!! I dislike Trump, being so bored by hearing about and from him, but at least he's a male. That's what we like about Ron DeSantis - he's a man through and through, and also a family man. He knows it's possible to chew gum and walk at the same time!

Ex defence force guys - crack specialist units, all of them - who work with my son have said they'd never fight for Australia again as protecting the woke, soy boys and virtue signallers just isn't worth the effort anymore.

[jserraglio]

What about the soy boys that pass for Democrats these days!!! I dislike Trump …

When you don’t have an answer, you just keep repeating, “What about …?” “What about …?” “What about …?”

Then you tell us that Ron DeSantis is a “man through and through”, a “family man” (your words, not mine), as if Joe Biden were a serial philanderer like Trump.

Re: Trump. Fact is, you defended him in this very forum after 2016 when he emerged as a winner, then turned your back on him after 2020 when he ended up a loser. The very same path of a fair-weather supporter that you trod with Scott Morrison.

A great republican once described such behavior as the actions of a “summer soldier and sunshine patriot”.

Now that Trump has become the presumptive Republican nominee, suddenly we are treated to another of your flip flops. Once again you defend Trump, albeit grudgingly this time — “at least he's a male”, you argue in his defense.

Now, that’s real news. I had thought a presiding judge in a civil court had called Trump out as E. Jean Carroll’s rapist, to the tune of 5 million bucks in damages.

What sort of “male” is that? Might I suggest? Dirty Old Man!

[Belle]

No hypocrisy here. Or anything.

[jserraglio]

[jserraglio]

Well, Your Honor, who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?

[Rach3]

Melania re-negotiates her pre-nup ? Again ?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/melania-trum ... 00123.html

[jserraglio]

Melania re-negotiates her pre-nup ? Again ?

It amounts to divorce without tears and recriminations.

[jserraglio]

What They Don’t Tell You About Getting Old

New York Times
Sept. 30, 2023,
By Roger Rosenblatt

Mr. Rosenblatt is a longtime contributor to Time magazine and “PBS NewsHour” and the author of several novels and memoirs, including “Cataract Blues: Running the Keyboard.”

I recently turned 83, and while there are many joys to getting older, getting out of taxis is not one of them.

What you don’t want to do is get your left foot caught under the front right seat before you try to swing your right foot toward the door; otherwise, you’ll topple over while attempting to pay the fare, possibly injuring your ankle, and causing the maneuver to go even more slowly. If you make it past the taxi door, there is still the one-foot jump to the street. You’re old. You could fall. Happens all the time.

And that’s when it’s just you in the taxi. If some other old person is with you — a friend, a spouse — there’s a real possibility of never getting out of the vehicle. You might live out the rest of your days in the back seat, watching Dick Cavett do real estate ads on a loop.

“Old People Getting Out of Taxis.” I was thinking of making a film with that title, if I knew how to make a film. Figure it would run four hours. I asked an actor friend, also old, if he’d star in it. His response: “If I can get out of my chair.”

It’s no joke, old age. It just looks funny. Mel Brooks latched on to this in his 1977 film “High Anxiety” with Professor Lilloman (pronounced “little old man”), a stock character who moves at a turtle’s pace, mumbles and whines as he goes, equally irritated and irritating.

I used to find the professor a lot funnier than I do now. Slow? Merely to rise to my feet in a restaurant takes so much angling and fulcrum searching, the waitstaff takes bets on whether I will do it at all.

Old age isn’t what the books promised it would be. Literature is littered with old people for whom the years have brought some combination of wisdom, serenity, authority and power — King Lear, the ageless priest in Shangri-La, Miss Marple, Mr. Chips, Mrs. Chips (I made that up), Dickens’s Aged P, crazy Mrs. Danvers. In fiction, old folks are usually impressive and in control. In life, something less.

I can’t think of anyone who has come to me for wisdom, serenity, authority or power. People do come to sell me life insurance for $9 a month and medicines such as Prevagen, which is advertised on TV as making one sharper and improving one’s memory. Of course, that is beneficial only to those who have more things they wish to remember than to forget.

One thing I need to remember is which day for which doctor. Two years ago, my wife and I moved back to New York City after 24 years of living by the sea. The city is safer, we thought — just in case we may ever need to be near medical facilities. Since our move, not a day has passed without one of us seeing a doctor, arranging to see one or thinking or talking about seeing one.

On one day last week, I had a vascular sonogram in the morning, consulted my ophthalmologist in the afternoon, made an appointment with a retina specialist, spoke to my primary care physician about test results and put off my dentist. As a result of such activities, my vocabulary has increased. I now can say “occlusion” — and mean it. Has anyone seen my oximeter?

Activities such as getting out of a taxi are not only degrading and humiliating; they take so much effort, they simply make you tired. You may reasonably say, “Why not take the subway?” I would, except for the two hours needed to get up and down the stairs. Still, it’s all a matter of adjustment. It took me three or four years of taxi rides to finally admit to myself that I’m old.

Old. Even the word sounds like a sigh of surrender.

I wrote a book called “Rules for Aging” 25 years ago, when I used to leap in and out of taxis like a deer, if you can picture such a thing. The rules were less about aging than about living generally, one of the first being “Nobody’s thinking about you.”

In old age that’s true in spades. And that’s another of aging’s unnerving surprises. You disappear from the culture, or rather, it disappears from you. Young women and men shown on TV as world famous, you’ve never heard of. New idioms leave you baffled. You are Rip Van Winkle without having fallen asleep.

To be sure, old age has compensations. Grandchildren. Their company is delightful, partly because they think you have something useful to impart, if you could remember to impart it. Waitresses tend to treat you sweetly. Doormen and maintenance crews show respect. And there are positive or harmless activities for the over the hill. Women take up watercolors and form book clubs. Men find loud if pointless camaraderie in diners and on village benches all over the country. Hey, old-timer.

While here in the city, we hail taxis. And cringe to see whether the one we have hailed is a normal car, for normal people, or one of those sliding, clanging door jobs that require a forklift for entry. I’m not exaggerating — much.

My point is: Who ever expected to spend time wondering if Madison Beer is a beverage honoring a founding father? Who ever expected that one’s social circle would consist of Marie, who does blood work, and an M.R.I. technician named Lou? Who ever expected that getting out of a taxi would be so momentous an issue that one is a bundle of nerves planning exit strategies halfway through the ride? Who ever expected old age?

[maestrob]

I freely admit to having trouble getting in and out of taxis these days!

[jserraglio]

I freely admit to having trouble getting in and out of taxis these days!

Roger is a deeply influential former teacher of mine (modern poetry). I can't picture either him or you having that problem.

[Rach3]

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoons/dail ... =TNY_Humor

[jserraglio]

Get a life, Matt! —Kevin McCarthy

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”I go fer pretty young things more than this stinky stuff, but ya know,he is camera ready and sometimes hit’s any port in a storm.” —‘Baby’ Gaetz

[maestrob]

Brilliant!

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”And rest assured, ma fella Americans, I shall embrace this darkness rather than flip a light switch.” —Ron DeSanitize

[Belle]

Woody Allen, "Kidnapped".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4sdnb0sYTc

[Rach3]

I hope not behind a paywall .From Des Moines Register Oct.13:

" Northwest Iowa is home to this year's best breaded pork tenderloin sandwich.
Breaded pork tenderloins from five restaurants in Iowa vied for the title of best in the state. The winner hails from northwestern Iowa.

Check out this story on desmoinesregister.com:

https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story ... 138740007/

(Rach3:For me, to the meat just add salt, a couple small round dill pickle slices, and a glob of French's yellow " salad" mustard, with a cold lager.No lettuce, no tomato. )

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