When It Rain...It...Rains...And...

Bumper Sticker

1) Driving behind a woman in a Toyota sedan, Riverside, CT. Bumper sticker:

Wise Men Still Seek Him

Note To Him:

With all due respect, this does not seem to be working well enough. Perhaps it's too exclusive a group. May I humbly suggest more Women Seekers be pursued or that You ramp up efforts to recruit more Un-wise men?

Respectfully,

3G

2) In-Turn Defined: "You will provide work to us and our clients and can tell your parents, friends and prospective selective schools that you work/ed here; you will have  other people with whom you can work, and services and products with which you can work - In-Turn - we will not pay you much or at all, or cover your personal expenses, and we will own all of your work and it's value forever. Further, this in-turnship does not imply any offer of future employment or future in-turnships."

3) License plate on Mini Cooper parked in Greenwich, CT:

MOMLET

Merc nearby:

BREATH 

Please. Why do we do these things to ourselves?

Full

4) Somebrellas are Better Than Others: One of our favorite city things to do is walk down Madison or Park in the rain after visiting our club on East 79th Street. We buy a new umbrella near any subway station or major intersection, if we've left ours at home or on the train into town. We always get the big one for about $10. We say "about," because, depending on where you are, the vendor, just in from Africa (they own this business), might ask $12 or even $15. Just tell him you're a New Yorker and he'll take less, maybe even $8 on a slow day. After all, he wants to be a New Yorker too.

5) Speaking of our club: the Travellers &Writers Club is the result of the merger some years ago between two clubs, The Travellers and Writers & Artists. The Travellers had a great building, the site of the merged club, and W&A had a better library.

Choice

The club offers a very efficient solution to the fact that it has no steam room. On hot, rainy, muggy days , such as we've recently been having, the staff closes the windows and doors in the The beautiful tall-ceilinged Reading Room on the 2nd floor and turns off the air conditioning for an hour or so. This results in members being able to read and get a steam in the same room.

No need to bother with a shower afterwards on those rainy days!

Also, the club has brilliantly outsourced its all of its dining, except for Elevenses and Tea, to the very affordable Viand Cafe, which is practically next door. It is, of course, run by a man named Ari (Greeks still own this business).


6) License plate on a gray Maserati ahead of us in Rye, NY:

F08-08S

We though it odd that this Mighty Mas owner would not bother to get a vanity plate; however, while stuck at a red light, we figured it out. F**k 08, 08 Su**ed. Indeed. Guess it was an '09 Mas, succor (sorry) for the TooBigToFail class.

Confusion

The Mas was immediately replaced in front of us by a gray Astin Martin Rapide. License plate:

RAPIDE

How slow can you get. Arrete!


Ed Note: Apologies, but currently my old iphone is not on speaking terms with my old  mac with new software. So, we need to use stock photos.  Maybe my editors will provide a new phone!!??

Get Thee to The ...Nuttery

Discourtesy's Up

1) You get home in the evening after a tough day. Before deciding not to go to the gym, whose homework to tackle, and what to make for dinner, you want a little room to decompress.

The phone rings; it's the land-line. You hesitate. It might be your brother, your mother, or your brother about your mother or visa versa. Could it be that client you pitched a couple of months ago, finally, or that job you applied for last year, but never heard back? You grab the receiver.

"Please hold for a courtesy call," says the lovely voice. Courtesy? As if. Instead, it's a perfect example of an Orwellian corporate world, intruding on you in a most discourteous way, but giving it a warm and fuzzy name.

What kind of fellow-humans thought that this would be a good idea? Get thee...!

2) You're on hold again - duh! - after punching in your account or phone number.

"We appreciate your call..." Really? Then, why don't you ever answer the phone without putting us on hold? If you truly appreciated our business, we would not be automatically on hold, or, at least, we would be able to proceed quickly without having to listen to nine different options, none of which cover the real reason for the call.

My Account Number

Eventually, you get through, and the first thing you are asked is: "May I please have your account number?"

What do they do with these numbers , while you've been on hold for five, ten, eighteen minutes?

Get thee to...!

3) Triple Play is a baseball term for something that is very hard to perform and only happens 4-5 times a season, since 1876, less than 1,000 times in baseball history!

And yet, you might think that it's a commonplace event the way certain companies throw this supposed money-saving term around:

Cable-Internet-Phone. Phone-Cable-Internet. All for about ninety bucks a month. Such a deal.

Well, not always. It turns out that Cable companies may not be any good at phone calls, in the same way that they are not always good at Cable! And, phone companies don't always offer cable in your area, or aren't really so good at that. You get what you pay for.

Triple play? Near-miracles don't come cheaply. A double and a single is just as good as a home run.

Get thee to The...!

4) You're on the check-out line and hand in your Shopper's Card. Before the cashier begins giving you some special benefit, she asks, "Would you like to donate a dollar to help children?" Huh, didn't this just happen at the gas pump?

Charity is epidemic: it's at Stop & Shop and Costco. Chase "card services" wants you to donate to Robin Hood Foundation online. Suddenly, the most generous citizens in the world by any measure of giving are being inundated with more requests for giving. Everywhere we go: everywhere we look.

Want Heaven With Those Fries?

And, where there is charity, there is...guilt, whenever you choose not to give. Was that an "attitude" you saw in the cashier's eyes, when you said no? How did we get here?

Obviously, we are not against giving. To the contrary, we do what we can and encourage others to do so (see Disclosures, below), but this feels different. The companies facilitating the giving see it as part of their brand. Banks especially, after nearly taking the country down a couple of years ago, seem to be on a new mission or several of them with our money.

Here's an idea: why don't these companies start asking people and The Party in China to start an epidemic of giving? Why aren't American companies building their brands and doing good by expecting their Chinese "partners" and consumers to donate to these worthy causes?

Could it be that they would not want to offend their Chinese customers?

Get thee to The...Nuttery!

Disclosures: A)We think that there is a place for giving in a consumer environment, just not everywhere. We once created a national limited-time program for vending machine giving called Small Change, Big Dreams, in which one of the snack/drink choices was a specific program to reduce child obesity. Everyone loved it until the vending company's corporate parent sent in the lawyers...and it died. B) We created a tennis tournament, which currently raises money for a local children's tennis program. C) One of our business services clients is an educational non-profit organization for whom we develop ways to reach donors among other things. We see pervasive requests for charity giving as a privacy issue more than a giving issue.

When It Rains...

"...the wind is part of the process
     the rain is part of the process..."
- Ezra Pound, Canto 74, The Pisan Cantos


"...But visionaries are limited by their vision..."
- Malcolm Gladwell, Creation Myth, TNYer, 5/16/11

                                                                            *

Sunday morning tennis was rained out, and so we had to conjure up other things to do. Shall we think about how complicated our world has become? Yes, let's; and let's also talk about how we deal with that.

                                                                             *

Simple, but not digital

We have plenty of digitized gadgets that are meant to simplify our lives; some call these hardware. These gadgets provide and contain information in a number of new ways; some call these software. Are you with me so far? Good. Now, here comes the hard part: these digitally-engineered gadgets and their info packets have raised our expectations regarding human capabilities. Just for fun, let's call this Simplicity's Complication.

                                                                            *

During the past week, I have spoken to a bank supervisor in Bangalore on my cell-gadget regarding the fact that a significant sum of money seemed to be missing from my balance, as indicated on my mac-gadget in my virutual account. He was very professional, but could not find the money either and apologized, saying "I"m sure it's there somewhere." He also explained how some "cash" was not always "cash" to a bank, until that bank, especially if it is comprised of not one but two formerly Too Big To Fail Banks says it is cash.

I have also spoken to a representative of an office supply company in Oklahoma about a dysfunctional wireless printer, who said the "connection is there somewhere, but we just can't see it yet."
According to my calculations, we  couldn't see it yet, as we could not see the "cash" yet because it was not there. The systems were flawed. But, according to the humans on the other end of the lines in these capers, these things were not there because a certain human was too flawed to see them: namely, me. Apparently,  I hadn't been updating my software: read, digital capabilities.

This was getting too complicated. I just wanted to have the cash to cover my chili-steak wedge and to print out my email exchange regarding the missing cash. Couldn't do either.

                                                                               *

Complex

This might be a good time to tell you that my friend Mulligan has a theory about people that might help us here. He believes that there are only two kinds of people - no, not richer or poorer or sick or healthy or alive or dead - as in marriage vows.

A Type #1 person begins each day expecting good things are going to happen in the course of that day; this places the person in an excellent position to deal with anything that might be somewhat troubling in the course of the day. Type #2 begins each day expecting trouble during the day; this does not help the person deal with trouble, and, what's worse, it places the person in a poor position to take advantage of good opportunities that might arise.  In fact, most of the time, #2 will not even recognize a good thing when it hits them in the face.

According to Mulligan, all religions revolve around the difference between the two types and why being one Type is infinitely better than being another (Hint: if you do not know which is which, you are Type #2), unless you really love suffering, which, apparently, billions of people do.

Mulligan is certainly no Norman Vincent Peale*, and I have tried to poke holes in his theory many times, without any real success. The guy seems to have a very good point.

                                                                                *

Where were we? Oh yes, complications.

When things get too complicated, I resort to a few tricks, all of which have the following goals: A) to slow me down, B) to keep it simple, C) to poke fun at myself, and D) to make me into Type #1, at least for a little while, even if I am a natural born Type #2.

humble

One of my tricks is to read poetry, which is, perhaps, the perfect literary form for our age. It is relatively short compared to most stories and novels; it is musical; and it contains mystery. This last trait is very important, and has turned poetry into a kind of torture for generations of students unfortunate enough to be taught by people who mistake mystery for something called Hidden Meaning. 

For those poor students, we offer the following thought: great and even good poets never hide anything. Ever. They offer only clarity; however, they do it in a unique way right in front of our noses, and therein lies the mystery.

I might read a deceptively simple poem by Kay Ryan, our former Laureate, or a longer, more complex poem or series like Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos, which happens to have been Sunday morning's choice (see quote above).

Digitally-engineered gadgets love precision, not mystery. When they do not function according to the engineered plan, according to the engineers and their representatives, it is also due to hidden meaning. This is why engineers mistrust poetry, mystery, and people like me and probably you, if you're on this mailing list and have time to read this stuff.

                                                                            *

TooSmallToFail©twmcd

Another of my tactics is to look at a very fine book called humble masterpieces: Everyday Marvels Of Design by Paola Antonelli, Curator of Architecture & Design at the MOMA.

It is impossible to recommend this little book highly enough to anyone interested in simplifying life in the face of constant complication in the form of poor design, shoddy workmanship, lack of customer service, general rudeness or a prevailing memyselfandI-ness.

Here are some of the most profound design ideas and improvements by human beings, who, one has to think, are united in their Type Oneness; they expected to be able to make something really cool, and so they did.

Here are Karl Elsener's Swiss Army Knife, Reach & Shibe's baseball, Kasper Faber's lead pencil, Italo Marchioni's ice cream cone, Sire Henry Tate's sugar cube, Walter Hunt's safety pin, and a French Design Team's Bic Crystal pen, with which I composed the first draft of this piece.

apple

And there are many more examples of how human beings make life truly simpler for themselves and others using nature as the best design teacher. They were artists as well as designers; they slowed down, kept it simple, had a sense of humor.

Somehow, after looking at this book, I cannot help being a Mulligan #1 person for an entire rainy day and longer. Innovators are not limited by their own design; they borrow, tinker. They dream, but carry a tape-measure. And they love a good mystery.

We need more of them right now, before we drown in our own complexity.



Ed Note: We highly recommend the current May 16 Innovator issue of The New Yorker. We particularly recommend Gladwell's story about the creation of The Mouse and Anthony Lane's profile of Pixar. It is no coincidence that a man named Steve Jobs plays a pivotal role in each of these stories. 

* wrote a book called The Power Of Positive Thinking among others. I seem to recall that he was one of Richard Nixon's favorite authors. We recommend skipping it and going with Mulligan's ideas, which are shorter and do not involve any connection to Nixon.

For Insanity, Press Seven

"Thank you, Mr. Dermo"

We moved recently. We moved only a few miles away, but, as far as certain "service" companies were concerned, we may as well have moved to Mars. Perhaps you too have encountered one of the absolute non-miracles of our digital age (some might say, The Middle Digit Age), the Main Menu, on which everything is a la carte. Here is our compendium of recently recorded Main Menu telephone "conversations:"


1. " To continue in English, please press 1 and do not whine about English being relegated to a 'second language' or mention how stupid it is that you have to press a digit, instead of someone who doesn't understand English. These might lead to a disconnection and/or losing your place in the queue, which, for your information, is not spelled c-u-e. If you do not press 1 and are a resident of Arizona, you will be asked a few brief questions by a representative of the Arizona Department of Immigration and Naturalization."

2A. "For Billing and Accounting questions , please press 2 and be prepared with your 27 digit account number. If you cannot remember your account number, which data shows 99.9% of callers cannot or, if you are not calling from the phone number listed on your forgotten account, you will be asked several 'security questions' you answered when establishing the forgotten account. If you cannot remember the correct answers to these questions, for example, What is the mother's maiden name of person who stole your first boy/girlfriend, you probably don't have an account with us, and you may hang up."

2B. "For Billing and Accounting questions (Cable). Please note: we are a cable company, and, as such, nobody outside of a few geeks inside the Accounting Department actually understands cable billing, and these geeks are not available for consultation. We recommend canceling service, at which point you can speak immediately with a sales representative. They do not understand your bill either, but they may offer you a slightly better deal in order to keep you as a customer, and, although you will still not understand your bill, you might pay a little less each month for a couple of months anyway."

3/4. "For repairs, technical assistance or to make or cancel an appointment or installation, please press 3. If you are calling about removal of 30 feet or more of unnecessary cabling and stapling in a room, which may or may not have actually needed cabling, you will need to remove it yourself; however, please go back to the Main Menu and press 4, so that you can temporarily turn off service. Please note, we are not responsible for injuries due to self-repair. Also, Please Note: all appointments and installations require the presence of an over 18 year-old adult on the premise, and do not even think about trying to make appointments outside our regular 8am-2pm and 2pm-8pm slots."

In your dreams....

0. "Sir/Madame, Please do not press 0 again. Pressing 0 will not bring you to an Operator, because we do not have any, and it will not bring you to a representative. At the end of this menu, you will be instructed as to how to properly receive representative service, since the menu has been created in order to reduce the cost of having representatives, which only creates a bigger monthly bill for you.

5. "For Customer Service, please go to www.wedontdothatanymore.com or press 5, but we highly recommend our web service, which has been specifically designed to avoid having to offshore customer service representative jobs, which, if we were going to hire customer service representatives anymore, which we most assuredly are not,  almost certainly would be American jobs for Americans, who usually press #1 and speak reasonably good American English with local colloquialisms, lilts, and other kinds of things your grandmother would remember if she can remember much of anything."

6-8. "Pressing these numbers will not actually bring you anywhere except back to the beginning of the Main Menu, which, as you already know if you've ever eaten there, is longer than the wine list at La Tour d'Argent in Paris. You should have pressed something in the 1-5 range already. If you have not pressed any number, due to having a sorry, old  a rotary dial, Hah!

La Tour d'Menu

9. "If you now want to speak with a representative or require phone trauma therapy, press 9. If you would like to speak with a trainee, we offer service at no charge. If you would like to speak with an experienced representative, who might be helpful, we charge $10 per each five minutes. If you would like to speak with a supervisor-level representative, who will use their real local name and not a made-up American type name and actually answer your inquiry somewhat to your satisfaction, we charge $25 per each 10 minutes. Please have your credit card number, expiration date, security code, and the name of your first pet available. If you never had a pet, that's terrible, go back to the Main Menu."

Snow Job: Early Season Games

MLB Early Season

Tomorrow, May 1,  is Opening Day. I am perfectly aware that Major League Baseball now begins its season in March, while it's still snowing, but that is their problem. I have begged the Commissioner's Office without success to begin the season in Florida and Arizona, where all the teams gather and it is warm and sunny. One always has to approach the Commissioner's Office; the actual "C" is like an ancient Chinese Emperor and must be protected from individual fans without an Inc. after their names.

What MLB calls early season games become spring training for me; their "spring"training occurred mostly in winter. Are you still with me? This is the kind of issue that caused me to create a whole new league a few years ago, the Universal Baseball League, with myself as very accessible Commissioner and to become a co-owner owner of the New York Pearls with my friend Mulligan, who needs the carry-forward losses. But that is a good story for another day or the "Mulligan" novel my agent, Goldberg, continues to bug me about.

World Champions

As some of you know, this is a special season for me, because it's the kind of season that only happens every 56 years. The Giants are defending World Champions for the first time since 1955, when I saw my first game in the Polo Grounds ( vs. the new Milwaukee, nee Boston, Braves). Many pundits have chosen the Giants to repeat, but true Giants' fans may know better; they are off to a middling start.

The New York Yankees, Inc. are off to a fast start, winning at a near .600 clip, which will win them a division title if they keep it up. They won't. They have too many pitching holes and Burnett and Joba's shrinks do not travel with the team. The slow-starting Red Sox will eventually light up Fenway like a pin- ball machine against what, in another era, would be AA pitching.

The first miracle of the season (No, not Barry Bonds' acquittal on the serious charges) is the Mets, who have recently won 6 in a row after a fittingly dismal start. They are still below .500, but are respectable on the field, which is the most that Mets fans have hoped for since their beginning in, of all places, the same Polo Grounds. The Times, which has always considered the Yankees to be the only team in town, even when NYC had 3 MLB teams (and when  they owned a piece of the BoSox), has been battering the Mets owners like a Joba fastball straight down the middle.

Now, I must disclose that I am a lapsed Mets fan. Very lapsed, indeed for excellent reasons. One Opening Day, Mets management decided to card everybody buying beer. Everybody. I was over 50, but they still carded me. This created long lines and many missed the first pitch and inning of the season. At another game that same season, it became apparent to fans that the Mets players ran the bases and fielded with an utter disregard for how many outs there were. Also, my former friend, Goldberg, not the agent another one, stopped sending me his free Inc. tickets.

Ebbetts Redux

The final straw was the new "Citi" Field, which pays open homage to the Brooklyn Dodgers' old Ebbets Field and Jackie Robinson, since the owner-Wilpons hail from Brooklyn. Any self-respecting Giants fan would be deeply offended by this grave transgression. This, of course, makes our recent Series victory that much more satisfying (to add insult....this season the "C" has taken over the Dodgers who are a mess at the moment. Golly, that's too bad).

When the Times starts pummeling even hapless owners, when Bernie's People come looking for dough, when you have to borrow from the "C" just to make payroll (as the Mets have done), when you have to let your son run things (see also Knicks/ Dolan, James), and when you field mostly AA-AAA talent everyday, well sir, I start to get interested, because I love the underdog. Plus, you have to love a team that builds a new "field" and makes it so big even The Babe could not reach the fences, but forgets that it doesn't have any pitching to go with it. Oops. Bring the fences back in.

One can only wonder how Casey would explain it all. He would know, because he played for The Dodgers (Ebbetts Field) and the Giants (Polo Grounds), and managed the Yankees (Old Stadium) and the Mets (Polos again and Shea).

But, then again, we wouldn't understand what he was saying anyway. This, in its way, might make him the perfect spokesperson for MLB today or any pro sport for that matter.

The Sunrise Monologue

Nina, middle

My family has a term they use to describe my ability to speak at length about certain subjects (okay, all subjects). They call it  "doing a Columbus." This is a reference to a somewhat one-sided "conversation" between my then middle school-aged daughter and myself, which took place in Sunrise Pizza some years ago. The Sunrise Monolog.

She was working on a Christopher Columbus project and had obviously only been receiving the PC version of this former hero in which he was merely an imperialist, racist, gold-monger. She asked, "Dad, can you tell me more about Columbus?" Perfectly innocent question: ....over an hour later I was just summing it all up, when my dazed daughter said thanks, but she had something really important to do like pore hot wax on her legs.

Thereafter, family members prefaced their rare questions to me by saying,"without doing a Columbus....." 

But, without doing a Columbus, you might say, why do I bring this up?

I bring it up because I have been thinking about old Chris lately, because I have been thinking a lot about destiny and journeys of discovery for reasons I won't go into here.  I have also been thinking that we seem to be lost at sea at the moment. By "we," I mean the collective we, and by collective we, I mean more specifically the American We. US.

GPS

Critics or grouches among us might point out that Columbus was famously lost; however, I would answer that at least he had a direction and destination: West to The Indies. It was neither his fault nor failure that he happened to bump into The Bahamas (thank you), Hispaniola (whoa), Cuba (caramba) and, by extension, this little nation called America. This was his destiny. Destiny, in CC's day, was thought to be decided by a higher mysterious power, not by Oprah or W.

We, on the other hand, seem to be obsessed with controlling our own destiny, without paying attention to our direction. We are terrified to take a risk on sailing into unchartered waters in search of something meaningful. Yet, we seem overly eager, as a nation,  to jump into any convenient conflagration, calamity, or compost heap. It is as if we had a national case of A.D.D.

On the other hand, we want to carry a GPS at all times, so we will know exactly where we are or a cell phone so that someone else (our boss, partner, google) will know exactly where we are. If we think that this means that we are not lost, we better stop and ask for directions. We actually believe that, if we could just get our taxes right, or our healthcare right, or schools right, or someone else's democracy right, that we would be alright.

Let's be very clear about this: if we really believe that our individual and collective destiny could or should be decided in Washington, on Wall Street, in the Principal's Office, or in Tripoli....we are hopelessly lost.

Too Grande Too Fail

We don't get to decide our own destinies; they play out in mysterious, some might say sacred ways. We can't make our own destinies, even if we (or our children) get perfect SAT's,  an 8-figure bonus, and drive a vehicle bigger than the Pinta and Santa Maria combined.


If the Frank Sinatras of this world want to claim "I Did It My Way," fine, but the gods have a song too and it is called, "Fool On The Hill."

Like Columbus, we do get to choose direction, based on certain calculated risks, but we seem to be stuck at the mooring or, at best, drifting without a rudder.

So why have we seemingly turned into a whining, scattered, conniving scrum of a people? Maybe it's just me (as I'm sure you would tell me). Maybe I need a vacation. Can't be: just had two!

Columbus was not perfect, but he had the courage to lead and take a calculated risk. His banker-backers, First National Bank of Ferdinand & Isabella, took very little risk for a potential great reward (why does this sound familiar?). Plus, they were using other people's money anyway and could always get some more. They probably gave little thought to CC during his voyage of several years in a 65' ship, although they may have given great thought to how to spend some of the gold upon his return.

Our contemporary heroes would seem to be Ferdinand & Isabella, rather than the tattered Columbus. F & I had great credentials, a house to die for (many did while building it), and tons of dough. All the things we now covet.

Ridiculous tax codes, blatantly unmanageable debt, entitlements galore for all, and leaders who couldn't clean CC's bilge pump are only inconvenient details. If we do not have a serious national conversation about who we really are now, where we want to go, and the best course to set in order to fulfill our as yet unknown destiny, none of those boring debates will matter.

Every age thinks that it is more enlightened than the ones before it. As stupid as our age has become, even we believe that we are smarter, faster, better than previous ages. Here's a newsflash: we are not as smart as we think we are, and, even if we were, it would not matter, since destiny has little to do with smarts, income, or relationship status. It has to do with being true to deep spiritual and cultural values, just for a start.

And, what are our shared spiritual and cultural values worth taking along on our journey? Hard to say....

....without doing a Columbus.

Ed Note: Sunrise Pizza is located in Rye, NY and is the finest pizza emporium in the area despite what others with less knowledge about these things might think. They serve a classic slice, whose origins are clear: Brooklyn, Lower Manhattan, and Queens. Not Chicago, Greece, or, please, New Jersey or California. Sunrise pizza is as close to the pizza of my youth at Pizza Prince on Austin St. in Forest Hills as pizza can get. With each slice, I recall the jukebox at the Prince: from Frankie Avalon's Venus to The Rolling Stones' Not Fade Away. 

You May Find Your Easter Bunny...

The Easter Bunny is everywhere, if you let him or her be. You might find your Easter Bunny....

....At the pump, after paying $97.52 for a full tank....of regular, and you will smile at the wonder of that.

....On line at the bank, which is your old bank with a new name and logo, which is an unattractive red and gold, and there is a huge expensive flat screen TV behind the counter telling you how many good things are available to you from this bank which was once not only one but two banks just....Too Big To Fail....and you think, "Liar, liar, pants on fire," and dance a little jig with him....

....or maybe when you realize that your property taxes are exactly equal to your child's private college tuition, ....and that both amounts are about what your parents paid for their house in 1966, and you will think about them, your parents, with even greater admiration and gratitude...

....or, you might find your Easter Bunny....

....when you read that GE, a company you once admired and held shares in, did not owe any federal income tax for 2010, and, in fact, will receive a seven-figure refund or credit, and you may marvel at the size of the American flag flying in front of their HQ in beautiful Bridgeport, CT....and you will think that boys will be boys, oh well....

....or while listening to a commercial on your TV which continues to blast at a much higher volume than the regular programming so that you can still hear it in case you try to leave the immediate vicinity of the TV area during said commercial, and you might recall that Congress was going to legislate about that, but have not yet and you imagine the TV lobbyist at lunch over perche du lac at a restaurant in Washington and his voice is so loud it can be heard over the collective voices of the lunch crowd as he explains to your Congresswoman, in her 10th Congress, how much his clients need that volume to sell more and create more jobs and you can almost see her smiling at the thought of profiteroles for dessert....

....or you might find her....

....when you realize just how much you truly love your dog, who does not ask for much beyond an occasional walk in the sun, a nap on your lap, a period of scratching her belly, and those fabulous "pet pocket" things in which you hide her pill, but which to her taste like the boudin noir you once ate for lunch at 33 Rue Jacob in the Sixth, and you think Ah, Easter in Paris in April....

....in the centerpiece of the dining room table all set for family Easter dinner as you did when you were a child,  and he is yellow on the outside and marshmallow inside and you bite off his ears which taste even better than you imagined a sugar-coated marshmallow Easter Bunny's ears could possibly taste....so you bite off all the rest of the ears too....

....or you might find him while on your knees trying to fit the contents of your old very large clothes-closet into you new quite small one, when you also remember just how fortunate you are to pay more than your fair share of taxes, fly an appropriate-sized flag and have something in that TBTF bank; and so you pray a decent length prayer, while accepting  the gifts you've received regardless of their size and promise not to lose sleep over other things you have not yet received and may never, which is perfectly okay....

Happy Hunting.