Editor’s note: It’s hard to believe but Burton Cole is on vacation again. While he’s snoozing, we bring you this Cole Classic from June 27, 2004, when Burt was still a bachelor — which explains his behavior. We are diving headlong into another picnic season, and you know what that ...
Dad was wrong. As a kid, every chance I got during the summer, I flopped onto the couch in front of a fan to read books until I drifted off to sleep. Summers were for napping. Dad toiled at a full-time factory job before coming home to climb onto the tractor and work the fields the rest of ...
Gardening season has sprouted, which means there will be plenty of fresh vegetables soon. It’s horrible. I’m not against healthy eating, it’s just that dining on what’s good for me is, to use a scientific term, yucky. Do-gooder nutritionists claim we need lots of fresh veggies, ...
I read the other day that San Francisco won’t let lawmen use facial recognition technology anymore because sometimes the computer hoots and hollers, “Hello!” across a crowded restaurant at the wrong person. Me, too. The difference is that technology never pretends to be waving instead ...
Years of far-too-personal research have taught me that the best way to learn something is to screw it up. This is not true in all cases. Folding fitted sheets serves as the prime example. Experience makes a lousy teacher when it comes to sheets that frustrate me into fits. I end up wadding the ...
For a generation — my mom’s — Erma Bombeck was the voice of motherhood. Not the Shangri-la, idealized, TV commercial version of every-hair-and-tablecloth-in-place mothers. Erma wrote about the real-life adventures of mothers with piles of dirty dishes, dandelion bouquets and smuggled ...
One of the coolest things about my secret identity as a children’s author is that I get to read kids’ books and pretend that it’s research. “I’m working on my next novel,” I sputter to the librarian. “Oh, I believe you,” she chuckles. She hands me the comic collections of ...
May is the month of blossoms, as set forth in the Ohio Revised Code: “April showers shall bring May flowers.” When I was in school, I thought the Pilgrims brought the Mayflower. I refuse to live any longer in that kind of ignorance. I consulted a few offbeat calendars to find out what ...
Why doesn’t God have a cellphone? That’s a question that stumped my friend Lisa the other day. “I’m 73,” she told me. “I was talking to my 5-year-old granddaughter about Heaven because I didn’t want her to be sad when I’m gone. I told her I’d be watching over her from ...
The big news in science this past week was the release of the first photographic image of a black hole. Black holes are those outerspace phenomena that make things disappear. Anything caught in the gravitational pull of a black hole gets sucked in with no hope of return. Just like my ...
I don’t mean to alarm you, but I need $10,000. Quick. Otherwise, I’m gonna get arrested. See, I got this extortion notice with an official CIA logo pasted at the bottom. For $10,000, the technical collection officer who signed promised that he can make my name disappear from the case file ...
It’s not the groundhog, the daffodils nor March 21 that tells me when spring has sprung. And it’s definitely not the weather. As the great philosopher Charles Dickens wrote, “Spring is the time of the year when it is summer in the sun and winter in the shade.” Or as the great ...
That great philosopher Mark Twain once mused, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter — ’tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Exactly. One of those two things is what kids put into jars during the summer to ...
Few things bring out the blush in your cheeks like forgetting your cellphone at someone else’s place. It gives your friends hard evidence of something they’ve long suspected — your synapses are firing a couple of spark plugs short. “Poor ol’ George,” they’d say — providing ...
Amid a bludgeoning of news about floods, fires, assaults, walls, cheats, liars, murders and other mayhem, a pastoral headline went largely overlooked: Oklahoma City’s airport no longer is selling cow-tipping T-shirts. After more than 10 years, Will Rogers World Airport has sold out of ...
The more a man talks, the less likely he is to say something significant. That’s the word from several experts on the subject, all of whom happen to be female. Most are related to me. According to their standard of worthy talk, I haven’t engaged in a meaningful conversation since 1983. I ...
It’s not that boys intend to irritate their parents. We just have gigantic imaginations overwhelming teeny tiny filters in our brains. If a notion pops into our heads, we already are embarking on the adventure that will hereafter be known as “the incident” before any flicker of common ...
In retrospect, loaner spouses was a bad idea. I pitched the plan years ago in this space. In my defense, I was single at the time. I based the theory on trips to my auto mechanic. There’s only so long that you can ignore the shakes and shudders, the groans and moans, the passing of gas and ...
Valentine’s Day wings its way across the calendar this week, but according to a marketing survey more than a third of you — OK, us — won’t spend a cent on it. (The survey said nothing about the after Valentine’s chocolate sales, which is when I spend my loving loot. It may be ...
Ah, February, when a young man’s fancy turns to... Actually, I can’t recall. Too many decades have fluttered past since I’ve been a young man. But I can say with some authority that a cranky old geezer’s fancy turns to chocolate. And why not? The more doses of chocolate with which we ...