Obtusities go bump in the night

November 8, 2015

I shuffled to my wife’s side of the bed, felt around for her tissue box, knocked over her phone, found the box, bumped a bottle of water, grabbed a tissue, blew my nose, tripped over the wastebasket, and wandered back to my end of the world. Terry’s eyes flickered. If I’d known she was going to wake up anyway, I just would have reached over her. She yawned. “Do you need a box of tissues for your nightstand?” Being a typical man, I answered with typical male decisiveness: “I guess.” “They’re in the closet...” “I know where they’re at,” I said, ...

Essay fair or fowl: You be the judge

November 1, 2015

A few years back, I crafted what I hoped to be a small piece of brilliance to wow the judges of the annual Robert Benchley Society Annual Award for Humor Writing. They weren’t wowed. I got chucked in the first round. The problem may be that it was a departure from my usual style of writing. Or perhaps I forgot the humor. So now, nearly five years later, I am dragging the essay out the desk drawer to let you be the judges — of whether I should stuff it back in the drawer and leave it there, or burn the desk: “Why the Chicken Crossed the Kangaroo” I cannot accept credit (or ...

Get gooey with pumpkin innards focus group

October 25, 2015

Editor's note: Cole is on vacation yet again. This pumpkin goop of a Cole Classic originally ran in 1996. xxx All I wanted was some practical, fulfilling uses for that gooey, squishy stuff you scoop from inside pumpkins. So I put the question to a bunch of otherwise reasonably intelligent adults. They formed a focus group. The Pumpkin Goo Committee met over cider and apples to generate ideas, brainstorm proposals, and facilitate strategies and the like. Already, things weren't going well. Focus groups and committees are fine when you can't figure out what else to do at a major ...

Draamaw strikes without warning

October 18, 2015

Life has become a bit more, well, ordinary since we lost my mother-in-law this summer. She was the gift of quirkiness that kept on giving. Quite often, the gifts she gave were big manila envelopes full of expired coupons, clipped newspaper articles about people you didn’t know but she thought you should, and programs for events you’d missed — or even programs for shows you saw with her. She snagged programs for everybody. You just never knew what stunt the celebration-happy Carol would pull next. Her lore and legend morphed into the nickname “Draamaw” — one part grandma ...

Worries box fun out of old days

October 11, 2015

The disc jockey dusted off a recording from 1975 and announced, “Here’s a flashback from the carefree good old days.” He must not have lived in the same decade I did. Or he was already out of junior high school. How come we never recognize the days as good old while we’re slogging through them? Back in my 1970s, anxieties popped up more prolifically than acne. My fears fell into two major categories — girls and geometry. I didn’t understand either. Geometry involved calculating angles to figure out how long a line was. As I recall, it was summed up like this: One ...

Cows with a beef run rogue

October 4, 2015

We are at their udder mercy. Utter. I mean, utter mercy. I speak, of course, about the rash of rogue cows running roughshod in our neighborhoods. The latest reports came last week from New Hartford, N.Y., where police set a trap in hopes of finally catching a cow that’s been on the run several months. It wanders into town, then bolts into nearby woods. My guess is that’s where it has a bovine bunker, stocked with all manner of ammoonition — I mean, ammunition — including dozens of cans of Reddi-Whip nitrous oxide-propelled whipped cream. These are not the loving, gentle ...