Let’s be silly today.

It has probably been years, even decades, since you last read Ogden Nash’s poems, so let me drop a few on you. You look like you could use a few giggles.

THE PORCUPINE

Any hound a porcupine nudges/Can’t be blamed for harboring grudges./I know one hound that laughed all winter/At a porcupine that sat on  a splinter.

THE BAT

Myself, I rather like the bat./It’s not a mouse, it’s not a rat./It has no feathers, yet has wings./It’s quite inaudible when it sings./It zigzags  throughout the evening air/And never lands in ladies’ hair,/A fact of which men spend their lives/Attempting to convince their wives.

TABOO TO BOOT Read More→

I have just finished a strange, intelligent and funny book about what happens to our body after we head off to the Big Playground in the Sky.

The book, “Stiff,” by Mary Roach, opens thusly:  “The human head is of the same approximate size and weight as a roaster chicken. I have never before had an occasion to make a comparison, for never before today have I seen a head in a roasting pan . But here are forty of them, one per pan, resting face up on what looks to be a small pet-food bowl. The heads are for plastic surgeons, two per head, to practice on.”

She spends a lot of time in the classroom, watching and explaining what’s going on. There’s an “eeeewwwwww” feeling as she writes, but she explains that if we ever need plastic surgery, we’d be damned glad that our surgeon had a lot of practice before taking the knife t0 our face. Read More→

Most people today probably don’t know who Dick Powell was, but I remember the first time I met him — and the last.

The first time I met him was important to me because I was starting a brand new job, and he was my first assignment. I had been working for 12 years as a Los Angeles newspaper reporter, but NBC-TV won my heart by offering me fifty bucks a week more than the newspaper, so I was now starting a new job  as a “publicist” –I wasn’t too sure about what a publicist was, or how to do the job. Read More→