Brat Candy (II)

I got lucky at the last minute. After another day of forgetting to buy protection candy for the little bastards, I remembered that last year, I overbought and stuffed the remains in a plastic sack in the fridge downstairs (for weird reasons, I have always lived in a house with a spare basement refrigerator).
There were [...]

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Brat Candy

Hard upon today’s encounter with Pestilent Child comes the realization that it is nearly October thirty-first and I have not yet gotten a bag of Brat Candy.
For a while I tried handing out nominally healthy treats, like little sesame candies from the co-op health food store, until I realized it was like throwing a vitamin [...]

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Rude Assholes

I am hardly the first person to comment on the Decline of Civility but it has really gotten out of hand.
Civility, as I see it, isn’t about refinement or protocol (after all, I just said “asshole”); it’s about according other people the same respect and consideration you would want for yourself. Kind of like that [...]

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Cardiac Cookies

My bank has been collecting for the American Heart Association. Today, to promote the fund drive, they had a table in the center of the lobby and were offering cookies, brownies and coffee.
Am I the only person who thinks there is something schizoid about this?
It reminded me of the comments of old-style 60s peaceniks about [...]

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Yikes!

Today in the gym, assuming the Bat Woman orientation, I realized a second after doing so that I had relaxed my handgrip on the crossbar and was doing abdominal curl-ups while hanging essentially by my shoetops from the top bar of a Smith machine. I normally do those while hanging by my knees, a distinctly [...]

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Stone Ginger

Given that the economy is tanking, I took the opportunity today — just in case necessities become scarce –  to lay in a case of Stone Ginger.
What is that, you say?
Aaaaaahhhhhhhh.
Divinity, aroma, ambrosia. Dark fruity currant wine brewed by little witch women and hot spanking vapors of ginger and physick for all that ails you.
I [...]

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Your Child is Pestilent

I do not like children. Oh, I’ve met a handful in my life who stirred indulgent feelings in me (if I cogitate upon it, I can think of one, anyway), but mostly, I want the noisy, messy, nasty, self-centered, stupid little things to go the hell away. Don’t ask me to be near them till [...]

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Viva Kermit Schaefer

This text (also visible in the main story body) appeared when I floated the mouse pointer over a headline on my Yahoo home page:
“Socks fell on Tuesday as fears that the global economy may not avert recession slammed shares of technology and consumer companies, eclipsing a government rescue plan for banks.”
Immediate flashback 45 years to [...]

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Ancestors

The woman standing on the right of the picture is my great-grandmother Wilson, nee Wittlake (neither of those are my name).
In every picture that was taken until she reached her late eighties, she is in profile, looking to the left.
The way I heard the story was that when she was still in her teens, a [...]

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Commodernism

I started out to write a review, with nods to my ace Frontier, of Kim Newman’s alternate-history vampire novel The Bloody Red Baron. Oddly it’s the hardest one of Newman’s vampire trilogy to find in print, though I find it the tastiest, because of the bent that I share with the Frontier-man for the minutiae [...]

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