An Old Dog In Need of One More Trick

“That’s it,” I barked. “I don’t care how old you are, you’re going back on the Gentle Leader until you learn how to walk like a lady.” “Oh no, really?” my wife said. “Oh yeah,” I answered. “It’s time she finally starts acting like a civilized mongrel.” Harumph! The lady, of course, is a dog — my dog. A wonderful dog, by most accounts, but one who often treats a walk as an opportunity to see if she can pop my arm out of socket. Not every walk. Many are nice, quiet strolls where she leisurely sniffs and befouls the neighborhood like a good animal.

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In the Eyes of College Students, Not So Young Anymore

“What was it like living through the 80s, Brian?” read the writing on the whiteboard. Grrrrr! Those darn college kids. Little whipper-snappers. Children of the — gasp! — 90s. Nineties?!? Can that be right? Did they — gulp! — did they really grow up in the 90s? The dry-erase board with the cutesy, sarcastic little question written on it snickered at me. So did the students gathered around the office of the student newspaper that I advise. “Har, har,” I grumbled at them as they gazed at this “dinosaur” — me — squinting his tired eyes to read the board. “Yes, I have worn parachute pants and they’re actually quite comfortable.” Little buggers, asking me what it was like living through the 80s?!?

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The big weather rat and gloom-be-gone

Punxsutawney Phil, you over-hyped weather rat. You let us down. You dampened our spirits. You … ahhh, why do we care whether an over-sized groundhog sees his shadow any way? I shouldn’t blame poor Phillip. We’re smart people. We know better than to put our good faith in the hands of over-fed marmots. You know, I’ve heard groundhogs are also referred to as land-beavers or whistle-pigs, and you should never trust anything called a whistle-pig. But we want to believe. We want to think that the groundhog might just be able to dispose of this gloomy time of year. That time when even we bright and cheery Floridians — normally drenched in a cocktail of sun — start to doubt whether the shiny stuff will ever re-emerge. We wonder why we’ve been forsaken and yell out at the heavens: “We’re lookin’ like cave fish down here, oh Lord. Bring us back our rays!” When the clouds don’t break and worse, torture us with a tinkling of monotonous drizzle that has plagued us the past week, we turn to critters who look like they should lay off the carbs. Why? Because we want hope — to make a clean break with winter and get jiggy with spring. Remember spring? That time of year when wilted and frost-burned vegetation sparks back to life and drowns us in heaps of lung-choking pollen?

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Terror on the Radio

Terror. Absolute terror. That’s the only way to describe it. I was sitting at my desk, waiting in pained anticipation for the moment when my voice would come across the radio, and I was dreading it. Nobody likes to hear the sound of their voice. You know, their “true” voice. Not the one we hear everyday in our own heads — the one that sounds like “us” to us. I’m talking about our REAL voice — the one everyone else hears. The one that makes us recoil and cringe in pain if it’s ever played to us on a recording. It always sounds so strange, so alien, so unusual and, well, like we should be wearing pocket protectors and saying things like, “the square roots of integers are always irrational, unless of course they’re perfect squares.” Not to mention I’m nasally. Oh sure, you say, we all are, but I sound like I’ve got a bushel of cotton stuffed up the old nasal passageways. And it’s possible I do.

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