36

July 14, 2009

And then one day the stop sign was gone. It was the very stop sign one block from my house that was oddly stationed at a low-traffic, three-way intersection, tempting every driver to slow down but not come to a complete stop.

How the city cleaned up on that one! I have personally coughed up in excess of $1,000 for tickets there, one time receiving two tickets in as many days. This sign was even the reason that I spent a day in jail for failing to fork over when the judge said I should.

37

March 9, 2009

A conspicuous cultural change we can look forward to is a dramatic change in men’s dress style. Guys, you might as well get ahead of the curve. The free-fall economy means a boon for better fashion for men who intend to survive the onslaught.

We will be highly fortunate if the second Great Depression turns out to be as stylish as the first, in which even the bums sleeping on the park benches looked better than the average workers and even CEOs today.

38

December 26, 2007

There I stood at the pharmacy counter, with a head cold, sniffing away, and begging for some product that contains pseudoephedrine, which works like a magic nose unclogger. The stuff you can get off the shelf now contains the similar-sounding drug called phenylephrine, but it might as well be a placebo. It just doesn’t work, and most everyone knows this.

39

November 9, 2005

In a classic case of News of the Weird, President Bush gave a press conference the other day to announce yet another central plan to deal with yet another disaster—this time an impending disaster, or so he claimed. It seems that some birds are catching a flu called Avian Influenza or, more commonly, the bird flu. It causes ruffled feathers and a drop in egg production. It can kill a chicken in two days flat. Scary.

40

August 10, 2005

You know why so many men walk around with sloppy hair? We hate haircuts. You have to drive there to get one, which represents decline, because if you know about Figaro from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” the barber came to your home (but then he also pulled out your teeth and passed on furtive notes arranging encounters of various sort, etc.).

41

April 22, 2006

Look, I’m the last guy to trash a consumer product. I’m disinclined to blast the manufacturers of a beloved bathroom gel as deceivers who make money off people’s ignorance and perpetuate the problem they are supposedly solving, or charlatans who deliberately hook people on some chemically produced gunk solely for the sake of profiting from repeated uses.

But someone has to say it: shaving cream is a racket.

42

July 16, 2003

Guys, here is your one-article guide to dressing, based on many years in the rag business and a lifetime of observing the sheer ubiquity of error.

There are two general types of men’s clothing.

43

December 1, 2007

You don’t want to read this article. But you should and must. It contains some dreadful truths that are universal but no one is willing to talk about them because the subject is so uncomfortable.

I would like to reveal a universal prejudice—it is a cruel and judgmental attitude that is written on the hearts of people in all times and all places—that might very well wreck your life, but which you can deal with rather easily.

44

August 1, 2005

Blog memes can be annoying, so this is no attempt to start one. It is merely an interesting exercise that yields interesting information about both the subjects and the person doing the choosing.

45

July 8, 2003

Closely linked to the issue of gay marriage is the issue of gay adoption. The subject raises the stakes in the current national controversy, and, as usual, state intervention complicates the picture enormously.