Now THIS is scary.

I was out in the yard, trying to estimate distance, and I realized that I'm really bad at that. This was kind of a reminder that I'm bad at pretty much everything you can name.

How did I get this lame?

I always looked up to Batman when I was a little kid. Bruce Wayne is an omnicompetent adult, able to speak 40 languages, run a multi-billion-dollar corporation, kick anyone's behind up to and including Superman's, and makes all the ladies swoon.

The anti-me

I'm the opposite of omnicompetent. I'm incompetent. No, really, I'm anticompetent. I drain the competence of others around me.

Is it unfair to compare myself to a fictional character? Okay, compare this to anyone you know.

I speak one language, despite multiple years of study of others. I have failed to dislodge Stephen King or James Patterson from the best-seller lists, or in fact anyone from any list. I am haunted by the thought that after years of mortgage payments I may still owe more than I am worth. I suck so much at sports that I'm certain that the teams I like get worse because I root for them. (I recently told a New Jersey Devils fan that if I joined his fan club, the Devils would all break their legs and their arena would burn down.) I'm no good at strategy games; I'm the only person I know who fell for the fool's mate in chess. I can tie my shoes and tie a necktie, but despite making it to Webelos, that's it for knots. I can read music a little, but after years of lessons I can play no instrument. I act like a pro editor, as packed with English knowledge as a can-you-guess-how-many-knowledges-are-in-this-jar contest at the fair, but I have to look everything up every day. I view my large book collection with despair, for I have forgotten 99 percent of everything I've read. Don't ask me to diagram a sentence. I'm an adequate driver, which is my way of saying I haven't killed anyone, although I did total a car. I can't dance. I can't ride a horse, a snowmobile, an ATV, or a surfboard; I can't skate, ski, fly a plane, drive a rig, and I'll never hang-glide. I'm clumsy and I like to eat food that's bad for me. The legions of women I have met have without exception failed to swoon at me. I can handle jobs around the house about as well as a Jerry Lewis character; my dad could do any of that stuff and I barely learned light bulb maintenance. My dogs are good boys because my wife trained them and because they are just good-natured guys. At heart I'm not even a good-natured guy; the very people whom the Bible tells me to be good to as a bare minimum--brothers and neighbors--are the very people who hate me the most.

And I can't tell thirty feet from twenty feet without a very long tape measure.

Were I to write a ghost story, my ghosts would not be vengeful and angry. That stuff enflames the spirit and burns out the ghost. Mine would be sickly and regretful, mourning all the failures, doomed with Sartrean nausea.

I feel certain that your presence here has helped you lose some competence points. I think I have Schleprock powers to bring misery to others. Perhaps I could become a supervillain -- Failstorm, who sucks competence from others and... it dissipates. Not like I can use it.

Meh, I'd probably just trip on my cape and fall down the stairs. Embarrassing.

Of eggs and loot.

I was thinking about Halloween in my childhood, having listened the other day to Larry Miller's podcast, specifically the episode "How to Egg Like a Pro." On it he shares some great Halloween memories of his childhood in Long Island. It includes the funniest egging story I've ever heard.

I never egged anything, but I did throw an apple at a bus once. I certainly remember riding home from school on a city bus and it getting thwacked with eggs a-plenty. You didn't open the window on a city bus on Halloween in those days, no matter what time it was or how pleasant the weather. City buses were egg magnets. Maybe they still are.

We never did any tricks, not really. Perhaps once, but it was incidental. That Halloween when we were much too old for trick-or-treating, I and some of my fellow knuckleheads made impromptu costumes, grabbed a large election sign off someone's lawn, and went all over the area; we would ring the bell and kneel behind the sign as if we were trying to pretend to be little. Some people thought it was funny, anyway, and we got some candy. No one got mad at us for electioneering. Late in the night one of the guys smashed a family's pumpkin, just grabbed it and hurled it into the air as we walked down the street. That was the extent of our hooliganism.

My best memories are from when I was younger, and all about the roving thuggery of candy acquisition. Eyeing other packs of kids in their finery, wondering which houses had good stuff, which ones were busts, which ones were giving out money... rain or cold, whatever weather, we went for it. I think one year we had a map of the neighborhood so we wouldn't miss a house by mistake. We were supposed to be home before sunset, so efficiency was key
-- tick-tock, people, let's move!

👻👹👺👿👾💀👸🐵

various disguises

I can't remember ever pulling a real trick on anyone. No eggs or TP or any of the usual things. I was pretty good-natured about Halloween. In fact, I've been so happy to get a full-size brand-name candy bar that I'd have left a present. "Hey, that kid in the robot costume left us a skid of Charmin."

Every year we wound up with a big sack of candy. We would gorge that night, but Mom would portion out the rest for weeks thereafter. I couldn't really tell you how much was in the haul, but it seemed like a vast amount. I wonder how much it was. 

I'm grateful to all the families in the neighborhood who took the time and trouble to buy and hand out the stuff. I'm grateful to my folks for being good about it. I guess I'm glad my father never encouraged me to do the stunts he did when he was a city kid at Halloween -- he was vague about it, but kids were 100% punks where he grew up.

It wasn't always perfect, but it was always fun, and I don't remember anyone ever getting into fights. Nuh-uh! You might bust your Ben Cooper or Collegeville mask!

Drunkin' Donuts.

Sunday was a completely crazy day, so I don't have much for you -- except this, seen in the supermarket:

Yep, Dunkin' Donuts, the chain I love to love and love to criticize, has partnered with Harpoon Brewery to bring us Harpoon Dunkin' Coffee Porter.

I just don't know. On the one hand, coffee porters and coffee stout have been around a long time, and many people find them quite tasty. On the other hand, Dunkin' Donuts (I'm refusing to drop the Donuts part) is about a step above Chuck E. Cheese's in mature chain brands, and I don't see this is a good match. I've busted on DD for partnering with Pop-Tarts and Oreos and Peeps, products that bring out the kid and the amalgam-filled sweet tooth in us all. Those are a good match, though, for a chain that sells sweets. Beer? I think Harpoon would have been better off teaming up with a non-fun brand like Caribou Coffee. Maybe someone's already tried it.

As addiction and alcoholism continue to take a breathtaking toll on society, we make it culturally easier for people to get whacked. The legalization of drugs continues apace, damn the torpedoes. The access to and advertising of hard liquor makes drinking look more attractive and apparently harmless. As does branding family-level shops with alcohol.

Perhaps we will next see Absolut Dunkin' Vodka? Absolut makes plenty of flavored vodkas but not coffee yet. Opportunity! Maybe Dunkin' Jack Daniels? JD has started coming out with weird flavors that only a child would like. It's a short step from their cinnamon-flavored Jack Daniels Fire and teen-friendly Country Cocktails to Dunkin' Daniels.

Of course, this is all leading to Dunkin' Choom -- marijuana and munchie all in one!

You laugh now, but Dunkin' beer would have seemed like an impossible joke ten years ago. These days everything bad starts out as a joke.

It was you all the time!

There may be spoilers here, so tread with care....

I was thinking the other morning that I hate the "this time, it's personal" school of thriller writing. It's lost its sting, but it was always so phony anyway. It takes the great, vast world and makes it small and circular as an episode of Seinfeld.

In the sixth season of 24, for example, our hero, Jack Bauer, winds up dealing with his own evil and incredibly wealthy father, ultimately leaving the old man to a righteous death on a bombed oil platform. Who thought that Jack came from money before this? And from evil money, no less? He never seemed like any rich kid I ever knew. I think we all would have guessed he was from a military family. But for the sake of the "It was you all along!" moment, we had to make his dad rich and evil. How did superpatriot Jack come from this guy's loins?

Worse was the ridiculous mechanism in Spectre, the 2015 James Bond movie that went through Gordian-knot-like-loops to make iconic villain Blofeld into Bond's own adoptive brother. Billions and billions of people in this world and the most important players in it are brothers? 

"I must find out where this enemy of all that is civilized comes from."
"It's me! You coming over for the hols, Jimmy?"

Nope, too stupid. Too small. Can you imagine how much trouble the world would have been saved if the Bond house had suffered carbon monoxide poisoning one night?

I could almost forgive in 1989's Batman, where villain Jack Napier (pre-Jokerized) turns out to be the killer of Bruce Wayne's parents many years before. Of course, in the comic books, Joe Chill was the young punk who kills the Waynes, which is the kind of street-level thuggery that doesn't require a future supervillain.

Not this guy.

Joe Chill (right).

But in Batman it's Napier who thus creates Batman, who later accidentally drops Napier into a vat of chemicals and makes him the Joker. Holy incestuous relationship! At least they weren't blood relatives. I could almost forgive this if it weren't for Napier's stupid, stupid knack of saying "You ever danced with the devil by the pale moonlight?" before he shoots someone, or at least before he shoots someone named Wayne. The only reason for this is so that the World's Greatest Detective can discover by chance that the Joker killed his parents. I have been sore about that lazy writing for decades now.

Star Wars probably started the whole thing, or rather the second film, when we find out that Vader is Luke's old man. Again, the whole galaxy would have been better off if the Skywalkers had run into a bridge abutment on Naboo. (Also, we find out that Obi is a great big huge liar, but no one tumbled to that until VHS was invented.)

I want to point out again that this is not just the "It's Personal" trope as defined by the invaluable TVTropes site. They include things that become personal, like a cop character's spouse getting killed and him or her going after the bad guy in a rage, because the best police work is done by insane revenge cops. I'm talking about things that are personal at the beginning and stay personal, especially the ones that cause any amount of damage to innocent people dragged into the conflict. All the primary movers in these plots could fit in a Volkswagen Beetle.

I get that they want to bring the added motivation to the character, give the audience a shock at the reveal (which now is about as shocking as the scene where the rebel cop has to turn in his badge), but it was for things like this that the phrase "done to death" was invented. I expect that the Red Baron will turn out to be Snoopy's litter mate in Peanuts 2. "Olaf! It was you all the time!"

The next trope I may have to address is the origin convenience issue, wherein a character we meet as an adventurer of long, rich experience (do the names Solo or Sparrow ring a bell?) turns out to have gotten everything associated with him over a two-week trip to Vegas or the like, from nicknames to sidekicks to personality quirks. Suddenly it becomes Joe from Accounting: The Origin. How he got his position! How he got that expensive chair! How he got to be pals with Wendy from HR! How he got that weird cut shaving! How he got that cool Coach briefcase! All in his first month on the job.

Yeah....

"I dunno, Pete... lately I feel kinda empty inside."

New dog breeds.

Everyone likes a unique and interesting dog, don't they? Of course they do! You can go to the pound and get some run-of-the-mill mutt, but that's not interesting. Or you can get something amazing, like my North American Cheese Hounds. Another option people dig, much like a dog, are new crossbreeds. Like the Labradoodle, a cross between a Labrador retriever and a poodle. Or the cockapoo, a cross between a Cocker spaniel, a poodle, and a bad name.

Here are some exciting new cross breeds I'm sure will be more popular in the years ahead. Get yourself a couple of dogs and let nature take its course, and you'll be getting in on the ground floor.

Kerry Blue Terrier and Skye Terrier: The Blue Skye

Flat-Coated Retriever and Pembroke Welsh Corgi: The Flat Broke

Plott and Pointer: The Plot Point

Yorkshire Terrier and Cardigan Welsh Corgi: The Corki

Shih Tzu and Spinone Italiano: The Shih & Spin

Black Russian Terrier and Irish Red and White Setter: Black & White & Red All Over

Finnish Lapphund and Dandie Dinmont Terrier: The Finn & Dandie

Glen of Imaal Terrier and Treeing Walker Coonhound: The Maalwalker

Mastiff and Polish Lowland Sheepdog: The Stiff Pole

Leonberger and Redbone Coonhound: The Leon Redbone

Boykin Spaniel and Norwegian Buhund: The Boy Buhund

Pug and Karelian Bear Dog: The Puggy Bear

Boxer and German Shorthaired Pointer: The Boxer Short

Scottish Terrier and American Water Spaniel: The Scotch & Water

Bull Terrier and Schipperke: The Bullschipp

Daft punk(ins).

Every Halloweentide I like to have a look at how people are decorating. You can learn a few things from that. How eager are people for Christmas? (A lot of decorating: eager.) How good's the economy? (Expensive decorating: good.) What can I do to amuse myself while walking this dog? (Answer: this.)

Here's a few I saw recently on our perambulations:

Classic pumpkins, piled up in a patch sincere enough to attract the Great Pumpkin. When I was growing up we never put pumpkins outside; even in the city, the wildlife would tear it up. Squirrels, mostly, but not exclusively. What the squirrels really liked was Indian corn, also called flint corn. I think we put some out as a decoration once. Just once.

Around here the pumpkins seem to remain unmolested, except sometimes by teenagers. They're the pumpkins' only known predator.

Now this is more what I'm used to -- a good ol' fashioned plastic Halloween pumpkin, just like nature intended.

Nobody I've seen around here is doing Bloody Lawns of Death that would send preschoolers screaming into the street. This ghost is about the scariest thing there is, and that's only when the wind makes it flap. Well, unless you count this....

GO HOME SPIDER YOU ARE DRUNK

A banner is always nice, and here within the classic behatted pumpkin. Halloween is the only time of year people put hats on fruits and no one thinks it's weird.

This here is one of those moving displays, revolving symbols of the holiday in lights shone up against the wall. I'm sure you have noticed the questionable aspect of these bats, though -- they are red, gold, and green. In other words, this is a Christmas decoration that has a Halloween feature but only shines in Christmas colors. I'll report back on this one in December, see if they're doing reindeer or something.

And speaking of Christmas decorations repurposed for Halloween in a Chinese factory, we have...

A stack of three pumpkins. Right. And the top one has a top hat. Uh-huh. This is obviously just a snowman. C'mon. You're not fooling anyone, pumpkins.

Full moon and empty pockets.

How could I have lost?

My wealth plan had very clear steps, which I followed closely, and yet somehow I was not successful. 

1) Wait until lottery goes over a billion dollars.

2) Play winning numbers.

3) Cash out billion.

Very clear, very orderly, just like those books that promise 10 Steps to Real Estate Wealth, and yet I failed. 

The only thing I can think of is that the full moon screwed me over. 

But the full moon is actually tonight, the closest such to Halloween this year. That's why it's so spoooooky.

You know, when I was a kid I remember seeing so much Halloween art that featured a full moon that I somehow got the idea that the moon was always full on Halloween, perhaps on the last day of every month.

And, gigantic.

But of course that is not the case. Maybe that's why we don't see witches flying around on brooms. Too many dark nights. Crashes. You never see a witch with a parachute, or even a helmet. So a full moon would be lucky for witches, but bad luck for non-witches.

Although the news says that there was one winner of the Mega Millions, in South Carolina. They tell me that they get the same moon down there that we do. So unless that person is a witch, the moon didn't make him or her unlucky. Maybe you just need the right moon.

Hey, wait a second... the actual full moon is tonight... Powerball tonight is up to $620 million...  💡

Start the car! We're headin' for the convenience store!

I'm lookin' for pound notes, loose change, bad checks, anything....

Just a brief note today, my friends; I've been busier than a one-penciled editor at a metaphor contest. But I had to drop you a line about tonight's record $1.6 BILLION Mega Millions drawing.

And that line is: Sorry! I've got the winning ticket! Mwah ah ah!

Well, all right, we still have to go through the formality of the drawing, but by this time tomorrow, your man Fred will be calling architects for bids on my own Scrooge McDuck Money Bin to swim around in. Bezos has five of them; he can hook me up, I'm sure.

A friend of mine once took a statistics class, and he said his professor was of the opinion that it was worth buying into a lottery at the lowest amount ($2 in the case of Mega Millions, $1 for the New York Lottery); this because the difference between 0 and any figure, however small, was greater than the difference any two positive numbers. Buying more than the lowest amount possible was a waste of money, he said, because it did not increase your odds significantly, but the increase from zero to anything is significant.

Pace Douglas Adams and his Infinite Improbability Drive, impossible is impossible, not just highly improbable, and having a ticket takes a player's win from impossible to improbable. Very, very, very improbable.

Except me. Because I have the winning numbers.

No, I'm not going to tell you which numbers, because you would go play them and split my fortune with me. Then I'd have to get one of those small, economy size Money Bins, and the guys would make fun of me. Buffett and Gates can be mean.

I'm sure I'll miss a lot of the simple pleasures in life, but at least I won't have to avoid calls from the dentist reminding me of checkup time (because his bill hurts more than his drill). I'll have people to go to the dentist for me! Nor will I have to worry that the next annual car inspection will turn up a dead opossum in the transmission (expensive to get out). I'll buy the opossums their own car so they'll leave mine alone. And maybe I can actually go on vacation! Look out, Seaside Heights, here we come!

Get your tickets if you must, but it is a hopeless task. See you tomorrow, peasants!

Environ-mental.

Today we have a couple of environmental notes for all you tree-French-kissers out there. I feel the need to establish my bone fides on this issue. Earth-friendly Fred is all about nature. I could watch it on TV all day. And look! I'm already green as can be!

Could be something I ate.

For example, here's one environmental promise I absolutely keep:

The 30 Wears Challenge: Yes, it's brutal, but you have to promise that if you buy an article of clothing, you'll actually wear it 30 times. I know! It's like, you should be a saint or something by then!

In fact, I can't tell you how many times I wear things because I wear them until they die. Seriously, unless I get too fat for an article of clothing, or my wife tells me I'm embarrassing myself wearing it (c'mon, everyone knows leisure suits are coming back), I will wear something until it falls apart. I have favorite shirts I've probably worn 30 times since April. I've worn dress shirts to the office not realizing that the cuffs and collar are literally threadbare. A pair of pants I loved just ripped along the back pocket when I reached for my wallet; I had to sit at my desk all day and stay there until no one was around. Fortunately I was driving to that job so I didn't have to wear ripped pants on the subway -- but, then again, I might have hustled some change that way. "Help out a guy with bad pants?"

Here's another environmental idea that's in keeping with the season of Halloween: Recycle yourself.

I've got a body. You've got one. Birds and bees, they all got one. All God's creatures got a body. But you know what else we all got? A day in the future when we stop using it. What do you plan to do with yours?

Well, you can stick it in a grave and take up valuable land. I kind of like cremation, though, just in case I'm not quite dead -- I'd rather be burned up at that point than awaken six feet under. (Scaaaaary!) Plus, when you're a pile of ash, you have several options for planet-friendly secondary use:

1) Tree planting.

You can have your ashes interred with a potted tree and planted. This, like all options with one's mortal remains, requires the cooperation of your survivors to carry out, but let's suppose they are nature-lovers too and can be trusted. There are still other issues with this, as the site Humour Zone notes:

Of course, we do not want haunted forests, so please include instructions that your dead-body tree be planted far from other dead-body trees. An individual haunted tree is not so terrifying.

Another option for your burned-up cremains is to be:

2) Eaten.

Cedric Voets of Cracked shares the story of a teenage girl in California who decided to bake the ashes of her dead grandpa (I guess "the ashes of her live grandpa" would be silly) into cookies for her classmates:

All said, at least nine teens ate gritty grandpappy cookies, some having been tricked into it, others volunteering for this once-past-a-lifetime experience. Though it wasn't actually that hard to get your hands on the cremains of this late, not-so-great-tasting man. Previously, the teen had offered one student a handful of the ashes in exchange for switching seats in class. And honestly, from that point on, they really should've expected that any future dealings with her would come with a side of dead grandpa.

One difficulty she ran into with her grandpa-disposal scheme is that ashes are hard to eat. I think the takeaway here is that if you want your ashes to be eaten, especially by unsuspecting enemies whom you had invited to bite your ash, you have to find some medium that works better at concealing the ashiness than sugar cookies. It's a problem, because people generally don't like gritty food. Blueberries, spinach, and of course grits can all be gritty if they're poorly prepared, but it doesn't make them easy to eat. It gets you nowhere if they just spit you out. I'd suggest having your ashes used in some kind of savory snack like a chip and handed out at the cannabis store.

And speaking of drugs, you might wish to be:

3) Snorted.

Yes, we're dragging the story about Keith "Keef" Richards snorting his old man's ashes with cocaine again, because it's the most Keith "Keef" Richards story ever. Richards claims to be clean now, though, so you are not likely to be able to get him to snort you. Start interviewing drug addicts as soon as you get a bad diagnosis, would be my recommendation. Make sure they like you. No one wants to put someone they don't care for up their nose.

👻

So there's some thoughts on these important green issues. Make the right choices and you could be as green as ol' Fred! Or you could just get there by eating some gas station chili dogs. Urp.

Killing frost.

Between Thursday evening and Friday morning we got the first frost of the season. The killing frost.

Welp, there went the dahlias.

I planted them in May and we have enjoyed beautiful blooms all summer, into the fall, right up until Thursday evening. Then, wham. All at once. I've never seen such a vivid example of the killing frost in action.

Of course I can't think of killing frost without thinking of 1975's "Wildfire." It was one of those horribly tragic story songs of the sixties and seventies, wherein a story is told and it looks like someone meets a bad end. It could be suicide ("Ode to Billy Joe"), a fugitive caught by the law ("Indiana Wants Me"), needless death in war ("Billy Don't Be a Hero"), hanging of an innocent man ("The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia"), a trapped miner getting eaten by his coworkers ("Timothy"), a crippled veteran abandoned by his wife ("Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town"), miscellaneous death ("Seasons in the Sun"), or procreation of vermin ("Muskrat Love"). All tragic. In the case of "Wildfire," it was the story of the eponymous pony who busted out of his stall and got lost in a blizzard. His female owner ran out into the blizzard after him and I guess they both froze to death.

Oh, they say she died one winter
When there came a killing frost
And the pony she named Wildfire
Busted down its stall
In a blizzard he was lost

Now, this is awfully sad. But I first really became aware of this song when Dave Barry solicited entries for a column, and later a book, of the worst pop songs ever recorded. One of his respondents, Steele Hinton, nominated "Wildfire," noting that a killing frost is only deadly to "flowers and garden vegetables" and "no normal person or pony would freeze as a result of getting lost in the killing frost." And, "Nobody ever got lost in one that wouldn't get lost in July as well."

Barry responded: "This makes sense to me, although I guess the song wouldn't be quite as dramatic if it were about a girl running around desperately calling for her lost tomato, named Wildfire."

I suppose, as Hinton thought, that the meaning of the phrase "killing frost" may have been unclear to those in warmer climates, like Southern California. All they would know was that "frost" rhymes with "lost," and that was the important bit.

I guess I could have saved my flowers from the terrible tragic fate that met Wildfire by protecting them with some fabric, or maybe the grill cover, but it's mid-October and their doom was only a matter of time. I read that you can keep your dahlias over winter by digging up the tubers and keeping them warm inside, but that sounds like work.

Sorry, dahlias. As we say on the ranch, you've gone the way of Wildfire.

Apostro-phooey.

If you live in a city and you know a copy editor, you may wonder why her eye twitches and her jaw clenches like she's striving mightily to avoid picking a fight with oxygen. What is making her crazy is not the omnipresent and necessary element, but something almost as common in an American urban environment: Bad apostrophes. 

Of all the bits of punctuation, apostrophes may be abused the most. The little dance between parentheses and period at the end of a sentence are often screwed up as badly (as in this very sentence.) (This one too). But apostrophes are more common. 

This example demonstrates the way in which the poor apostrophe is most abused, dragged into service where he does not belong:

Heroes is of course the plural of hero; hero's is a contraction of hero is or is used to indicate heroic ownership ("the hero's hamster"). But you see this exact error on any Manhattan shop that sells big sandwiches. Something like "Our Hero's Are #1!" If you are using an apostrophe to indicate a plural, stop it. There's a perfectly fine plural version of each noun, and none I think requires an apostrophe.

A more subtle error was shared by a friend of mine -- less obviously wrong, but more egregious because it was found not in some mom & pop shop owned by non-English-speaking immigrants, but on official signage in the mighty box store PetSmart:

The friend who sent it to me A) knows I shop often at PetSmart and B) hates me and wants to see me furious. I am of course referring to the single open quote being used as an apostrophe. I see this error constantly these days, after having not seen it my entire life. I blame texting. 

When them is contracted to ’em, the apostrophe is used just as when do not becomes don’t -- it curls to the right. These are special characters and don't show up well online, but in a nutshell:

ʼem = correct

ʻem = wrong

Think of Dom DeLuise in Blazing Saddles yelling at you with a megaphone if you're ever tempted to use the latter. 

How many blinkered boneheads at PetSmart HQ approved that damned sign?

This last one -- well, it's so wrong that I hardly know where to start. 

It's from a bakery box, a box of cookies that were delicious. But their punctuation and capitalization are not. I'll leave the capitalization aside and just talk about the olé.

The bakery in question is Italian, not Mexican, so clearly they are not looking for the same olé! taste. They meant to say same old, just shortened to the familiar and cozy ol’. They actually had to go to some effort to screw this up -- it's tougher in most typefaces to add an accent to a letter than to use a plain ol' apostrophe, and the much-maligned Comic Sans font shown is no different. But the cookies are terrific*, so I don't want to expose them to ridicule. If they see this post, they'll know who they are, and can mend their ways the next time they review their box design.

Anyway, those are three egregious uses or lack of uses for apostrophes. Let's all try to do better in the future, for the sake of the many high-strung copy editors roaming our streets. Dom DeLuise is watching.

---------

*I know, it's hard to believe -- Italian cookies that aren't dry or all taste like anise. Mind = blown.

Anyone for tennis?

So our little dog, Nipper, still loves to destroy tennis balls. I mean, annihilate them. We usually get him the Tourna Pressureless Tennis Balls, which are safe for dogs, but his favorite are the Kongs, because they squeak like a dying rat. So much fun.

Often he leaves nothing behind but some bright fuzz and little bits of rubber. But sometimes he can be very neat with the destruction.

Back in the 1990s, when I first worked in children's books, kids were being taught that they could save the earth by recycling, and the best way they could do that was to recycle garbage into arts and crafts projects... projects that they or their parents would turn back into garbage down the line anyway. We did a lot of those books. So I wondered, what could be done with this dead, not-totally-destroyed tennis ball?

First I came up with Deviled Tennis Ball, which is really more of a bad art project than anything else.

My next thought was Tennis Igloos, based on Linus Van Pelt's former struggle to remember to bring eggshells in for the igloo project that his beloved teacher, Miss Othmar, had assigned.

Try as he might, Linus could never remember those eggshells, and she became quite sad. She actually got so frustrated that she quit teaching to get married, although she returned to the strip later.

But I have no teacher, and no interest in doing faux Inuit tableaux.

Ultimately I thought of our pal Stiiv, and that inspired me to make some art in his honor.

Happy Friday, Stiiverino!

Okay, it's trash day, so out this goes.

Meanwhile, on campus...

What's odd is, this would be the least strange thing to happen on an American university campus today.

Autumn miscellany.

Just emptying my phone of recent pictures -- another sentence that would have made no sense 25 years ago -- and I wanted to share a couple with you. Always something interesting around, if I bother to look. 

A month or so ago our lilac plant, one of several we planted last year, came under attack by those disgusting purveyors of disgustingness, tent caterpillars. For a short time in late August and early September these punks were busy in the neighborhood, and apparently some of them like lilacs. The plant became bare of leaves where the little creeps were munching away, and it seemed to be spreading rapidly. My wife, who hates tent caterpillars even more than I do, or would if such a thing were possible, was convinced we would have to uproot the thing and hope to plant a new one in its place. But not I. I was too determined, too thoughtful, too cheap to entertain such a notion. So I went to Home Depot to get vicious, dangerous poison, and came back with some weenie insecticidal soap in Miracle-Gro's Nature's Care organic schmorganic line. I didn't want nature to care, I wanted it DEAD. The store was out of all the really effective stuff because everyone else was also killing tent caterpillars. So I wound up with soap. I wasn't planning to give these bugs a freakin' bath. 

Well. Not only did the soap kill the bugs, but the lilac survived, and was the only one to give us a late bloom. 

"Ta-da! Thanks for killin' the bugs, mate!"

So I owe Miracle-Gro an apology. Sorry, Miracle-Gro; thanks for saving the plant.

Other bugs I have left alone this fall. This big fellow gave me a start, but he was just minding his own business.

Caught this shot below while driving (totally illegal, I know -- breakin' the law! breakin' the law!). Obviously an abandoned little house, right by a busy road. Almost looks like it had just been dropped there.

Made me wonder if little tiny houses can be haunted. It's always castles or big mansions in the stories and most of the movies, but the little ones might have even more ghosts. Depends on what happened there....

And maybe... maybe even station wagons can be haunted!

There was so much stuff packed into this one that I thought it had to be driven by a ghost, because there was no room for a live human being. In a way this car was itself a ghost; there was a time not that long ago when cars like this were all over the place. Then they started to fade away, get replaced, drive off into the sunset, and now they're all gone. All but a small, brave, possibly haunted few.

To end on a pretty note: All the mums are fading, but weren't they nice in September? A neighbor had a bunch of these around.

So that's some stuff that swam into my ken of late. What's new with you?

Don't let the neighbors see.

One of the most annoying ads on TV right now really shouldn't bother me as much as it does. Culligan, the water cleaning outfit, shows all the members of the household doing things with water. With the images are tags in a passive aggressive font, pointing out that the things are using water: "___ Drinks". "Pets Drink" "Clothes Drink" "Skin Drinks" "Saltwater Taffy Drinks".

Grandpa Drinks.

All of this in a not-exactly-subtle way to indicate that water is vital to your household and by the way your local water supply is probably coming straight from the waste pipe of the Cow Manure Processing and Toxic Chemical Plant. Which is bull, and I don't mean the manure.

Here are the things that bother me so much about the ad:

1) America's water supply is excellent. The ad is clearly using what they think is a friendly means of saying "Water is important" and "You're going to get sick and die if you don't use Culligan." Well, maybe if you live in Flint, Michigan, but that's an out-and-out crisis. Our laws on water safety are pretty strict, and one area where we all agree the government has a legitimate purpose. The indication that we're all in peril because of our water is akin to vaccine panic. If you're really concerned about the safety of your water, you should be talking to the local government and the EPA, not Culligan.

2) "Drinks" is one of those words that really scrapes the nerves after a few repetitions. It's unpleasant in the way "moist" is unpleasant, but it gets a pass most of the time because, hey, it's five o'clock somewhere! Remove the convivial association and it becomes a clunker of a word.

3) Everyone in the fictional household looks like someone you'd cross the street to avoid.

I can't remember another ostensibly cheerful spot that got under my skin this way. The Lowe's "Never Stop Improving" ad of a few years back worried me a bit, because it made life look like a brief flash of light filled with nothing but home improvement work.

I suppose this will be a successful ad for Culligan. It inspires fear without looking like it intends to -- most people wouldn't say "They're trying to scare me!" which would be a turn-off, but it is intended to make you think "Gee, is my water safe?" Fear is a great motivator. We like to think we make decisions based on intellect, but usually it's emotion, with intellect supplying the data (or rationalizations) to support it after the fact.

Anyway, I'd be more worried about drunk ol' Grandpa (above) with a pot of boiling water, but that's me.

UPDATE: Mr. Philbin asks in a PM, What about people with well water? It's not an insignificant population, I agree, but from my experience people who use well water hardly need to be told to have a water softener like the Culligan equipment. One family I knew had a shower that smelled like rotten eggs because of the high sulfur content, at least until they installed a system. The Annoying Family in the commercial (I think of them as the Annoignos, an Italian name because Drunk Grandpa is cooking spaghetti) clearly live on a suburban block in a new house almost certainly serviced with municipal water.

Second dog song.

Everyone knows about second kid neglect, especially if you are the second kid. If you were a tot before smartphones made photos common, when you still had to get this stuff we called "film" "developed" at a place like the "Fotomat," you may have seen 30,597 pictures of your older sibling and 18 of you. If you were a third child, 2. Kid #4 and beyond were lucky to have their names remembered. And of course that did not mean your parents loved you less. They just had less time and -- let's face it -- the novelty of progeny had worn off.

Well, I suppose the same could be true for your pets, although it hasn't quite turned out that way here.

Tralfaz, our first dog, did get a bazillion photos of him when he got here, but Nipper, second dog, got the same treatment. They were both so stinkin' cute. Sorry, I mean Ka-YOOT. And Nipper was such an excitable puppy, such an energetic puppy, such a freaking hungry puppy, that he demanded an outsize amount of attention in a way that babies don't. (Newborns need a ton of attention, but for quite a long period in their lives, if you put them down someplace, they tend to stay there. And they don't chew wallboard or flooring. Usually.)

Over time, the attention issue has seesawed until neither dog need feel neglected, or both dogs should feel equally neglected. We do our best.

One area I had neglected was I had never written a song for Nipper. I had, yes, written a song for Tralfaz, three years ago, when he had gotten quite large and scared people who were scared of big dogs. Some folks are scared of big dogs no matter how friendly they are, and I can understand that; it's kind of irrelevant to a normal healthy adult whether the Chihuahua next door is vicious or pleasant, but that German shepherd is another story. Anyway, I wrote Tralfaz's theme song to the tune of Caspar the Friendly Ghost's, and you can find my humble efforts here.

I decided that, to be fair, and even though dogs have no clue that we do any of this kind of thing or why, I would have to give Nipper his own song. And so I did, to the tune of the old Gumby theme song:

He was once a little cute ball of fuzz
Nipper!
Now you should see the crazy things that he does
Nipper!
He can help you with any job
With a lick on the elbow too
If you've got a heart then Nipper's a part of you

If he knew what the heck we humans were on about I'm sure he'd be pleased. He is one of those dogs that like to follow you around when you're doing little jobs about the house and gets in the way, and he really likes the taste of human elbows. He has always been a lot of fun; even when he's been naughty, it's never from malice, just from wanting to be part of the party. And he is our party pup.

So that's the dogs, and if we get a third, or a pet weasel, or go adopting children or taking in homeless bums, I guess I'll have to write songs for them too. I'm in danger of becoming the crazy theme-song-writing guy.

Boss level.

Getting ready for the holiday! I am of course referring to October 16, Boss's Day. I'm sure you love your boss and will want to get him or her something very thoughtful on the big day. Something that says "Thanks, boss" and "Thinking of you, boss" but "Not in a creepy way, boss." You have two days.

 Alison Green of US News & World Report explained the holiday thus:

Amusingly, it turns out that Boss's Day was created in 1958 by someone who was working for her father at the time, according to several websites. It might have been a kind (if daughterly) impulse at its start, but it's since grown into an unwelcome obligation that many workers feel bound to celebrate – not only with cards, but with actual gifts. In fact, I regularly hear from people who have been pressured to donate cash to workplace collections to purchase expensive gifts for their managers.

I have either eight bosses or one boss. As a freelancer, working from home, I currently report to eight different clients, so my contact at each of these companies is a kind of mini-boss. Or, I could say that I am self-employed, and thus have only one boss: me. Some of the companies I work for act as if they are totally my boss; because of the laws of the City of New York, or other locales in which they are based, they are not allowed to employ me as a stringer indefinitely, and so have found it advantageous to pretend I am an employee. It tends to be cheaper for them than paying me per job, even though they have to offer me benefits that they do not pay me enough for me to participate in. What this also means is that I have to do the stupid training that all office employees have to go through every year, and you probably know what I mean -- watching videos online to teach me how to not harass my fellow employees and not break confidentiality or security.

Security tips are always a good reminder, but whom am I supposed to harass around here? My wife? She'll kill me. The dogs? They'll report me to my wife. So those tips are less useful.

Fortunately I do not have to do employee self-reviews, one of the most evil things ever invented by companies. The one upside to those, though, is that they usually result in a small cost-of-living increase at least. If I want to raise I have to ask my client gently and hope they don't decide that some dimwit fresh out of college can screw things up just as well as Fred can for less money. I will often be told that Management must be consulted, and that's as far as we ever get.

For the purposes of Boss's Day I have decided that I am indeed my own boss, and intend to celebrate accordingly. I will be alternately cold and friendly to myself, I will hint around about a big project before dumping it on my desk, I will listen and believe all the bad gossip about myself that comes over the transom, and I will tell myself what a great job I'm doing while looking for some H-1B visa holder to take my job at a third of the salary. Then I will expect to get myself a card and a cupcake or some dumb tchotchke for the desk and wish myself a happy day. Yippee.

Same ol' story.

Great literature as limericks.

(Poet's Note: Spoilers!)

Grendel came out of the blue
To harass poor Hrothgar and crew
Then Beowulf got
To beat out his snot
And he took out his old lady too

Odysseus finally left Troy
For a voyage he couldn't enjoy
There was Cyclops and Circe
And Sirens (have merce!)
Then killing some creeps with his boy

In the Montague/Capulet game
Romeo must abandon his name
Juliet, she pretended
To die, so he ended
His life, and then she did the same

The Terror brought everyone dread
And Defarge watched the royals get dead
When Darnay got arrested
Good people protested
And Syd wound up losing his head

They said that Jay Gatsby was great
His parties were truly first-rate
And though he was the bomb
Daisy really loved Tom
And a slug in the pool was his fate

Good help.

"No foolin', Joe, that's the best sheep dog I've ever seen."

Outrage of the day?

An ad popped up for me from Chewy, fine Internet provider of pet stuff. We order from Chewy all the time, because I'd rather have the UPS man deal with 40-pound sacks of dog food than do it myself. And even being purchased by PetSmart last year has not ruined Chewy's outstanding customer service.

The ad featured doggie Halloween (sorry, Howl-oween) costumes, which PetSmart's stores have been pushing since July. As I've noted before, PetSmart gets the Halloween stuff out even before my notoriously early supermarket does. Here was the costume that caught my eye:

Yes, indeed, the Holy Hound Pope Dog Costume by California Costumes. Cute, huh? But shouldn't that be Howly Hound?

So. As a Catholic, I look at this and think: I should probably be offended. I'm not one of those dog owners who thinks Dogs = People, let alone Dogs > People. I do think dogs are great and useful and lots of fun, and if we weren't in charge of the joint then I'd hope the dogs would get a shot. I do not, however, think that a dog would make a good pope.

I feel like I should take offense, as if this were mocking the pope. Then again, I have to admit they did a really good job with the chasuble and miter, but I think the papal stole is not worn with the miter because the latter is used when celebrating Mass, and during Mass the pope wears the zucchetto (skullcap). I could be wrong; the pope wears about 8,782 articles of clothing with choir dress and it's hard for a non-cradle Catholic like me to remember it all. Anyway, it's a good likeness and you'd know what the dog was supposed to be immediately. And I am glad that, while some design elements were changed for paws, the Cross remains, albeit made of bones. (Also glad that that other universal symbol of doghood, the fire hydrant, was not used.)

My offense builds, though, when the auto-offense generators in my mind kick in: This is the kind of thing that is bought for the dogs of Catholic haters. It is not done out of respect. I'll bet you'll see some of these in the Greenwich Village parade. They'd never, EVER sell an imam costume. And so on.

On the other hand, I think it's cute. I wish the Holy Father could inspire as much love as people have for their dogs. I think Francis would probably find it amusing. He's not a Franciscan (he's a Jesuit), but by taking the name of St. Francis you have to think he is devoted to the great saint, famous for his love of all God's creatures.

And on the third hand -- or paw -- I can decide not to take offense, laugh at the humor of it, and not care. I don't think every damn thing has to result in a world war anymore. We need to laugh stuff off, and with a kindly laugh, not an irritated HA! or clapter or any of the other things that pass for a real laugh these days.

On the final paw: I wouldn't buy it for my dogs, because they are too huge and they hate hats. They'd make bad popes.

Alpha-ripoff!

A post mentioning Post Alpha-Bits cereal on the blog of the Great Lileks reminded me of my investigative reporting on  Alpha-Bits some years ago, on the old defunct Blog.com site. I wanted to repost it now as a public service, but the text was lost along with contents of the blog itself. However, I did save the pictures, and can reconstruct the series of horrible events. 

So: I'd gotten a box of Alpha-Bits, and immediately set to finding out whether it contained all the letters. If it failed to contain all 26 letters of the English alphabet, I thought there might be cause for a class-action lawsuit. 

First, like all kids who eat Alpha-Bits, I had to confirm the most important thing:

Yes!

Then I meticulously sought through the box to reconstruct the alphabet, and that's where the shocking truth was revealed:

Gasp!

That's right: no G, no M, no V, no W. This is an outrage! Or, as we'd have to spell it, an outra e! 

I did find a large number of pieces that could not be identified as belonging to any particular letter. I suspect some may be broken "bits" of G's, M's, V's, and yes, even W's -- but there's no way to tell. At best this is evidence of shoddy workmanship by Post.

All I can say is, Shame on you, Post! Failing to give American children the whole alphabet wrecks any possible educational benefit from your cereal. Further, think how this discriminates against children with affected names! Poor George, Marvin, Margaret, Wilma, and Velma -- or should I say, eor e, ar in, ar aret, il a, and el a. How they must cry themselves to sleep!

As I said, this is the basis for a class-action lawsuit. I'm calling my lawyers, Greef, Sorrel & Payne. And we're not just suing Post. We're also going after the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Food & Drug Administration, which supposedly "oversee" America's food. Oversee indeed, sirs!

Next: We beat the crap out of Campbell's for its Chicken Alphabet Soup for its failure to provide all the letters -- that is, once we get these squishy pasta letters to hold still long enough to see what they all are. We're coming for you, can boys!

Columbus: Floater.

I don't really feel like writing about Columbus Day today. I've written before about that remarkable man and the history behind the day; also about how Italians need to fight back against the menace of "Indigenous Persons Day" (a day solely made to try to eclipse Columbus and the spirit of discovery). Today I'd just like to note my own history of Columbus Day, which hasn't been much of anything since high school.

What I mean by that is, I've had to work every Columbus Day I can remember since I started college. Sure, my college was closed for the holiday, but not the office where I was lucky to have a part-time job as a general flunky. (The stories of things I massively screwed up in that job would make Will Ferrell, Pauly Shore, and Jerry Lewis wince.) I don't even know what the business did. Something real-estatey. It was a small, family-owned firm, and all I know for sure was that they both generated and received a lot of mail.

That was how I found out that, in a large city, although the mail would not be delivered on Columbus Day, you could send a flunky (me) down to the local post office to get the mail. All you had to do was bring something on letterhead authorizing said flunky to pick it up, and I think call ahead to let them know the flunkster was on his way. Please note that this is all to the best of my memory; don't quote me. It was a long time ago and I was as new as a baby out of the womb, and knew about as much.

Anyway, all this meant that I wound up dragging a couple of sacks of mail about seven or eight blocks back to the building. But that was okay; every other job I'd had to that point had involved lifting heavy things. Much worse was a later, rainy day -- possibly Veterans Day -- when I had to deliver a dozen sacks of mail to the same post office on a wobbly cart with wonky wheels that was not large enough for the job. That's another story.

This was my first job with an actual paycheck, a check that had actual taxes taken out of it. It would not be the last. And I think that all those jobs in my future would have this in common: no Columbus Day off.

"You! Get to work!"

I'm not sure, though. My first job in publishing was a small outfit connected to a nonprofit, and those guys get every holiday. But in the deadline-driven places I subsequently worked, holidays were often a major inconvenience and fit to be ignored. One job involved coordinating with a lot of British people in London, who were not off on Columbus Day, of course. Magazines I worked for closed issues around the second week of the month, which meant that not only was Columbus Day not a holiday, but it was a late night. I don't say all of this to complain, just to note that I haven't often had the day off. In fact, I have a huge pile of work to do today.

Columbus Day is, sadly, like Veterans Day, a second-tier holiday that people seldom get as a paid day off. They may be given the days as floaters, to use on the holiday or some other time. Many of those who do get these days off have little respect for Columbus or veterans. I guess that can happen to national holidays in a nation where millions of people have strong but varied priorities.

I just want a day off with pay. But Columbus didn't get one; why should I?