Za anyone?

Saw an artical in the paper today about how the Official Scrabble Dictionary has included the "za," as in a slang term for pizza. The reporter called an Italian pizzaria in New Jersey and asked them if anyone had ever ordered "za" and they said no, they had never heard of it. Have any of you guys? I think they just made this word up to make the game more exciting. And they added the word "qi" for the energy that flows through the body according to Chinese medicine. I have always seen this word written as "chi." Come on people, if you can't handle having a z or q left on your rack at the end of a game of scrabble maybe you should play something else.

Slow time

Slow day today. You know once, a long time ago, I saw a commercial on the TV for an overnight laxative. It showed people waking up in the morning feeling just fantastic, accompanied by the chorus of the Arlo Guthrie classic folk tune "The City of New Orleans." You know the line: "Good morning, America, how are you?" Well, I have always liked that song and thought it was a little sad to hear it used to push laxatives. But of course I was intrigued by the challange of composing a few more verses of the hypothetical constipation-themed version. I am particularly proud of the way I managed to come up with a rhyme for the word "beltline".

Well I’m more backed up than the I-440 beltline.
There’s a train inside me but it ain’t about to move.
And you’ve done dropped yours but I ain’t even smelt mine.
It ain’t funny boys, I can’t get in to the groove.

I don’t care if I mess my pants, I’d settle for some flatulence,
Did I really need to drink five pints of beer?
Some water would be fine by me, a bowl of bran flakes, some broccoli
Suppositories…just let me be free and clear.

Good Morning America how are ya?!
Me I’ve seen better days on the dark side of a war.
I’m in pain and I blame an irritated membrane.
I’ll have gone 500 times when the day is done.

Advice for newlyweds

Having been happily married to Mrs. Tobit for lo these many years, I have been considering dispensing my copious wisdom regarding conjugal matters to those youngbloods out there who are just getting into the game. Here is one particularly salient object lesson I would like to share:

One day I noticed that we had way more spoons than would fit in our flatware drawer. We had about, oh, I'd say, three hundred spoons, and it was very difficult to get them all to fit in the drawer. How many spoons do we really need? I asked myself. Like a fool, I did not ask Mrs. Tobit this same question. I surmised, using what I realize now was extremely faulty logic, that we needed about a dozen or so. I put the remaining spoons in a plastic grocery bag and gave them to a Mexican family down the street that had just moved in and didn't have much of anything. Well, 'twasn't long before the love of my life was on the phone with her mother and various cousins and friends all across the country and some abroad in foreign lands, that I had given away all the spoons, and now we could not host any parties of any kind or entertain in any way, given the lack of spoons, we would not be able to seat twelve for salad, dinner and desert obviously without having to jump up and wash a bunch of spoons in the midst of the festivities, and of course, that just would not do, and for the time being, the hospitality flag would not be flying over the house of Tobit, due to the current spoon crunch.
As you propably have guessed by now, the spoons started arriving post haste. No waiting for birthdays or anniversaries, all manner of spoons came by frieght, air-mail, rickshaw, taxi, telegraph...Every two or three days some cousin or great aunt would drop by with a box of spoons and a comment about how they heard we didn't have any spoons. Since I am the one who usually washes and puts away the spoons, life for me suddenly became much more complicated. We were back up to the three or four hundred spoons in the drawer in no time at all, and we had stocked boxes of unopened spoons in the sideboard, the china hutch, the attic and even the crawl space before the whole spoon crises ran its course.
Moral: Dudes, don't make unilateral decisions regarding flatware, no matter how certain you think you are.

Ghost stories

I have been telling these kids some ghost stories. Of course I don't know any ghost stories, but in my inspired moments I can cobble together a pretty good spine-tingler from the fragments I dredge up from what I have heard, decapitation stories, headless horseman, tailey-bone, the teeny-tiny woman, Phantom 309. Tonight we sat on the back porch for a very fine hour, listening to the thunderstorms gain and flow, and with each terrifying tale, the younger child, not quite even four yet, would get very quiet and still. When brother and I would ask him, did you like the ghost story? He would shake his head no. We sit quietly a moment longer. Then young man says: tell another ghost story. So of course I would. He wanted more and more. Then mrs. Tobit came out and learned what I had been up to. I don't think it is a good idea to be telling these stories to a three-year-old, she says. We sit for a while, and the boys ask for more scary stories. I am all out, I maintain. Mrs. Tobit says the same. But then, in response to the little ones' persistant cries, Mrs. Tobit improvises the creepiest, most bone-chilling tale I have ever heard in my life. It involves a young boys' stillborn twin ghost haunting the cellar of an old house. Speechless and stunned, the three of us can but gesture, please....tell another one...