Roughing It
Fidge defends his boring vacations.
The Great American Vacation (Part 1)
10,000 old people want your camping spot.
Dog Food and the Aorist Infinitive
Sometimes when I’m in one of those Big Box stores I find myself in the company of what in polite circles are called Old People. (This happens frequently in stores with lots of mirrors.) I pause in front of a pharaoh’s tomb of something, 5000 boxes of dog food supplement for example, and ask myself…
Boom
I’ve been thinking about the hydrogen bomb. Did you know that a few years ago while flying across the country a nut popped loose somewhere in a B-52 and armed four warheads? They stayed armed until the boys reached the west coast and noticed a blinking light or something. Freaky interesting, huh? And a while…
Extroverted Before Breakfast (Part 2)
Continued from: Extroverted Before Breakfast (Part 1) Recently Ariel and I were planning a trip to a place where we knew there would be lots of stairs and cobblestone streets. It would be hard to drag around the kind of luggage that goes on little wheels, so Ariel got herself a new suitcase that had shoulder straps so…
Extroverted Before Breakfast (Part 1)
One morning not long ago, Ariel and I were having breakfast in a very small cafe in a very small town in west Texas. The waitress brought our coffee, and suddenly Ariel’s face lit up. The coffee had arrived in old-fashioned mugs like the ones that used to be common in small cafes: extra-thick white porcelain…
Foreign Policy Rant (40 years late)
“What happened?” It’s been a couple of months now since Sara and I met at Starbuck’s, when she mentioned she had a friend who was going to Saudi Arabia to work. Sara asked me what I thought might be different about the Kingdom since I had left it.
Fidge Leaves The House!
One day last week I told Ariel I was going to the post office to mail a package. Her eyes got big. “You’re going out?” she asked, in a tone that would have made perfect sense if I’d had two broken legs and yellow fever, but I didn’t. I was perfectly healthy and I have…
News
Are you confused? Do you wish for simpler times? Me too! Or I did until I rediscovered this state-of-our-planet description on the back of a folk music album from 1968: We live in “a world so wrought and chained with meaningless ideas that its dreams are merely pastel colored nightmares.” Can I get that in…
Moon Landings
Gumby here. If you want to see for yourself which of us is really the “professor,” just tiptoe up to my editor and whisper into his ear: “George Eliot in a briefcase.” [Ed: Yaaaahhhhhhhhhh!…] I’m just Gumby. I’m an inanimate Jello-horse. Which is why I’m not even sure if you put the period inside the quotation marks. [Ed:…
Gumby & Fidge 