This may not apply to you.

If, however, you have a friend who needs to write on a weekly basis 100 words that are maybe a little bit diverting or silly or peculiar and they come to you asking for your input about where to get new ideas for their little essays you could do worse than to advise them to make it a regular habit to read about advances in science which not only will make them a better informed citizen of the world but will expose them to sentences such as “Moroccan fly maggot uses fake face on its butt to infiltrate termite colony.”

Ripped from the headlines!

I know there are a lot of things demanding your attention. Maybe you missed this science headline: “66 million-year-old fish vomit discovered in Denmark.” (In nearby Sweden they call that Surströmming.) So many questions. Did someone come rushing into the lab hollering “Guys! This fish vomit is 66 million years old!” and did someone else react by saying “Holy crap! That’s the oldest fish vomit ever! Yay!” Who did they call first? Is there currently somebody in some other lab looking sadly at their sample of what is now the world’s second-oldest fish vomit? And finally, who knew fish puked?

Pop Will Eat Itself

You might have hoped that Walk Hard had effectively killed the entire celebrity musician genre, but this year something called A Complete Unknown is up for multiple Oscars. Timothée Chalamet plays Bob Dylan and no less an authority than the BBC says he “creates a thoroughly convincing avatar of Dylan." I say that only time will tell if his performance has the staying power of Tyrone Power’s star turn in The Eddy Duchin Story, but if this whole acting thing doesn’t work out for the young man he can always join the circuit that features Elvis imitators and Beatles tributes.

Be Kind. Rewind.

Remember the VHS boxes lined up at Blockbuster during the golden age of crappy action pictures and the image always included 1) a gun, 2) a square-jawed hero, 3) an explosion in the background, and 4) a scantily-clad starlet? Not a big fan of movies like that, but I have some leftover names if they ever need to make some more: Proximal Cause. Convection. The Dog Walker. Metric Conversion. Arbor Day. Ambient Temperature. Permanent Marker. Also, why back when they were shot on film did we call them movies but now that they’re mostly shot digitally we call them films?

fit to print

The New York Times had an article about what was the best peanut butter. There are a lot of reasons why a person might want to read the New York Times and while those reasons undoubtedly vary from reader to reader I’ll bet you dollars to donuts that the percentage of New York Times readers who turn first to the old grey lady when seeking guidance in choosing their peanut butter is a very small number. A number, I would wager, approaching zero. This too: Breakfast pastry used to be cheaper. Nowadays, dollars to donuts is pretty much even money.

The late Dave Maleckar

Well, okay, the reason I’m late is I had some errands this morning and I had no prewritten verbiage to post and I’ve not yet sunk to the level of serving up “best-of” rants from the previous decades although as a legacy blog I would certainly be entitled to do so like Family Circus or Hi and Lois which to call them comics is to completely disregard the root meaning of the word and actually why were they ever included in the funny pages although so was Rex Morgan MD, which admittedly was at least as funny as Beetle Bailey.

Not my circus

How much fun a barrel of monkeys would actually be would depend on how tightly they were packed and how long they’d been in there. Would this barrel be jam packed? Chock full? How much fun would it be to open a barrel of angry ravenous monkeys? No fun. I don’t even want to think about it. Also, under what system of measurement is the barrel anybody’s standard unit for a quantity of monkeys? Because I happen to know that crabs are measured by the bushel and while they too are eukaryotic bilaterally symmetrical critters, they’re nobody’s simile for hilarity.