Give the man the respect he so well deserves

It is fitting that during his final "Tonight" show, Jay Leno showed clips from Rodney Dangerfield, whose famous line was "I don't get no respect." In a sense, neither does Leno. Even as he crushed David Letterman in the late-night ratings, many critics continued to swoon over Letterman and, at best, make snide remarks about Leno's success. But Jay has a way of connecting with people that Letterman does not, and I, for one,  respect that. I'll be looking forward to Leno's new show in the fall at a time when I will be fully awake to watch it.

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During my last week at work before retiring nearly four years ago, I was sick as a swine yet I came to work every day. I was alternately sweating and cold, and felt extremely weak.   I often wonder why I still came to work. It certainly wasn't because I was expecting a farewell party; I had made it clear that I wanted none. Maybe it was the work ethic that has been part of me since I had my first job at age 10. Or maybe I feared that people would think I really wasn't sick and was just goofing off in my final week. (Why I should care what they thought is another question.) Maybe I thought I wasn't really sick and this was just an emotional last-week thing. In any event, it wasn't till I was through with the job that my problem was diagnosed: I had Lyme Disease. Fortunately, it wasn't contagious or I would have been the one giving my colleagues a farewell "gift."

Sing, sing a song ... sing it loud, sing it long

Sometimes I find myself wondering about the damnedest things. This morning, for instance, I started thinking about how singing started. Did some caveman one day start melodiously saying, "Zorg, zorg, zorg,  zorg, ZORG" and enjoy the sound of it? Or did some prehistoric person create an instrument and decide to imitate the sound with his voice? I, of course, will never know. But I do know that life would be so much drabber and drearier without the sound of music.

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And speaking of music, I think the most non-sequitur lyrics in modern music are contained in Gordon Lightfoot's "Carefree Highway": "Pickin' up the pieces of my sweet shattered dream/
I wonder how the old folks are tonight."

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Back in the day when many people kept St. Christopher medals or statuettes in their cars, my brother mounted a plastic toad on his dashboard. When people asked about it, he would explain, "Why, that's St. Toad of the Road."

Time flies -- in this case literally

"Do not open the back of this watch. Only a professional jeweler should," said the instructions that came with one of my digital watches, which uses solar power but nonetheless needs a special battery evey 10 years or so. "Hah," said I. "I'll change the battery myself." So after spending many minutes removing screws that are smaller than atomic particles," I got the back of the watch open. The battery, however, was clasped in place, and in attempting to unclasp it I sent the entire inside of the watch flying across the table. "No matter," thought I. I retrieved the core of the watch, replaced the battery, and screwed everything back together. It was then that I noticed that a couple of parts were left over. But, aha, it was showing the time. Just one problem: It was nowhere near the correct time and the buttons used to set the watch no longer function. So as long as I don't mind the displayed time being seven hours and 18 minutes earlier than it actually is, and the date being Saturday, Jan. 1, the watch is as good as new!

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Good thing I've got 199 other watches to choose from. Well, not 199 that actually work.

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I'm sure a shrink would have a field day with my timepiece obsession ("You appear concerned about the passing of time, Richard"). Ah, but what do they know.

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With Newsweek's redesign, I can't always tell the stories from the ads.

Over hill, over dale ... and out of sight

For years, one of the highlights of the televised Memorial Day concert in Washington, D.C., was seeing and hearing actor Charles Durning spare no emotion as he talked about World War II, the conflict he valiantly fought in, and was wounded in, and was honored for. Then last year he was introduced but looked old and ill and only waved to the crowd. This year, although a brief clip of one of Durning's past speeches was played,  the 86-year-old was not even present. Time marches on and the Greatest Generation rapidly fades from our sight.

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Answer to Sunday's bizarre puzzlement: H. Ross Perot was the 1992 presidential candidate with the biggest ears.

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A Memorial Day meal with my wife and kids consisting of steamed clams, lobster and a bottle of Amstel Light -- it doesn't get a whole lot better than that.

Butterflies and frogs and trees, oh my

The other day I wondered whether anything could be more comical than a baseball game played by 5-year-olds. Today I wonder if anything could be cuter and sweeter than a play staged by preschoolers. The plot was a woodsman-spare-that-tree kind of thing, and my grandson had the challenging role of pointing to the tree. Kiddies dresssed as butterflies flapped their "wings," while others in frog disguise hopped across the stage. When the next Tony awards are handed out, this play should definitely be in contention.

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Here's a puzzlement for those with long memories: Which U.S. presidential candidate in 1992 had the biggest ears? (Answer will be given when we next post.)

It's only words -- lots and lots of them

I have so many unread books in my library that I would need two lifetimes to finish reading them. So what do I do? That's right, I go out and buy more books.

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Instead of reading those books, I could spend the rest of my days trying to decipher the lyrics of "Tin Man," as recorded by the group America. For example: "And Cause never was the reason for the evening/Or the tropic of Sir Galahad."

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You know what's really painful: when they give you a senior discount without your asking. Then again, I saved 9 cents on my latest purchase.

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One reason my wife and I have gotten along these past 42 years is because we tell each other, "Do what you want. You will, anyway."

He squeaked and squeaked for three decades

Can it be anything but a sad day when the man who did the voice of Mickey Mouse for three decades passes on? RIP, Wayne Allwine.

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The only drawback to a vacation is that everything -- and I do mean everything -- you didn't do while away is sitting there just waiting for your return. 

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I would have sworn that the great song in the AT&T TV ads (the one that begins, "I think that possibly, maybe I'm falling for you") came from the movie "Juno." But my swearing would have been in vain. The song is "Falling in Love in a Coffee Shop," from an album by by Landon Pigg (a great name).

Win or lose, Adam Lambert is the winner

It doesn't matter who wins this week's "American Idol" finale: The future superstar is going to be Adam Lambert. Maybe the 12-year-old girls who I suspect make up the majority of voters will choose Kris Allen because they find him cute, while Lambert may be too edgy and gay (or gay-like) for their tastes. But Lambert has what the late writer George Frazier called "duende" -- that special something that will shoot him to stardom and keep him there long after Allen is forgotten. Update: Told you so!

That was the year that was

Surely I am misremembering and all these things couldn't have happened to me when I was 4 years old. But here's what I recall:

* While riding a bus, I slipped from my mother's sight and somehow lifted the back door's emergency bar, causing me to nearly fall out and the bus to screech to a halt.

* When crossing a street, I froze and a car tapped my knee. I received only a small bruise, but to this day my heart rate increases when I cross the street.

* I began to stutter. There were fewer child experts in those days, so my parents decided that my thoughts were coming out too fast for me to properly process them into words. Sounds like a baloney theory now, but after a few weeks my stuttering stopped, so maybe they had something there.

What a traumatic year ... assuming these three things really did happen within 12 months.

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Answer to Friday's puzzlement: Fred is 6 and Joe is 22.

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I'm going to Disney World! In October! With my grandson! Wheeee!

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I don't know if I'm happiest when I am traveling, but I am usually pretty happy.

Pop goes the memory

During my grandson's Little League game, I bought some popcorn from a booth, and to my surprise it came in a small brown paper bag. Seeing it sent my mind traveling backward to the Common in Salem, Mass., when I was a boy and a popcorn man dispensed his product in the same kind of paper bag. The difference is that after filling the bag, he poured in a generous quantity of melted butter, which was hardly good for us but in this case, ignorance was truly bliss. Although the small bag was rather pricey at 10 cents, never did popcorn taste so heavenly. Sometimes I would splurge and also buy a Coca-Cola in a 6-ounce glass bottle for a nickel. Hot popcorn in a butter-stained bag and a cold Coke in a glass bottle -- it didn't get a whole lot better than that.

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Here's a puzzlement: Fred is 16 years younger than Joe. In 10 years, Joe will be twice as old as Fred. How old are they now?  Answer Saturday.

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This is not the Big Papi I remember.

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Gee, maybe I should have asked for a new rebate form (see earlier items). The DVD collection would have been quite a bargain and maybe this time I would have actually gotten the rebate. (And maybe the proverbial pigs would have flown.)

Take me out to the (chuckle) ball game

Can there be anything more comic than a bunch of 5-year-old Little Leaguers playing their first game? I think not. Hard to decide what my favorite moment was during yesterday evening's game. Maybe it was when my grandson somehow crossed home plate after the guy who batted him in. Or mayb e it was the guy who, instead of cathcing the ball, ran from it. But this is how our future baseball stars start their careers. So carry on, boys and girls.

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I haven't yet reported on my wristwatch collection, which must number 200 timepieces, most of them worthless. I just can't stop collecting things, which would explain the Elvis LPs in gold, blue, green, and red vinyl.

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One of my geezer-class professors has l-o-n-g sideburns, a la Steve McGarrett on the old "Hawaii Five-O" TV series. So I spend much of the class imagining a razor floating through the air and then shaving off those sideburns.

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Ah, the golden years: floaters in the eyes, ringing in the ears, a shortage of synapses, and more prescriptions than Elvis and Heath Ledger combined.

Take those rebate forms and !@#$%^&*!

My Rebate Rage is alive and well. I wrote earlier in this blog that although I always fill out rebate forms properly, the submission always seems to be declared invalid. The latest case is a DVD set I bought at f.y.e. with the promise of a $20 rebate. Yesterday I got an e-mail saying that my form was invalid because the clerk had given me a form that was coded for a Wii and I should go back to the store for the proper rebate slip. Yeah, right. Then the rebate sadists would tell me that I had been given the form for a robotic dinosaur or something.  So I got my money back. I have read that it does no good to write to a store to say you will never shop there again. Instead, I just won't shop there again. And I'm never applying for another rebate again. Absolutely not. Well, probably not. Well, maybe not.

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Answer to Tuesday's puzzlement: The blind beggar was the sister of her brother, who died.

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Unsolicited testimonial: My favorite newsmagazine is The Week, because it does what Time originally set out to do: provide a lively summary of the past week's news.

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You know what's boring (besides this blog)? Insomnia is boring. Fortunately, I don't have it much anymore, but I can sympathize with those who spend never-ending nights of staring at the ceiling. 

Hey, look, it's what's-her-face!

Wherever we go, somone recognizes my wife. Just one problem: She is not the person they were thinking of; she just sort of looks like that person. Over the years, this has happened hundreds of times. "I have a generic face," my wife says.

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Robert Parker is best known for his mystery books, but he writes a mean Western, too. His latest of that genre is "Brimstone."

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Willie Nelson is my kind of geezer.

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Here's a puzzlement: A blind beggar had a brother who died. What relation was the blind beggar to the brother who died?  Answer Wednesday.

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Unsolicited testimonial: I'd rather give up one of my front teeth than my Sirius XM satellite radio subscription. And I listen at home, not in the car.

A red-hot memory (or is it a green-hot memory?)

While in the buffet line at an Asian restaurant yesterday, I was reminded of a previous visit. I am a fan of the restaurant's green tea ice cream and scooped myself a sizable quantity. Unfortunately, the horseradish-like wasabi, which looks just like the ice cream, was located nearby. You know what happened. When I took a big bite of the wasabi, flames rocketed out of my mouth, and I could have substituted for the dragon at a parade.

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Answer to Friday's puzzlement: You would need to take out 12 socks to ensure getting a matching pair. (Don't ask me why.)

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James Earl Jones has the finest voice in the movie world. Maybe in the whole world.

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I am testing the Windows 7 operating system, and I think Microsoft is going to have a hit on its hands.

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There may be nothing in the world more adorable than my grandson's new kitten, Freddy. He is about the size of a can of Foster's Lager.

M is for the many things ...

Happy Mother's Day to all you wonderful women out there. My mother passed away in 2005 at the age of 93, and what I wouldn't give to hear her mispronounce "aluminum" just one more time.

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As a pre-Mother's Day treat, I took my wife to the International House of Pancakes last night. Our giggly waitress was new on the job and got  one aspect of her work out of sequence. Shortly after she took our orders, she came back and said, "How's everything so far?" We looked at the empty table and didn't quite know how to answer. Finally, I said, "This is a fine glass of water." I tipped her generously.

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I always thought the idea of reading books on an electronic tablet was silly and impractical. Now, after seeing the Kindle in action and after downloading 130 classic books on my iPod touch for $2.99, I'm not so sure.

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I've never understood what people see in Walmart.

Enough strutting and fretting for one lifetime

Watching "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" last night, I found myself wondering whether I, like the movie's title character, would like to get younger and younger. I decided that, knowing what I know now, I wouldn't make the same mistakes over again -- just different ones. The more I thought about getting younger, the more frightening the prospect seemed to be. Maybe it's a good thing that we have, in Shakespeare's metaphor, just one hour upon the stage. 

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Speaking of the film, it is amazing that Hollywood could turn a short story of 20 or so pages into an epic that lasts nearly three hours.

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Gee, it's almost three weeks and I still haven't received notice that my rebate submission has been accepted. (see entry for April 28.)

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Shane McGowan of The Pogues has one of the most distinct voices in the world of music. Note that I said "distinct," not "great."

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Jimmy Carter may well be our finest ex-president.

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My subconscious may finally be giving me a break. Although I have been retired nearly four years, I used to dream every night that I was still at work, a scary thought. Now I only dream that every third night or so.

Ah, sweet mysteries of life.

One of life's great mysteries, to me anyway, is how people who face the same circumstances act or react so differently. Both my parents struggled through the Great Depression. And afterward? My mother became cautious and saved every penny she could. My father, on the other hand, became reckless and spent every penny he had, and some he didn't have.  A mystery indeed.

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The last time I went to San Francisco, I was going to wear flowers in my hair, just as the song says you should. But I discovered my hair was too thin to support the stems.

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Today's puzzlement is an oldie but a goodie. A drawer contains 10 brown socks and 10 black socks. How many socks must you remove without looking at them before you are sure to have a pair of brown socks. We'll give the answer Monday.

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Once I had a bright yellow car. But I was so much younger then.

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The movie "In Bruges" made me want to go to that city, despite the weird goings-on depicted in the film. Or maybe it was because of the weird goings-on.

But you should try, anyway

When they said, "You can lead a horse to water but you can't make him drink," they may as well have been talking about children. You can surround your daughter with books but you can't make her read. You can throw out your TV but your son will watch it with a vengeance elsewhere. You can talk about the evils of drugs and liquor but they will give it a try,  anyway. In sum, it is easier to teach a cat to jump through flaming hoops than to send your children in the direction you want them to go.

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Answer to Wednesday's puzzlement: Linguine means "little tongues."

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I once sold a Donald Duck anthology to a man named Donald Drake. It was his real name, too.

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Some paranoid people really are being persecuted. And, sadly, some people with inferiority complexes really have inferiorities.

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I do everything online: pay bills, order goods, read articles, send e-mails, blog, etc., etc. My wife says I am working toward never having to communicate with another human being in person. She may have a point.

One month later ....

The reincarnated Boring File is a month old today. During that month, it has been published 26 times and the page has been called up several hundred times by people other than me.  Most of those page "hits," I suspect, were on purpose, although some people  must have wandered in here by accident, said "What is this crap?" and scooted right back out. I certainly didn't start this blog to make money, and that's a good thing. You remember Dialing for Dollars? Well, this is Blogging for Bupkes. In any event, I may continue a while longer in hopes of attracting more readers. Can't understand why everyone doesn't want to read  incoherent, yawn-inducing ramblings.

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Watching "Last Chance Harvey" starring Dustin Hoffman, it dawned on me that several male stars like Hoffman, Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox and Alan Ladd are, or were , short guys. Maybe it's a compensation thing: Because of their small stature, they worked extra hard to reach great heights in their profession.

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The aforementioned Alan Ladd was so short (about 5 foot 5)  that movie sets were scaled down to make him look taller.

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And the aforementioned Michael J. Fox rates high on my list of good guys. Watch his TV special Thursday night to see what I mean.

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It's puzzlement time. The name of which pasta means "little tongues"?  (Answer Thursday.)

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Anna Quindlen, I will miss your Newsweek columns.

Fathers and sons

My father, who died in 2003, would have been 94 today. We didn't always get along -- what father and son do? -- and I didn't always take his advice, yet it wasn't until after he died that I realized just how much of an impact he had on my career. For most of his life he wanted to do two things above all others: travel and write. He was a child of the Great Depresion and the quest to make a living took him in a different direction, allowing him time for just a little traveling and a little writing. Although I never consciously set out to fulfill his wishes, I became, among other things, a travel writer. "You're doing what I always wanted to do," he once said late in life. I guess that, as Dan Fogelberg sang, I'm just a living legacy to the leader of the band.

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The movie "State of Play" repeats the same dumb mistake that movies about newspapers have been making for eight decades. Listen up, Hollywood: Reporters do not write the headlines for their stories.

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POTHOLES!!!!

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Pepsi Cola's new natural sugar cola is called Pepsi Throwback, giving wiseacres the opportunity to refer to it as Pepsi Throwup. What were the product namers thinking?

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Speaking of such, I get a chuckle over the names of cellphones -- names like Curve, Dare, Storm and Bold. What are they, phones or strip-tease artists?

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When I read about negotiations between the Boston Globe union and the newspaper's parent company, the editorially liberal New York Times, I am reminded of singer Phil Ochs' description of a liberal: “ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right if it affects them personally."

Not-so-goody two shoes

During my recent stint on the grand jury, I showed up one day wearing one brown shoe and one black shoe. And although I sat in the front row with both feet visible, no one said anything and I saw no eyes examining my mismatched shoes. That proved to me what I have long suspected: No one looks at men's shoes. I think women look at other women's shoes only,  and men, unless they are foot fetishists, look at no one's shoes. I would like to say that I purposely wore two different shoes as a sociological experiment, but that would be a lie. Chalk it up to a sleepy guy getting dressed in a dark room.

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Pete Seeger, who turned 90 yesterday,  may once  have been a naive communist, but we could sure use some Seeger-type songs today. 

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It probably doesn't do much good to take a brisk 30-minute walk then top it off with a slab of strawberry-rhubarb pie.

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Speaking of gluttony, the illustration for May on my Coke  calendar probably first appeared in the 1920s or '30s and proclaims, “The six-ounce glass is the right size for a perfect Coca-Cola.” Today, of course, the standard is 20 ounces in a plastic bottle. No wonder so many Americans are supersized.

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Here's the puzzlement answer you've been waiting for. Two babies born on the same day in the same year with the same mother and father are not twins ... because they are two of a set of triplets.  (Heh.)

Life (and its opposite) could be a dream

Let us begin the week on a morbid note. As Jim Morrison of The Doors once noted, no one here gets out alive. Accordingly, I have spent some time planning for the inevitable. A gravestone for my wife and me is already in place (and a fine one it is, with both a Celtic cross and a Polish eagle), and I have picked out my funeral music. Beyond that, though, I have come up with what I think will be a nice touch: three or four doo-woppers singing “Sh-Boom” at graveside. When they come to the lyrics “take you up to paradise up above,” they will point with one hand at the coffin and with the other hand at the sky. (Not that I am certain that I will qualify for any paradise up above.) And by the way, everyone is invited to my final  farewell party ... to be held sometime in 2055. (Yeah, right.)

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I mentioned to my wife that there are a lot of ads promoting electronics as Mother's Day gifts. "Are some mothers men?" she asked.

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Speaking of my wife, her yard sale was a smashing success. She sold tons of stuff, just as I have on eBay and Amazon the past couple of years. My question, then: Why is our house still stuffed with stuff?

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In "Honest Lullaby," Joan Baez sings, "I look around and I wonder how the years and I survived." Ms Baez, I wonder, too.

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One person in the United States has died from the H1N1 virus, formerly known as swine flu. Yet this year some 40,000 Americans will die in motor vehicle accidents and no one seems to care very much, except Mothers Against Drunk Driving and people who have lost a relative or friend in a crash.

Toothsome thoughts

While in the dentist's chair yesterday, I told the hygienist that as our yard sale drew near, my wife was getting tense. "Getting tents is a good idea," she said, "because it might rain." I didn't correct her but chuckled inwardly. Then, as she tackled my teeth, my mind sailed back to when I was a boy and went to a cut-rate dentist, who would fill a tooth for about a tenth of what my current cleaning was going to cost. His stomach gurgled continually as he worked, but the price was right. I also thought that if I were to give a graduation speech, I would eliminate the baloney about reaching for the stars and say this: "Take care of your teeth, kids. You will look better and feel better and save scads of dollars over the decades." I imagine I would get a standing ovation.

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I remember toothpaste brands like Kolynos and Ipana. I remember chlorophyll toothpaste. I remember "miracle" ingredients like Gardol. I even remember tooth powder.

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The aforementioned yard sale is happening even as I write this. People are arriving in droves and buying in quantity. But why?

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Memo to Classmates.com: I don't care how many mystery people have signed my online guest book, I am not going to learn who they are by buying an automatically renewing membership.

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Blogs are contributing to the demise of literacy and fairness. (Fortunately, this blog contributes to nothing.)

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"There is no body fat in the Obama administration," writes a contributor who signs himself Rhyming Silver. He cites such physically fit administration members as Obama himself, Timothy Geitner, Peter Orszag, Emanuel Rahm, Arne Duncan, and Kathleen Sibelius. Then he drives his point home by noting, "Bill Richardson definitely wouldn't have fit in."

Where is H.G. Wells when you need him?

I want a time machine but not just any time machine. This one would allow me to be unseen and unheard as it whisked me exactly where I wanted to go.  I would stand with the crowd while Jesus delivered his Sermon on the Mount.  I would watch John Hancock boldly sign the Declaration of Independence. I would join the cheering as Lindbergh emerged from his little plane at Le Bourget field.  I would peer over John Steinbeck's shoulder as he wrote "The Grapes of Wrath." I would stand in Sun Studios while a singer with the unlikely name of Elvis Presley cut his first record. But perhaps the most significant destination would be a little apartment in Massachusetts in the 1940s. There I would gaze at my parents as they were in their 20s. And I would loook at two little kids playing and think, "Why, that's my brother and me!" This is getting spooky so I will  stop here.

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Hooray, hooray, it's the first of May. You know the rest.

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With less than 24 hours to our yard sale, the tension is unbearable.

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Embarrassing moment: I was walking down the street when a woman asked, "Am I allowed to park here?" Puzzled, I replied, "I have no idea." She in turn said with a sneer, "I wasn't talking to you." I turned around and there was a meter maid.

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Riding Boston's swan boats with my grandson on a sunny spring afternoon -- it doesn't get a whole lot better than that.

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All right, it's puzzlement time and here's one from Discovery Education, whatever that is. Two babies born on the same day in the same year with the same mother and father are not twins. How can that be? (Answer Monday.)