The unkindest cuts of all

I guess you could call yesterday Bloody Tuesday. In the morning my wife cut her finger badly in the kitchen, so we roared off to our HMO ... where we waited and waited. By the time they got to her, it's a wonder there was any blood left. Then in the afternoon, we heard the person who handles our savings alibi about why the account has been bleeding red ink.

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Speaking of money, I am learning that most bloggers make virtually none. I guess that's why the call the Internet a virtual world.

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You know how you sometimes mishear song lyrics? For a half century, when the chorus in Jimmy Dorsey's "So Rare" sang about "Angels singing the Ave Maria," I thought the lyrics were, "Angels singing way off in the rear."

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I don't mean to make a career out of writing about John Updike, but his final short-story collection contains a great quote: "It is easy to love people in memory; the hard thing is to love them when they are there in front of you."

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Years ago, I worked at a newspaper that had a photographer named Pete Zaharis. It didn't take long for our summer interns to name him Pizza Harris. (One of those interns went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.)

Two lives that turned a final page

The other day I brought home "My Father's Tears," which presumably is the final collection of short stories by John Updike. When the author died in January, in a hospice in the town I live in, I found myself thinking about my friend Dick Iwanowicz, who died three decades ago of a brain aneurism. Dick was a big fan of Updike's writings, but his German-born wife thought they had a depressing effect on her husband. "You read too much of this Oopdeek," she used to tell him. So when I heard that Updike died, I remembered that unique pronunciation, and off and on throughout the day, despite my wife's withering glare, I shouted, "OOPDEEK! OOPDEEK!" in tribute to a great writer and to a good friend.

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My wife and I went to a health forum yesterday. The main speaker, a feel-good kind of guy, said something like, "We can't control what happens to us, but we can control our reaction to it." Gee, when something adverse happens to me, I usually shout, "OH F***!!!!!" in a voice loud enough to split the skies. It has a most satisfying effect.

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Cherry Dr Pepper is pretty good. That's something I've never said about regular Dr Pepper. (And, by the way, if you look at the can or bottle, you will see that "Dr" is not followed by a period.)

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Whatever happened to the "reasonable facsimile"? I remember announcers used to say things like, "Send in the coupon or a reasonable facsimile and we will mail you some useless junk." I suppose nowadays they would say, "Send in the coupon or Xerox that puppy." They still would send you useless junk, however.