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.

*

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

*

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

*

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

*

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.

*

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.

*

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

*

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.

*

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

*

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.

*

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.

*

POTHOLES!!!!

*

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?

*

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?

*

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.

*

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

*

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.

*

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.

*

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.)

*

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.

*

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?

*

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

*

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.

*

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

*

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

*

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.

*

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

*

"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.

*

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

*

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

*

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.

*

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

*

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.)