People get kind of silly around babies and pets, don’t they?  Babies?  Fine.  All bets are off.  It’s like some biological imperative to let the baby know we’re not a threat by acting ridiculous.  Pets, though, people fall in to two rigid camps: ‘Getting Cutesy With Your Pets is Idiotic’ and “Mr. Barkington doesn’t see […]

Plain and simple.  There’s just no masculine way to call a cat. Even if there isn’t someone in the vicinity – and there usually is, and it’s usually some guy dismantling the engine of his car down to individual molecules or something – you still feel the sting of it.  Try it sometime.  Try to […]

There’s this hotel M and I love at the coast – which  I suppose right there gives away a sense of my geographic location… People don’t really talk about going to the “beach” in Oregon.  It’s not just idiomatic, it’s just that going to the “beach” carries a set of expectations with it: bathing suits, […]