It is a family legend that my great-great granduncle Ezekiel used to go on fishing trips with his close friend Ralph Waldo Emerson, at the end of which, Waldo—he preferred the name Waldo to Ralph, if you can believe it—inevitably dragged my relative to a local brothel (no one in my family believes this, but still).

All seasoned gamers have their own sack of dice. Maybe even several sacks of dice. Those are the greatest gamers of all.

A tin-plated nonsense came up over the hill on spindly legs and entered our village at a stately pace.  Our village, having never seen such a thing, crowded the visitor, eager for a chance to benefit from its peculiar form of smarts.  Presently, the crowd around the figure thickened so that its stilts now acted as posts sunk into the earth.  Its immobility was all the better for the onlookers to worship it, and although skeptics existed, they were shouted down by the others.  The nonsense itself, now robbed of the ability to execute its gawky walk, it preferred, I thought, not to make itself a target of ridicule.  It stayed in our village thereafter.

Hey Prudie,

I’m a thirty-something woman, and as you can imagine, I’m getting to that age where all my lady-gendered friends are dropping like flies. Ditto for female relatives and my paramour’s various exes. Cancer, bum tickers, car accidents–you name it, they’re dying tragically young from it. And creating passels of little orphan kids in the process, natch.

What kind of inhuman monster boils water in the microwave?!