Bon Soir, Je m'appelle Caleb

    Well, that worked like a charm. As you might recall, my last post was a plea for American voters to do the right thing. They responded with a resounding “Get Bent” and day after tomorrow we’re going to inaugurate the odds on favorite for worst President ever. As a Pennsylvanian born and raised this is good news as he will undoubtedly supplant fellow native son James Buchanan, the current title holder. And from now on this blog will no longer concern itself with American politics. This does not mean, however, that I’ve given up bitching and whining about the state of the world.  I just won’t be doing as much here. To that end, I’ve launched a new blog, a companion you might say, to this platform called “The Rockefeller Democrat” and it can be found by clicking a link somewhere over there on the right.

    We now return you to this blog’s regularly scheduled content.

Incident At Milepost 49

The HoJo at Oakmont looked just like this

             Lately, I haven't been posting much for reasons that really don't matter but have resulted in my going through some of the essays and other writing that I've had laying around for a long time. Over the years, I've accumulated a trove of mediocrity that I once thought was pretty good. At some point, everyone even semi-serious about writing imagines their masterpieces being featured in the New Yorker or some other lofty publication and I was no different. But most of my stuff was written with no idea where it could possibly find the light of day. I paid no attention to any of the advice every aspiring writer gets on researching markets and how to appeal to editors or anything else that might have at least gotten me some encouraging rejection slips. So now I've decided that if none of this stuff is ever going to make me a member of the next Algonquin Round Table, I'm foisting it off from time to time on whoever runs across this blog accidentally in the course of surfing for pornography.
       
           The first of these I've rewritten so many times I can't stand it anymore. It was intended originally for some now defunct online magazine in Pittsburgh and I think I was encouraged by most of the previously published pieces being worse. I'm not sure Thurber would have gotten very far, either, if his mantra had been, "Shit, I'm not that bad."

How To Gain 15 Pounds In A Month (Guaranteed)

            We just came home to Bordeaux after spending a month in the States. This was my first trip back since moving last September. I hadn't thought I'd been missing much in the way of food except a good steak. The beef in France leaves something to be desired, and a couple of steaks was the only thing I planned to eat. But being constantly confronted by things we couldn't find here, well, something came over me. By the time we left I was having a hard time putting my pants on and when I worked up the nerve to stand on a scale on Friday, I'd gained 15 pounds. I haven't weighed this much in a long time and what surprised me was not how much I'd gained but how easy it was. So if you've ever wanted to gain a lot of weight in a hurry, with little effort, here's how I did it (your results might vary).