Look, “Singin’ in the Rain” is one thing. But are you ready for “Strollin’ to the Tub”?
Two recent side-by-side New York Times stories, “Baths May Benefit the Heart” and “Find Health 4,000 Steps at a Time,” intrigued me because they seemed at first to contradict each other.
Tell me this hasn’t ever happened to you and I’ll politely reply, “LIAR!”
You write someone a well-reasoned email, explaining in compassionate detail why you simply can’t accept his or her marriage proposal…how you come from very different worlds…how the momentary excitement you feel for each other would likely cool and eventually turn to active animosity…how it’s really your problem (not his or hers)…
In the April 3 installment of The Goldman State, my calling our shelter-at-home era The Isolation Age apparently tickled a few readers, which in turn tickled me. It was especially nice to receive compliments from the artist Ellen Brouse, a faithful reader who lives on a peninsula on the Washington coast. More to the point, Ellen’s been a friend of mine since junior high school. She taught me back then how to improve my dancing—enough to prevent alarmed bystanders from leaving our school “platter parties” to phone for an exorcist.
As you know, we’ve been granted an extension to file our 2019 federal income taxes, which would have been due today. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start concentrating on our 2020 returns and lining up shoe boxes on the dining room table in which to toss our receipts and hope they’ll remain in chronological order and sort themselves by month and category by the time we begin compiling them, around 11:59 p.m. on April 14, 2021.
Hey, what about getting haircuts during this international lockdown? wonders faithful reader Jim Drennan.
For the 15 years prior to his retirement from KCRA-TV News, Jim had been the NBC affiliate’s assignment editor here in the capital, though his background in TV goes much farther back. In an email he sent me the other day, he said, “I would imagine that most barber shops are closed since there’s no way you can give someone a haircut while maintaining that sacred social distance.”
With Passover beginning this evening at sunset, and Easter arriving this coming Sunday, I thought I’d pass along some helpful hints for those of you who won’t be able to share in-person these totally different holidays with your loved ones or relatives (who are not always the same people, I’ve just been informed).
Just because we’re involuntary shut-ins doesn’t mean we should stop playing the stock market or getting into other ventures that happen along. Accordingly, here are four Investment Tips for the Savvy Self-Isolator.
You could call this “insider trading” but it’s unlikely that any of us who’ve been forced inside will be arrested—as long as what we’ve been doing inside doesn’t include our hollering, “That’s what I’m talkin’ about!” every time we beat our toddlers at UNO™.
I think the definition of the word “retire” should be “to get weary again.”
The difference would be that this time around, you’d be getting weary of doing things you actually enjoy, not working at a job you finally got to leave.
Have you had it with being home? Board games got you bored? Weary of wayfaring friends posting Facebook photos showing them enjoying tall, umbrella’ed cocktails in the Eastern Republic of Uruguay? “Hi, y’all! Can’t wait to share the recipe for this rabo-de-galo! when we come back, which we may or may not do!” (For those of you who have no intention of seeing these people if and when they return, a “rabo-de-galo” is just a mix of red vermouth and cachaca, which is fermented sugar cane juice. And if you’d like to further dazzle your remaining friends, “rabo-de-galo” is simply Portuguese for “cocktail.”)
Why are house-pets considered to be part of our families except when things get official, like for the 2020 Census?
First, some background. I gladly stayed inside to work on my census questionnaire on-line during this pandemical year, when a rallying cry like “Stand Up And Be Counted” should probably have been replaced by “Stay In And Be Counted.” But this had less to do with the coronavirus than my distaste at having census takers come to my door, (which is what they’ll do if I don’t email the form in time).
As someone who’s been in self-isolation since 1984, though I always called it working at home, I thought I’d provide 12 tips on things you can do to make your next 137 weeks of quarantine, or whatever duration the CDC is calling for, both productive and even enjoyable.
A well-meaning acquaintance recently sent me an article showing how much the estates of famous deceased writers and artists continue to earn each year. In response, I asked if she were suggesting that death might be a good career move for me.
She became very annoyed and did the email equivalent of slamming down her phone. (No, I can’t explain that gag, either. But I think you may know what I mean.)
In 1994, medical science definitively debunked the notion that children can contract “sugar highs” from having cake, cookies, ice cream and soda at a birthday party, or as mid-morning and mid-afternoon snacks, or for after-dinner dessert, or as pre-bedtime nibbles.
Incidentally, what I just described is the daily menu seven-year-olds, if they were precociously licensed dietitians, would create for their patients.
A milestone of alleged masculinity is being shattered.
Parallel parking will no longer be a requirement to get a driver’s license “in more than a dozen states,” according to a recent front-page story in The Wall Street Journal.
My cat thinks I’m Doctor Who.
You probably know who Who is. He’s that extraterrestrial do-gooder who’s been played by at least a dozen actors in the staggering 57 years since the show first began airing on British tellies. The doctor is a universe-hopping Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, if you’re following along on your inter-galactic Thomas Brothers atlas.
Why Resetting Your Clock Can Be…Fatal!A Timely Warning for March 8By Ed Goldmanhis Sunday, in what Frank Sinatra called "the wee, small hours," we welcome back daylight saving time to our already unmanageable schedules. But we’re being warned that...
Hallmark’s failing greeting-card division recently dismissed its president, Steve Farley . I can only hope it wasn’t done in its patented doggerel style:
For my President’s Day column, I’d like to discuss obituary notices—those things most of us claim to not read but secretly do. Mind you, the column has nothing to do with President’s Day. I just like to seem current.
Let’s start with a not-that-grim old joke.
I always wanted to have my own personal stuntman.
When I was eight years old, watching films and TV shows changed for me forever. My brother Stuart pointed out that I wasn’t actually watching cowboy star/personal idol Clint Walker in a fight scene, explaining to me the concept of stuntmen or “doubles,” as they‘re also called.
Today’s column is eventually about spam, and for all I know, it sailed directly into your own spam folder instead of your inbox. Let’s start with the day I was born.
Had I chosen a more serious life, my birth and given names would have gone to waste. My surname, Goldman, has allowed me endless punning possibilities, as the name of this column illustrates, one hopes.
