Just now, walking down a tree-lined street of mansions on my way to the store for some honey-roasted peanuts for lunch, I thought I heard my first bird ever really saying “tweet”. Listening more closely, I realized it was actually saying, “tveet.”

“You grogoch,” she says to her little sister.

On a rainy, foggy day the little one looks out the window. “Oooh, the Grey Man.”

A friend gave us a book about Irish fairies, and suddenly Austria is aswarm with them.

May peace prevail.

Bob Hope, Idi Amin and now Leni Riefenstahl: hopefully, this tragic series (deaths of people you weren’t sure were alive or not) has reached an end. We reprint here a

tribute to Idi Leni Riefenstahl.

That’s what you get when you babelize the phrase, “are those eels in your hovercraft or are you just happy to see me?”

As I was telling you earlier, about when I was working on the tunnel crew one summer while I was in college, tunnel workers are hard drinkers. A professional tunneler, I don’t know when he sleeps. Digging and drinking is what they live for.

There are tunneler bars. This still strikes me as odd, since they are largely an itinerant bunch, moving from job to job, digging a subway tunnel in this town, a freeway tunnel in that town. But somehow they always manage to find a bar where filthy dirty men are tolerated, and they always congregate at the same one, even different crews working on different jobs.

Not that there are ever alot of tunnelers around, of course. Most people never notice them, maybe most people never go into those bars.

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