"She just kept pouring me drinks," he explained, "she just didn't know when to stop."

I have a picture of Cornwall on my computer monitor. At the time of the eclipse, I'll turn down the brightness on the screen, wait a bit, then turn it back up.

If past eclipses are anything to go by, it should be just like being there.

My choice is a conscious one; I have literally hundreds of different fonts from Aachen to Zurich in my computer. And even though I've never even looked at half of them, I still keep collecting more. It's a sickness, albeit a seemingly benign one.

I recently acquired Crunky, another font I'll probably never use, probably never ever. What sold me was the description:

Crunky is a thick, chunky font with no numbers and no punctuation. Have you ever seen the drawings done on cave walls by Cro-Magnon men? This font is kind of like that, only I did it with a $3 grand computer. Ha!

So far so good.

When I needed to get a new watch, I decided to get a Swiss Army watch. There were lots of them on display; I chose one that had an attractive face. It turned out to be the diver model, "water resistant" to a depth of one hundred meters.

My selection meant that I could, in theory, dive twice as deep with my new watch as I could with the other models on offer. In practice, I've never been deeper than maybe five meters underwater, except in a submarine. Still, I liked the idea of having a watch that was much more than I needed: nothing succeeds like excess.

I should have known better. I recall that years ago, Idi Amin challenged the Swiss to a battle on Lake Victoria. The Swiss stayed well clear of Uganda. It could have been because of the shameful quality of their dive watches.

I went for a walk in a gentle rain. My Swiss Army diver's watch got damp and stopped working, forever.

End of story.

"Where?" I asked.

"LA," Edwin explained.

I normally prefer full names to nicknames or acronyms, but I'll make an exception for wretched El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula.

The text that was originally here disparaged a fatuous, pompous twit. It was very easy to write; the twit in question presented a broad, inviting target.

The text that was originally here disparaged a fatuous, pompous twit that my perfidious colleagues and I are about to approach for a very large favor. In fact, we are going to ask him to give us buckets of money. Based on our collective experience, we think there's a very good chance of success.

My perfidious colleagues have pointed out that should the fatuous, pompous twit happen to notice that I've referred to him as a fatuous, pompous twit, the likelihood of getting our paws on his money is increasingly unlikely, bordering on improbable.

And that's why the text that was originally here isn't here. It's been pulled, yanked, spiked; it's gone. I can't believe what a slut I am.

I've been waiting forever for my udon, and the waiter can't tell me when I'll be served. Every time I've asked him, he just tells me, "The path of the noodle is both winding and long."

Tomorrow it's back to burritos; there's nothing inscrutable about a burrito.

I decided to test its abilities with a homonym.

"I write," I said.

The Kaymogre 4399 replied, "No, you wrong."

I was very impressed.