The three-martini lunch may have come and gone, but the seven-beer lunch is here to stay.

Few people can deny that that’s damn good advice.

Now, here’s the good part: the companion animal in question was a one hundred and forty-kilogram pig.

The pig slept through most of USAirways Flight 107, but got excited when the plane landed in Seattle. (But, that close to Mt. Rainier, who wouldn’t?) As the plane taxied toward the gate, the porker ran though the plane, shitting everywhere, and tried to break into the cockpit before holing up in the jet’s galley.

I don’t know what’s so funny. Given the inevitable errors in the airlines’ seating computers, I’ve accidentally flown in the first-class part of the plane enough to know that most of us in the front of the plane are, in fact, swine.

Can you see the little piggies?

No.

If I’m alive then, I’ll be over seventy-five years old. Given my inadequate knowledge of maths in general and probability and statistics in particular, I’m not especially concerned that 2000 SG344 may have my name on it. (For the record, 2000 SG344 is a bit of cosmic debris, perhaps a meteorite, or perhaps one of nine discarded Saturn V rocket boosters left in planetary limbo from NASA’s Apollo program.)

Death by 2000 SG344 is just a bit less probable than expiring from a heart attack after a four-day orgy, and a jillion orders of magnitude less likely than being consumed by the cancer that’s already chewed too many friends to death.

I thank the International Astronomical Union for its timely advice. Unless four-day septuagenarian orgies make an extremely improbable comeback, 2000 SG344 will be an increasingly attractive exit option.

I knew David as the godfather and midwife of myriad “wilderness” books. He was also the first president of the Sierra Club, one of the founders of Friends of the Earth when told by the Sierra Club to take a hike, a cofounder of Earth Island Institute when told he was no friend of FoE, and no doubt would have been the cofounder of another fine environmental organization if he ever ran out of room at Earth Island.

Truly an hombre!

His stories of “doing serious damage to a bottle of whiskey” in a tent in Yosemite with Charis and Edward Weston and Ansel Adams are the stuff from which Great Adventures are made.

I remember one of my last visits with David. I walked into his office and said, “You really pissed me off.”

“Take a number and stand in line,” he replied. A second later, he asked hypothetically, “By the way, what did I do this time?”

I replied that, after becoming comfortable with my apathy, I’d inadvertently listened to a speech of his on the radio that had left me the slightest bit motivated. He’d inspired me to get off my comfortable derrière, albeit somewhat involuntarily.

When he was pushing ninety, ninety pushed back hard, real hard. Real hard, as in cancer.

David Brower died yesterday.

Damn.

“Yechhh, this crap tastes like it came from some damned bog,” said one young lad after a sip of Bowemore whisky.

“Fucking swamp water and kerosene,” echoed one of the underling’s colleagues.

“Tastes great to me,” I said without hesitation. It wasn’t quite as yummy as Bunnahabhain, but I certainly appreciated the lovely peat flavor.

“Rinehart will drink any vile swill,” a third technician chimed in.

I poured myself another glass, and assured my friends at the bar that the relatively expensive bottle wouldn’t be wasted. Later, I’ll explain to my young employees that all Islay whisky has lovely peat overtones. I think I’ll wait a few decades, though, until the youngsters have passed along another case or seven of “undrinkable” whisky.

What an Experience!

The lovely reunion made me want to revisit Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

(Without all the wonderful women in my life, I doubt it would have been worth living.)

I sat around drinking cocktails thinking about that very question until 19:13, when an Un Chien Andalou moon dictated that I make a snapshot to illustrate my meaningless, irrelevant quandary.

As always, there’s a reason.

It turns out that Minnesotans rely on potatoes for personal warmth. The northerners stuff freshly-baked potatoes in their bulky jackets and inside their plaid shirts. Their baggy pants are jammed so full of bulky potatoes that many can only sit on large couches.

But why do almost all the Minnesotans, including those without potato-filled clothing, appear to be all too chunky?

As always, there’s a reason, and it’s not pretty.

After decades of eating the potatoes inside their winter clothes, the poor Minnesotans now resemble their tuber-laden garments. There may be some truth to the old saying, “You are what you eat.”

Who will rescue the poor, starchy Minnesotans? Not me, I’m gone.