I want to use words you can understand.

Colleen agreed, and suggested that any giraffe with a modicum of intelligence would prefer to subsist on freely available leaves and other vegetation rather than try to survive on the paltry sums actors receive. I suspect that if humans could enjoy a comfortable life foraging, there’d be far fewer actors around.

Would that be a good thing, or a bad thing?

I adopted this intentionally deceptive practice for two reasons. First, most alleged poetry really is quite dreadful. Second, I want to discourage people from sharing poetry for the reason cited in the previous sentence. Poetry is like eggplant: tasty and rewarding on rare occasions, but generally unpalatable.

Today, I discovered a word that will simplify discussion of matters poetic: poetaster, “a person who writes inferior poetry.”

That’s perfect!

I can now say that I love the work of a good poet. And a pox on poetasters!

Margaret differentiates herself by providing Margaret’s Dinner Theatre; she lets me watch her concoct dinner. She gives me a ringside seat—with a bottle of wine!—at the kitchen table, then proceeds to delight and entertain while preparing an invariably great meal.

Since Margaret can do no wrong in the kitchen, I asked her to tell me about eggplant. She told me that the male eggplant is better than the female eggplant.

“How do I tell which is which?” I asked.

“The male is lighter because it doesn’t have any seeds,” she explained.

“So always choose the male eggplant?” I confirmed.

“No,” Margaret replied, “you shouldn’t buy any eggplant unless you like the taste and texture of wet cardboard.”

And with that, I now know all I need to know about eggplants.

Councilor Martin Mullaney pronounced that apostrophes, “are not needed. More importantly, they confuse people. If I want to go to a restaurant, I don’t want to have an A-level [the equivalent of a high school diploma] in English to find it.”

?!

I’m familiar with British stupidity; who isn’t? Having said that, I’m nevertheless impressed by the breathtaking inanity of the Birmingham councilmembers. I can’t think of another instance of any body trying to remove a character from the English language. I suppose the next step is to ban commas, or maybe even lower-case letters. After all, it must tax their tiny moronic brains to differentiate A from a, B from b, et cetera.

There’ll always be an England, so I’m glad it’s quarantined in the middle of the Atlantic.

Colin just received a letter in the mail that spent over two weeks in transit. Even so, the delivery certainly outpaced any member of the Gastropoda family. His large envelope qualified as snail mail because it had a snail attached. The mollusk evidently found that the packaging was rather tasty.

So there! I know I’m again delusional, but I hope I never hear the idiom “snail mail” unless it involves something slimier than the person using it.