Attention: Toy lovers and/or neurotics: A new line of stuffed animals with mental illnesses has been introduced by The Paraplush Toy Company in Germany. Really! There’s Dub, a severely depressed turtle (Are turtles ever happy?), Sly the Snake, who has terrifying hallucinations (Could it be guilt over that Garden thing?), and a crocodile with an irrational fear...

How do you get to be a blogger? Personally, I think you must be cursed at birth. A gypsy woman (I am SO in the mood to be politically incorrect) spies you in your baby carriage, slinks over and slaps a hex on you. This child will be blessed with nice legs, a high IQ, an overbite, and an insatiable desire to create a blog. Create a what? A blob?? No one back then...

How can an obituary cheer you up? Well, for starters, the person who died is not you.  That’s a good thing. I know someone who reads them every day to make sure she’s not included. So far, so good. But one recent obit in The New York Times really gave me a lift. It was for Bobby Thompson, you know, the guy who fired “the shot heard round the...

OMG, last night DVR stopped being my BFF and had me saying WTF! After watching the Emmys for an hour, we decided to record the rest and switch to Masterpiece Theatre, because Inspector Lewis is rather cool in his own curmudgeonly way, and there are no commercials on PBS. Okay, no problem. Lewis first, Emmys later. We’d skip the commercials and cut off the...

There are some things I will not discuss in this blog: religion, politics, chin hairs. But there is something I must talk to you about today: poop. There are, of course, words describing this substance that are far less cute, but I’m taking my cue from Oprah (a girl could do worse) and sticking with the P word. For now. For years, filmmakers have found it...

Do you get those emails whose main function is to remind you how old you’re getting – and how young the rest of the world is? The latest one, at least, had interesting information to process, assuming that any of us above the Age of Consent are still able to process information. It was about Freshmen  —  the kids who are starting college this Fall....

This is the kind of story that makes you feel good to be alive. Or slit your wrists. A family in the south had fallen on hard times. They were out of work, out of money, but — hold on to your Kryptonite — not out of luck. As they were cleaning out the attic, because the house they had owned for 60 years was now in foreclosure, they came across a pile of old comics....

Or is it just that some people ON Facebook are dead? No, really. As Facebook gets older, so do its users: people over 65 are joining at a greater rate than any other age group. And some of these people, poor dears, pass on. No, they haven’t switched to MySpace. They’ve gone to the Great Internet In the Sky. But here on Planet Earth, dearly departed...