The Art of Procrastination You gotta have a plan, or you’ll never be able to procrastinate in peace. Say you really don’t want to see that exhibit at the museum, the one everyone says you absolutely must see.  Here’s what you do: write it down in your date book with as much sincerity as you can muster. When you get to that day  — make it...

How do I get into trouble by blogging? Let me count the ways. First of all, the usual: Readers don’t always agree with what I say. Or they don’t like getting emails directing them to my site where they can read what they don’t agree with. Or they just don’t like getting these kinds of emails. But, being me, I get in trouble in new and...

The blogging adventure continues. Today I got my first expletive-deleted reply to an e-mail blast. The expression was nothing special, just the usual three little words, beginning with “go” and ending with “yourself,” with a four- letter expletive in the middle, suggesting an activity I might want to perform on my person. I hear this...

               What good is a “secret” that’s been out for thousands of years? Well, if it’s news to you, it could change your life. The Secret, which had everyone buzzing on Oprah, is that everything in the universe is connected, including your thoughts, so that what you...

It was The Summer of Our Discontent, or at the very least, Our Profound Crankiness.  Here in the East, it started in June with endless rain. It seemed as if it rained every day. Probably because it did rain practically every day. It broke some kind of record, not the kind of record you want to break. It’s like getting into Guinness for hiccuping for 40...

And if possible, send money. You think it’s easy being a blogger? Even when people love your posts, they almost never send money. There’s just so damn much competition out there. And some of it is good! Besides the other 50 million blogs, and all the funny e-mails, there are those wonderful letters where someone offers you $1.5 million if you will only...

Oh, The Indignities of Travel . . . The e-mail message I sent from Rome was brief: Bring Colace. The reply from New York equally succinct: Relief is on the way! If this isn’t the most effective communication in the history of the Internet, I’ll eat my cappello. So what’s the story behind these messages between the Old Country and the New World?...

The warning signs of a Bad Dating Situation (or BADS) are like the clues in a cheesy detective story: obvious to everyone but the victim. Let’s face it, this guy is wrong for you, probably for the planet as a whole, but you, my sweet, are in total denial. If this were a song parody, it’d go something like, “You’ve got the BADS and that...