Jeezus, $800? I’d go to Target and buy a magazine rack for $9.99 and hope for the best. (I am not a parent. Your calls to the Department of Child Services will go unheeded.)

The little R2D2 is the best. One of my young relatives had one that blinked and made noises. Does yours? Does your bird try to attack it?

Happy to oblige but neither of those phrases are creations of mine. I stand on the shoulders of giants.

During the 2008 campign Deb was a Hillary Clinton co-chair. She can do whatever she wants short of suspending the primaries; I, and everyone else I know in New York (and we’re not young, dewy-eyed hipsters, we’re middle-aged middle-of-the-road Democrats) are voting for Bernie. Despite the fact that Hillary was…

Your professor stole the joke. Bob Dole originally said it in 1995. But once heard, never forgotten. I think about it all the time whenever I see him mentioned, or his cousin Amy.

Like our elders who have memories of exactly where they were and what they were doing when they heard that Kennedy was shot, or like us when 9/11 happened, I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Sarah Palin was going to be the Republican VP choice. This lifelong Democrat’s joy turned to ashes about 24 hours…

I love him. He’s from upstate New York so not a native Masshole and he seems to be living his best life. And all those charity appearances. When I regain consciousness tomorrow morning I may take my dog to the park and do a “Gronk Spike” although I don’t own a football so it’ll be the football equivalent of air guitar.

I was thinking about you when I read this:

What toppings brought the plates up to $32 versus $8? Like a caviar crepe or something?

There is no answer to that. Order room service at a high-end Manhattan hotel and the sky’s the limit! $30 for plain, another $5 for a little butter, another $10 for some syrup. For a place like Denny’s I think $4 is about fair. I’ve often made more pancakes than I could eat and they would cost me about $2. Now that…

I read the comments, because I cannot resist a dare. One of them said, “The minute I saw this linked on Drudge I knew [something racist]” This is common. I read sites where they allow comments and they’re lucky to get a half dozen on any given post/article. A Drudge link? It goes into the thousands.

I second what Tina posted. We get all our dogs at shelters and you’d be surprised at the poor creatures that wind up there. The last time we went to ours there were no Frenchies but the breed is incredibly popular, at least in New York. This is a very sad reality: the shelters fill up in the weeks after Christmas.…

I don’t know. She might be working on the African Campaign or planning the Invasion of Normandy.

Is it your random roll of toilet paper behind the dog at least?

My worst nightmare. Is that your Dad in the orange T-shirt in the second picture? How was that photo taken? From the opposite side of the circle using a telephoto lens? As it is it looks like someone was hovering in midair in the middle of the circle.

One of the things that lessens my anxiety about the future is that according to the original “Star Trek” TV show women will have sensibly returned to the bouffant in the 23rd century.

I wouldn’t normally cry during an anthem, but I was offline for most of yesterday and woke up ridiculously early to be confronted with that atrocious (literally, it is an atrocity) news out of Paris.

One of my brothers does something similar to me. He’ll say something like “You’re always a good source of useless information…” and ask a question, which I can usually answer. He wants to know something so he asks me, but he cannot let go of the fact that it’s something he doesn’t know and I most certainly do. Things…

I’m with you. I’m about your age but I don’t have children. I’ve had a very charmed life. I don’t want to spend the last 10 years of it semi-lucid in a nursing home.

I think “hole-in-the-wall” is pretty neutral but whenever I hear the term “dive bar” I pretty much expect an all-white clientele supremely conscious that they are in a dive bar. I’ve never been disappointed and I’ve been going (reluctantly) to “dive bars” for 30 years.