How many of you have kids? How many of you used to BE kids? Oh great! Then you are all familiar with ‘Crap-Dar.’  No?  Sure ya are, you just didn’t have a name for it.  It’s like radar, all kids have it.

This is the way it works: no matter how far away your kids are, as soon as you go into the bathroom to take a well-deserved dump, they’re home banging on the door.

Picture it.  You’re at the office and you feel the first twinges, but you hate taking a crap in front of your coworkers.  Flatulating so loudly they can hear you in the next building does nothing to promote the dignity and respect you try to engender.  Besides, you don’t want your office mates speculating on whether you make floaters or sinkers.  So you assess the situation and decide you can wait til you get home as long as you take small steps and stand with your legs squeezed together while waiting for the bus.

You get home and try to do the parent thing first.  You look for your kids to yell at them just so they know whose in charge.  But no kids are around.  They left a note saying they were playing a double-header game of soccer in some town 25 miles away and didn’t expect to be home before midnight.  Therefore, you feel perfectly safe in spending at least 10 minutes taking a nice, protracted, eye-watering fecallation.  You find your virgin NY Times crossword puzzle of the day, open your hidden safe and take out the last pencil with its eraser intact that you’ve hidden for just such an occasion.

Then you go into the bathroom.  You turn on the water from force of habit.  You used to do it when your bathroom was off the kitchen in that 2-bedroom closet you lived in that the landlord laughing called an apartment.  Since the walls were made out of plastered-over tissue paper, you’d have to run the water whenever you relieved yourself so your guests wouldn’t think there was a horse pissing in the bathroom.  Now it has become an almost Pavlovian thing.  You can’t use the bathroom unless the water is running.

So you turn on the water, check the toilet seat for dog hairs, push your bottoms around your ankles, and settle yourself comfortably on the bowl.  Just as you’re letting forth with your first wall-shaking, plaster-cracking pre-dump fart, there is a banging on the door that makes you jump so high you almost trip over the pantyhose binding your ankles together.

Crap-dar in action.  From 25 miles away, and in the middle of the championship soccer game of the year, your kids knew you were gonna take a dump.  Instantly they get teleported to the other side of your bathroom door.  On top of which, they heard you cut loose such a big one it registered on the Richter scale.  So much for parental dignity.

However, I have learned to use Crap-dar to my advantage.  Since my son is now old enough to have a social life, he goes out at night.  Being a typical parent, I worry.  If he says he’ll be home by 11, I start getting nervous at 11:01, and am ready to dial 9-11 by 11:02.  This is where Crap-dar comes in.

I merely eat lots of broccoli at dinner and start drinking a lot of hot tea around 9 pm.  By the time 11 pm rolls around, I’m ready to take an emergency crap.  And sure enough, as soon as I sit down and let loose the first ear-shattering fart, my son is banging on the door.  And finally, I can take a crap with peace of mind.

(This story is absolutely true, but all names have been changed to prevent matricide.)

When my friend’s preteen son first took an interest in doing laundry, she immediately began to wonder if he’d want an Easy Bake Oven next and began to worry.  And when she kept getting only single socks in the laundry before going through the washer, she knew something weird was up.

It was a very strange summer anyway.  Her new landlord was probably a terrorist and he used her address as a mail drop for any number of Middle Eastern names.  He also had a phone call-forwarding device installed in her basement closet, even though he had never lived in the house. The dog was getting huge erections every time he saw a fire engine — which was quite frequently since the firehouse was around the corner.  And her son was taking an inordinate interest in laundry instead of video games.

Being a blonde, she didn’t figure it out right away.  But one day she had a brunette moment and realized that he was only washing his sheets.  He would wear the same crud-covered shorts for days, but his sheets he had to wash almost daily.

She did what any discrete mother would do — bragged to all her friends that her son was now having wet dreams more often than the dog!  Not only that, but he didn’t clean up after himself with his tongue.  She was so proud; she even left a bottle of that expensive protein stain remover right on top of the washer.

But it still didn’t explain all the single socks in the laundry basket.  Was she dating a one-legged man she didn’t know about?  Were her bananas looking for blankets and wearing them??  She hadn’t a clue and was rapidly going broke having to buy her son new pairs of socks on a weekly basis.

By this time, her son was spoiling her by volunteering to do all the laundry.  She figured he was gonna ask for some outrageous privilege, but was willing to be spoiled until that happened.  Besides, the basement was full of centipedes and jumping spiders and basements had always creeped her out.

She was blissfully ignorant until the day the furnace decided to turn itself on for no reason and spray rusty steam out of the radiator and all over her newly painted pink walls.  She had to go down to the basement to shut it off.  She also had to empty it of water.  She filled up the first bucket and took it over to the sink to pour it out.  However, the sink was blocked.

What was it blocked with, you ask? 

About 100 single sticky socks in varying colors. 

Oy.

Her son the laundry freak had reinvented the sheet protector in the form of a cottony, breathable condom-like, one-size-fits-most ‘sperm guard.’  And at the rate he was going through socks, he was using them for more than just nocturnal emissions.  Any port in a storm…any sock in a…well…. you know.

She didn’t want him to know she’d stumbled across his secret, yet she couldn’t keep buying him a new pair of socks (at least) every day.  She was subtle, yet direct.  Diplomatic, yet … nope, not diplomatic.  Not even subtle.  But her timing was perfect..

Just as her out-laws (other people have in-laws, she has out-laws) were honking their horn for her son to go with them for the weekend, she gave him some advice along with a good-bye kiss.

“If you’re gonna jerk off over there, do it in the shower like everyone else and you won’t have to do the laundry.”

Recently, I volunteered to keep an eye on a friend’s teenager while she was away for the weekend.  This entailed stopping by to bring over some food and making sure that no wild parties were being thrown.  Who knew I was about to get a lesson in personal hygiene from a man who is younger than some of my girdles?

After giving Sam instructions on how to reheat the food,  I went to use the bathroom.  As I got off the toilet seat, I noticed a large amount of pubic hair in the toilet bowl.  My initial thought was ‘Damn!  I knew getting older wasn‘t merely prune juice and Geritol … first I sprout hair on my toe knuckles, now my crotch is going bald.’  But upon closer, if somewhat difficult inspection (I hadn’t bent that far over since the last time I waxed my toe knuckles!), I realized that my nether half was still well-carpeted.

I finished up what I needed to do and went looking for Sam to find out what was going on.  I put it to him bluntly.  “Sam, what’s with all the pubes floating around the toilet?”

After a few moments hesitation, Sam admitted they were his.  Being the nosy bitch that I am, and acting in loco parentis, I insisted that he tell me why his pubic hair was paddling around in the pissoire.  After a few awkward seconds, Sam told me that it was really his butt hair doing the backstroke in the bowl.

“Why would you shave your butt hair?” I asked him out of pure inquisitiveness.  ”Does it stick through the spandex of your Speedo swim trunks, or do you just miss that baby-soft feel of a youthful caboose?”

Sam was thoroughly embarrassed.  But my curiosity wouldn’t let it rest.  I did what any good parent would do when faced with an intractable teenager … I blackmailed him.  I threatened to tell my son, who would then spread it all over the school.  His butt would become the butt of adolescent ridicule.

Under such pressure, Sam had no choice ‘butt’ to tell me the truth.  “It’s cleaner that way,” he admitted, somewhat abashed.

“Cleaner?”  I asked with a bit of skepticism.  ”Did you have to shampoo your butt hair on a daily basis before you decided to shave it?”

“Not that kind of clean,” Sam replied.  “It’s just that without butt hair, I don’t have to worry about getting dingleberries,” he said sheepishly.

To say the word ‘cleaning is not in my vocabulary is a gross understatement.  Its breadth and scope go so much farther than that.  It goes back so many generations that I think there is a messiness gene that is carried on the ‘x‘ chromosome.  To wit: my son is a slob, I am a slob, my father was a slob, his mother was a slob, and her father was a slob.  It seems to be passed on from father to daughter and mother to son for all eternity.  It looks like my progeny and I are to be cursed for perpetuity to live in swill and utter disorder.  But that doesn’t mean we don’t occasionally try, albeit in vain, to be neat.

                Way back, when getting a new pair of Keds or PF Flyers were the first sign of incipient spring, and the second sign was commercials for Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, my dad was forced to clean the garage.  It was a new way of thinking for us, since we had recently moved from a housing project in New York City.  In fact, trees were a new thing for us too, (well, me anyway).  We had moved ten miles west to the wild and woolly suburbs of New Jersey.  We had sidewalks, sewers, gutters, and dense housing with tiny lawns, but I was sure that I was gonna see cows at every turn.  My ignorance of life outside of the city had actually won me a contest the previous year.  There was a citywide art contest for kids sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art (I think).  My painting won first prize because of its content.  Having never seen a forest, I painted one complete with pine trees, squirrels, a yellow curb and fire hydrant, and a taxi in the background.  Who knew?  I had never been west of the Hudson River (except for going to Palisades Amusement Park), and the only nature I had seen (besides Mark Eidlerman’s wee-wee) was at a day camp amidst the subdivisions on Staten Island.  But I digress.

                We had a garage that was attached to the house, although you couldn’t get into it from the house.  But they did share a common wall.  For some reason, the garage had come with real knotty pine paneling.  Dad was very proud of it, as if he, personally had given birth to it (ouch, the splinters).  But like all garages, it was used for cars and old stuff.  Stuff like defunct vacuum cleaners, old cribs, holey buckets, old PF Flyers, old pieces of half-chewed Bonomo’s Turkish Taffy, and eventually tree toads.  The tree toads were my doing.  I was so smitten with ‘country living’ and the fact that there was wildlife beyond ants, roaches, water beetles and rats, that when I discovered tree toads in our local park, I took them home as pets. 

                Mom had said that three kids were pets enough, so I had to hide them. The back of our garage was so crowded with junk, that only a small body could get through.  It was the perfect place for my tree toads.  And luckily, I had found an old, porcelain-lined bucket back there.  It was kind of rusted through in a few places, but I didn’t think the tree toads would mind.  So I happily collected them all summer, feeding them and keeping them wet and alive, until their ranks swelled to 17 in number.  The day I realized a few had escaped was the day my mom found my little brother trying to eat one that was jumping around the dining room. Apparently they had gotten out through one of the holes in the bucket and found their way into our house via the holes in the knotty pine paneling.  I was forced to confess, and my parents weren’t even too mad.  But they realized they would have to clean out the house and the garage to find all the tree toads before they died in the walls and began to rot.  Thus began “The Big Cleanup.” 

                Dad was a gung-ho sort of guy, so to him, cleaning up meant cleaningeverything.   I was told to clean the bathroom, but I needed remedial scrubbing lessons since I had never seen it done before.  I had dutifully smeared the dirt around the counters, collected the dust bunnies from the corners, washed them off and put them back, and then called my mom to come and see.  She was very upset with me.  It wasn’t just that the wet dust bunnies had lost their shapes, it was the fill lines in the toilet and on the bathtub.  Fill lines, you say?  Well, in my slovenly ignorance, I thought that the brown lines in the toilet and on the tub were the high water marks, above which things would overflow.  So I carefully left them there. Boy, was mom mad.  When she told me I was brought up to know better, I brightly and cheerfully contradicted her.  She began yelling and crying, and dad came over and they got into a fight and I thought it was all my fault.  After all, if I hadn’t hidden the tree toads in the garage, we wouldn’t have to clean the house and they wouldn’t be fighting.  I think it was that incident that permanently traumatized me to cleaning house.

                Ever since then, I have blithely gone along living in a messy place, and when the dirt and garbage get too high, I move.  (I got the idea from Lewis Carroll’s Mad Tea Party in Alice in Wonderland, a book that has been my role model for coping with the world.) It’s been a method that has served me well. Until last night.

                While cleaning the house may be anathema to me, I cannot afford to throw out dirty dishes.  However, washing dishes is tantamount to cleaning and so I try to avoid it.  Which is why, I think, I have a son, formally known as Sir Stinkyfeet.  Whenever he transgresses, which is frequently (being a teenager), I punish him by making him do the dishes.  Although this system doesn’t please him, it has suited me perfectly.  However, the little creep has gone out of his way to be disgustingly obedient recently and so we have been reduced to using paper plates since the dishes haven’t been done in eons.  Up until yesterday.  He used the ‘F’ and ’S’ words to me; that is, he used the words ‘Food Shopping’.  I nearly lost it. How could I go food shopping if the counters were covered with dirty dishes?  I guess he was tired of eating toaster crumbs and dog bowl leavin’s so he decided to do the dishes.

                How can a kid who remembers every word to every episode of “Son of the Beach” forget how to do the dishes?  It must be something in the Laffy Taffy.  Anyway, Sir Stinkyfeet forgot how to do the dishes.  He squirted around the dish washing liquid until everything was covered in it.  Then he turned on the water full blast.  I was in the next room blissfully watching TV when I thought I saw little bubbles floating across the screen.  Since I hadn’t been doing any Nyquil shooters, I figured there must really be little green bubbles floating around.  Just as I was going to get up to investigate, the smoke alarm went off. Our dog Butchie, also known as The-Beast -Who-Can-Poop-In-5-Languages, tried to hide himself in the cracks of the sofa.  Since this was impossible, he did the next best thing and tore up the throw pillows, trying to hide under the settling bits of foam rubber. 

                Our apartment, which had at least six months of living and messing before we had to move, was now ankle deep in debris mixed with tiny bubbles (and there was no sign of Don Ho).  Meanwhile, the smoke detector blared on, while the house smelled eerily clean.  Maybe I was having nasal hallucinations, but I could have sworn that I smelled evidence of someone having committed a neatness.  I lurched and skidded my way into the kitchen to find Sir Stinky Feet desperately looking for a fire.  Common sense took over and I asked him if he’d been cooking anything.  When he replied in the negative, I checked to see if any appliances were plugged in.  They were not.  Nor were any lights on.  The only activity going on in the kitchen was dishwashing and that damned noisy smoke detector.  I suggested we try feeling the walls and floors for heat, but again, nothing.  Sir Stinky Feet was sure there was a fire and was about to call the Fire Department when I stopped him.

                Patiently I explained to him that the house was too messy to call the Fire Department and that by the time we got it clean enough, if there was a fire, it would have burned down anyway.  Instead, I removed the battery from the smoke detector and took everything into the bathroom.  We normally keep the door to the bathroom closed, and so it had no soap bubbles in the air and no aroma of Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid.  When I restored the batteries, the smoke detector was wonderfully silent.  As soon as I stepped out into a bubble zone, it went off again.  Well, it didn’t take a brunette to figure out what was going on. The dishwashing liquid set off the smoke detector.

                Sir Stinky Feet was sure I’d been inhaling the mold off the old cheese in the refrigerator again.  However, I told him that we would know the truth within two days.  Either the house would have burned down or we’d have to wash the dishes again and the same thing would happen.  In actuality, it took three days (we ate off of paper towels for a while until we found out that it doesn’t make a good bowl for cereal and milk).  Then I blackmailed Stinky into doing the dishes again.  Sure enough, the smoke detector went off, the dog destroyed some more pillows, and I was vindicated.

                Stinky took it as a direct sign from The Almighty that he was not meant to wash anything beyond his own hairy body.  The dog took it as a signal that it was acceptable to tear into the cushions.  And I took it as proof that cleaning was hazardous to my ears.  So as of this writing, I have every piece of crockery, cutlery, and cookware sitting out on our counter in a state of filth.  I am testing the theory that, in a pinch, one can eat off of aluminum foil, and drinking cereal and milk out of a paper cup isn’t half bad.

Everybody has something which makes them shudder.  For some it’s spiders, or nails on a chalkboard, or a letter from the IRS.  For me it is those words echoed nightly on every planet throughout the known universe: “Hey Mom, what’s for dinner?”

Way back, when playing cowboys and Indians was still legal and not politically incorrect, I was a child and used those very same words.  I guess that’s when the shudder reflex set in, but for different reasons than today.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved to eat (my hips are a testament to that), and I loved my Mom, but Mom was not a very good cook.  She did a mean laundry, double softened and nicely fluffed and folded (even those pesky fitted sheets), but in our house you only used the words ‘Mom’ and ‘food’ in the same sentence as either a joke or a threat. I remember the time she thought she had poisoned us and made me drink half a bottle of Pepto-Bismol for dessert.  She poured it on top of vanilla ice cream and tried to convince me it was pink peppermint syrup.  Needless to say, I now have an aversion to pink food of any sort.  But that was par for the course in our household.

Mom wasn’t very good with food, but she was great with organization.  Our refrigerator was arranged by color code.  The brown stuff on the left was meat, the green stuff on the right was cheese, and the long black things were bananas. It wasn’t until I was an adult and did my own food shopping that I realized that black bananas weren’t from Africa and yellow bananas weren‘t from China.  Mom also kept cold water in an old vodka bottle in the refrigerator because it was pretty, had a good screw cap, and fit perfectly on the door.  Occasionally, when we had a new visitor to our house, they would give me the strangest looks if they happened to catch me drinking water from our vodka bottle.

Mom never liked to waste food and sometimes when she had company over she would serve fancy hors d’oeuvres to go with the inevitable martinis.  The next day I would have the strangest lunches.  While other kids opened their Superman lunchboxes to find peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or ham and cheese, Mom would pack my Lone Ranger lunchbox with hors d’oeuvres sandwiches.  To her, smoked oysters with avocado hearts, cream cheese and black caviar on white bread held together with a fancy toothpick spearing a stuffed olive was a gourmet treat.  Besides, she figured it fulfilled the U.S. government’s recommended four food groups for healthy living:  something green, something white, something black and something brown.  (The red in the stuffed olive was just for aesthetics, or so she said.)

By the time I was 14, I had taken a job at our local Howard Johnson’s in self-defense.  Besides earning spending money, I got to eat the food there.  That was around the time I started to develop breasts and the inevitable cellulite.  I ate so many fried clams during my interment there, that if I ever get liposuction the doctor’s gonna be sucking out tarter sauce from my thighs. (I guess that’s what makes all those little lumps.)         

Fast forward to motherhood.  My son, Sir Stinkyfeet, had a normal childhood, cuisine-wise.  I gave him the proper foods from the proper food groups of the moment, served in an attractive and appetizing way.  I was not the Asparagus Attila, or the Genghis Khan of green beans, or the cabbage

Gestapo; I served him kid-friendly healthy foods in a pleasant and palatable manner.  Then I found out that I had incipient diabetes.  It wasn’t severe and could be managed without medication as long as I controlled my diet.  I was told to exclude most carbohydrates and include more proteins in the way of meat and fish.

It was around this time that Sir Stinkyfeet decided to become a vegetarian.  His motivation was admirable; he loves animals, wants to be a veterinarian, and doesn’t want to eat his ‘friends’ and future clients.  But it made mealtime at our house Mission Impossible.  He allowed for the fact that I needed to eat meat, but “nothing with a face” would ever cross his lips.  Which meant that I would have to prepare two separate meals.   Broiling something for me was no problem, but Sir Stinkyfeet wanted gourmet vegetarian fare.  This he expected from a woman with tarter sauce for thighs?  Heck, I thought soy paste was what they used to stick together collages in Chinese kindergartens.  I thought couscous was a furry little endangered animal from Tasmania.  Obviously something had to give.

You have no idea how many foods have hidden animal byproducts in them.  Things like certain food coloring, gelatin, and most prepared foods.  I mean, that was practically everything we had been eating.  So I asked Stinkyfeet what he’d like to eat and it basically boiled down to anything that was either salty or chocolate, as long as it didn’t have a face or a heartbeat.  Great.  That left pasta, rice, and beans, none of which I could eat.  Mealtimes had rapidly deteriorated into a major hassle.  Then came the inevitable nightly mantra:

“What’s for dinner”, he’d intone.

“A pasta dish, a rice dish or a bean dish,” I’d respond, as pleasantly as possible.

“I don’t want that again,” he’d complain, and mope around in a sullen snit.  Then he’d scrounge a meal from his three favorite food groups: two Ring Dings and a cherry Coke.  I’d feel guilty about not being a good mother, wonder how I’d managed to lose control over my (once) adorable, obedient, and eager-to-please little boy, and worry about his nutrition.

  One night I’d had enough.  I was tired of feeling rebuffed and guilty.  He wants something chocolate or salty, I’ll fix his health food-vegetarian-nothing-with-a-face-wagon, I thought to myself. 

When dinnertime came around and he asked the usual question, “What’s for dinner?” I was prepared with a retort that was filled with the long months of frustrations and fretting that I’d had come to endure.

“Bosco and seawater soup,” I responded brightly.

He just stared at me for a second and asked me to repeat what I’d said.  And I did.  Then he repeated it while I just kept smiling sweetly.  Finally, he asked me if I was kidding.  I told him that I wasn’t, and turned back to the stove to put the finishing touches on my delicately poached chicken breast in white wine sauce that the dog was sniffing with amorous abandon. 

“But you’re my Mom,” he complained.  “You’re supposed to make me dinner,” he cried.

So I patiently explained to him that every night when he asked me what was for dinner, I’d given him the choices from his self-imposed diet, and he’d reject them. He refused to go food shopping with me, so I’d run out of options.  Then he broke down and asked me if I’d make him some macaroni and cheese.

“You mean from a box,” I retorted smartly.  “As in prepared food?”  I just wanted to make sure I’d heard him right.

  “Yes, please, Mom,” he answered meekly.

“Make it yourself,” I snapped back.  “I’m tired of catering to you.”

Suddenly, the adorable, obedient, eager-to-please little boy had returned.  “But Moms are supposed to make dinner,” he pleaded.  “Besides, you make it better than me.”

Needless to say, I acquiesced, but not before a lot of huffing and puffing. I also extracted several promises from him.  While he still refuses to go food shopping with me, he does help with the list and puts away the food, and best of all, henever asks me what’s for dinner.  Now he just looks at our supplies and tells me what he wants.  And if he can’t find anything he likes, I graciously allow him to order an emergency pizza, as long as he does the dialing and talking. (My mouth and dialing finger are on permanent strike.)  However, I can’t help but sometimes ask God why I couldn’t have just had a normal kid who smokes pot.

The 75th annual National Spelling Bee was held recently and 13-year-old Pratyush Buddiga of Colorado Springs, CO won it by spelling his name correctly. Just kidding. Actually he misspelled it, but since he managed to spell prospicience they gave him the trophy anyway. Prospicience, in case you can’t find it in your Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary because, well, it’s not in there, means foresight. As in having the foresight to study the list of 4,000 words they commonly use. That’s words they use in spelling bees, not real life. Face it, nobody walks around saying words like prospicience and morigeration in public unless they enjoy having the crap kicked out of them.

Buddiga beat out contestants from every state except Vermont and Utah, which didn’t send anyone. That says a lot about those states though I’m not going to say what that is lest I get inundated by hate mail from a few zillion sap drained maple trees and Mormons. He walked away with $12,000, an engraved cup, a copy of theEncyclopaedia Britannica, $1000 U.S. Savings Bond, and a bunch of reference books which I’m sure he’ll proofread and send back with his corrections. He also got to be on TV since ESPN televised the finals. Yes, this means spelling bees are now an official sport, so you can expect to see one in the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens. Of course being the first time it won’t have an event of its own, it will be part of the New Pentathlon, sandwiched in between the Frisbee Toss, the Playstation Marathon, the Hacky Sack Relay, and Downhill Speed Remote Control Clicking.

“>It’s nice to know that there are kids who think good spelling is important in life. After all, not every kid will grow up to be like Seattle Mariners pitcher Jeff Nelson, who auctioned off a bone chip from his elbow for $23,000. True he gave the money to charity, but that’s only because he doesn’t have enough time as it is to count the great big piles of sports bucks he’s raking in. The truth is, most children will end up having to work for a living, and spelling, like math, geography, and coming up with new excuses to take a sick day on the Friday before a three-day weekend will be an important skill to have.“But we have spellcheckers now,” you’re probably typing, hoping your computer knows that spellchecker is one word. True, but not only are computers so dumb that they don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re, but today’s New and Improved Rebellious Hip Spellings™ completely elude them. For example, U2 isn’t just a band whose lead singer goes on State Department tours of Africa with the Treasury Secretary, it’s also the approved reply to the compliment, “U r 1 hella kewl grrl!”

Yes, it’s spelling for the Hooked on Phonics Generation. It’s quick! It’s easy! And it saves letters, which is not only energy efficient but also environmentally correct since you can recycle the unused letters in words that really need them, like intelligence, impression, and employment. Though in its defense, the new spelling has a royal lineage since Prince was one of the earliest proponents of it, having written songs including When 2 R in Love, I Would Die 4 U, and Tell Me How U Want 2 B Done. That’s Prince the musician, not Prince Charles, who may actually use words like prospicience and morigeration. And not get his butt kicked, though that’s only because his bodyguards are there to protect him.

“>Xtreme is another popular new spelling of a good old word. It started out as an adjective to describe really edgy, out there, fringe sports but is now so hip, cool, and underground that (True Fact alert!) you can get Xtreme Right Guard deodorant, Xtreme3 shaving razors, and X-treme Jell-O. Ads say it will “X-Cite Your Kids with X-treme Flavors” like green apple, wild berry, and—gasp!—watermelon. That’s the Jell-O, not the razor blades or deodorant. Maybe I’m a bit too old for their marketing, but watermelon Jell-O just sounds so-o-o-o X-treme. Yeah, right.This raises a whole new problem—what’s the correct spelling of a made up word like Xtreme? Is it hyphenated or not? Is it correct to put numbers after it like a sequel? How about putting them be4 a word, like 2morrow, 1derful, or 4get, as in “4get it, this is 2 complicated 4 me”? This is important. After all, how can we expect our children to grow up to be president if they can’t spell? Okay, aside from having a father who was president before them, which would mean that we’ll only have Bushes, Carters, Fords, and Clintons in office from now on.

Cheeses priced! Eye doughnut wont two bee sill he, butt eye wood knot no watt two tail ewe has un ant sir. May bee eff yule lettuce, wee Ken due a bet her job off tea chin. Oar may bee knot. Won thing 4 shore, my Eddy tore’s spell Czech her his go wing knots rite now.