American Chimpanzee

I wrote a little bit about food in last Monday's "Pigs Is Pigs" column. I have another observation. As much as Italians love life and enjoy eating, they really dropped the ball with desserts. France has delicious desserts. So does Germany. But Italy… I've never had panna cotta, but isn't it just custard? I've had custard. I'm not impressed. Tiramisu? Wasn't he the Japanese warlord from  Shōgun ? You can tell cannoli desperately wants to be an éclair, but fails miserably. And why have gelato when you can have the real thing:  ice cream!  Preferably Mint Chocolate Chip from Baskin-Robbins. Personally, I'm a Dairy Queen kind of guy myself, but the rest of my family loves BR's chilly green concoction. Many's been the night when my wife has interrupted a perfectly good rerun of  Just Shoot Me  by asking me to go buy her a quart. I go… …but I'm not happy about it. You see, I just don't have the energy anymore. Of Newton's Laws of Phys...

Anthea’s Hope  story by Jim Duchene tech by Grok 1      The desert stretched endlessly before Thomas Jerome Newton. A cracked and desolate expanse that mirrored the fate of his home planet, Anthea.       He stood atop a dune. His thin frame cloaked in a tailored suit that  seemed out of place against the barren landscape. His eyes, hidden behind dark sunglasses, scanned the horizon. Not Earth’s, but a simulation he’d built in a Nevada warehouse. It was a desperate attempt to feel something of home. A planet dying of drought. Its inhabitants reduced to dust and memory.      Newton had come to Earth decades ago with a mission. Amass wealth. Develop technology. Save Anthea by bringing water back. He’d succeeded in part. His patents had made him richer than King Solomon, but the planet’s bureaucracies, wars, and petty squabbles had delayed him. Now, time was running out. Anthea’s last transmissions had...

After church, I took my wife and granddaughter to eat at Red Lobster. I remember the first time I went to Red Lobster, I took my ex-wife. They kicked her out for bringing her own crabs. Anyway, my father didn't want to go, so we took him home. "Bring me back something," he told us. Now that he's older, he's become like Bigfoot and prefers to stay away from people. You're going to think I'm crazy, especially since I've told you how cheap-I mean, frugal-I am, but my granddaughter, who's 10-years-old, likes to order The Ultimate Feast. It's about forty dollars. If you include my tip, that makes it forty dollars and twenty cents. Fortunately for the server my wife does the tipping. I don't want to say she's too generous, but people have been known to retire after she tips them. "Tipping is the price I'll happily pay not to cook or do dishes," she tells me. Normally, if anybody else wanted to order a forty dollar meal on my dim...

An interesting thing happened at the church I go to.       They stopped having Saturday services.      This may not seem like a big thing, but it goes back to something I've always wondered concerning Christian worshipping practices: Why do we go to church on Sundays ?       I understand that's when Jesus rose from the dead, but in the original Ten Commandments, of which there were actually 613 we were supposed to follow, we were commanded in the 4th to "Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy." There's more to it than that, a lot more, but I'm giving you the Reader's Digest condensed version.      When did that change, who changed it, and why do we accept it?      Let me put it this way: If my father tells me to do one thing and my buddy, the one who's always getting into trouble, tells me to do something in direct contradiction to it, who should I obey?       Maybe someone can e...

  After dinner, my granddaughter wanted to know what we were having for dessert. My wife, who’s not only beautiful but an excellent cook, hadn’t made dessert, so she informed her, “You don't always have to have dessert.” My granddaughter wasn't happy with that news. “Then why did I eat all my food?” she demanded to know. Yes, you could say my granddaughter has a way with words. The other day I caught her studying my face. I thought it was with love. That is, until she asked me, “When I grow up, are my ears gonna stick out like yours?” But it's not just my granddaughter. The rest of the world can come up with an occasional odd quip. For example, when my granddaughter and I were hitting all the local used bookstores, we stopped at a sandwich shop you would recognize the name of. I bought a footlong we were going to share. “Can you cut it in fourths?” I asked the professional sandwich maker before he wrapped it up. He seemed to be in his late teens. “Sorry,” he said, “but I’ve...

There's an old joke. I think I read it first in Bazooka Joe. A man answers the phone. "You don't say!" he says. "You Don't Say!" YOU DON'T SAY!" He hangs up the phone. "Who was it?" his wife asks. "He didn't say." Later, I saw it on Benny Hill. Anyway… My father answered the phone. This was back when we still had landlines. He's not one to gab, but he talked so much I began to wonder who he was talking to. "How ya doin'? I'm doing fine. How 'bout them Yankees? Blah, blah, blah…" I scooted a little closer, trying to get a bead on who he was talking to. You never know, it could have been someone out to cheat him out of my inheritance. Someone like my brother. Five minutes must have passed, which is a marathon for my father. He's not much of a talker. At least, not on the phone. Neither am I, for that matter. Now, five minutes might not seem like a long time, but try keeping your head underwater...

The question even caught ME by surprise.      When you get back from vacation life goes back to normal no matter how long you've been away. There are groceries to buy, floors to mop, naps to take... and doctors to see. My granddaughter had to go to the eye doctor. My son had an appointment to see the foot doctor. I used to listen to Dr. Dean Edell on the radio and he once said that you don't want to have a woman's reproductive system before the age of fifty and you don't want to have a man's reproductive system after  the age of fifty. That was the kind of doctor my father had to see.      When my father and I were signing in at the front desk, the girl who was checking us in was asking him questions that he would also have to answer on the paperwork she was giving us to fill out. These days you have to answer the same questions four times: to the receptionist, in the paperwork, the doctor’s assistant, and finally to the doctor him- or herself when the...

Before my mother passed away, I was having breakfast with her and my father. It was something I did every Saturday, join them for breakfast. In retrospect, I should have taken them both out for breakfast, but it never occurred to me.      I was starting to have problems in my first marriage, so I must have been feeling sensitive. I asked them, “What’s your secret to a long marriage?”      My mother looked sweetly at my father.      “I love him,” she said sweetly.      My father is not one to be sentimental, and that day was no different.      “How about you, pop?” I prodded.      “I love me, too,” he said.     

      Not only does my father come up with the occasional amusingly snide remark, my girls are also pretty snarky themselves. They always come up with an unintentionally witty quip that makes me laugh.      I’m trying to cut down on bread, sugar, and fried foods per my doctor’s orders, but it’s hard. My wife, who I love dearly, always takes the doctor’s side, so she’s adjusted her shopping habits so that everything in the kitchen is low-fat except for me.      “Why doesn’t healthy food keep you full?” I complained to her, chewing on a celery stick for a snack.      “You know what keeps ME full?” my granddaughter said. “ Candy! ”      As if I don’t have enough pennies weighing down the pockets of my jeans, my youngest daughter will also throw in her 2 cents of a more mature nature.       Before our trip to Mexico, I asked my doctor to prescribe something to nix any potential tummy ailment...

     For the two weeks my beautiful wife and I were in Mexico, things kept chugging along at home.     We kept calling to make sure the kiddies and grandkiddies were okay. I called my father, but, as I found out later, he kept his phone turned off the whole time we were gone.     “Why did you turn it off?” I asked him when I got back.     “I didn’t want to use up the battery,” he explained.     Besides being able to recharge the battery, I asked him, “But what if I was calling because of an emergency?”     “Oh, I would have turned it on for that,” he said.      The entire vacation, my wife’s cousin and her husband were always taking selfies with a selfie stick, and, since we were talking about phones, I made the mistake of telling him that.     “I’d like a selfie stick,” he told me.     “You would?”     My father, who’s not a fan of technology or fads (he doesn’t tell Alexa to ‘...

I’ll continue telling you about my vacation adventures later, and maybe even tell you about my almost drowning in the middle of the ocean, but I figure you and I could use a little break.      Besides, life goes on.      When we got back from Mexico, my father’s hair looked a little shabby. It’s funny how our roles have switched. When I was in my teens and early twenties, my father was always after me to get a haircut. Now  I’m  the one who takes the other fussing and fighting to the barber shop. I call it a barber shop because my father refuses to go to a hair salon.      Myself, I keep my hair so short my wife can do it. In fact, she does. It began with my youngest daughter. She started cutting my hair around the age of 10. She only stopped when she got a real job, then my wife took over. Before that, I used to go to a cosmology school where haircuts were only two bucks, but they were given to you by students learning how to cut h...

     The four of us--myself, my wife, her cousin Laura, and Laura's husband--spent the first day of our  Cancún  vacation enjoying the pool. That's just how it worked out. By the time our plane landed, between checking in and getting rid of the timeshare salesman, there wasn't much time or energy to do much else.      I thought it was funny that most of the people in bathing suits chose to swim in a pool while there was a perfectly good ocean to frolic in. As for me, my ocean frolicking days are behind me, so I laid on a lounge bed under an umbrella ordering margarita after margarita, because the only thing better than a margarita is  another  margarita.       I tipped the waiter 20  pesos  until I realized two things: 1) my free drinks were costing me money, and 2) I had legs. Just so you know, at my age laying down on the lounge chair is easy, getting up is hard, so I  earned  all the 20  pe...

    On our vacation in Mexico ​,  the all-inclusive resort we stayed at for the first week was located right on the beach. White sand. Blue water. Thonged women. One in particular revealing a roundness that a perfectly proportioned peach would envy. I’ve never seen so many bottoms in my life.  Some old, some young, some too young. I made it a point not to look at that last category. You never know if Chris Hansen from  To Catch a Predator  is hiding in the bushes.      I don't mean to judge, but I wonder about fathers who let their daughters dress like that . One father at the beach was even taking selfies with two daughters who looked like they had just entered their teens. I wanted to tell him, “Hey, buddy, two thongs don’t make a right.”  Sure, that’s a bad pun, but that pun remind ed   m e  I  needed  to go through my   youngest  daughter’s closet and throw some s tuff   out.  ...

   ​ We were in Mexico for two weeks.      My wife and I considered this vacation our official honeymoon   s ince  we never went on a proper one when we jumped the broom  25 years ago .  ​      The first week we spent at an exclusive resort in Cancun called Krystal. It was all-inclusive, meaning the food, the drinks, the female companionship was already paid for. I'm kidding about the female companionship part. At least if my wife is reading this. ​      As we entered the resort, the first  person  who came up to us was a   guy selling timeshares. I tell my kids when someone you don’t know walks up to you with a smile on their face they want to sell you something, and this guy had a BIG smile on his face. ​      He was young, with movie-star good looks, so  I took a picture of him schmoozing my wife and her cousin Laura  and sent it to my youngest daughter ...