American Chimpanzee

  When things go bad, they go bad quick.       Like weight gain, for example. The last time I asked my wife if my chin looked fat, she told me, “Which one?”      My wife is beautiful… but rude.       Anyway, that’s how I found myself in the hospital ER with my elderly father this past weekend.      He was in the shower when he slipped and gave himself a pretty good conk on the head. It was followed by a nice little lump and, even though he didn’t want to go, my wife insisted I take him to the ER to get it checked out.       “I’m fine,” he insisted. “I don’t want to go.”      “But what if you have a concussion?” my wife argued. “You could go to sleep and not wake up.”      My father, who suffers from insomnia, said, “That would be wonderful.”      It sounded pretty wonderful to me, too. I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep since my first kid was b...

 A sore throat, a head cold, & the flu walk into a bar. Seeing them, the bartender says, “What is this? Some kind of sick joke?”      I start with that because I have bad news.      Let's see:            Sneezing… check!      Headache… check!      Congestion… check!      It’s official, I’m sick.      Man, if it's not one thing, it's ten others.      "The difference between you being sick and me being sick," my beautiful but unsympathetic wife told me when I complained to her, "is you  get to stay in bed all day."      It's easy to be snarky when you're healthy.      "No," I answered her, "the difference is my being sick is worse because it's happening to me ."      "There's nothing harder on a marriage than a sick husband," she said, getting in the last word.      I went to be...

  2        Elon Musk, ever the visionary with a penchant for detours, had one condition before they plunged into the cosmic unknown. A stopover on the Moon.       He wanted to see the Monolith. An enigmatic, jet-black enigma which he believed might hold secrets to mankind’s place in the universe. Perhaps even clues that might aid Newton’s mission.       Newton, though impatient, acquiesced. He’d learned Musk’s whims often masked a deeper curiosity worth indulging.      They touched down on the lunar surface near the Tycho crater. The desolate gray expanse stretching out beneath a star-studded void. Musk, clad in a custom SpaceX suit, bounded out first. His voice crackling over the comms with childlike excitement.       “There it is, Thomas! The Monolith! The mysterious black slab in the flesh. Or, well, in the whatever the hell it’s made o...

  RaisingDad by Jim and Henry Duchene   T hank You For Your Service “fifty cents and yellow skin”      My wife is not only beautiful but she’s also very generous.       More generous than I am, that’s for sure.       We were at a restaurant and my wife saw a young clean-cut gentleman in a wheelchair. He was missing a leg.      “Do you see that man?” she asked me.      “Who?” I said.      “The man in a wheelchair.”      I said no, not because I didn’t see him, but because I knew saying yes would cost me money.      My wife wasn’t fooled.       “Your  father  was in the service,” she said, giving me an elbow to the ribs, disgusted by my financial thriftiness. She got up and walked over to the young man.      “Thank you for your service,” she told him, her eyes moist with tears. “I’d be honored to pay for yo...

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...