Odds & Ends: October 2004 Archives

"My local post office leaves the front door open all the time now so that people can buy stamps through a vending machine in the lobby.

"I put a bulky envelope on the scale, punched in the zip code, slipped in a credit card, and got back a label to stick on the piece. Then the machine asked, 'Do you want to buy stamps?', and I figured, 'Don't mind if I do.'

"I pressed the button for 'yes' and got a packet of eighteen first-class stamps, at a price of -- uh, 18 times 37 cents, that's... $6.66. My soul shuddered.

"Later, the stamps squealed lightly as I burned them."

I missed the news that Robert Merrill died last Saturday at the age of 87.

He was one of the greatest baritones of all time. Here's an appreciation.

Can I hear from visitors to this blog if the flu shot shortage is a concern to them? I'm having trouble understanding the whole bruhaha around the shortage, Dick Cheney getting a shot, shot lotteries, etc.

This could be the worst newspaper sentence I've ever read.

The Curse of the Bambino, that amalgam of jinx, superstition and despair that has dogged the Boston Red Sox for nearly a century, was reduced to just so much human imagining on Wednesday night by a scruffy lot of ballplayers who cared more about their hair than they did about history, except for the kind they were determined to make.

And you might be surprised from whence it comes.