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Last month I gave you a picture of the sad ignored late-60s / early 70s bathroom coatrack in the vestibule of the office bathroom. Today: it has a purpose. It holds things.

I have no idea why someone brought a Mason jar to work, let along brought it to the bathroom.

Outside the building, the snow doth melteth, but the remaining foes are hard and high and vicious. This is water that draws blood. Glacier #1 comes with its own drop shadow:

This SOB is just evil – it looks like some hideous growth you’d find in The Big Book of Alarming Fibrous Skin Conditions.

Full hammered Jet-Lag day hits me now, foursquare twixt th’ eyes, as Chaucer might say if he had airplanes and computers. Apologies for this; it was unexpected, for a couple of reasons:

Had a big honkin’ nap today, but in retrospect it was one of those churning toss-n-turn naps where you wake in a start, heart hammering, some panic dream receding, your jaw aching from an hour of constant grinding, and you rise and say: okay, what was the point of that? If you ask someone if he’d swap an hour of steady sedate consciousness for an hour of churning nonsense ending in shrieking jaw discomfort, most people would say, er, no, I’ll take Awake. But since I was discombobulated yesternight from the trip, and stayed up late – hey, 2 o’clock is really just midnight! – I woke overdrawn on the sleep-bank, and needed the calm sweet restorative powers of the nap.

Got up and got in the car and went to get Jasper Dog from the sitter’s. To call them “the Sitters” isn’t fair, really – the Lady of the House used to daysit for Gnat when she was wee, and before that, the Lord of the Manor was a caller to the Diner, which is how I got to know them in the first place. I never figured that would be the end result when I cracked the mike and started the Diner on AM 1500, but that’s life. One day you’re taking calls at 11:37 PM and talking to a guy who has an interesting numerical theory, and then it’s a decade and a half later, and you’re at their front door, picking up your dog. They have their own dog, and board dogs for friends – it always seems as if Jasper has to deal with some other impertinent twitchy yappy beast. He bears it well. But when I showed up today he wanted to GO NOW THANK YOU VERY MUCH BOSS, and so we went.

I was chugging some refried coffee, listening to the XM radio Old Time Radio feed, and either I was in Jet-Lag vapor-brain state, or I had actually stumbled across an episode of Fibber McGee I actually found amusing. Never liked that show. Perhaps it’s an example of a cultural example whose nuances are unavailable to modern ears; our conception of the Scrappy Everyman has changed, so these characters have no resonance. The jokes were bad. But if there’s one thing that characterizes every era before the SNL-enabled post-modern comedy revolution: jokes are usually bad. People accepted this. The groan was equal to the laff; as long as everyone knew it was Corn, it was Jake.

That’s an oversimplification, but you know what I mean. Even they knew what I meant: the scripts poked fun at the jokes, too. There was Humor, which arose from the general mood and situation, and then there were JOKES, which were almost expected to be lame, but were accepted as long as they conformed to certain parameters. The pun. The put-down. The blaringly obvious cultural reference. The hackneyed overextended metaphor. I don’t know what would be worse: working in a medium where the audience accepted and expected Corn, or working in one where the audience expected constant ironic reevaluation of the old notions of Corn.

Anyway, the dog was happy to see me, and whined all the way home. Barked when he got home and barked when he went up the stairs and gave my wife a grand oration of annoyance and reproach when they met again. Took him about 21 minutes to settle into his old routines, including dinner-whining.

I was intending to settle into a comfy evening of website work, but several things immediately intruded: daughter’s piano, long-distance technical support for my mother-in-law on her Mac, and then the sudden OH CRIMINEY, RIGHT realization that my column for the National Review is due tomorrow. So! That was the evening. Then this. But:

Matchbook Museum today; Joe Ohio for members. Bleatplus on Thursday, and UltraBleat this week as well. Thanks for the visit! See you tomorrow with the Tale of the Carbon Monoxide Detector, and How It Lied.