The Ferret Racing Corrections Department

          The name of the Upper Wharfedale Fell Rescue Association was incorrectly given as the Upper Wharefedale Fell Rescue Association in a Page One article Thursday about ferret racing.

                                    The Wall Street Journal 

Yes, it’s really a thing.

In a listing of past winners of American Hot Rod Association Championships, Donald Glenn Garlits’ nickname was given as “Big Ferret.”  Mr. Garlits is known to racing fans around the world as “Big Daddy.”  Ferret Breeders Monthly regrets its error.

In the article “American Sports Heroes of the 20th Century” the ferret “Tricky Trev” was described as a winner of horse racing’s “Triple Crown,” the Preakness Stakes, the Kentucky Derby and the Belmont Stakes.  “Tricky Trev” is a ferret, and thus ineligible to race in horse racing’s Triple Crown.  He is a past winner of ferret racing’s Triple Crown, the Gas Pipe Stakes, the Commando Crawl, and the Sewer Pipe Stakes.  Ferret Racing Digest apologizes for any confusion caused by its error.

In the February edition of the New England Journal of Genealogy ferrets were referred to as members of the Saltonstall family, related to the Cabots and the Lowells.  Ferrets are in fact members of the Mustelid family, and related to badgers and polecats.  The Journal regrets any embarrassment to ferrets that this inadvertent comparison to old-line Boston families may have caused them.

Leverett Saltonstall:  “I’ll shake your hand if you promise me you’ve washed it today.”

 

In the article “Great Unsolved Murders” that appeared in the January edition of True Ferret Crime Paul the Ferret was identified as a possible suspect in the murders attributed to The Boston Strangler.  Paul the Ferret was incarcerated for the murder of six hens at the Craven Arms in Appletreewick, England during the early 1960s, and thus has an airtight alibi.  In all other respects the story was accurate.

The Kentucky Derby (yawn)

A story in the December issue of Turf Monthly transposed the pictures of Don Prince, Jr., owner of the Prince Racing Stable found guilty of doping horses with banned anabolic steroids, and Louie the Ferret, a member of the Ferret Racing Hall of Fame.  Mr. Ferret uses only abolic, not anabolic steroids.

Owen Broder’s 2nd Tribute Album to Johnny Hodges

Jazz Album Review: Owen Broder’s “Hodges: Front and Center, Vol. 2” — A Vibrant Homage

Avant Garde Feline Lit 101

As he descended into paranoia at the end of his life, poet Delmore Schwartz sent telegrams to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, harassed friends on the phone, and left a stray cat at the offices of New Directions, his publisher.

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, James Atlas

“So?  What do you think of my coming-of-age roman a clef?”

Whew–glad to get away from that guy, even if did get me in the door at New Directions, publisher of experimental and innovative fiction.  Exactly the kind of house I need to handle my stream-of-consciousness, coming-of-age, roman-a-clef, hyphen-festooned novel.

I’ve schlepped the manuscript all over New York.  I’ve licked the stamps on so many SASE’s my little pink tongue is raw.  I’ve sat outside editors’ officers, begging, pleading, meowing.  I don’t mean to suggest that the experience has been entirely unpleasant–after all, I do get to rub up against receptionists’ panty hose.

“Mr. Thorn, there’s a pussy between my legs here to see you.”

If I had an agent things would be easier, but try getting one!  Nobody wants to represent you unless you’re published, but you can’t published without an agent.  Talk about chasing your tail!  And they wonder how I developed a six catnip mouse-a-day habit!

It’s hard competing with the legions of MFA’s churned out by America’s literary-industrial complex every year.  They at least have the option of waiting tables until they can make a living as a writer.  Me?  I’m the Blanche DuBois of first-time novelists–I have to depend on the kindness of strangers.

Maybe if I jump up on the receptionist’s desk she’ll bump me to the head of the line, ahead of Angry Young Man Novelist slouching in his chair, and Sensitive Oppressed Female Novelist gazing hopefully out the window.  It’s worth a shot.

“Hey, babe–what’s shakin’?”

“What a cute kitty!”

That’s the spirit.  “Say–I’m kind of in a hurry.  I’m 35 in cat years–I age faster than these young tyros.”

“I wish I could have a cat, but my lease says no pets.”

Isn’t that always the way it is.  You try to dedicate yourself to literature, but women constantly throw themselves at you because you’re a writer.  It’s the occupational hazard–if not the occupation–of a cat of letters.  Well, I suppose I could use a scratch under the chin.

“That’s a good kitty!”

“Please don’t patronize me.  I’m an artiste.  Although that does feel good what you’re doing back there on my tail bone.”

“Would pussums like to see the big powerful editor?”

“Now you’re talking!”

“He’s a huge cat-lover–let me see if he’s busy.”

She buzzes the intercom–I didn’t know those things even existed anymore, but I guess if you’ve got the world beating down your door you need something to keep the hordes of Truman Capote wannabes at bay.

“Rocco the Cat?  Well, send him right in!”

Mr. Big answers:  “Yes?”

“There’s a Mr. Rocco hear to see you.”

“Rocco the Cat?”

“Yes.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so?”

“I just did.”

“Oh, you’re right.  Well–send him right in!”

I looked over my shoulder at my two human competitors and couldn’t restrain myself from giving them my best Cheshire Cat grin, as if to say “Nyah-nyah-nyah-NYAH-nyah.  Your work’s derivative and mine’s not!”

The receptionist opens the door and plops my ms. on Mr. Big’s desk, then asks if either of us would like anything.

“I’ll have a water–anything for you, Rocco?”

This is an important meeting, so as much as I’d like a plate of liver ‘n onion snacks, I demur.  “I’m fine, thanks.”

She says “Very good,” gets the Bossman an expensive plastic bottle of tap water and closes the door behind her.

“So,” the famous editor says, “tell me a little bit about your book.”  This is, as the eminent folk poet Eminem would say, my one shot, my one opportunity.  I better not blow it.

“Well,” I begin, “it’s an affecting tale of a young cat’s struggle to find himself.”

“Um-hmm.”

“I was”–I hesitate for a moment, unsure of myself.  The competition in the false-memory-fictionalized-memoir genre is tough–I’d better lay it on thick.

“Yes?  Go on.”

I lift my paw over my eyes, as if I’m crying.  “Abused as a kitten.”

“*sniff*  It was HORRIBLE!”

“Really?” the editor says.  I’ve got him on the line, just have to reel him in.

“Yes,” I say.  “By my older brother–Okie!”  I pause to make a sobbing sound into my paws.

“Is that so?” the editor asks.  “Don’t cry–that’s a good thing.”

I thought so, but I play dumb.  “It . . . it is?”

“Are you kidding?  Running With Scissors, A Million Little Pieces?  The more controversial and dubious the facts, the better the book!”

“Great!” I said, and I meant it.

“You . . . do have releases from all the parties involved, don’t you?”  I gulped involuntarily when I heard those words.  “Have you . . . got a hairball?” he asks.

“Well, I don’t actually have them in hand, per se,” I mumble, “if that’s what you mean.”

His face clouded over like the plains of Kansas before a summer storm.  “We need those, you know,” he said, rather sternly, his enthusiasm of a moment before gone like a grasshopper in a tornado.

“Well, I don’t think it will be a problem getting one from my mom and dad.”

“Why’s that?”

“They’re empty nesters and would like to stop buying cat food and kitty litter for me.”

“Okay, so they’ve got an economic interest in your success.  How about your brother that you mentioned?”

“No way I’m signing that.”

I inhale deeply.  “We’ve . . . always been close.  I think I can persuade him . . .”

Just then the door flies open and who should come bounding in but my slightly dense brother Okie.  He’s a grey tabby, and has gotten as far as he has in life–which is usually no further than the living room sofa–on his good looks, like the high school romeo who ends up mastering a business vocabulary limited to “Paper or plastic?” or “Regular or unleaded?”

“Well, this seems to be Cat Day in Manhattan . . .” the editor says with a mixture of amusement and consternation.

“I tried to stop him,” the receptionist says breathlessly.

“That’s all right, I can handle this,” I say.

Okie jumps on the wide desk of the man with the checkbook and pleads his case.  “It’s a tissue of lies!” he squeals.  I haven’t seen him get that much emotion into a performance since he horse-collared a squirrel on our back patio.

The editor looks at me and shrugs.  “I won’t be able to get this past legal without it.”

I jump on Okie’s neck, trying my best to appear playful.  “Let us have a brief sidebar,” I say, as I drag him over to the window and we gaze out on the Manhattan skyline.

“Look, you dingbat,” I hiss into his ear, “for once in your life listen to your first instinct, then do the opposite.”

He gives me a look that says–well, it doesn’t say anything in particular.  Okie’s like that, a little slow on the uptake sometimes.

“What do you mean?” he asks

“Play your cards right and we’ll never have to eat Iams low-cal dry cat food again.”

Dawn breaks on Marblehead, as we say back in Massachusetts.

“You mean–you’d share some of your millions with me?”

I give him a disingenuously friendly look.  “No,” I say, “but I’ll let you have first dibs at the cat bowl for once in your miserable life.”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Cats Say the Darndest Things.”

Intensive Seminar Helps Cat Poets Sharpen Claws

BECKET, Mass. This sleepy western Massachusetts town is home to St. Judith College, the only institution of higher learning in the world named after the patron saint of cats, but that’s not the explanation for the high number of cat lovers here this weekend. “I have learned so much and made so many good friends—some of them human,” gushes Judith Sherman about a three-day intensive seminar in cat poetry she is attending here that began Friday night. “I will never rhyme ‘cat’ and ‘mat’ again, that’s for sure.”

Sherman and nineteen other applicants were accepted into a program designed to reverse what Professor Roger Guilbard sees as a disturbing downward trend in the quality of cat poetry. “Poetry about cats reached its zenith in the eighteenth century with Christopher Smart’s ‘Jubilate Agno’ and Thomas Gray’s ‘On the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes,’” notes Guilbard, an authority on cat poetry. “T.S. Eliot and Stevie Smith went all cutesy-pie in the twentieth century and it’s been downhill ever since.”

The thrust of instruction and correction in one-on-one sessions and small group discussions has been to discourage the tendency to anthropomorphize our feline friends, says teaching assistant Glynda Gaelwig, who is studying for a master’s degree in English with a concentration in cat poetry. “Excessive sentimentality is the occupational habit—if not the occupation–of cat poets,” the slim, bespectacled blonde notes as she takes an unsparing pen to a poem entitled “My Best Friends Are Cats.” “We try to get our cat poets to understand that first they must observe and make us see their cats, then if it’s not too saccharine to let us know how they feel about them.”

Melinda Stiffel is first to recite in a roundtable group of poets who will have their work critiqued by other participants and, after clearing her throat, she launches into “Some Things About You I’m Not Fond Of,” a poem about her male tuxedo cat, Mr. Scruffy:

I love you much, I love you truly,
You’re just as cute as a bug,
But I really wish you wouldn’t upchuck
Field mice upon the rugs.

“Anyone want to take a stab at that?” Guildbard asks, and Nancy Palsgraff, who writes a weekly pet poetry column for the North Adams News-Courier, meekly raises her hand. “I think Melinda did what you told us to,” she says. “You said to take an unsparing look at our pets and not churn out greeting card poems.”

“Fair enough,” Guilbard says. “Although the gimlet eye that a great poet must strive for is clouded by affection, it’s a worthy first effort. Let’s hear what you came up with, Nancy.”

Palsgraff shuffles her papers to place “There’s Just One Thing I Don’t Like About You” on top from the bottom, where she had kept it concealed until prompted in order to hide it from the prying eyes of her fellow students. She looks around the room warily, hoping the criticism of her work won’t be too harsh, then begins:

I think you are perfect in many ways,
And I don’t mean to be a grouch,
But I’m tired of yelling at you all the time
When you sharpen your claws on my couch!

“Ok,” Gaelwig says, “now we’re getting somewhere. I sense a strain of resentment. You’d like to have nice furniture, but you can’t as long as your cat insists on being—a cat! It’s an insoluble dilemma—he can’t change his nature. That’s the kind of knotty problem that makes for great poetry.”

Palsgraff allows herself a tiny little smile of self-satisfaction, and a barely-audible “Thanks” issues from her lips.

“Any comments from the group?” Gaelwig asks.

The hand that shoots up belongs to Con Chapman, the only male in the group, and from the look on his face it is apparent he doesn’t think much of what he’s heard. “That was nice, Nancy,” he says with a sarcastic tone, “really nice. Why don’t you just get your damn cat a scratching post, and spare us the limp claptrap?”

An audible gasp is heard from the class, and Guilbard clucks his tongue in disapproval. “I’ve warned you about maintaining a civil tone in group discussions before,” he says with a stern expression.

“And E.B. White warned us to avoid the gerundic, and yet you persist,” Chapman shoots right back at the professor.

“Well, let’s hear what you wrote,” Stiffel says through a sniffle.

“I’ll be happy to ‘share’ it with you,” Chapman says. “This be the verse,” he says by way of introduction, invoking “His Epitaph” by Robert Louis Stevenson and the poem of the same name by Philip Larkin, “that I would like to be remembered by.” He straightens himself, announces the title—“My Wild Feline Boy”—and begins:

It’s three a.m. and the cat wants in,
My wild feline boy.
He’s made his way home from a night of sin,
My errant feline boy.

With a notch in his ear from an honor-mad fight
And a tail that is shorter than at last sunlight
He stops to eat, then he curls to sleep
My sated feline boy.

He recalls for me a time when I,
Like he, roamed the streets at night.
He unlike me, sleeps an untroubled sleep.
My antic feline boy.

“That’s awful!”

 

There are looks of consternation on the faces of the others except for Palsgraff, still smarting from the criticism her work received. “I think it’s horrible!” she says with an exhalation of poetic afflatus.

“Would you care to . . . elaborate?” Guilbard asks her gently.

“A cat who fights is a bad cat!”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “Cats Say the Darndest Things.”

On Mistaking the Legs of One’s Wife for Another’s

I suppose there can be no happier mistake,
and one that I was shocked to make,
than to look with longing at a female leg
and thinking yourself a rather bad egg

for admiring the calf and the well-turned ankle–
a crime that makes the divorce bar thankful–
then allowing your gaze to climb slowly higher
to take in the woman and better espy her

and find, once you’ve crossed the line of her clavicle,
and to get a better view, made a move tactical,
that the woman you admire in line ahead of you
is one who has shared a marital bed with you.

You have to laugh, and confess the crime,
though no one gave you the Miranda warning.
You won’t be sentenced to do hard time,
your excuse is no coffee, it was early in the morning.
Of course your wife may be of two minds about this,
as you tell her the story once she gets a surprise kiss;

you were being naughty, and your eye had wandered,
some domestic good will you have certainly squandered.
I possessed the mens rea, the criminal intent,
and I had no alibi, but an iron-clad defense:
“It wasn’t another woman I wanted to woo, dear,
My heart leapt up when I looked at you, dear.”

Some Grouse as Skinny Types Again Dominate Marathon

BOSTON. The Boston Marathon, the world’s oldest annual marathon, attracts runners from around the world every Patriot’s Day, a holiday on the third Monday in April that serves as an excuse for local bureaucrats to take the day off.  “Running Boston is my dream,” says Ngtmbe Jpksgzi of Freedonia, whose name was cobbled together from surplus letters left behind by American “eco-tourists.” “Perhaps if I win, I can afford a few more vowels.”

McKelvey: “It’s not fair!”

 

But locals are beginning to chafe at what they say is a system that results in skinny guys and gals winning the event year after year, leaving them with nothing to show for their half-hearted efforts to stay in shape.

“I musta done ten, maybe twenty situps since last year,” says Chuck McKelvey, a regular at the Kinvarra Pub in East Roxbury. “They told me to forget about entering.  Me–who freaking grew up here!”

“That guy’s so skinny he has to pass a place twice to make a shadow!”

 

So regulars stage a “drink-in” at the bar every Patriots Day, refusing to move from their seats until all the free snacks have been consumed and all runners have crossed the finish line.  “We need a marathon that looks more like America,” says Mike Flaherty who is currently on disability leave from his job with the state Department of Weights and Measures.  “Boxing has flyweight and heavyweight divisions–why not long-distance running?”

“It’s tough, believe me,” says Bob Wychekowski, a long-time patron whose loyalty caused him to adopt the pub as his mailing address last year when he was going through a divorce.  “I know the runners are in excruciating pain, but on the other hand they don’t start serving lunch here until twelve o’clock on the dot.”

Pizza-flavored goldfish on Salisbury Steak

 

Until then, customers depend on a subsistence diet of honey-roasted peanuts and pizza-flavored goldfish served free at the bar, or garlic and onion potato chips and Andy Capp Pub Fries purchased from a vending machine next to the men’s room. “You got to suck it up,” says Mike Donahue, pronounced “DONE-a-who.” “Those urinal deodorizers can kill your appetite if you get a Bubble Gum or Wild Cherry scent.”

Advocates say they will push for the creation of a new category for plus-size participants, just as the Boston Athletic Association, the marathon’s sponsor, eventually recognized female and wheelchair partipants. “I don’t see why they can’t have a separate Couch Potato Class,” says McElvey, whose weight tops out at around 250 pounds during the off-season. “Don’t they understand I have an eating disorder?”

Boys Rejoice as Pope Shuts Down Cafeteria

Pope Francis Shuts Down the Cafeteria.

Headline, The Wall Street Journal

I was walking to Sacred Heart School (motto: “The Fear of the Nuns is the Beginning of Wisdom”) and as usual I stopped by Timmy Schoenen’s house first to see if he was ready.

“Tim-my!” I yelled outside his gate although I saw in a second that I didn’t have to–he was already bounding down the steps from the kitchen and practically crashed into me.

“Guess what?” he exclaimed.

“What?”

“The Pope shut down the cafeteria!”

I checked the handy calendar that came with the wallet I got for Christmas to make sure it wasn’t April Fool’s Day.  It was the 15th so maybe he wasn’t kidding.  “So no more fish sticks?”

“Yep.  And no more yellow wax beans served by sweating stevedore-like lunch ladies.”  Timmy got a +99% on the vocabulary portion of the Nebraska Aptitude Test of Basic Stuff.

“Huh,” I huh’ed aloud.  “How do you know?”

“It was in the newspaper my dad was reading at breakfast–The Wall Street Journal.”

“The Daily Diary of the American Dream?”

“That’s the one.  It’s all business news and stock prices, no sports or comic section.”

I stopped and gazed off into the distance, taking it all in.  “So does this mean we won’t have to clean our plates to avoid a lecture from Sister Mary Joseph Arimathea.”

“And get sent back to our table to finish off tuna noodle casserole.”

“Have you ever tried the trick where you drink your milk, open up the carton and stuff that crap inside?”

“Sure I have, lots of times.  She’s on to me–says I’m a . . . ‘re-cidivist’–whatever that is.”

“Whatever it is, I’m sure it’s not something good.  She’s the ‘bad cop’ of the Sisters of the Precious Blood.”

“I am so gonna enjoy thumbing my nose at her.”

“Careful,” I cautioned.  “You never know if this is some kind of Jesuit mind-trick.”

Star Wars fans will be familiar with “Jedi mind tricks,” but most people don’t know that it was the Jesuits who came up with this mental jiu-jitsu.  When the Scottish Reformation  made Catholicism illegal in 1560, priests learned to parry the question “Are you a Catholic?” in Yogi Berra-like fashion by saying “You mean right now?”

We picked up several anti-cafeteria fellow travelers on the way and by the time we reached the corner of Third Street and Moniteau we were a rabble ready to tear down our personal Bastille, sparing only the chocolate milk, which cost 3 cents a carton, as compared to 2 cents for regular.

As we approached the steps to the “new” building that housed the cafeteria in the basement who should appear on the front steps but our nemesis, Sister Mary Joseph Arimathea.  Like Davy Crockett at the Alamo, she apparently wasn’t going down without a fight.

“What’s all this about, you hooligans?” she shouted as she crossed her arms with an air of determination.

“The Cafeteria’s been shut down!”

“Yeah–we want some real food for lunch.”

“Like pizza . . .”

“. . . or hot dogs”

“. . . or hamburgers!”

“Yeah!”

A smirk stole across Sister Joe’s customarily grim visage, but I didn’t get the sense she was amused.”  “If I added up all of your reading comprehension scores, I wouldn’t get to the 50th percentile,” she scoffed.

We looked at each other.  “Why do you say that?” Timmy finally managed to gurgle through a throat constricted by fear.

“Because the Pope isn’t shutting down cafeterias–he’s shutting down Catholics who think they can pick and choose their way through church doctrine, observing the ones they like, ignoring the others.”

“Ha, ha–I’m shutting down a metaphor, not a real cafeteria.”

You could have heard our collective gulp all the way down at the end of the gleaming aluminum bars where the cash register was located.  The long exhale of disappointment we let out when we realized that we’d have to keep eating “mystery meat”–charitably described in the menu as “Salisbury Steak”–and deserts of limited appeal, such as Jell-O cubes.

“So,” Timmy said in a dejected tone.  “What’s on the menu for today?”

“Sloppy Joes,” Sister Joe replied.

We fell as one to our knees, and Timmy led us in prayer.  “Praise the Lord!”

 

As Marathon Approaches, Race to Be Most Charitable Tightens

WESTLAND, Mass.  The Boston Marathon, the nation’s oldest, is today, so the weekend before would normally be a time of high anticipation for Nicole Stansler, who’ll be running in her fifteenth such event.  “I always do it for my college sorority sister May Dignan,” Stansler  says over an audible lump in her throat.  “She died of armpit cancer from the asbestos dress shields we all used to wear back then.”

A ticking time bomb–who knew?

Nicole’s face usually graces the front page of the local newspaper, the Westland Times-Courier-Sentinel, the Thursday before the Patriots Day holiday in a touching tribute to her ongoing charitable crusade, but this year she was surprised to find her across-the-cul-de-sac neighbor Kimberly Greenlaw featured instead.  “I don’t know where the hell that rag gets off thinking she’s more charitable than I am,” Stansler snaps.  “We’ve been advertising with them for over a decade,” she says, referring to her husband Ted’s local business, an insurance agency where he sells life and disability policies for Modern Moosehead Insurance.

But talk to the Greenlaws and you hear the other side of the story.  “Our nation is plagued by an epidemic of fantods,” says Kimberly, a pert brunette who has a home organizing business and does volunteer work in her ample spare time.  “My college roommate Lisa Solari just keeled over from an attack of this dreaded disease when the PTO voted to replace the Evian in the water fountains at the middle school with Poland Springs,” a regional and less prestigious brand.  “One in five women over the age of 30 can expect to have an attack of fantods in her lifetime, the others will be okay and die of something else.”

Know the five warning signs of a fantods attack!  Or maybe it’s seven, I forget.

So Pete Mathewson, a career newspaperman who was recently promoted to Editor-in-Chief of the Times-Courier-Sentinel, was faced with a dilemma: honor the wishes of a long-time advertiser, or–counter-intuitively–bring something “new” to the news section of the weekly paper that most people in town read only to see their children’s names on the sports page.  “It was a tough call, but the Stanslers hurt themselves with their advertising budget,” he says.  “I couldn’t face my j-school classmates at reunion if they found out I engaged in ‘green’ journalism.”

Clashes between competing charitable instincts are becoming more common across America, according to sociologist Myron Nowak of nearby Brandeis University.  “There’s really no point in doing volunteer work unless you get a lot of credit for it,” he says, as he surveys the programs he’s collected from a number of recent galas on behalf of–or more properly in opposition to–various fatal diseases.  “I tell my own children ‘If you want to save the world, fine, just make sure you bring a publicist and a photographer with you.’”

“Because of people like you, we raised over $200 to fight split ends!”

But that’s brings no solace to Nicole Stansler, who finds herself odd-woman-out after her long run–literally and figuratively–as poster girl for shin splints and dehydration for a good cause.  “I suffered dammit,” she says bitterly as she laces on her running shoes for a last workout before “Marathon Monday.”  “I don’t do all this charitable crap out of the goodness of my heart.”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “The Spirit of Giving.”

My Jolting Vasectomy

I have a piece in the April issue of Humour Me magazine (not a typo, they’re British).  TRIGGER WARNING: It includes a vasectomy and jumper cables.

ISSUE # 20 APRIL 2024

Hope for Golf Nuts as Male Disenhancement Drug Approved

LEXINGTON, Mass.  Tom Sholes is a certified public accountant and a certifiable golf nut for whom the first full week of April is a holy season.  “During the Masters, I don’t want to be bothered by anything,” he says.  “Including sex.”

“Why don’t you go to bed, honey?  I’m re-watching a Cinderella story unfold for the second time.”

 

Tom likes to watch the fabled tournament live, then turn to the Golf Channel for highlights, then revisit each day’s play by watching again on the digital recording he makes on his Tivo.  “Sometimes you don’t get a sense of the rhythm of a round until you watch it the second–or third time,” he says.

“I don’t care if it is the best damn sports show, period!”

 

In the past Tom’s obsession has interfered with the promise he and his wife made as part of marriage counseling a few years back that they would have sex “once a week, whether we need it or not, unless I’m having my period or there’s a special two-hour episode of Grey’s Anatomy on” says his wife Theresa.  “You need intimacy in a marriage, not just a sharing of expenses and appreciation in the value of jointly-held real estate,” Tom concedes.

Potassium nitrate, or saltpeter:  Ineffective unless you’re making toothpaste for sensitive teeth.

 

Still, he considers it unfair that his wife gets a free weekend a month, while he must perform on command the remaining Saturday nights, “with no time off for good behavior” he notes.

“And with the high-performance speakers, you can drown out your wife’s whining.”

 

Past efforts to curb the male sexual drive have depended on natural remedies such as potassium nitrate or “saltpeter,” which folklore credits with anaphrodisiac, or lust-depressing powers.  “That’s an old wive’s tale, which didn’t do much to help wives regardless of their age,” says Dr. Phillip LoPresti, founder of Anaphro Pharmaceuticals.  “If we can put a man on the moon and teach sign language to monkeys, we should be able to invent a pill that will give a man a ‘free space’–like Bingo–on a Saturday night.”

“The prototype is ready–we’ve compressed thirteen sports events into this weekend sampler.”

 

So LoPresti and his product development team developed the first over-the-counter male disenhancement drug, MyWeekend, which renders a man incapable of sexual activity for forty-eight hours.  “If taken on a Friday evening, MyWeekend kills all sexual desire until Sunday night, when a guy’s wife will be too tired from chauffering children around, doing laundry and cooking to stay awake for sex,” LoPresti claims.

Clinical trials last December incapacitated a number of male Central Ohio College fans who watched their team roll to victory over Northeastern Kentucky State in the Weed Wacker Probation Bowl, a holiday contest for schools with an undefeated record who are barred from play in other post-season games.  “I wanted to spend Saturday night celebrating, not thinking about my wife,” said Chad Everett, an insurance broker in Columbus, Ohio.  “Is that too much to ask?”

The drug seems to work for Sholes as well, who tested it last weekend in a trial run.  “My wife came into the bedroom wearing a see-through negligee,” he says, “and all I could think of was ‘ball washer.’”

Available in Kindle format on amazon.com as part of the collection “This Just In–From Gerbil Sports Network.”