March 19, 2024

Lindy Would Have Blushed

It never fails to amaze me how focused our species can become when the subject becomes the misery of another. Case in point: the Dottie Hariass trial. Hariass was accused of luring her boyfriend into the bedroom, having sex with him, then carving him up like a Christmas turkey before shooting him in the head and stuffing him into the shower. Her trial concluded this month with a guilty verdict followed by three resounding huzzahs from the wired-eyed crowd of onlookers camped on the courthouse steps. But they weren’t the only ones transfixed by the trial’s endless stream of lurid…

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The Mother of All Yard Sales

Esmeralda and I just finished having the mother of all yard sales. Technically, you could call it the “aunt of all yard sales” as Esmeralda’s aunt was at the root of the thing. Under normal circumstances, I stay away from yard sales, whenever possible. And hosting one is completely out of the question. As a shopper at yard sales, I have discovered I possess little will power and am constantly vexed by whatever sort of clutter is being offered. I can’t tell you how many times I have left on a Saturday morning hoping to return with a small sack…

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It Takes a Village

Alright, I get it. You don’t like the idea that I put my dog in a mail box and shipped him of to live with a Caribbean witch doctor. No more letters. Please. However, for the sake of full disclosure, it wasn’t my idea. For those of you, who missed last month’s article, let me fill you in. Back in February, I came home one dismal afternoon and found my 90 pound pooch, Jethro, squoze tightly into my mail box. After I had successfully extracted, I noticed he had postage stamps stuck to his forehead and the address of a…

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Doing Something About the Weather

by Gideon Noire Perhaps you’ve noticed, but doesn’t it seem that the weather is a bit out of control. Remember Sandy? I’ll bet there are some pizza workers on the Jersey shore who won’t soon forget it. After years of scoffing at Katrina, Sandy woke up the East coasters in ways not seen since the Red Sox took four straight from the Yankees. And what about those melting ice caps? It seems there are entire civilizations and perhaps a species or two living above the Arctic Circle that depend on them. As if there isn’t enough cultural extinction in the…

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That’s Not My Dog

by Gideon Noire I went boating a few weeks ago with my friend, Skeeter. And when I got home there was a pooch on my porch. I don’t suppose that’s all that newsworthy, but the dog, in the words of the famous criminologist Inspector Clousaeu, was not my dog. At least, that was my impression. His name, I was told later that evening as Esmeralda and I sat staring into his obviously loving but clearly confused canine eyes, was Luther. And yes, she said, he was…our…dog. As Skeeter and I had bumped blissfully over the Ditty River’s shallow rapids that…

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Calendars . . . FREE . . . and worth it!

If you are reading this, then you know, as I do, that the world did not end on December 21, 2012. Conspiracy theorists, New Age nincompoops and a cabal of defrocked priests with Internet divinity degrees have been saying for the last few years that life, as we know it, would cease to be on that auspicious date. The source of their purported knowledge was a calendar composed some 5,000 years ago and, according to scholars, distributed in hardware stores throughout the Mayan world, for free. I’m not sure if the prediction was based on the calendar itself or something…

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Happy Holidays–It’s Not as Bad as It Sounds

By the time your ink stained hands have riffled through this month’s Excentric, searching madly for my monthly column, I will be squatting Asian style on a white sand beach somewhere off the coast of Thailand, with only my fears of a tidal wave separating me from tropical nirvana. Yes, for those who have followed my sordid escapades over the last decade or more, you know that when the holidays hit, I split. Pukapuka, Sri Lanka, Cocoa Island, Ihuro and my present paradise, the Similan Islands off southern Thailand, have become my vacation home as I do my very best…

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It Was a Dark and Stormy Night . . .

It has been said that one of the great financiers of the early 20th century liquidated his portfolio shortly after he discovered his chauffeur had dabbled in the market—and shortly before the great crash of 1929. I don’t know if the story is true or not. Nor do I care. But I certainly get the point—when the amateurs take the field, it’s time to sell your season tickets. The question now rattling about my head is, “Will I heed the old nabob’s advice in light of what I see coming across my desk, or will I hang on to the…

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Gideon Goes to the Dark Side . . . by Gideon Noire

“Farewell has a sweet sound of reluctance. Good-by is short and final, a word with teeth sharp to bite through the string that ties past to the future.” John Steinbeck “It’s the emptiest and yet the fullest of all human messages: ‘Good-bye.” Kurt Vonnegut “Sleep tight, ya morons!” J.D. Salinger All great writers have dealt with the sadness of saying good bye. Even the greatest of them all, the late Bill Shakespeare, took a swing at it (“Parting is such sweet sorrow”). The fact is, when it comes your time—when it’s your turn to ride off into the sunset—there is…

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation . . . by Gideon Noire

It is entirely possible, given the number of cheesy photographs my publisher, Sir Willy Rudolph, has run of honeymoon couples on the French Riviera, retired postal workers in cheap shirts and pressed Bermuda shorts, and rebel tourists lurking about that crumbling seawall in Havana—all sporting a broad smile and a prominently displayed copy of this esteemed publication—to suspect that as you read this column, that some of you, at least, are on summer vacation. Am I right? I knew it. I can see your smiles. I can see last month’s issue. Summer vacation is a subject that is near and…

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