Teabag tag says:

The only tool you need is kindness.

Robin says:

If kindness is all you have, you’re a tool.

For the history of the teabag-tag wars, go here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Tomorrow is Milo’s fourth “Gotcha Day” with us! I wrote a little essay about him on his second, and a poem for him on his third. Digging through some old computer files, recently, I found something I’d written a couple of months after we got him, that will suffice as this year’s celebratory post:

Much as I often type “teh” instead of “the,” I’ve discovered–since the arrival of Milo, our adorable mixed-breed rescue dog–that I usually type “god” when I mean “dog.” I always manage to notice this and correct it, usually with an obscure feeling of guilt. However, if I hadn’t, here are some of the things I would have written in various e-mails to friends in the past month:

• If you’re really not up for having a god in the house along with the new baby that’s perfectly okay.

• He is a great god, bra fetish notwithstanding.

• And we have a new god, who is a constant source of puzzlement and delight, and who appears to find us much the same.

• He’s a gentle god but “calm” is not a word I would use to describe him.

• We are working on “quiet god” right now.

• My husband and my god like each other.

• If anyone is afraid of or allergic to gods be assured that he will be crated and upstairs during our meeting. If anyone likes gods you can go meet him after we’ve concluded our business.

• The important question is how are you doing these days, and the really important question is when are you going to come admire my new god?

• And can I force you all to admire the attached picture of my new god, bravely defending us against an evil, scary bunch of bananas?

• He doesn’t feel the need to mark his territory as male gods often do.

• On the upside, I LOVE MY NEW GOD! He is the BEST god ever and we just signed the adoption papers today.

Happy Gotcha Day, little man. While your humans are cavorting in Italy, you are staying with a friend in the country, and I hope you are having a wonderful time. We are probably looking at all of the Italian dogs and saying to ourselves, and sometimes each other, “That dog’s not as cute as Milo.” You remain a source of puzzlement and delight to us, and it appears we remain so to you, as well.

And here, for anyone who cares to see it, is the picture of Milo the second night we had him, defending his new home against that sleeper cell of terrorist bananas (he’d been barking at them, so we put them on the floor and let him investigate):

Mr. Improbable and I are off on a much-needed trip to Italy. I will be very glad of this. The past few months have been a long haul for me of minor but debilitating health problems (allergies and back problems in addition to the “sick” I blogged about earlier) and work stresses. I feel I’ve been just managing to fulfill the barest of my responsibilities — getting the columns done, though never in advance, and the blogs kept more-or-less up to date, and my Harvard Business School job more-or-less under control.

Things will be better when we get back, I hope: I have reason to think my health problems won’t bother me so much for a while, and the Big Project at my Harvard job is almost entirely done, and I’ve made a few decisions that ought to lighten the load for me for a while.

I also sent around an e-mail to some of my friends who had really helped me out, or listened to me rant, or been gracious when I canceled plans on them for the third time in a row because of some health or work emergency. People really are there for you, you know. When they say, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do” — you can, if there is. We all want to be independent and self-sufficient, but sometimes it’s good to remember that other people will put up with your nonsense, because they love you.

Even when you’re covered in bees!

See you in November! I’ve got a couple of posts scheduled to go up while we’re gone, but posting will be light. If you leave a comment and you haven’t commented before, it won’t go through until I moderate it, which might not be until I get back.

Many of you are probably familiar with Etsy, the online crafts store — “Your place to buy and sell all things handmade,” which brings individual craftspeople and customers together. So, after the High Holidays, and inspired by a friend’s mention that she had bought a beautiful wedding headdress from Etsy, I thought Etsy might just be the place to pick up one of those pretty beaded-mesh yarmulkes that one of my readers had mentioned last year. So I bop on over to the site, go to the “Religious” category, choose “Jewish” — and what should I find but this:

The Antler Menorah.

Described by its creator, JewishCowboy, as “A real unique artwork, made to be handed down for generations to come. Made by hand, guided by faith.” He goes on to add, helpfully, “If you have questions, please ask.”

I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

His other offerings tend toward the wall-plaque variety, including this gem:

I’m not so sure barbed wire is the ideal medium for Judaica, given, you know, history.

(Yes, I have submitted these to Regretsy, the online equivalent of The Museum of Bad Art. But I had to share it with you first, because you, like the Antler Menorah, are very very special to me. And also real unique.)

… with apologies to Dr. Seuss:

I do not want them with a bow.
I do not want a peeping toe.
I do not want contrasting trim
I don’t want stitching on the rim.
I do not want platforms or wedges
Nor metal accents on the edges.
I do not want embossed designs
Of logos from designers’ lines.
I do not want an ankle strap.
I do not want a fringy flap.
Don’t want a sky-high stripper heel
(Sciatica does not appeal.)
I do not want a Mary Jane.
I want them simple, classic, plain.
I know the shoes I have in mind
Oh why are they so hard to find?

What might it look like if Petruchio actually did have the good sense to write to Miss Conduct for advice? Maybe something like this:

Dear Miss Conduct,

I am a returning war veteran. Although every other donkey in Padua has a “Support the Troops” sticker pasted on its butt, the fact is, my benefits are running out and I’m going to be on the street soon. Also, there’s a long waiting line at the Padua VA for counseling, so my post-traumatic stress disorder has gone untreated for far too long.

Here’s my problem: I did meet a beautiful, rich woman whom I like a lot (she kind of reminds me of my old drill sergeant). But, as I said, I have pretty bad PTSD, and I’m afraid I used some inappropriate … let’s call them “enhanced wooing techniques” on her. Can this relationship be saved?

Signed, Love is a Battlefield.

What might it sound like if other famous literary characters wrote letters to an advice columnist? Leave yours in comments. (More fun if you don’t mention names, so we can guess!)

Not enough we awarded 10 Ig Nobel Prizes last night … this morning Google Alerts informed me that “Miss Conduct” was dubbed one of the “9 Hottest Roller Girls of All Time” by Complex.com. I don’t quite recognize myself in their photo, I must admit:

I don’t think they carry that skirt at Eileen Fisher.

From Sociological Images comes this gem, an early 1900s chart describing the two paths a woman’s life can take, one leading to shame and ostracism, one to love and honor:

Now, you’ll notice that the ages line up here at first — 13, 20, 26 — but then the “good” woman winds up at age 60, while the “bad” one winds up at age 40. Perhaps they mean to suggest that she dies young, but I prefer to imagine, instead, that after all that study, obedience, virtue, devotion, and caretaking, the woman on the right treated herself to one HELL of an offstage midlife crisis before settling down to grandmotherhood! I hope she had a good time, and is whispering some scandalous stories in her granddaughter’s ear.

For anyone who is interested in the path of Miss Conduct’s life:

At 13: Bad literature (I much preferred Stephen King and those Hitchcock anthologies to the Newberry Award winners the librarians were always pushing on me)

At 20: Flirting and coquetry (well behind my peers on that one, actually, as a result of always having my nose stuck in a mystery novel in my teens)

At 26: Fast life & dissipation

At 32: Fast life & dissertation

At 40: Advice columnist.

Of late, it seems about half my Facebook friends are playing Farmville, and the other half are playing Mafia Wars. Both these games post updates every time a player adopts a cow or whacks someone. This doesn’t annoy me, but it does seem rather counter to the ethos, does it not? I mean, New England farmers are renowned for their laconic nature, and the Mafia has that whole omerta thing going on. Certainly, the only farmer I know doesn’t post every time she helps a neighbor bring in their crops, and my friends who are — oh, wait, I promised I wouldn’t talk about that. I like clunky shoes, but not actual cement ones.

Anyway, I mentioned the ubiquity of Farmville and Mafia Wars on an update of my own this weekend, and Molly — she of the Jewish-pirate jokes — responded with this parody of “The Farmer and the Cowman” from Oklahoma!:

OH, the farmer and the mobster should be friends
Yes, the farmer and the mobster should be friends
One man likes the rising sun
The other man likes to kill for fun
But that’s no reason why they can’t be friends…

I, of course, had to write the chorus:

Facebook folks should stick together,
Facebook folks should all be peeps.
Farmers dance with mobsters’ goomars,
Mobsters dance with the farmers’ sheeps.

So, as noted, tomorrow is Rosh Hashanah — and International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Since I won’t be posting tomorrow, then, may I draw your attention to this post I did last year, translating a passage from my 1942 copy of Emily Post into piratespeak.

Do you know how to tell if a pirate has good manners? He’ll ARRRRRRRsvp.

The Rosh Hashanah/TLAP Day thing has sparked a fair amount of comedy among my Facebook friends. Molly rewrote the major prayer of the High Holy Days:

On Rosh Hashaaarrrnah it is written; on Yum Kipper it is sealed:
Who shall live and who shall die
Who shall pillage and who shall be pillaged
Who shall plunder and who shall be plundered
Who shall die by drowning and who by cannon fire
Who by walking the plank and who by keelhauling
Who by scurvy and who by plague
Who by mutiny and who by navy
But rum, rum and rum shall lessen the severity of the decree.

… and also came up with this gem:

What is the most important text in Pirate Kabbalah? The ZohARRR.

This was in response to mine:

What’s a pirate’s favorite part of Shabbat service? The pARRRRRRRsha.

What’s a pirate’s favorite parsha? DevARRRRRRRim.

But you don’t have to be Jewish to play! My friend Jane posted this great YouTube video of a sportscaster calling a horse race … in which one of the horses is actually named “Arrrrrrrrr.” It’s 90 seconds long–watch it all the way to the end–

Happy Talk Like a Pirate Day, Happy New Year, TGIF, and have a good weekend! (And feel free to post your own pirate jokes in comments!)

There are certain stock joke phrases that always seem to work, and that unlike cliches or groaner puns manage to have a respectability along with their inevitability. (Perhaps because it’s impossible to use them unironically, so you sort of inoculate yourself against the joke’s failure before it’s even out of your mouth.) I’d sort of noticed these in the past, but you really notice them on Facebook.

I have a friend who’s got it bad for “So’s yer mom!” jokes, for example. As an “Office” fan, I’m partial to “That’s what she said!” myself. I’ve been known to do the “What has two thumbs and [insert other qualifying clause here]? This girl!” or “Welcome to Nounville, population: me” occasionally, though not as often as some of my younger friends. One joke phrase — or phrasing — is that “must … talk … like … dying … Kirk” thing that you can either do when you’re talking, or in writing by inserting ellipses like I just did so that any pop-culturally literate reader will hear your words in the voice of William Shatner. It’s a good way of ramping up the humor factor of an otherwise so-so joke.

Probably, as a person who likes weird words, my most common cliche joke phrase is, “That would be a great name for a band.” Such a cliche. Never gets old. (And being involved with the Ig Nobel Prizes gives me reason to say this a lot. Doggone it, “Cheap Placebo” would be a good band name. So would “The Fesmire Method.” Not to mention “Homosexual Necrophilia in the Mallard Duck.”)

What are your favorite — or least favorite — joke cliches? I strongly suspect the ones I know and notice are very much Gen-X. Do you think there’s a generational aspect to stock humor?

Our friend Dan Meyer, professional sword swallower and winner of the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in medicine, is … well, really, where do you go after that? Of course he’s an unforgettable character. In addition to swallowing swords, Dan has a passion for collecting languages and exotic animals. From a recent Facebook exchange:

All together now! “Watch me wallaby’s feed, mate, watch me wallaby’s feed! They’re a dangerous breed, mate, so watch me wallaby’s feed!”

Speaking of awkward compliments, I sort of got one at the reading I did last week at White Birch Books in New Hampshire: “Have you always had such a wonderful sense of humor?” That’s almost too complimentary! How can you answer that in a modest fashion? “Why, yes, and I’ve always been terribly good-looking, too.”

I thanked the woman who asked it, of course, and then said, in essence, yes I have.

I come from funny people.

My parents were funny, and communicated the value of funny to me, in the way some other families are musical, or athletic, or intellectual, or political. I don’t think they did this consciously–I’ll be real interested to hear what the ConductMom has to say about this post, online or off–but they certainly held humor in esteem not just as a random good thing, but as an important good thing.

I remember the day it occurred to me, around age seven, that my mother was funnier than most people. We were living in Oklahoma at the time, and I was taking horseback-riding lessons at a local farm. There were goats at the farm, too, and I vividly recall my New-York-born-and-bred mother’s mingled amusement and horror at being told, “Don’t park under the trees or the goats will climb on your car to eat the leaves.” This wasn’t something she’d ever had to worry about in Queens.

One day, I asked her, “Why do goats have scabby knees?”

“They pray a lot,” she replied. After a perfect beat, she added, “If you were that ugly, you would, too.”

I suddenly realized two things: one, that not everybody’s mother would have said that, and two, that not everybody would joke so irreverently about something that they took, at heart, very seriously. (Prayer, that is. I don’t think anyone from New York City can truly learn to take goats seriously.)

Growing up, my parents and I used humor as a way of bonding, of dealing with our stresses, and perhaps most importantly, as a way of breaking out of the roles of Mom and Dad and Kid, or of Good Midwestern Christians, or whatever. We valued those roles, but somehow also knew it was important to subvert them, to create a place we could just be Nancy and Jack and Robin together. We did humor in a lot of different ways: my father of blessed memory was more the Borscht-Belt kind of old-school joke teller, and also liked to make observations about the oddities of the English language. My mother and I were not above physical slapstick, but were mostly fast and quippy–my mother, in particular, had a remarkable facility for sick jokes, a side of her that I was one of the few people to see. We bonded over “The Carol Burnett Show” and “M*A*S*H” and, especially for my dad and me, “Take the Money and Run,” which we must have watched a dozen times together.

We had a lot of private jokes as a family (“checking the map,” “now I’m a vidow”). Humor was part of our culture. It’s not as though my father ever took me aside and said, “Daughter, humor can bridge social gaps and help overcome psychological defenses, and I want you to think about that,” or that my mother was some kind of godawful Comedy Mom (“Go to your room, young lady, and don’t come out until you’ve written ten witty observations on the difference between dogs and cats!”). But somehow, I knew that being funny was an important part of who they were, and an important part of who we were, as a family.

I can’t even begin to speculate on why my parents were like that. Neither of them were close to their extended families, so I don’t know how far or wide in the family tree the funny blossoms bloom. Through Facebook, I’ve recently become friends with a passel of cousins on my mother’s side, and although I have certain differences with them (I rather decisively did not remain a Good Midwestern Christian) we all share a love of a good laugh. My cousins write some of the funniest updates and comments I get on Facebook, which considering that many of my friends are professional writers and/or performers is going some.

What activities or qualities were particularly important to your family of origin? How were those values communicated? Do you think your parents valued those things consciously, in a way they could explain, or is it simply something deep within them that you picked up on?

So, yesterday, a friend of mine mentioned on Facebook that Hoda Kotb was on vacation and Tori Spelling was guest-hosting with Kathie Lee.

Imagine my shock when I got to the studio today and saw–Tori Spelling. In fact, when I saw her in the dressing room, I vaguely thought, “Wow, that chick kinda looks like Tori Spelling. Pretty funny, considering what my friend said.”

Because this friend–if she’s anything like she used to be in high school, when last, pre-Facebook, I knew her–is entirely the kind of person who would make something like that up just to rattle me. It never even occurred to me that she was telling the truth.

I have another, similar, story about a mischief-making friend who told me something shocking and improbable that turned out to be true, and because I was so sure that he was making it up, I very nearly committed a horrible faux pas.* If you’re my friend, you probably know this story; if not, it involves too many innocent parties for me to write about.

But have you ever done this? Discounted a true statement because a friend was such a joker? Or do I have an unusually high percentage of friends who like to play mild practical jokes of this sort?

Or do I have an unusually suspicious nature?

*Frankly, if I’d said what I almost did, it would have blasted through the atmosphere of “faux pas” and gone faster than light into the deep space of “dick move,” it would have been so bad.

Fillyjonk of Shapely Prose reviewed Mind over Manners today! Go check it out, and thanks, Fillyjonk!

How FJ got a copy of the book in the first place is a sort of amusing story. Since I’d long been friends of Shapely Prose, and we’ve linked back and forth a lot, I probably would have sent one of the bloggers there an advance copy anyway. But Fillyjonk won hers fair and square. I had a few advance copies to play around with, see, and since both Darwin and Lincoln had their birthday on February 12 of this year, I decided to start a contest, the Emancipation v. Evolution Love Smackdown:

So, today is the 200th birthday of both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln. Tomorrow is Friday the 13th. Saturday is Valentine’s Day. Put it all together and it might … look … something … like … this:

It’s always bad luck to be put in an awkward dating situation. If both Charles Darwin and Abraham Lincoln asked you out for the same night, which one would you choose go out with, and why?

I think I’m going to give a prize to the most creative answer for this one, so make it good, folks. (If you don’t date men, your answers are still only limited by the power of your imagination!)

And Fillyjonk won for this entry:

I’m a fan of Darwin, run-on sentences and all, but I think the people opting for Chuck don’t know much about Darwin the man. Abe was clever, calm, and expansive; Charles was anxious, neurotic, and preoccupied with his ill health. Abe would take you to a John Hodgman reading and then out for ice cream, Charles would take you to Chili’s and spend the whole time looking at his tongue in a hand mirror. Sure, if you ever went back to his house he’d turn out to have lots of great creepy taxidermy and volumes of brilliance in Big Chief tablets under his bed — and to be fair to the man he was a devoted-to-the-point-of-neurosis father. But you WOULDN’T go back to his house, let alone have children with him, because you already would have crawled out the bathroom window after the seventeenth time he asked you if you thought he looked a little jaundiced. And then you would have called Abe and gone to ride the bumper cars.

That still makes me laugh, especially the line about the hand mirror. So there you have the backstory of How She Got That Review. I totally agree with her, too–I was shocked how many people picked Darwin in that poll, when Lincoln would clearly be a much better date. It’s also a bit of amusing backstory because Fillyjonk’s one criticism of my book is that it contained too much evolutionary psychology!