Every year, some media entity terrifies the nation with a Shark Week. We here at LWON feel strongly that sharks, while terrifying, look scary and live in the ocean and therefore are pretty easy to recognize and avoid. Much harder to recognize and avoid are the innocent-looking, furry, feathery animals that under the pretense of […]
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I learned a lot of languages in my teens and 20s. I say “learned,” but don’t expect fluency. You shouldn’t try to have a very complicated conversation with me in any of them today. But there have been points in my life when I had dear friends with whom I only spoke Japanese or Norwegian. […]
Okay, ladies, it’s high time we ceased the knuckle biting and the swooning, the weeping and the throwing of things, and certainly the touching of our own private parts in lieu of honoring the phallus. Someone might think we’re hysterical. For as long as men and women have coexisted, which is pretty much the whole […]
Time is a jail that we’ve built for ourselves, I think as I look at the clock and realize this post is due by some daunting hour of the morning. How could this day have been contained by a big hand and little hand on the face of a clock? Sometimes, or some places, the clock […]
If there’s a landmass that has them, get off of it now. As you’ll learn in this blog post, the last thing you want to do is find yourself trapped in a confined space with sloths, and I consider a continent a confined space. For starters, the sloth is the only animal listed as one […]
Back in the 1970s, Saturday Night Live ran a skit in which Chevy Chase played a very clever land shark. He selected his victims by going door to door. And because no one would in their right mind would open the door for a shark, he pretended to be other, more benign things: a plumber, a […]
Apparently there’s some television extravaganza going on this week that makes it seem as if the beach is a scary place where a shark could attack you at any moment. Don’t believe it. You want a dangerous place? I’ll show you a dangerous place. A farm. It’s not just the little roosters. If you’re worried […]
Some years back, in search of sunshine and sand, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I packed up the Bronco II and headed down to the Florida Keys (we love punishingly long and mind-numbing drives). We’d brought camping gear because we hadn’t booked anywhere to stay and, more important, we were dirt poor. The fee to […]