Author: admin

In case you missed it, the Miss America pageant happened last weekend. Miss New York, who looks distinctly mid-Eastern, won. When I was growing up, the composition of that pageant contestants was so homogenous that I knew I could never participate (my last name was Italian, I had brown hair, I was chubby and – most of all – I hated getting dressed up). Now the faces on stage truly do look like a multi colored ethnic rainbow.

So while I am still not sure why we need a Miss America, or how we can choose one girl and say

Bella has a face that says mom and dad are in for quite an adventurous roller coaster ride in the years to come.

Batten down the hatches – Bella is in the house!

And our family thought her mother turned everyone’s hair growing up. I think Bella will set new records.

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On his show a few days ago, he interviewed someone who’d written a biography of JD Salinger. The book’s author talked about how World War II and Salinger’s experience walking into a concentration camp made him the author he was. Without the war, according to this biographer, we would not have had the JD Salinger who wrote Catcher in the Rye. To which Stephen replied, without skipping a beat, “So I guess we owe Hitler at least a small apology.” This was followed by a moment of shocked silence as the author looked at Colbert as though he’d just arrived

I’m in the Costco parking lot filling up the back of my car with bags of peanuts so the Stellar Jays won’t break my windows pecking at them when a car pulls up behind me, a woman gets out and asks, “Are you Elise Patkotak?” When I answer in the affirmative, she pulls out my new book that she’s just bought in Costco and asks me to sign it. A few sentences later I realize she is the granddaughter of people I knew in Barrow and the daughter of a woman I know from Barrow.

It’s only in Alaska that

We don’t care how cold it gets, until it actually snows and sticks on the ground, we wear shorts and t-shirts.

I am not a good consumer. If the fate of the free world depended on my spending habits, the only survivors would be grocery stores and animal rescue groups. So when I was recently forced to shop for shoes and a purse the sticker shock I felt when I pulled out my credit card would have been enough to convert my heart from manic fibrillation.

What the hell is this? Some dumb lady puts her name on the purse and suddenly it costs twice as much as I paid in rent on my first NYC apartment. Have we all lost

You know who you are. You are all very annoying. And if you are a politician, every robo call is just one more reason I won’t vote for you. This is worse than telemarketers. Never let a politician figure out a cheaper way to annoy the good citizens of this country because once they have, there is no going back. It just gets worse and worse. I don’t know how you’re feeling about now, but I’m thinking benevolent dictator doesn’t sound all that bad anymore.

I thought my connection was acting funny because of all the rain and the earth was so wet. I figured that had to affect my Internet connection, right? Wrong. That thinking apparently is a hold over from when TVs had metal rabbit ears that had to be turned just right to see Ed Sullivan without lines. I believe that was sometime in the 1950s.

So after spending a very reasonable amount of time with a very nice GCI tech person, who never once commented on how old people should not be allowed around these new fangled devices as I called