Fishing nets, buoys, lobster traps all cited as tocsins — Seated by the window of Cap’n Queeg’s Invasive Barnacle, watching red tide gently lapping the seal remains drifting through the sea nettle bloom that has shut down the beach since the Renaissance, you search your plate for the lobster roll using the standard grid pattern you learned on CSI, aided…

‘Some doors are best left closed.’ ¹ — Dear ██████ of Open Letters, When you ********** an open <REDACTED> on Medium, did it ever occur to you that ******, not to mention <REDACTED>, but — and this is the absolute worst part of it all — CENSORED? Every. <REDACTED>. Time. Apparently it didn’t, you *umb mothe&^%$#$%s. Think about…

Marketers jones for that branding edge — Maybe you’re nursing a Mango Dragonfruit Lemonade and feeling righteous because your MacBook-Pro has 16GB and all the other marketers inhaling Starbs WIFI are limping along with 8GB. Never mind that CPA-looking loser with the Lenovo. And maybe you think pushing collateralized mortgage obligations to Gen Alpha is all nang…

A horse is a horse, of course, of course, but not when it’s a Trojan Horse of course — If you’ve never heard a live recitation of The Iliad — and readers born after 323 BC haven’t — you probably don’t know Homer spontaneously abridged his epic. Those verses skipped in the official version are the world’s first outtakes. He had to do it. We’re talking verse— there’s strike…

Squatters WILL be evicted, man — To: American Federation of Musicians From: Gatemouth Cornbread Sizzle Lips Murphy, Executive Vice President, Jazz Nickname Approval Board (JNAB) Re: Unauthorized Use of Monikers Reality check, hipsters. We’ve got intel that some of you cats are improvising bootleg monikers. We get it. Snakehips gets you gigs at the Village Vanguard…

SeaWorld? I’ll see your abused orca and raise you a battered tiger — Good parents take their children to SeaWorld, and write about it. I took my kids to Joe Exotic’s Animal Park. Wait, wait, wait. Some pub editor got a little trigger happy with the Publish button. Yes the button’s green. That doesn’t mean “Go.” I’m not ready. …

Sublime dance of the humblebrag —

#HotCreditDefaultSwapSummer! — Ahh, summer camp! Who can forget Camp RusticPolySyllables by the shores of ReveredNativesWhoseLandsWeStole Lake? The nougies. The wedgies. The PTSD. Urine-resistant bedbug strains. Bingeing on smoking carbon chunks with tiny, gooey nuclei dripping from flaming twigs. Second-degree burns from snapped towel rat tails. …

Leitmotif with extra cheese — When I taught Landscape Architecture at Lemming Cliffs Community College in Busted Sprocket, ND, I was surprised at how few freshmen failed to perceive stylistic differences between the architecturally stunning Fallingwater House and the Chuck E. …