The American Spectator

Three years ago, at a wedding in Prague, I met an Englishman with whom I had an immediate and powerful connection. We e-mailed for two months, and then I joined him in the Bahamas for a weeklong second date. At first, the match seemed fated, the product of a romantic version of paying it forward. [sic] You see, my cousin Luke, who grew up in Michigan, started things off by marrying a woman from Prague named Kaja. At their wedding, my cousin Beau met Tereza, Kaja’s younger sister. They had an immediate and powerful connection, e-mailed and Skyped for a while, and then Beau moved to Prague. I met my Englishman at their wedding.

This is where the international matrimonial chain reaction ends, however, because we broke up in less than a year, driven asunder not by the 5,000 miles that separate London from Palo Alto but, mundanely, by our own incompatible personalities.

Had we met under different circumstances, I doubt we would have dated at all, but weddings impair judgment. It was 4 in the morning; it was Prague. We weren’t alone in behaving imprudently. After I walk-of-shamed the length of Wenceslas Square back to the apartment I was sharing with the groom’s sisters, I found a dress soaking in the bidet. One of these sisters, ordinarily an elegant and selfpossessed woman, had gotten the giggles so severely while stumbling back from the bar that she had executed a kindergarten-style collapse-andpee on the sidewalk.

(July 19, 2012)

NewYorkTimes.com

A sad missive from someone named Lowin addressed to an aspiring Times blogger of tender years named Dick Cavett, sitting at home in his underpants:

Dear Mr. Cavett, The occasion of my comment is, of course, sad since it relates to the death of [Nora Ephron,] one of our greatest wits and talents.Nonetheless, the event has caused you to write again and for that I, and no doubt many others, are and will be always grateful. Your columns remind us all of an era when there was hope for progress and respect for intellect in the land. Now, as the empire crumbles under the weight of forty years of right wing policies, anti science, anti intellectual, flat earth, fanatical, and, not to put too fine a point on it, fascist in nature, looking back on you and your show and revisiting the glowing personality that powered it, I smile.

Eric Lowin
Pleasant Hill, CA

(June 29, 2012)

Washington Times

A bizarre sexual ritual, as reported in the infallible Times of our nation’s capital:

SALT LAKE CITY—A man spotted dressed in a goat suit among a herd of wild goats in the mountains of northern Utah has wildlife officials worried that he could be in danger as hunting season approaches.

Phil Douglass of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources said Friday the person is doing nothing illegal, but he worries the so-called “goat man” is unaware of the dangers.