Big day here today. 
     First, the remnants of Hurricane Bret safely blew through between entries, allowing me to take down the Martha Stewart posters I'd covered them with.
     Second, it's the first day of a new school year for my wife.  No, she's not a student - she's a high school English teacher.  That may sound like a dangerous job to have these days, but I'm not worried.  I'd be much more worried if she were, say, a farmer's wife.  Why?  Because while relatively few English teachers have come to a bad end in Ohio, bigamy is a crime in all 88 counties. 

     A few words of advice to her new students: 

• Bring your own pillow  in case your neighbor hates to share.
• Don't attempt to apply deodorant in the classroom without first raising your hand.
• Always bring an extra spitball with you in case the first one goes dry.
• Don't even think about wearing trendy clothes to class unless you have enough to go around.
• An intelligent look on your face is worth two in your head.
• "Thoreau - 1838" is as good a guess as any.
• Open auditions for class clown are held daily in the principal's office - ask him for details. 
• Above all, remember: Anyone can get an "A" but it takes a real student to stick around and help it mature into a complete alphabet.

      To help her feel as if her summer break wasn't an entire waste, I took her to see "Bowfinger" on Sunday.  I'm told it was a good movie.  I wouldn't know.  When I wasn't distracted by the guy behind me kicking my seat, I was distracted by the memory of the opening credits. 
     Specifically, I was distracted by the "Written by Steve Martin" credit.  It appeared quite early on.  In big yellow lettering, I believe.  Lower left corner of the screen.  Just so you'll know what not to look for if you don't want to be distracted like I was when you go to see this flick.
     Maybe if Steve hadn't had the main role in the film it would've been ok, but as it was every time I saw his face I instantly wondered, "How did he write this?  Did he write it long hand?  Did he write it on a computer?  Did he write it on a typewriter?  Did he dictate it to someone?  If he used a typewriter made in 1960 or before, did it really lack a '1' key like the newspaper told me typewriters back then did?  If he wrote it on a computer, was it one with a storage disk the size of a tractor-trailer tire like that same paper tells me they used back in 1965?  Those disks had a capacity of just 2.5 megabytes and had to be sandblasted to be erased.  This scene with the dog in high heels is great, but it would really be impressive if it had been written on a computer that required regular sandblasting!" 
     Alas, my wife was utterly unable to shed any light at all on these questions - or maybe she was just afraid the guy behind us would start kicking her seat too if she did....

     I'd especially like to know how Steve wrote the line that went, "Just because I'm from Ohio doesn't mean that I'm from Ohio."  That line was spoken by the naive young actress wannabe who arrives in Hollywood by bus determined to be a star and ends up dominating everyone by the end.  Was it written in the same way that his silly character in "The Out-Of-Towners" was revealed to be from Ohio?  Or was that lifted directly from Neil Simon's original script?
     Am I the only one who thinks both these movies are part of a plot by non-Ohio natives to make Ohioans out to be rubes, bumpkins, squares, and hayseeds when we can do the job all by ourselves??
     Well, Fact #1: Ohio sent more men to fight on the winning side of the Civil War than any other state.
     Fact #2: Ohio now has more cities with a population of 100,000 or more than any other state.
     I trust this makes everything clear as to who's a hayseed and who's merely being charmingly paranoid, petty, and provincial!

     But enough chatter.  Time to get back to the grindstone.
     "What is a grindstone, anyway?" someone asked in an email today.
     A grindstone is what you leave your children after spending all your money on a nice rhinestone for your wife.
     Especially if she has a sense of humor.