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Postcards from The Pug Bus

Lifting a satirical leg on popular culture

Persons in the Ether

Question of the Week

Passion or stability?

MD

Mavis Drouk, emotional escrow officer

Believed to be near Harrisburg, PA

Stability. Passion is what people choose when they still believe a staircase can be made entirely of sparks. Stability may not sing outside your window, but it does remember where the insurance cards are.

RC

Rufus Clenn, freelance thunder consultant

Last reported west of Tulsa, OK

Passion, obviously. Stability is just boredom wearing shoes with arch support. I want life to arrive late, smell faintly of lightning, and explain nothing until several lamps have been broken.

NV

Nora Vell, deputy curator of small regrets

Possibly sheltering in Eugene, OR

Passion is useful for beginnings, stability for the paperwork afterward. I prefer both in moderation, which is another way of saying I would like to be ruined briefly and then driven home safely.

The Grammar Grump Sticks It to The Neosecularist and ESPN

philmaggitti blog 15 years

While navigating the backwaters of the internet yesterday, I nearly ran aground on a website entitled The Neosecularist. What brought me up startled was this sentence:… Read More

The Grammar Grump Rides Hobson’s Choice to Victory

philmaggitti blog 15 years

While simultaneously watching The Hour on BBC America last night and reading Nina Burleigh’s The Fatal Gift of Beauty: The Trials of Amanda Knox, I heard one of… Read More

An Open Letter to Those Barenaked People in San Francisco

philmaggitti blog 15 years

Dear Hideous-Looking Tools:OK, you had your little nude-in last Saturday, now put your damn clothes on. Put ’em all on, every last bit you left at home… Read More

Chapter 1: Divine Intervention Strikes Twice

philmaggitti blog 17 years

On a warm Sunday afternoon in April 1990, I was sitting on a hillside in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, watching a timber race, when god spoke… Read More

Chapter 2: The Antimother

philmaggitti blog 21 years

I wouldn’t be writing this book if my wife Mary Ann had not decided that our first pug, Percy, needed another dog for companionship. The… Read More

At Preakness Time, a Pimlico Tale

philmaggitti blog, dog 21 years

BALTIMORE – The best stories in sports are about horse racing or boxing. That’s because the best characters in sports are in the gym or… Read More

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The Pug Bus Breaking News

The Pug Bus Breaking News requires no email address, no mother's maiden name, no first pet's nickname, and no DNA sample. You simply mash the link below and read.

Deliver It

⚡ Scholars at the Royal Institute for the Advancement of Obvious Things have concluded, after eleven years of exhaustive inquiry, that people who speak at great length in meetings do not thereby become more correct. The findings have been submitted to a committee for review.

⚡ It has been determined by authorities in several jurisdictions that the phrase "I just want to be honest with you" reliably precedes the portion of the conversation one would most prefer not to have. Legislation is pending.

⚡ The Bureau of Perpetual Reassessment has announced that this is not, in fact, the most divided the nation has ever been, a distinction that continues to belong to a prior era when the disagreements concerned rather more consequential matters and people occasionally died over them.

Adverse Effects

The following lines of prose cleverly arranged as poetry may induce brief clarity, misplaced certainty, and the sense that something has already been decided without your approval ...

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

Read It All

By seventy you know which doors you walked past without opening,
can name the rooms you never entered,
hear the echoes anyway.

The years do not accuse.
They simply pile up like newspapers you meant to read,
each one carrying news that is no longer news.

You think: I should have said that differently.
I should have stayed. I should have gone.
The mind is efficient this way,
filing the same cases under the same wrong headings,
finding them again at 3 a.m. in perfect order.

What surprises is not the weight of it
but the patience —
how regret waits,
how it has nowhere else to be,
how it sits across from you at breakfast
and asks for nothing,
knowing you will offer it everything
on your own.

The body slows.
The catalog does not.
You carry the unlived lives
the way old houses carry
the smell of people who are gone —
not haunting exactly,
just present,
just there,
just refusing
the simple courtesy
of leaving.