Let's Hear from One of My Readers

Enough politics for awhile.

First, an unsolicited beverage recommendation: go get yourself several gallons of refreshing and delicious "Minute Maid Pomegranate Tea." (Is that spelled correctly? Pomegranate looks wrong. I don't have time to look it up.) As the two Aussie crabs in "Finding Nemo" would exclaim, "Sweet nectar of loif!" This has supplanted Snapple Grapeade as my favorite healthy drink. Yes, Tara, I concede that each 18 fl. oz. serving (that's my rough estimate of how much I usually guzzle straight from the container before taking a breath) is probably the equivalent of ingesting 8 tablespoons of granulated sugar. But who cares. It has massive drinkability! And antioxidants! As we all know, antioxidants stop, er, oxidation. Which is one of the main causes of prostate cancer -- and global warming. And the pomegranate is one of those exotic fruits that has special curative properties. In fact, I suspect that even though sucking down this tea every day for, say, a month will give you diabetes, the pomegranate -- with it's high concentration of naturally occurring omega folic acids and vitamin triple E -- will actually kill off the malignant diabetes cells before they metastasize. Well, at least that's what I tell Isaac and Riley when I fill their sippy cups with tea to kick start their day.

Now, let's take some reader mail. Here's a letter from my very knowledgeable friend, Todd Fuller:

Dear Tony: Isn't the purpose of a blog (short for "weblog," a term first coined by Nostradamus in the 14th century, when he predicted the rise of "Hissler" and a futuristic communication system known as the "Indernut") to post short, pithy, entertaining thoughts multiple times each day? You post once every two weeks. That's fairly pathetic. I don't want to rain on your parade, but maybe you should just keep a journal -- for yourself -- and scribble in it twice a year. That way you won't continually disappoint and waste the valuable time of friends who expect some minimal level of effort and productivity from you. There's no shame in admitting this just isn't your thing. It took me years to realize that dressing up as an Arthurian Knight and jousting at Renaissance Fairs wasn't my calling -- and when I faced that hard truth, it freed me to play Dungeons and Dragons 24/7 and eventually become a 27th level Paladdin; essentially, a demi-God. I'm not saying you will achieve what I achieved, but your journey of self discovery needs to head in another direction. Glass blowing, perhaps? Scrimshaw? (That's a dying art, especially here in Pittsburgh.) Good luck, my friend. You will always have my brutally honest support.

Todd, thanks for caring. I should mention that Todd -- seriously -- is an excellent and quite successful estate planning attorney. I think somewhere around 76 percent of his typically infirm and mentally diminished clients, have in their Last Will and Testament named Todd, and not their children or beloved pets, as sole beneficiary. That speaks to the deep bonds of trust that Todd forms with every person he represents.

Todd and I got to know each other when we worked together at the same Harrisburg law firm. Perhaps my favorite Todd anecdote from our Glory Days is the time that he went to get a hair cut -- and returned to the office bald.

See, Todd is famously frugal. (His wife Jen is yelling: "Cheap! The word is cheap! He made me live next to an ugly, sulfur-spewing steel mill in a house with tested radon levels of "Infinity and Beyond" -- Todd says radon is a 'government hoax started during the Carter administration' -- because he refused to have a mortgage that was higher than our grocery bill.") Anyway, because Todd is ... thrifty, instead of going to a reputable salon or barber to have his thick, lustrous hair shorn, he decided to go to "Cost Cutters."

There is a legal concept known as "assumption of the risk." When you are foolhardy enough to go to a place called "Cost Cutters" for a trim, you assume the risk that the person cutting your hair will be so incompetent -- indeed, may have only sheared sheep prior to making the giant leap to coifing a human scalp -- that they may sever your jugular vein or cut off an ear lobe while trying to trim side burns. Your chances of receiving a hair cut that looks marginally better than simply placing a mixing bowl on your head and tracing its rim with dull sewing scissors are one in four. Yet, Braveheart Todd was undaunted -- and, more importanly, he had enough quarters for the $2.25 "Hans Christian Anderson Pageboy."

Well, we know how this story ends. In tears. Literally. As Todd tells it, he knew something had gone horribly wrong when, in the midst of his hair cut, the young gal wielding the clippers turned ashen, then began crying. Alarmed, Todd asked what was amiss. She stammered that the plastic shield had come off the clippers, causing her to "turf" his head, as they say in the lawn care biz. She had cut out a neat, 2" x 2" rectangle -- down to the bare, pasty scalp -- in the back of his head. The only way to rectify this, short of Todd wearing ski hats for a month, was to get the full Sinead O'Connor.

When Yul Brenner returned to the office, he was mildly displeased. We tried to cheer him up by telling him that for a white boy with a large, asymetrical dome, he didn't look too hideous. But when his secretary -- who Todd hated already because she was lazy and couldn't type -- said he got what he deserved for going to "Cost Cutters," he bludgeoned her to death with his dictaphone. Which marked the beginning of the end of his tenure with the firm.

Todd let his hair grow out after that traumatic incident, and he now sports a thick pony tail, which his nursing home clients and his wife really dig.

Well, I hope you all enjoyed that extra special glimpse into Todd Fuller's life. I'm sure Todd will correct me if I've gotten any of the particulars wrong, although my team of fact checkers seldom miss anything.