Buying the New Yorker 1986 - page 87

"Relaxing, stress-reducing lifestyle of Scandinavians."

Pardon me for a moment while I wipe the spit-take off my monitor screen.

Helo Sauna has branched out into Steam and Infrared rooms. Not using that closet or bathroom? Let these guys at it and you can pretend that it will raise the resale value of your house.


I'm not entirely sure what the Great Books Foundation is up to but they seem to have most of their energy focused on teachers.

What an adorable classified help wanted ad! It is so evocative of a bygone age. The New York Foundling Hospital is still looking for help. Here is their spiffy new web page so you can upload your resume data as a word or .pdf file. O Brave New World! (Hey! That's a great book!)

And next, "Good Used Books," not Great used books. This looks like some fellow who spent forty years selling books and happily typing up a list of what he had and mimeographing it and mailing it out to the folks on his address list. Now we have the internet and this bookseller is most likely out of business and probably dead. O Brave New World!

Onto other topics -- Bagels! In the eighties American gentiles discovered bagels. The problem was - we didn't know how to slice the damned things. The result of this (I am absolutely not kidding by the way) is that in the Midwest there was a huge upsurge in hand injuries as folks tried to slice a bagel without really knowing what they were doing. To solve this problem, the market was suddenly flooded with all sorts of bagel slicing contraptions. Like this one. You think I'm making this all up? Take a look at the address -- LaCrosse, Wisconsin.

I spent a good deal of time at the website for the Rancho de los Caballeros to try to figure out what might have changed in twenty years. What do I find? Birdwatching! They have a nice big list of all the birds that you might see here - with the most common birds in italics. Now amongst the italicised birds? The Loggerhead Shrike!

Oh, Wikipedia? Can you tell us about the Loggerhead Shrike?

These birds wait on a perch with open lines of sight and swoop down to capture prey. They mainly eat large insects, also rodents and small birds. Known in many parts as a "Butcher Bird," they impale their prey on thorns or barbed wire before eating it, since they do not have the talons of the larger birds of prey.

I'm sure that trees full of impaled rotting animals help make the golf course a lovely and evocative place.