200 nations have read this blog!

The blog’s notoriously unreliable “stats” page says today there is reason to celebrate: someone from the 200th different nation stopped by to check out my blog.

Two hundred seems large enough to host a decent Olympics so I should be pleased.

But stats, the biggest time suck of a life that’s chock full of them, can’t be trusted so I won’t be getting drunk today.

Well, I might get drunk today, but news from stats won’t be the inspiration.

Here’s the problem: Right now, 7:30 a.m., stats is showing there are five page views for my home blog.

But when I click into the audience section, it shows there are 11 readers in the U.S., two in France, one in Brazil (hello Bob McCarthy!).

Even a math moron like me can see that number adds up to 14.

So which section of stats is telling the truth?

Just last week I awoke to read that 94 people from Slovenia stormed the joint and had one hell of a party.

They read more than a dozen distinct posts from across the three years I’ve been blogging.

I saw that and rushed out to get a haircut and shop for a new shirt then spent the whole rest of the day reading about Slovenia.

I wanted to make a nice impression in case some friendly Slovenians called to say they wanted to declare me king.

(Fact: there is no Fastvenia to give timely balance to Slovenia).

Clearly, someone started reading the blog, began sharing it with friends and soon Slovenia came to a grinding halt as the entire nation began immersing itself in my blog -- and that’s assuming Slovenia is populated by just 94 folks.

Then Slovenia started acting like so many of the girls I used to date. We went out one time, seemed to have fun -- and then they just vanished.

I half expect to see Slovenia driving by with a dude in a nicer car.

So what happened? Did stats err? Did it miscalculate? Did Slovenia wake up groggy and ashamed at having spent the night with me?

That’s not without precedent either.

It seems like stats is once again messin’ with Sasquatch.

It’s incredibly frustrating for someone who’s trying to build a readership.

But until someone suggests a more trustworthy option, I’m stuck with stats.

Here are the 199th through 200th nations who’ve registered at least one reader over the past six months.

191. Netherland Antilles

192. Macau

193. Lebanon

194. Macedonia

195. Qatar

196. Uruguay

197. Nepal

198. Sudan

199. Botswana

Clues to how at least some of this disparate group found its way to my blog can be found in the “traffic sources” section of stats.

It’s clear by some of the search terms that a niche group of deviants troll the internet for Amish porn and to their consternation, I’m sure, wind up here.

Search terms include “amish lingerie,” “amish threesomes,” and “amish boobs.”

It has me thinking I ought to inaugurate a “Search Term of the Day” feature.

Pity mingles with hilarity when I realize my blog’s responsible for this confusion.

So who secures the milestone no. 100? Envelope please . . .

It’s Trinidad!

And it’s Tobago!

It’s Trinidad and Tobago, one of the few nations on earth I can call “Sonny.”

The Republic of Trinidad and Tobago is a multi-island nation off the coast of Venezuela formed in 1976.

“Together We Aspire, Together We Achieve” is the nation’s charming motto.

In a divisive era in America when Republicans and Democrats can’t get together on anything, here is a Caribbean nation where two major islands figure they can do better as one than they could if they fended for themselves.

It sounds perfectly harmonious.

Stats tallies just one lone reader, but the optimist in me likes to think the entire 1.3 million carnival mix of Africans, Indians, Creoles, Portuguese, Venezuelans, Spaniards, Caribs, et al, are right now in the big capital library in San Fernando crowded around one warm computer screen.

Well, welcome to the nation of readers who’ve found their way to a blog whose name pays subtle tribute to how long it’ll be before economic considerations force me to give up things like electricity and store-bought butter.

Stick around a while and you’ll see there’s nothing truly Amish about my blog.

And, alas, the only real boob you’ll find here is me.

The coolest I've ever been

Just one more story about why I love Philadelphia before we take the train back to the reality of dashed expectations, earnings chaos and wild uncertainty.

And I’m talking here about my career, not the financial markets.

Philadelphia was the last place where I entered the rarified zone of supercool and there were people around to see it.

I can manage to be really, really cool about once every 10 years. It’s a cool so perfect it’s like a total eclipse of the sun.

Stare at it too long and there’s a chance you’ll go blind.

It happens to all of us. It’s one of those cosmic rarities when you’re dressed great, you look fantastic, your smile dazzles, your surroundings seem to glow and your wit is energized by one of those euphoric buzzes that make profound hilarity roll off your silver tongue like the waters at Niagara.

The problem with most of us those five or six times last for about 12 minutes and they happen when we’re all by ourselves.

That’s the way it is with me. I can feel it coming on. I see the transformation in the mirror. I run outside and start dashing down the street and screaming before it’s too late, “Look at me! I’m cool! I’m cool! I’m cool!” immediately vaporizing any of the cool that hasn’t already naturally dissipated.

With me, it happened in 2007 on the perches astride the very Rocky steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art mentioned in yesterday’s nonsense.

The day was as perfect as I was about to become.

The skies above Philly were azure. It was about 5 p.m. and the still-warm day tingled with the first fresh hints of fall.

The view is truly spectacular, one of the most grand in all America. The museum is atop the region’s highest hill and looks down the boulevard and all the museums, trees and parks leading into the heart of the great metropolis.

It was the last day of a four-day assignment for Cooking Light magazine, which had asked me to come to Philadelphia to write about the best restaurants.

Sweet, huh. And it’s a reputable magazine that paid good money.

See the elements beginning to orbit?

My hosts had invited me to a museum soiree to celebrate the assignment’s success.

I was resplendent. I was wearing pressed black pants with creases sharper than the bow of a battleship. I had thatch colored sports coat, glistening white shirt and a gold and black tie that shimmered like the lights on airport runways. The sun-colored socks were taut inside black Italian loafers.

As is my wont, I’d stopped at friendly cigar store and selected a robust Cohiba Churchill.

And if you didn’t already guess I had a big glass of bourbon on ice, you’re new to the blog.

I don’t know whether it makes me a bad father or a really great drinker, but the sublime buzz I get from smoking a cigar and sipping a bourbon triggers the same joy spot in my brain that comes alive whenever I am cradling one of my daughters and she isn’t saying I’m weird or stupid.

I don’t try and explain or defend it. I just acknowledge it.

So as the party hit a lull, I snuck outside and scampered atop one of the prominent ledges overlooking one of America’s great cities for a good smoke.

Really, if it weren’t for the regular movement of both my arms to my mouth, I could have looked like a work of art.

That’s when it started to happen. I could feel the cool come into me and begin to burst forth.

People began to smile and stare. I could tell some of them wanted to take pictures but were afraid the imperceptible noise would startle the rare butterfly into vanishing

(If it ever happens again and you see it happening, please feel free to snap away. I won’t mind!)

Then with a timing that’s never been duplicated and may never again, the cool came to full fruition just as it was at its most useful.

A touring rock band in town was drawn to me.

It sounds preposterous, but this is exactly as it happened. They came up to the steps below my perch and gazed up at me and asked, “Do you know any good restaurants in Philly?”

I swear to God.

These five musicians, four guys and a babe, looked like they were effortlessly cool for about 14 of their 15 wakeful hours each day.

And they sought me as someone who could give cool advice.

And I was off.

I was funny. I was witty. I was wise. I didn’t stumble off my little stage. It was like I was Aristotle and they were my students.

It was a great conversation.

As we wished each other luck and they turned to say goodbye, I heard the cool rock chick turn to her bandmates and say, “Wow. What a really cool guy.”

Again, that’s exactly how it happened.

The only way this absolutely true story could be any better is if I could now honestly conclude “. . . and the name of that band was Chrissie Hynde and The Pretenders.”

I pointed out exactly where it happened on Thursday to my wife. And as she always does whenever I tell this story she started cracking up.

Her cruel laughter stings.

She says the band was probably named the Sarcastic Quintet.

She wouldn’t know true cool if it married her and fathered her children.

In her defense, she’s slept through most of my cool.

Too bad so has everybody else.

Ben Franklin, Rocky Balboa & The Wonder Nun

I’m in a Philadelphia hotel full of romance novelists and the only stranger who’s inspiring any real love is a 70-something nun.

Good thing I’m not on the make.

More than 700 romance novelists are nothing like you’d expect, that is if you’d expect romance novelists are like the vixens on the sexy covers of the bodice-rippers they all pen.

They look homely, fatigued and they seem to talk endlessly in elevators about how clever each of them is.

In short, they’re a lot like me only with successful careers in the writing field.

What they do makes what I do seem like small potatoes.

I’m here for three days with my family to do a story on the world’s toughest restaurant.

That’d be the 107-year-old Moshulu at Penn’s Landing. It’s been docked there along the Delaware River since 1996. It’s sizeable enough to satisfy the appetites of up to 2,000 diners a night in the exquisitely appointed spaces that used to be dreary cargo bays.

That’s heavy duty for fine dining, but it’s sissy stuff compared to what she’d been doing.

She traveled around Cape Horn in the world’s fiercest weather 54 times hauling coal, coke, copper ore, nitrate, lumber and grain. She was confiscated by Americans in one war and the Germans in another.

She’s clearly seen bringing immigrant Vito Corleone into New York harbor in “Godfather” and going toe-to-toe with Rocky Balboa in that classic.

We had a blast on board, and neither of the kids nor their father did anything that would cause the maitre d to make us walk the plank.

I love coming to Philadelphia for reasons the romance novelists try to inspire.

My top two man crushes will live forever in Philadelphia.

The first, of course, is Benjamin Franklin, a man so cool it’s a confounding surprise to learn he didn’t invent sun glasses.

He’s the Founding Father whose conceptual fingerprints are today on everything from the way Americans deliver mail (hang in there, USPS!), heat homes, fight community fires, patronize libraries, and, not incidentally, lead and inspire a world that before Franklin was uniformly ruled by monarchs, chieftains, and spiritual poobahs who wielded power based on an alchemic brew of birthright and superstition.

But to me his greatest invention often goes unmentioned.

Ben Franklin invented America.

He’s the spark that ignited the flame that became the American spirit. He’s can-do and no quit. He’s self-made and selfless. He’s Free Speech and free hors d'oeuvres. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff describes him as “equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bugs Bunny.”

My other love is for the fighter who by one sacrilegious standard is the greatest fighter in history. Sure, Muhammad Ali beat Joe Frazier, but Rocky Balboa, Philadelphia’s underdog everyman, is on some score cards kicking the butt of historical heavyweight Benjamin Franklin.

“To many people Rocky Balboa has become the identity of Philadelphia,” says Meryl Levitz, president of Greater Philadelphia Marketing and Tourism.

You sense that at the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the strains of “Gonna Fly Now” still reverberate. Running the Rocky steps is one of the history-rich city’s biggest tourist attractions. Books have been written about what it means to people who scale the steps.

Jo-Jo and I did on Thursday. We ran clear to the top then duked it out on the spot where Rocky does his triumphant dance.

The 10-year-old disputes the result, but I contend the scorecards have me kicking her butt.

That was far from the best ass-kicking story told near the Rocky statue that day.

That would be the nun.

The Rocky statue is in a little park-like area just off the foot of the steps. There was a line of people about 20 deep waiting to take their pictures in front of the statue.

There were old and young, tattooed and reserved, the whole human panoply.

Still, the nun with the tripod stood out.

She was in line behind us. We didn’t even know she was there until we’d snapped our pictures.

As we walked away, we saw her set up a tripod; she was all alone.

We turned to watch and soak in more of the joyful atmosphere.

This frail, slight woman stood before the triumphant statue and raised her hands.

She yelled, “I beat cancer this year and this picture is going to be on the front of all my Christmas cards!”

And that’s the abbreviated story of the nun who loved Rocky.

Think you can beat that one, you published honeys of the romance novel world?

Go ahead. Take your best shot.

On bored Amtrak

ABOARD AMTRAK’S THE PENNYSLVANIA -- I love having the opportunity to slug a story of mine with a dateline.

“Dateline” is an old-fashioned journalism term for the all-caps story tag that used to include the date along with the place where the story was filed. It’s also the name of a new-fashioned investigate show where they resort to questionable tactics the likes of which old-fashioned journalists often disapprove.

The cool thing about a dateline that starts with “ABOARD . . .” is it makes it seem like I’m some kind of dashing war correspondent.

If you think that couldn’t be further from the truth, you’re mistaken.

I am a war correspondent.

I’m covering a war on boredom.

We are about six hours into an 8-hour trip through tedium clear to Philadelphia. Right now tedium is near Lancaster.

The girls out of childish habit say they are bored.

They are lying. They are fully alive.

They’ve just never been confronted with an opportunity to revel in the joyful boredom only a long train ride can bestow.

“I’ve ridden everything with either legs or wheels and nothing beats the train.”

That’s what an old friend of mine, John Clouse, once told me before he died. He was not lying. And that man was fully alive.

He was for years listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the World’s Most Traveled Man. I wrote maybe a dozen stories about him for everything from National Enquirer to Playboy because this veteran of the Battle of the Bulge was one of the most gregarious and entertaining men I’ve ever known.

The idea of watching 4 to 6 hours of television a day as a way to banish boredom was anathema to him.

The girls haven’t been bored once today. Rather they’ve been challenged to avoid boredom.

We arrived at the convenient Amtrak station in Latrobe about 30 minutes prior to the train’s scheduled 8:11 a.m. departure. There were about 20 people, three-quarters of them passengers, waiting.

“Is it ever going to get here?” said Josie, 10, cueing Lucy, 5, to commence the same whine.

They were confusing boredom with a moment that absolutely crackles with excitement: standing at a train station and waiting to hear a distant whistle.

At 8:10, a man who was probably steeped in boredom said, “See, it’s late,” an instant prior to hearing the whistle and seeing the headlight coming ‘round the bend.

It was right on time.

It’s a mechanical marvel that something so big, so loud and so muscular as a locomotive can seem so welcoming when you step inside of it.

“All aboard!”

Taking a train on vacation is like taking a vacation from the hassles of taking a vacation.

You can nap, you can read, you can talk, you can anticipate.

I told Lucy we were going to Philadelphia, birthplace of America. She asked if we’d get to see the hospital where it was born.

I never feel any of the apprehensions I feel on an airplane. If the engine on a train gives out, we just roll to a gentle stop.

The girls are beginning to think of the train like it’s a rolling prison and they are beginning to embrace the novelty of it.

Because it is boring and boring in our distraction-mad world is becoming a precious commodity.

Our nearly 8 hour trip will be maybe an hour too long. Maybe not.

The girls are still pressing their little noses up against the windows and waving at the smiling people at the crossings. They’ve spent the hours reading, playing cards and cuddling with us when the air conditioning got too efficient.

We ate in our seats the lunches we brought from the only fast-food restaurant that allowed us to continue the track theme of the day: Subway.

The girls are eager to get to Philadlephia, but have really enjoyed the trip and will be looking forward to the return ride, which will be maybe two hours too long. Maybe not.

I know now we’re embedding a memory that will have them loving the train the way Val and I do.

“All aboard!” is the phrase most associated with train travel.

Maybe it should be “All are bored!”

It’d be an excellent way to increase ridership.

Now they've ruined jukeboxes

I feel sheepish criticizing something I loved longer and spent more quality time with than even my family, but neighborhood bars are starting to suck.

I know. That’s like worms criticizing dirt.

I’ve loved my family for the nearly 11 years I’ve had them, but I’ve loved being in bars for about as long as I was biologically capable of conceiving a family, or at least since I was able to obtain a convincing fake ID.

What’s wrong with neighborhood bars?

Jukeboxes.

They are one of the man’s few inventions that as they’ve gotten better and better have gotten worse and worse.

Guaranteed, any jukebox from any local tavern or pizza joint even from the 1970s is far superior to any dazzling new internet Tunetown.

An old jukebox would have maybe 100 songs -- 50 two-sided 45s -- from an eclectic mix of top popular artists of the day. Guaranteed, they’d all have something by the Rolling Stones, The Who, Linda Ronstadt, Elvis, The Eagles, Boz Scaggs, Elton John and some of the still-memorable one-hit wonders of the day.

The owner decided what deserved jukebox inclusion. And by doing so he or she was setting an artistic boundary as imposing as any bouncer.

The fortunes of a bar’s reputation rested on the quality of its jukebox every bit as much as the charm or shapeliness of the person pouring the drinks.

Today’s jukeboxes have maybe one million songs on them.

There’s something for everyone.

Please all and you please none.

A jukebox with one million songs puts tasteful people like me at the mercy of morons.

Understand, I love all my fellow man. My fellow babes, too. And I go out of my way to make them all feel welcome when they stranger on into a bar where my frequent over-consumption makes me feel like I have a proprietary stake.

Blacks, gays, Hispanics, Muslims, Orientals, liberals and even sadly misguided conservatives -- at one time or another I’ll bet I’ve bought them all at least a drink or two and sought common philosophical ground.

I welcome the whole rainbow of humanity to sit down and share a drink with me.

Just leave your crappy music in your car.

That’s why the new mega-song internet jukeboxes are such disasters.

Now someone who doesn’t know any better can come in and instantly demolish the atmosphere of a really rockin’ bar.

That’s what would happen if, say, my daughter, 10, came into the bar with her allowance and what would have to be an incredibly realistic fake ID. She wouldn’t play Hayes Carll, Joe Ely, Steve Earle, or any of the Texas troubadours whose music enlivens any really cool tavern.

No, she’d play Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift and other saccharine pap from groups like the cast of Glee.

It would be so embarrassing I’d almost be hesitant to bum $5 off her before ratting her out for being underage.

Now, I love that little girl, more than Tom Petty even -- and Petty’s always been there for me. Sure, Petty’s never called me stupid, told his friends I smell bad and screamed he’ll die if I make him listen to one more Bob Dylan song, but the daughter wins my affection because in between bouts of tweener hostility she’ll still crawl up on my lap for sweet cuddling.

I reserve the right to change my evaluation of the two if Petty ever calls and says he’d like to come over and cuddle.

My point is the tavern owner should never abdicate his or her social obligations to pander to musical misfits who think Van Morrison’s best song is “Brown Eyed Girl,” think Mark Knopfler retired after he folded up Dire Straits, and love Lady Gaga but have never heard of Joan Jett & the Blackhearts.

Because I love rock ‘n’ roll. So put another dime in the jukebox, baby.

Here are 10 songs guaranteed to set a great vibe in your local tavern:

• “Piano Man,” Billy Joel -- Look around as everyone starts to sing along and you’ll see each of the characters depicted in the 1973 song in every bar you’ve ever been in.

• “The Road Goes on Forever,” Joe Ely -- This is Ely’s 1992 superior version of the Robert Earl Keen original. It kicks more ass than an impatient mule farmer, as does much of everything both Keen and Ely have ever composed.

• “Highlands,” Bob Dylan -- at 16 minutes, 32 seconds, this is the only song likely to get you your money’s worth in a day when a single juke box song costs as much as a draft beer. It’s so slow and swampy people hate for the first five mintues, become curious during the second five and finally start to dig it during the homestretch. I always play it at least twice in a row.

• “Sultans of Swing,” Dire Straits -- Maybe the greatest guitar song ever written with sneering Knoplfer lyrics about the boys in the corner who “don’t give a damn ‘bout any trumpet-playing band” because “it ain’t what they call rock ‘n’ roll.” This sure is.

• “Change The Locks,” Tom Petty -- From “She’s The One,” the ’96 Petty album known only to the most devout, this was an outstanding rock soundtrack to the forgotten indy movie. Petty’s only twice recorded another’s songs for his studio albums, I think. It’s a pickiness that works well here with this outstanding Lucinda Williams rocker.

• “You Never Even Called Me By My Name,” David Allan Coe -- This list is light on country, which I revere, but I never skip this on the jukebox. It’s classic country and goes out of its way to ensure listeners realize it with its uproarious last verse.

• “Can’t You Hear Me Knockin,’” Rolling Stones -- The Stones have so many indelible hits this great jazzy number often gets overlooked. This opens the ears of innocents who think they know all about the Stones from “Start Me Up,” “Brown Sugar,” and “Satisfaction.”

• “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” The Who -- From the opening chord to Daltry’s final euphoric shriek, this mesmerizes throughout.

• “Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding,” Elton John -- The first song on the first album, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” I ever bought. At 11 minutes, 11 seconds, it’s one of music’s most epic and eloquent rockers. The virtuosity dazzles still and the song is a surprise reminder that in 1973 when rock ‘n’ roll was at its best, Elton John was among the very best.

• “American Pie,”Don McLean -- This is it, the greatest jukebox song ever recorded. It’s tuneful, mournful, exuberant and tells the story of rock in such allegoric detail that it’ll ignite conversations clear through last call.

Rock on, my friends, rock on.

Bugs are buggin' me

I don’t understand how out of all the world’s winged creatures, the magnificent and the mundane, the one that’s attracted to dog poop and picnics is designated “the fly.”

It’s like calling the common carp “the swim.”

Jeff Goldblum was “The Fly” in 1986 and there hasn’t been a fly swatter big enough for him, and that includes his gargantuan ex-wife Geena Davis.

Insects are driving me buggy even as bugs are incapable of driving me insecty.

I drove my buggy up to the far northern reaches of Pennsylvania this weekend and was chewed upon by maybe a million black flies. I had an otherwise splendid time golfing with my cousin’s husband and his buddies in Warren near the New York-Pennsylvania border.

None of the bug sprays worked, but on Saturday night I consumed nearly a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and the next day none of the black flies came within eight feet of me.

Of course, neither did the white golfers.

It’s one of those parts of the country where black flies outnumber black guys by maybe a billion to zero.

I’m sure there are some local racists who are comfortable with that ratio.

Not me. I’ve never had a black guy try and zoom into my nose, my mouth, my ears, my tear ducts or linger near my crotch while I was trying to sink a four-foot putt for par.

And I’m not being politically incorrect. The nasty little buggers are widely known as black flies.

As far as I know there are no African-American flies, nor white or Caucasian flies, for that matter. It seems odd because there are Spanish flies and they’ve made colorful contributions to history and sex, two of my favorite topics.

In ancient China, crafty warlords mixed Spanish flies with arsenic, wolfsbane (a mountain herb) and human excrement to make the world’s first stink bombs. Why you’d have to mix anything with human excrement to make it smell worse seems to indicate the military-industrial complex were padding defense budgets about 2,000 years before Halliburton.

I certainly wouldn’t want some Chinese warlord to lob one through my car window, but the historical anecdote makes me nostalgic for the pre-nuclear days when wars were fought with what can best be described as weapons of ass destruction.

And on the other usage extreme, Spanish fly is regarded as the world’s oldest aphrodisiac.

Augustus Caesar’s wife, Livia, was said to have slipped Spanish fly into guests’ food hoping to inspire a randy indiscretion she could use for later blackmail.

Marquis de Sade was convicted of using Spanish fly to incite an orgy with prostitutes -- and that sentence features four elements for any really swell party. He was sentenced to death for poisoning and sodomy, but was later freed by what must have been some 18th century version of the Casey Anthony jury.

I knew a nervous freshman in college who was obsessed with trying to obtain Spanish fly for the same reasons as de Sade. He’d convinced himself giving doses of the extract to young women would make their clothes fly off.

When he became frustrated in his pharmacological pursuit, I suggested he try poems and peach schnapps.

I heard he got married and had five kids.

Either way, he never bugged me again.

This is the time of year when I can’t wait for summer to end. The heat’s oppressive, tempers are short, and the only thing more burned out than my lawn is my enthusiasm for doing anything outdoors.

Every time I step outside the skeeters, wasps and flies descend and I commence to spittin’, sweatin’, swearin’ ‘n’ swattin’.

The neighbors must think I’m some kind of sadist as they see me slapping myself to annihilate the bugs that are bugging me.

If anybody ever hits me as hard as I hit myself I’ll start researching internet stink bomb recipes.

You might think from all this I uniformly hate all bugs. Not true. Bugs make the demanding cut in my list of three favorite Americans (Ben Franklin, Mark Twain and Bugs Bunny).

Well, that’s enough talk about insects for now.

I’m busy as a bee and I gotta fly.

My tweets of the month

My time is so fractured this week I have been unable to devote the hour or so’s worth of brain power to conjuring up a coherent blog post for three days.

Why that should bother me must be some kind of psychosis.

Back in the days when I had a salaried job it never once bothered me when I’d dog it. In fact, I used to brag to fellow idlers about how little I’d achieved on the company clock while we were doing things like filling out football pools on the building’s roof.

I have had spurts of genuine productivity. I did a travel story about the 50th anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall on August 13, 1961. That should run next week on msnbc.com. Fascinating historical stuff, it is.

I sat down twice and tried to convey my observations about how jukeboxes have gotten so much worse as they’ve gotten so much better, but was distracted. I will soon, I’m sure.

Today I’m leaving for a weekend of golf with my cousin’s husband up in Warren, Pa. Should be a blast.

But while other men are out enjoying carefree time in the sun, I’m sure I’ll be thinking, man, I’m really neglecting the blog while I’m golfing.

Funny, but I’ve never once expressed similar feelings about the family.

I guess the blog seems to need me more than the family, which has HDTV when I’m not around.

So here’s a Twitter round-up to shave off some of your day’s productivity. Feel free to follow it at 8days2Amish. It’s a pretty good batch and makes me wonder if I should see if my local Chinese restaurant will hire me to compose notes for the fortune cookies.

Of course, those of you who read my blog should feel no obligation to follow my tweets.

Because I’m sure at some point next month I’ll need to drop another space-filler blog post when I’m feeling too harried to write something about nothing like I’ve been doing for three years now.

Have a great weekend -- and try and guess which Tweet I’m most proud of! (Answer at the end)

• I don’t know why I spend so much time caring about the global economy when there’s no evidence the global economy cares about me.

• Despite my objections, grocery store check-out lady insisted each purchase needed its own plastic sack. She was very bagnanimous.

• Honesty without tact is like brain surgery without anesthesia. The operation could cure, but the complications can kill.

• Those who build circular homes are doomed to live lives without foundational cornerstones.

• Calling one lone winged insect a "fly" makes about as much sense as calling, say, the tuna a "swim."

• A kid napping is one of the world's most joyful occasions; a kidnapping one of the worst. Behold the power of the space bar!

• Nothing -- not public speaking, not cop in the rearview mirror -- makes me go to pieces like hearing someone say, "Hey, just do the math."

• What am I to infer from the fact my blog readership spikes on days when I post nothing? Must I cease blogging to become a successful blogger?

• People who allow technological advances to drive them crazy are doomed to wind up in iPadded cells.

• If it cared at all about titular accuracy then Scotland Yard would be called London Building.

• "Retweet!" still sounds to me like something Elmer Fudd would shout when Bugs Bunny was closing in.

• Punchline in search of a joke abt mule farmer with a crazy rabbit: "And that's what happens when a farmer gets a wild hare up his ass."

• How can pigs be so filthy in a world rife with so much hogwash?

• Switzerland would today be an international superpower if it had only channeled its creative thinking toward the Swiss Army Bazooka.

• Is it just my imagination or does being First Lady mean you get to live to be about 97

• I hope in my next life to come back as a pot just so no one will point out the hypocrisy when I call the kettle black.

• Pacifists make the worst joke tellers. They're afraid to deliver a really good punchline.

My favorite is the one about kid napping and kidnapping. To me, it’s the perfect tweet because it’s clever, seems original, and there’s absolutely no where else in the world where I can find a place to use the line.