Day: December 11, 2015

My wife is an absolute follow the instructions, by the recipe, baker. But that attention to detail still hasn’t made her chocolate chip cookies taste any better. One day, after the cookies had been in the oven a while, I smelled a familiar odor. “The cookies are burning,” I shouted to her. “I know,” she said nonchalantly. “Aren’t you going to take them out of the oven?”  “No. They still have to be in six more minutes.”

# One of the nice things about Christmas in a big city is the way the office buildings leave lights on at night to form a cross and you can always tell the windows in the buildings on Madison Avenue. They’re the ones with the double cross.

A visitor asked a native Russian to explain the new government policy of openness or “Perestroika” to him. He said, “Imagine I have two tin pails. One is empty and the other is full of potatoes. I keep pouring the potatoes back and forth from one bucket to the other.” The America asked, “I don’t get it. You keep moving the potatoes around, but nothing has changed.” The wily Russian said, “Ah, but the noise you that it makes, that is Perestroika.”