•  We have a loud, eleven-year-old dishwasher.  We call it Moaner.  I keep asking Moaner to use its “inside voice” when it’s running, but it just blankly returns my stare and grinds its teeth, like all adolescents do.

•  My favorite quote?  Undoubtedly a double quote, where the opening quotes curl inward toward the quoted material and the closing quotes also curl inward, except that the tails of the closing quotes are at the bottom.  That’s my favorite quote — thanks for asking.

•  If I were walking down the street and someone called “Young Man!”, I would probably turn around, even though I am no longer a member of that category.  Of course, I would also turn around if someone said “Old Man!” but no one except troublemakers say that these days.  Besides, I would go home much less happy.

•  Woody Allen is a talented writer and director, as if I needed to point that out.  But his world is so limited. He seems to be fascinated by, and populates his scripts with, gossippy self-absorbed cosmopolitans who are hard to care about.  I liked him better when he was just a mensch.

•  Someone near and dear to me in our household asked me to buy a bottle of Crema de Mezcal for a drink recipe.  Now, I have enjoyed many an apertif over the years, but this was like someone collected the discharge of the pipeline Andy Dufresne crawled through in Shawshank Redemption, then poured it over a bed of rotten quinoa, whose drippings were distilled ten minutes with a propane torch and then pumped into the air-conditioning system of a 1981 Buick Skylark, which was then driven 2,000 miles through the Ozarks (until the radiator cap blew off) before being filtered through four-day-old gym socks and hand-squeezed into a bowl of dead goldfish.

•  Just in case anyone didn’t get the message, you are welcome to what’s left of my bottle of Crema de Mezcal.  It’s nearly full.  Email me or leave a comment.

•  I keep waiting for someone named Cornelius Horatio Collins to become famous.  He will soon realize that no one spells Cornelius right the first time, and this will induce him to knock on my internet door and ask me to sell him the rights to my domain, chcollins.com.   Cornelius will say, I am sure we can come up with a price.  I will say, add a few zeroes and we can start hypertexting over the protocol.

•  I am a determinedly non-vocal participant.  I only mouth hymns in church and I would never chant om in a yoga class.  At dinner parties, of which luckily there are few, I occupy my lips with wine not words.  Those who share my affliction are often called introverts, from the Latin for turned toward oneself.  But a better term for people like me might be introvocative, or talking to oneself.  And this blog fits the description.

•  It is much easier to tune out of a bad movie on television than it is to walk out on one that you paid to watch.  I have walked out on two movies in my lifetime: Trash by Andy Warhol (1970) which we saw in a theater in Shadyside (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania, and 200 Motels by Frank Zappa (1971) which was being shown at a drive-in near Wampum, Pennsylvania.  Strictly speaking, the latter was a drive-out, not a walk-out.

•  It is also much easier to flip the channel on an annoying television evangelist than it is to walk out of a church service — but we have done that also.  (Like good Presbyterians, we waited to leave until the congregation stood for the next hymn.)   I would be interested to hear the walk-out stories of my readers, if anyone would care to comment.