Prompt on page 6 of
No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog.

My favorite pieces of advice:

To choose a spouse, find someone who is flawlessly kind but has an incredibly strong backbone. See also: Marry him only if you will be proud when your child turns out just like him.

Don’t make assumptions, and don’t take things personally.

What you give is what you get. When you predict that negative things will happen, they do. The opposite is also true.

*Update: Three more good ones:

Plan less, do more.

Always have a valid passport.

Stop picking at that.

Prompt on page 16 of
No One Cares What You Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog.

Three underused insulting words:

1. Nit
As in, “Can it, you nit.”

2. Amok
As in, “I can’t put my finger on it. There’s something amok with him.”

3. Soft
As in, “I wouldn’t borrow her notes. She’s a little soft.”

by Philip Larkin
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Excerpt from Antonia Cornwell’s very kind recap of her trip to the U.S.:

“Just as Earl Grey tastes better in England and A&W root beer tastes better in America, certain music sounds better here too, like Elton John’s Crocodile Rock on the Mustang radio when you’re driving past baseball games and white picket fences on the way to the diner to sit at a Formica table and order pancakes and corned-beef hash.”

Also, this is the second Londoner (Londonist? Londonite? Luddite?) I’ve heard wax nostalgic about pancakes and/or giant American breakfasts. If there’s one thing we do better than public inebriation, it’s hangover breakfasts.

Sarah Hepola is a better writer than you (and by you, I mean me). Anyway, today we are celebrating because, despite moving to New York where they frown on such things, Sarah’s blogging again! And this time, she’s not just blogging about her life and articles, but also about sex!

Here’s what she has to say about American Idol:

“I start watching, I get addicted, I start shooting American Idol into the soft tissue of my upper thigh.”

Oh, darling, how we’ve missed you.