Maybe I’m nostaglic for my youth, that glorious time in your life when you had not a care in the world – but never took advantage of it. “Enjoy your youth,” my father would say. “Because it’ll be over before you know it.” Boy, was he ever right. Still, when I look at my kids when they’re sullen, sulking, or silly, I can’t help think, well, how damned spoiled they are. I never had Star Wars the Clone Wars Legos or Wii. (Pong was about as advanced as we got; hooking up the Atari used to drive my father nuts, especially if Walter Cronkite was within an hour of broadcasting.) Toys today have more sophisticated operating systems than most ‘computers’ of yesteryear – i.e., those spinning tape, punch card, flashing multi-colored light monstrosities.

However, I never thought I’d see some of the stalwart, classic toys of my youth become any more sophisticated. A yo-yo is pretty much a yo-yo; a spinning top is…you get the picture. But I stand corrected. And of all the toys that I never thought could be improved upon, there is one that I’ve seen perfected. The humble whoopee cushion has met the 21st Century.

My kids showed it to me and I couldn’t believe it: the self-inflating whoopee cushion is here. Instead of putting your mouth around the disgusting flatulating end, where you and all your snotty nosed friends with colds put their mouths as well, there is a sponge-like piece in the core of the cushion. When pressed, sat upon, or otherwise exhausted, the center recoils to its former state, sucking air back into the cushion. Genius? Some people in Stockholm will probably want to ‘catch wind’ of this.

The manufacturer, Ja-Ru, already has a patent on the “Self-Inflating Whoopee Cushion” – U.S. Patent Number 6,331,131, to be precise. I’m thinking, maybe, that such forward thinking, technologically advanced companies might want to expand their reach. The whoopee cushion is one thing; curing cancer another. And as my father used to say (and I’m sure everybody’s father said it, as well), “We can send a man to the moon, but we can’t figure out how to make a milk carton that doesn’t tear every friggin’ time you try to open it.” Maybe we can, dad. What better place to start than the ubiquitous whoopee cushion? Flarp!

What I mean is that a blog, to borrow a line from Woody Allen, is like a shark that has to constantly swim in order to survive. Not that I want a dead shark on my hands, but being an amateur blogger requires a diligence to the blog. You have to write and keep on writing stuff, coming up with ideas, thought, idioms, themes, what have you, in order to warrant an audience of any kind. It’s actually a bit of work.

My idea here, then, is to make a pledge of sorts. And that involves being diligent, staying on top of the blog. Amen. So be it. So I promise to periodically update content on this site, to be witty, urbane, and intelligent. While you are probably not going to get a whole lot of political commentary – likely because, at their core, I think the vast majority of politicians are a bunch of crooks anyway – you may get some. (For example, the self-aggrandizing hubris that motivates the would-be politician to run for office is unfathomable to me.) And as politicians make the promises during campaigns, so to shall I.

Whether or not I can sustain my own, we’ll see…