Burton Cole

Drive minus athletic ability equals disaster

When it comes to sports, I possess tons of competitive drive. But I misplaced my only ounce of athletic ability. In an elementary school football game, I was wide open for a touchdown pass. I ducked. On my junior high basketball team, I charged the lane and leaped. But I’d lost the ball somewhere around mid-court. I landed in a skittering heap of arms and legs about 20 feet out of bounds. It’s how I became a humor writer. People didn’t think anyone could be that clumsy without doing it on purpose. I resorted to finding competitions wherever I could to satisfy my ...

Running away as a grown up is just too much work

It’s been decades since I last ran away from home. I was 3. I wriggled through the tunnel my beagle burrowed under the backyard fence and set out to celebrate freedom with my cousins Dale and Gary. My career as a runaway thumped to an abrupt halt when my dad caught up to me on the tractor. I have no recollection of any of this, but I’m told I was paddled all the way back home. Timeouts hadn’t been invented yet. It must have worked. I never ran away again. But I’ve been tempted. The thing about running away from home when you’re in your 60s is that it’s far too ...

Cow therapy costs a lot of moola

People pay up to $300 to calm their nerves by cuddling with a cow just like that one over — LOOK OUT! Sorry. I’ve been a bit jittery around bovines since one jumped on me. It was at our farm, and teenage me bent over the watering trough to clean out floating bits of hay — cows are ...

I saw a man, he danced on an earworm with his wife

Among the greatest pestilences, plagues and pesky problems known to mankind — to womankind, too — is the earworm. An earworm is created when a bouncy song with lots of rhythmic repetition floats on the airwaves, gains too much altitude, freezes, and a chunk of the tune breaks off. Iced-over song snippets plummet to earth all the time. Every once in a while, a person — you, for example — accidentally steps into the path of a falling frosted flake of a melody, and it whaps your ear. That frozen snippet gets up, dusts itself off, then slithers down the ear canal and wriggles ...