Louie Castoria

I recently waxed rhapsodic about the “Tao of mowing,” the joy that comes from wordless attention to a fulfilling task. But every simple pleasure is balanced with a simple annoyance.

In the distant past, 1976, we started an Independence Day tradition of disparaging King George III, the British monarch who is blamed for touching off the Revolution.

Leo “The Lip” Durocher said it best, “Baseball is like church. Many attend, few understand.” I’m one among the crowd. My long-suffering wife, Susy, is among the few, a life-long,

With apologies to the Blues Brothers, I ask, “Who’s in charge here, humans or dogs?”

My friend Siri tells me that déjà vu, that nagging feeling that you’re in a time loop, means literally (in French) “already seen.” If so, movie goers are seeing a lot of déjà vu lately.

As everyone knows, we signed the Declaration of Independence on the Fourth of July, 1776. Except we didn’t.

As a professional Unpaid Humor Columnist, I recommend comedy as the cure, whatever kind of harmless humor you enjoy. Here are jokes of various lengths and topics. I hope at least one of them will brighten your day. I have no claim of authorship on them.

It’s Fall now, that time of year when the leaves go technicolor, then a drab shade of brown. It’s when we start depending on alarm clocks rather than roosters to tell us when to wake up.

Louie Castoria wakes up to the election ahead.

[Last week’s QuipTide was loosely based on Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” This week we do a similar injustice to Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” with more or less the same plot and some original text, but advanced to this year and reset in a high school. Caution: it’s mildly spooky.]