Cranky Large Medium reading, 11 January

Go away.

Will you go, now? Haven't we both suffered each other's company enough, these long seconds since you arrived? So, what is keeping you here? Oh, yes, the reading. Well, if that's all that is preventing you from making your departure, let us remove that obstacle. Here you are:

You are soft-hearted, loyal, and could double for the Hush Puppy. If you ever learn to make a friend, it will be for life, regardless of the very obvious flaws both of you have, mostly because you are so desperate to keep each other around, you're willing to overlook that you friend puts puppies in blenders and you bite your toenails (or some similarly disturbing habit) when nobody is looking. You will have a happy but short career in politics, business or teaching, until you are caught. Your marriage will be congenial. That means dull. Get used to it.

Are you happy, now? Of course not. Satisfaction is not exactly in your lexicon, especially when the truth hits you this way. Still, at least you're better off than these people, all of whom, on this date in history, became the dear departed: Staurakios, Michael I Rhangabes, Constantine IX, Pedro González de Mendoza, Prithvi Narayan Shah, Robert Garran, Pietro Bembo, Theodor Schwann, Isidor Isaac Rabi, Carl David Anderson, Ivan Combe, St. Miltiades, Pope John VI, St. Paulinus II of Aquileia, Yehudah Aryeh Leib Alter, Francis Scott Key, Thomas Hardy, Richmal Crompton, Padraic Colum, Barbara Pym, Sid Chaplin, Robert Anton Wilson, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Louis-François Roubiliac, Alberto Giacometti, William Williams Pantycelyn, Domenico Cimarosa, Vasily Kalinnikov, Oscar Straus, Elena Gerhardt, Max Lorenz, Josef Gingold, Mickey Finn, Spencer Dryden, Jack Soo, Michael Williams, Richard Simmons, Eva Tanguay, Edna Purviance, Beulah Bondi, Bob Lemon, John Molson, Carl Jacobsen, Gregory "Pappy" Boyington, Helmut Poppendick, Carl Karcher, Sir Edmund Hillary,

and James Griffin.

Where the heck is that lost and found department?
Happy birthday, anyway.