Good Night

My flight out of Philly just got cancelled, and I think the cancellation was caused by Sex. They claim it's due to mechanical problems, but I think the reason just might be sex. Lots of flights these days are cancelled because of sex. It has nothing to do with something going on in the bathroom of the pilot's lounge between the hunky pilot and a sexy flight attendant. It has to do with testosterone...or the lack of it. Testosterone is a key ingredient for guy-hood. And I think that might really be why my flight was just cancelled. Here's what I mean. 96% of the approximately 600,000 American pilots are guys. And in the last 30 years American men have had a 52% drop in testosterone. That's not a sexist statement, it's a medical statistic. The airlines are screaming for pilots. They're beginning to cancel more and more flights, because some picky-picky passengers still prefer flying in airplanes with pilots in the cockpit.

I'm sitting here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room, trying to figure things out. Things like "Why is everybody always taking selfies these days?" Could it be that it's because nobody else is interested? What would be a completely safe security question? How about "What is the meaning of life?" If we're not supposed to have midnight snacks, how come a light comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Why should we want to save the planet? How about because this is where we keep all our stuff, including our lovers, our chocolate and our beer. What does the word MATH stand for? Could it be Mental Abuse To Humans? What kind of answer would you get if you really did ask your doctor if the advice you got from a TV commercial was right for you? If the system isn't broken, does that mean it's fixed? How can we say no to negativity? And how come there aren't many well behaved people in the history books? Give the podcast a listen.

What happened when "Lawn Tractor Man" met "Piano Man"? Something happened. This podcast was done years ago. But it was by far the most downloaded podcast of all TODAY, and there are 558 podcasts in all. It has a story in it about NYC Police Detective Bill McGroaraty, who was a friend of mine until the bad guys got him. And there's a story about some chest thumping, sweat stained pride in having the fastest lawn tractor on the block. And there's also a story about two pilots and a woman...a story that took a lot of discipline for me to write because it hits pretty close to home. But it was published years ago. How come after all this time, it ranked as the most downloaded podcast of all time. I don't know "Whassup" but maybe you can tell me. I'd really like to know. My email is dick@dicksummer.com

I am sitting here in my big, comfortable, manly black leather poppa chair in my living room, reading a newspaper. A NEWSPAPER. Do you remember reading a NEWSPAPER? And it's published by the AARP! I guess that explains why when I fill out an on line form it takes forever to scroll down to my birth year. And why I sometimes think 1997 was ten years ago. I have good memories from 1997. My phone plugged into the wall in 1997. And I used the dial up method of getting on the internet. It took a while, but I had a while to spend back then. MTV played music videos in 1997. And the songs that were their picks to click back then are now called Classic Hits on You Tube. I carried paper pictures of my Lady Wonder Wench and the rest of my family in my wallet back then. There were only two genders in 1997, and I was one of them and my Lady was the other. Hard to realize that back then was now in 1997. Which maybe explains why when I sneezed yesterday, my back hurt all day.

I like fortune cookie words. Break some words apart, like a fortune cookie, and sometimes you find interesting messages inside. The word "Politics" is a good example. Break it apart and you find "poli" which means many and "ticks" which refers to annoying little blood sucking bugs. Do politics ever annoy you...like a bunch of little bugs crawling around on you...drinking your blood? I like sitting here in my big, comfortable, manly, black leather poppa chair in my living room, breaking fortune cookie words apart, because lots of times the hidden messages inside tell you something valuable. Impossible is a fortune cookie word. "Im" means I am, and the rest of the word is "possible." So break the fortune cookie word "Impossible" apart, and you get a boot in the butt that tells you to get up off your fanny and give something hard a try. Break open the fortune cookie word "analyst" and you find the word "anal" meaning anal, and "ist" which in this case means person. So breaking open the fortune cookie word y

Back in the day when there were daily duck and cover drills, when we practiced putting our school desks between us and thermo-nuclear distruction, there was a group of friends who called themselves, "The Royal Order Of The Purple Shaft." I was a charter member, along with John, Jerry, Frank, and Leo. We have all lost touch over the years. But a time warp ZAP! happened this week. John's daughter Jane sent me an email, and I think at least part of the Royal Order shall ride the shaft again. Jane says she remembers meeting me at a radio station… specifically WNBC in New York. She is now a knock out graphics artist but she was just a little kid back then. I don't know if she has kids of her own, but I'll find out. Lots of girls these days don't want to have kids when they find out that it takes 9 months to download a kid.

Who do you trust? I'm sitting here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room, looking at one person in my life who I can trust, completely. My Lady Wonder Wench. She's in her pink bathrobe, with her left leg tucked up under her butt, and she's sticking out her tongue a little while she's squinting through a magnifying glass at a cross stitch pattern she's working on. I'm a lucky guy in lots of ways. There are several other friends and relatives in my life that I can completely trust. I'm finding out that lots of people don't have anybody they can trust in their lives, and I don't know how they get from one day to another...not really trusting anybody. The late, great, Johnny Carson did a TV show called, Who Do You Trust. Married pairs of contestants were asked to answer some questions. The husband decided which one would answer. Right there you can see that was back in the old black and white TV days. You'd need a staff of divorce lawyers right there in the studio if you tr

This just in from a big tourist company: "What vacationers want to do most on vacation is nothing." That's not big news to those of us who are members of the Louie Louie Generation. But...remember that Big Louie...the head guy of the Louie Louie Generation says in my book Staying Happy Healthy And Hot, available at Amazon dot com...shameless plug...Big Louie always says, "There's never enough time to do all the nothing you want to do." And as usual, he's right. But not for the reason you might think. You simply can't do completely nothing, because doing nothing is doing something. Think of the word recreation. Re-Creation. Creation is a very big thing according to a very big best selling holy book...where it says God spent all week creating everything, then on the seventh day...even the Almighty God had to knock it off and rest for a day. Look, creating stuff is hard work. It doesn't matter if you create stuff by building a house, making potato salad, or figuring a way to get to Mars and back.

I like sitting by the window when my Lady and I go to Applebees for our regular Friday night dinner out. The window shade was down this Friday, so I pulled it back up so my Lady and I could watch the world outside spin around. We like to do that, because we like to watch the other people arriving for their Friday night dinners out. Are they holding hands? What's he doing with a girl as pretty as she is? Oh please don't bring that screaming kid in here. We had just started guessing what a young couple was watching on their smart phones as they were walking in, when a middle aged guy came storming over to our table, pulled the shade back down, looked at me and said, "You pulled that shade up so the sun is hitting me right in the eyes. I'm going to kick your ass." Without thinking, I stood up fast, so I could return the favor. I have some martial arts training. I was pretty good at it. In fact after my first Karate lesson I found I could break a 2 inch board with my cast. I was born and raised in Brooklyn, whe

Sacred excrement. I knew this was going to happen eventually. But it knocked me right out of my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room anyway. This just in...seriously: "A Vancouver Buildings Council has blocked the lease of a restaurant property to the fish-and-chips chain "Moby Dick" on the grounds that "Dick" is an offensive word. The restaurant chain says the name has "Literary significance" and does not refer to male genitalia. Dick is not an offensive word." No. Dick is my name. I am occasionally not offensive. Dick was also my dad's name, it is my name, and the name of a couple of other reasonably un-offensive guys I know. I figured this would eventually happen because that's where we're going. We are becoming a "Win or Whine" society. First there was the famous "N" word. And doesn't that sound weird to you when some well dressed, well paid fantastically famous newscaster is reporting on a serious story with a straight face, and he's talking about "Senator so and so" wh

I Just came back from a quick trip to our favorite diner with my Lady Wonder Wench. It's in a college town nearby. I couldn't figure out what was going on. Out of 13 couples we saw, only one couple was holding hands. That seemed very much out of whack. My mind often jumps from one thing to another, so I started wondering what is this whack some of us are so often out of. And I got one answer when I sat down here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room and started thumbing through Astronomy magazine. Some astronomers call the formation of our moon, "The Big Whack." They figure something very big smacked the earth a long time ago, and the stuff that flew off the earth eventually became the moon. Evidently that kind of thing happens a lot more than we know. One day about 66 million years ago a 6 mile wide asteroid slammed into the earth off the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The explosion was as powerful as millions of nuclear bombs. It kicked up billions of tons of vaporized ro

I almost fell out of my big, comfortable, manly poppa chair in my living room just now, when I saw this in a very legit news magazine. "Longtime single people in places like Brooklyn and San Francisco are now marrying themselves in full ceremonies." First of all, I was born and brought up in Brooklyn and I've been to San Francisco. Any comparisons are fraught with foolishness. Brooklyn guys figure a 7 course meal is a hot dog and a six pack. The same cannot be said for guys in San Francisco, because it's really hard to tell which people are guys there. Second, and far more important is I don't think Sologmasts have really thought this out. It's not like if you win a free trip to Paris, you get to go twice. There is a very high divorce rate. What does that do if you marry yourself? If you divorce yourself, who gets what?

Distractions, distractions, distractions. They're all over the place. I was sitting here in my big, manly, comfortable poppa chair trying to get started on a new podcast yesterday when a four engine, 6 ton wasp hit the glass door here in my living room. I mean he hit it. I thought he was going to break the glass. He didn't break the glass, but the whack must have made him dizzy, because he fell down, and glared up at me...and buzzed. I could hear him through the double glass door. There are a lot of wasps in our yard this time of year, and some of them don't understand glass, so they whack into the glass door. Generally they just get up and fly away. This guy didn't. I swear he was standing there at the bottom of the door, and glaring up at me. Now I'm not an expert at wasp anatomy, but it looked to me like he was standing on his back legs, and he raised one of his front legs and pointed it at me...I think he was giving me a waspy center finger. I forgot about the podcast, because I am a man, and I wasn't

I've just had a "Peek-a-boo I see you" experience at my eye doctor's office. Peek-a-boo I see you is the only game you can't cheat at. And it's magic. Real magic. Especially the I see you part. You put your hands up over your eyes and everything disappears...except what's inside you. You catch a quick glimpse & a feeling of what's really inside yourself. No words just a few quick images and sometimes deep feelings. It's like taking a selfie of your entire universe for a moment. Then you put your hands down and the rest of the whole world suddenly re-appears, and puts you back in your place...or at least the place where you think you belong. It's like you're in control of the universe for just that moment. There are no words in there. Just some fast images and...feelings. That's why even the littlest baby instinctively understands the game and laughs. No words, just feelings. A baby laughs when you play peek-a-boo with him because what's inside him is happy. That's a natural reaction to the fact that you'r

I'm sitting here in my big, manly, black leather poppa chair in my living room, scratching my head again. Those of us who are guys in long term relationships with someone who is estrogen enriched and has a high voice and confusing ways will understand. Arguing with a woman is like reading a software license agreement. In the end it's best to ignore almost all the endlessly depressing small print and just click "I agree." When you sense something has gone wrong in your relationship because you notice she is throwing your clothes out the window, and you innocently ask "what's wrong", she will often say..."nothing." So now we can understand that when a woman says "nothing" she sometimes means plenty of something. Women tend to react that way after you've told too many fart jokes at a party...or when you notice an extremely attractive and very silicone enhanced person slowly undulating down the street, and you mention how much fun it would be if breast implants came with little squeaky toys inside...better lock

Thanks for dropping in here on my podcast. I can use the company. I lost a little Louie Louie this week. If you remember how happy hearing Louie Louie used to make you, you'll understand what I mean. It was a middle finger kind of week. Almost, but thankfully not quite, a "Sounds of Silence" time. So now, I'm sitting here in my big, manly, comfortable black leather poppa chair in my living room, trying to figure out how to get my Louie Louie back. I think I need a shot of emotional Viagra. As the jazz great B.B. King used to say, "Playing the blues makes some guys happy." Not me. The Wall Street guys would probably put it differently. They might say, "The sky is falling this week."But I know it's not, As they'd say, "It's just a slight correction." It's been a tough week. I've been trying to get back the Gratitude Attitude that I wrote about in my book Staying Happy Healthy And Hot. It's easy to start feeling old when you've been around for quite a while. But I've got to put the gratitude attitude back to

I'm sitting here in my big, manly, black leather poppa chair in my living room, contemplating the great divide between men and women. I know a couple of really smart, pretty women who are leading lonely lives...I think un-necessarily. In my book Staying Happy Healthy And Hot, there's a story about a Louie-Louie Generation lady I saw in an Applebee's bar recently. She was eyeing some guy sitting alone. She reached into her pocket book for a small perfume bottle, squirted some on her little lace hankie, slipped it into the guy's jacket pocket, smiled up at him and walked away without saying a word. Naturally, he caught up with her and asked her what that was all about. She just said, "It looks good in your pocket." Then she asked if he went there often, and shook her head as if she couldn't hear and said, "It's noisy in here," and she leaned over toward him so she could hear his answer. The guy didn't stand a chance. That lady knew the secret. Just ask. I've never seen a woman get turned down when she say

Today's Headline: Heartthrob Kit Harrington, the brooding, sword-wielding hero Jon Snow in HBO's Game of Thrones, is fed up with women swooning over him, hearts throbbing like mad. Awww. Let's say it all together guys at the count of 3. 1-2-3...AAwww the poor guy. He says, "It's blatantly sexist." Yes, and I am shocked...shocked I tell you. And not the least bit jealous. Because I'm a real guy. If you women started spreading some of that excess swooning and throbbing over Kit around to the rest of us guys we wouldn't complain like he does. Because real guys don't complain. We just soldier on...even in the face of such throbbing, festering female ferocity. But if you're going to pitch in and throb for us too ladies, you can't start too soon. According to the Washington Post, Americans had about 33% less sex last year compared to 1990. And the smart guys in the white lab coats at the University of Pittsburgh say spending too much time on Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and Instagram seems to be the main reason.

I am generally in favor of telling the truth. Truth is powerful. But last week I lied. I lied to Facebook. I told them my birthday was last week, they put up a notice to that effect and somewhere around 400 of you sent Happy Birthday greetings...for which I sincerely thank you...I tried to answer all of you, to tell you thanks, I didn't mean to lie to you, I only meant to lie to the Facebook computer, and I really do appreciate your good wishes. But after about 100 answers, my computer screwed up and stopped working. There are at least 2 lessons here. Lesson #1 is, "Never let a computer know you're in a hurry." Lesson #2 is, "Never let a computer program like Facebook know all about you, because computers can't keep secrets, they'll blab to anyone who knows how to hack." So now, I'm sitting here in my big, manly black leather poppa chair, trying to figure out which of these to believe: "He who hesitates is lost," or "Look before you leap." Common sense says they can't both be true but there's an ELEMENT

Stop complaining. We can't do anything much about what is, but we can look at it differently...and we really should.