From the "what the hell?" category:

The ad on my main blog page (and WHY, pray tell, is it taking so long for the actual blog words to materialize these days? Huh, Blogger? Can you answer that? Well, CAN you?) gives two links to Minneapolis real estate. At the bottom it says: "Related searches: Duluth, Minnesota; throat cancer."

Must be something in the water. They've got a lot of it in Duluth.

I just e-mailed Jennifer to discuss her coming to dinner tonight, and told her I had a cold, and wrote "bleah." Spellcheck suggested that I change "bleah" to "bleach."

From now on, that's what I'm going to do. ("Guess what, Betsy! We're having beets for dinner!" My response: "Bleach!")

Of course, Kip suggests that bleached beets would be a good alternative. As he says, "All the flavor of beets without that annoying purple color. Yum."

To which I say, of course, "Bleach!"

My 70-year-old father had a heart attack a week ago Sunday.

He's been in good shape all his life and has never spent a night in the hospital. But on Saturday, November 1, he and my mother went out to lunch, and he developed what he thought was really bad heartburn.

It lasted until Sunday morning, at which point my mother -- who had tried unsuccesfully to get him to the hospital on Saturday -- realized things were REALLY bad when he agreed to go.

Turned out his carotid artery was 100 percent blocked. They did an angioplasty and found out that all his other arteries were between 75 and 90 percent blocked.

He was out of the hospital in a few days, but I think the experience scared the hell out of him. He's going to have a bypass in a few weeks; he's got an appointment with a cardiologist November 21.

Predictably, Jennifer and I were basket cases when my mother called us on Sunday evening to tell us what happened. Equally predictably, Megan was pragmatic. Sometimes it's good to be a nurse.

He told me while he was still in the hospital that he's been feeling little "twinges" (like his so-called heartburn) since the BEGINNING OF THE YEAR, but thought it was just bad indigestion.

I guess it goes without saying that I'm damn glad he agreed to go to the hospital on Sunday morning. I'm also damn glad he didn't drop dead on a tennis court or somewhere.

Someone was looking out for him.

Andrew is currently watching "JoJo's Circus" on the Disney Channel, a show that heretofore I considered really lame. But here's a bit of advice that I just learned from the show that we would all do well to follow:

If a grownup tells you not to honk the orange clown nose, they probably have a good reason.

Hard to argue with that. Don't honk the orange clown nose, people.