(Another weird day.  Elaine came home from the hospital at 10 PM, and I am glad she's back. 

However, I was in bed later and I heard her call for me, so I jumped out of bed, tripped over my often used wheelchair and flew across the room, where my fall was broken, once again by my over-worked face.

 A nice nurse checked me out, saw that nothing but my pride was hurt and bandaged me up nicely, so that I can now join the Halloween Parade.)

01.  Postcard Contest

Way back before the turn of the century, I belonged to a Postcard club called 1KSIG.  1K was once the price of a postal stamp in Europe.  SIG stands for Special Interest Group of Mensa.

One year, I participated in an annual postcard contest.  The winner of last year's contest was obligated to present the new winner with an athletic-type trophy. 

I decided to enter the current year's contest, the goal of which was to send more postcards around the world than anyone else - and I did.  A lot more!

When it came time to receive my trophy, I got a letter and postcard from last year's winner informing me that she could not afford a trophy but would donate 1 American dollar to some nice charity instead.

In the contest we always were neck-and-neck in our mailings, with me coming out ahead, and she was probably grumpy about that.  (As we know strongly today, some folks do not like to lose.)

To somehow poke fun at my beer-belly, she attached some "fat jokes" which I kind of liked.

You're so fat, when you step on a scale it says "to be continued.

You have more chins than Chinatown.

When you take the subway, the train gets stuck in the tunnel.

You have to go outside to put on deodorant.

They use your underwear for bungee-jumping.

I thought that these were very creative.

02. Riddles

Before the birth of crosswords in 1913, it was riddles that monopolized the brain power of humans.  

Adrienne Raphel wrote the Essay "To Riddle is to Read (What some of the oldest jokes in English tell us about the language and Anglo-Saxon culture.)

See if you can guess the answer to this riddle:

Name a creature with one eye and 1,200 heads.

Guess:  A monster.

Guess:  An organ. 

Nope! The Latin riddler called Symphosius gave us the answer:

A one-eyed seller of garlic.

I belong to the National Puzzlers League (NPL) as does my brother Joe.  Each moth brings a brochure filled with riddles of all kind.  Joe solves most of them easily; I have a very hard time with them.  I would rather do my crosswords.

If anyone could possibly be interested, my current suppliers of puzzles has expanded to:

Francine, who very kindly sends me some difficult but fun puzzles.

Atlantic Magazine which has some tough daily puzzles online.

Washington Post which has "Mini/Meta" puzzles online.

New Yorker that has some weekly puzzles of all degrees of difficulty online.

New Yorker that posts monthly cryptics online. 

Crossword puzzles are constantly appearing in my snail mailbox from:

Smithsonian

BBC Music

AARP Newsletters

Mensa Bulletin

ETC

We "crossword cookoos" are lucky!

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