my Rivendell

I rode my Rivendell home for lunch today, parked the bike in its
assigned spot near the others in the bedroom, noticed my wife notice me
notice the new, multi-shaped, cushiony-chair thingy, and feeling
pressured to comment, I recalled her pattern of recent purchases: first
the desk chair, and then the whole damn car just for the seat, and so I
asked:

"Lumbar support?"

She nodded her head yes. I sat down to a bowl of ox-tail soup, and she
placed the latest Bicycling magazine before me, back cover folded open.
She knows I like to read back to front; she's a sweetie, she is. I
slowly spooned the soup and perused the ads, then lapsed on the soup
and settled into a review of chain lubes. She snatched the magazine out
from under me, went to the other room and yelled back:

"Eat your ****ing soup before it gets cold!"

When I finished with the ox-tail soup, I felt a sudden awakenening of
my fullest expression of manliness; and I went to her.

"Hey," I said.

She returned my baritone bid with a deep flash of her enchanting eyes
of white circling gold circling black. And then it happened; out of her
blacks -- magical sparkling red stars appeared and danced toward my
eyes. I closed my eyelids and surrendered some of my most powerful
neurons to her red sparkles. Two by two, I paired off my knightly
neurons to her dancing stars and rushed the new couplings off to
private places in my brain to bounce, each with their own multi-shaped,
cushiony-chair thingy. Afterward, in a lull, on the floor, by our own
multi-shaped, cushiony-chair thingy, I noticed the tag sewn into it:
"Liberator."

"Where'd you get this thing?"

"I ordered it from an ad out of the back of one of your cycling
magazines," she said, with more than a hint of mild exasperation."

"Well then," I opined, "I must post a review on the bicycle tech list."

Joe Starck
Madison, Wisconsin

That must have been some amazing soup!

[applause]

ROFL!!