It’s time to talk about The Christmas Problem again, which I did last year and will repeat a bit this year, but most of it’s fresh. Or at least not dead-horse-beaten quite yet. Or maybe it is. I can never tell. Last year, I was in the dumps mainly due to a lack of both funds and sons, with the former having been stretched like a sheet of elastic putty over the newspaper comics so thin that the fat kid from Family Circus went...

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It’s not easy being a Texan when the rest of the civilized world ranks your state’s politics somewhere between corporate prostitution and eating babies, but it’s home. And I hate it. Don’t get me wrong, though. The area of the Lone Star State in which I unhappily reside does have its good points. For instance: the weather is always a pleasant 50,000 degrees and, with no shortage of refineries spewing toxins into the...

He came home from work like he did every night, tired and hungry and late. His children were already asleep in their beds when he creaked open the doors of their rooms to check on them and blow silent goodnight kisses into the dark. He crept down the hallway to his own room, careful to avoid the squeakiest of the old floorboards. He found his wife there, in bed and asleep, with a book resting on her chest. He smiled and switched off the...

Hello again, Internet. I see you have gotten along rather well in my absence, but all good things must come to an end. Deal with it. I could recount all of my grand adventures since my last post, but I want this to be a shorter entry than normal. In fact, I want all my future entries to be shorter from here on. Why? Because I can. Also, because you asked for it. Or, at least, the Internet at large did. So consider this my gift to you...

As you may have noticed, Coquetting Tarradiddles is no longer running new content on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is because I’ve decided to slightly alter the publication schedule to ‘whenever I damn well feel like it’. This is a minor change and absolutely no one should send me hate mail about it. Or, for that matter, thank-you notes. And, with that bit of business out of the way, let’s go ahead and jump right into...