There was once a professional football team called the Beloit Fairies.

CVS gives me receipts longer than some of my golf shots.

At one time, you were not supposed to have sex until you were married. (We can be confident that this “moral” injunction was frequently broken, even in Puritan New England, at least as revealed by studies of marriage and birth certificates that indicate a lot of babies were born in early Massachusetts only five or six months after the marriage.) My friend was a young modern woman, and she and her boyfriend had not waited for marriage to have sex. Indeed, they were living together without an official marriage ceremony. However, even though her work allowed her to put a significant other on the health insurance plan, she told me that she would never do that unless they were married. Ah, modern romance.

I learned at the bar trivia contest that the official state motto of Indiana is “The Crossroads of America.” That motto made sense to me. I have entered Indiana from the north, south, east, and west. Every time I continued driving straight through, wondering when I would get to the next state. I, however, have met nice, interesting people from Indiana. I met them all in New York.

The Indiana state motto is better than some others. Michigan’s is “Si Quaris Peninsulam Amoenam Circumspice.” Come on. This is the USA. Speak American. I tend to believe that we should have no Latin, except perhaps for et cetera. (Remember Yul Brynner in “The King and I?) Maybe you understand that Michigan motto, but I have to trust those who tell me it translates to, “If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.” I like lots of things about Michigan, but really? How many of you have ever woken up and said I would like to visit or live in a place that boasts it is a “pleasant peninsula.” How many of you have ever thought of Michigan as a peninsula? But then again, a part of Michigan is known as the Upper Peninsula. That implies a lower one, which means that there are two peninsulas. I am guessing that the motto excludes the upper one.

And I note without comment that the state motto of Alabama—“Audemus jura nostra defendere”–translates to “We Dare Defend Our Rights.”

The billboard from some sort of church warned “LUST DESTROYS.” And here I thought that lust led to the creation of new life.

I put on shorts for the first time as I head into a new summer, and I look down and think: “An old white man’s winter-white legs are never attractive.”

“Do they lie down in soft grass

to gaze up at a sky of roaming shape-shifting

clouds? Do children still have time for daydreaming?”

Harryette Mullen, “Urban Tumbleweed”