New Mexico Mercury

Fool’s Gold: Moolah Kalikimaka

You guys! I just got an Angebot I cannot possibly verpass! The email also said many other things in German, but the gist is that a kindly old woman wants to bequeath me six million euros. (That’s like Europe’s version of Canadian dollars.) And in return she wants … nothing at all.

I feel like I’m living in a medley of Charles Dickens novels. I started out as Pip, the poor soot-covered orphan who couldn’t even afford a real name. Now that I have a Generous Benefactress, I’m turning into Ebenezer Scrooge McDuck, a fabulously rich fellow whom everyone loves for his personality...

Fool’s Gold: No Taste Like Home

Those of us still alive survived the busiest travel weekend of the year. Whew! But that doesn’t mean we’re done traveling. We’re Americans, goldurnit, except for those of us who aren’t. We go go go. And when you next leave town, how will you ensure that your pipes don’t burst, or that your copper pipes don’t get stolen, or that your lead pipe doesn’t murder the butler in the conservatory?

Housesitters, that’s how. These people—some of whom don’t even look homeless—are willing to live in your home for about the price of a movie theater ticket per day, minus popcorn...

Fool’s Gold: The Secret’s in the Stuffing

I have a Thanksgiving secret I need to spill. The holiday is just about here, and like a stomachful of undercooked turkey, I can’t hold it in even one second longer.

But first, I have to tell you about how I’m a vegetarian. I am a hardcore, diehard non-meat eater. And I make no exceptions, except for a significant cross-cultural experience or when I want a hamburger...

Fool’s Gold: Presage Against the Machine

I like to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world. That’s why I try to examine magazine covers every time I’m in the grocery store checkout lane.

Hoo boy. Already I can envision the fan mail I will receive from the educated-at-a-college-that-doesn’t-even-HAVE-a-football-team crowd. They will ream me for collecting my news from the impulse-buy section. And then they will slyly inquire—you can practically hear them typing more quietly—whether the rumors about Lindsay Lohan and Tom Cruise are true...

Fool’s Gold: Busy to the Core

For two thousand and fourteen years—the entire period known either as A.D., “After Democracy,” or C.E., the “Congressional Era”—our government has been gridlocked. And Americans are SICK AND TIRED of it. We showed in the midterm elections that we finally want to get things done, so long as one of those things isn’t voting.

Hey, we never claimed that we wanted to DO things! We just want them DONE...

Holiday Budgets on the Fly

November arrived earlier than ever this year, probably due to global warming. That means it’s time for you to kick back and relax for the rest of the season, because your Christmas shopping is already done. Unless you’re like me. I just found out that people my age are technically adults. This classification burdens me with the responsibility of orchestrating a Flawless Holiday Season. Someone should have told me sooner! For I have not started thinking about what presents to give my loved ones, let alone how to make scarecrow table settings out of oak leaves, Q-tips, and leftover jack-o’-lantern scraps...

Halloween Hissssterics

Halloween centers around the ancient, solemn Celtic rite of taking candy from strangers. I spent Halloween in Ireland once and celebrated by getting too drunk to verify how they observe the holiday in the modern era. But in America, I know for a proven fact that the tradition had not changed in hundreds, or perhaps dozens, of years.

My parent’s generation brought Halloween to our shores in what historians refer to as “pilgrim times.” Abduction had yet to be perfected as an art form, which meant kids could go trick-or-treating after dark, with all the eggs their homemade costumes could carry. Meanwhile, their parents stayed home with the porch lights off, inventing the concept of “sexy Halloween costumes"...

Fool’s Gold: Medicine for Dummies

Several weeks ago, I wrote about the state of my prostate. The results are in. It turns out that I, despite all of my years spent eating Flintstones vitamins, am not a qualified health-care professional.

One concerned reader noted that a wellness checkup for men, an important component of keeping doctors in business, is not prostate cancer PREVENTION but rather prostate cancer DETECTION. I stand corrected, albeit a bit bowlegged after running myself through so many fruitless background checks. And my friend Andy, who is training to be a real doctor, wrote me to say that “as a medical semi-professional, I can say with confidence that you’re too young to need your prostate checked for anything other than recreational purposes”...

Fool’s Gold: Best in Show

I was riding my bicycle outside of town where, unobstructed by houses and buildings, I could see campaign signs for miles. That’s when I figured out how to fix our broken election system.

I sometimes ride one of those sleek road bikes made for athletes and other recreational crazy persons. My bike is a lower-end model that nevertheless weighs less than my water bottle thanks to technology discarded by NASA for making their spacecraft too light. Yet despite being designed for atmospheric re-entry, the bike fails to withstand the usual cracks and bumps in the road caused by extreme contractor ineptitude...

Fool’s Gold: Spin Cycle

It’s been a rough autumn in the news. From ISIS to reports that Tony Bennett is still alive, I for one am as depressed as ever. Other people are always saying, “Newspapers should run more positive stories, like about that nice young boy who picks up roadside garbage for free.” But other people don’t realize that no one—not even that parolee doing his time collecting trash—commits truly selfless deeds worthy of print.

No one, that is, except for me. For just as Rumpelstiltskin spun whole roomfulls of worthless straw into precious gold before it broke the camel’s back, so I want to puree leftover news into easy-to-swallow gold before anyone else chokes on it...