Disclaimer: Despite Halley's recent comments re The Money, this is strictly a public service announcement. Of course, if Good Vibes were to offer me a lifetime supply of the cock rings pictured above left, I suppose I could find a use for them. Forget all that penis-enlargement spam. These puppies really work! You won't get any more of a kickback than I do for promoting them, but your lover might get a serious kickforward. Might say whoa, dude, how'd you DO that? Just trying to be socially relevant here. Really.

• Like an expensive sports car, fine-tuned and well-built, Portia was sleek, shapely, and gorgeous, her red jumpsuit molding her body, which was as warm as the seatcovers in July, her hair as dark as new tires, her eyes flashing like bright hubcaps, and her lips as dewy as the beads of fresh rain on the hood; she was a woman driven -- fueled by a single accelerant -- and she needed a man, a man who wouldn't shift from his views, a man to steer her along the right road, a man like Alf Romeo.

• Sheila was easy as opening a jar of pickles, not one closed by a man who has virility doubts and closes a jar so women and young boys get hernias opening it or at least the boys get them; although I heard about a woman who had a hiatal hernia so I guess women get them too but doctors don't ask them to cough unless their malpractice covers sexual deviance but a jar closed by some ninety-year-old whose grip on the jar as well as reality has slipped.

• As Professor Wincklespoon took a sip from his coffee, craving the caffeine that scalding hot water had seduced from the beans, his eyes fell on an old equation he had written down years ago, metaphorically speaking, for the falling of his eyes should not be taken literally, and suddenly it struck him, as if his mind had been cleared by the same stormy wind that had brought a dark cloud overhead, two million volts of electricity from that same cloud and gone were the man and his equation, the solution to the theory of everything.

• It was then that Caroline remembered her kitchen back in Montana, with a stove that she might or might not have turned off, and so with a heavy sigh, she put down the penguin.

• "Mummy's gone to Paris to buy hats, and Daddy's pranged the Bentley," Fiona responded with a m�lange of wry acceptance and distant promise, her ring-less fingers playing slippily on the moist champagne flute in a way that suggested to the normally jaded Sir Jeremy far more than merely imbibing Bucks Fizz.

• Having opened my 40th birthday present from my husband -- a kitchen window fan -- and now on my way to the bakery to pick up my cake, I started thinking: What if I get hit in this intersection, and, struck with amnesia, I hobble to the edge of the highway, hungry and confused, and am picked up by a lonely trucker headed for McDonald's and since I have no memory, I've forgotten I hate McDonald's, so I hop in, and he -- just thankful for the company -- figures I'm a middle-aged housewife looking for love in all the wrong places and he's got several of them?