I Get By With A Little Advice From My Friends Dept

Especially the female ones. ;-)

FIRST BIT OF ADVICE RECEIVED, AND ITS FOLLOW-UP

A couple of days ago a good friend of mine was giving me advice on how to make myself more marketable to her sisters of the female persuasion. "Kenny," she said as we tootled down the street in my recently-acquired Man-Truck, "you really need to get a nicer car so that more women will go out with you."

Of course I wasn't offended; in fact I thought this was pretty funny, given that I am very far indeed from being in any hurry to sign up for a second tour of duty (in my case, unlike that of Doctor Johnson's acquaintance, experience has hope well and truly by the throat and shows no signs of intending to lighten up any time soon). And this morning something Novera said to me reminded me of the new car advice. So I chuckled and told Novera about said advice. Now, Novera, as some Gentle Readers may not know, drives a very nice car. And, in the interests of giving Novera a hard time (since she knows I know she drives a very nice car), I explained with a straight face that the rickety old cars I drive are actually a subtle and deliberate filtering mechanism...

"...because the kind of woman who would only be willing to date me if I had a nice car, is the kind of woman who would expect me to keep spending lots of money on her for the rest of my life, and who needs that?"

Novera promptly set me straight. "Kenny," she observed, "you're way over-filtering. You're not filtering out the women who would expect you to spend money on them -- you're filtering out the women who want to make sure they get home alive."

SECOND BIT OF ADVICE RECEIVED, AND ITS FOLLOW-UP

A couple of my female co-workers stopped by this morning, and out of nowhere (by the way, I generally like conversations that come "out of nowhere" and this was no exception) they told me that it was time for me to make up my feeble mind. "You need," they informed me, "to either dye your hair red, or else dye your beard blond."

A third subsequently offered up an additional option: "Of course the simplest thing would be to just go clean-shaven...but then [in tones that showed clearly that she knows the redneck she was talking to all too well], we all know that that would require daily maintenance."