A bump in the suicide rate from Prestonsburg to the Purchase was avoided the other night, when the buzzer finally sounded and the Cats had finally finished off upstart Ole Miss, a 22 point dog. That the impending defeat was at Rupp in the SEC opener had the good ol’ boys hanging ropes from the rafters, figuring life might not be worth living if the Johnny Rebs hung on.

The circumstances of the game are a great excuse to share one of my favorite bits of shtick from comedian Robert Klein:

One of the most interesting of the ironclad safety measures was that my father insisted I wait one hour after eating before going in swimming; something about dangerous cramping. This was probably derived from some myth about a kid who drowned in the East River in 1924 after eating an entire pot roast. Waiting a bit after a meal before swimming is not a bad idea. But with true Ben Klein hyperbole, I was warned that if I didn’t wait one full hour and not a second less, I would instantly sink like a rock and die a choking, gurgling death. “You’ll go right to Davy Jones’s locker,” my father would say ominously.

I was therefore scrupulous about waiting the full amount of time, regardless of the hot sun and the sight of other kids swimming happily ten minutes after eating. Their parents were evidently irresponsible. The idea of waiting exactly one hour was etched into my brain like a mental tattoo, as if the food would know precisely what period of time had passed since I ate it. One hour – okay; fifty-nine minutes – dead. When I got a little older, my father explained that I really didn’t need to wait a full hour. The actual amount of time a child would have to wait before swimming depended on what the child ate, and my father was the arbiter at the pool or beach who would decide such things. “What did you have, a tuna-salad sandwich? With a pickle?” Continue reading →