What H. Boyce sent was a copy of a decision handed down by the Georgia Court of Appeals in the case of Apostol Athanasiou vs. White. It seems the former had hired the latter to mow her lawn. What happened next, in the words of the court, is that “White allegedly slipped on some dog feces concealed in the tall grass, and his left foot was severely cut as it slid under the lawnmower.” I am not going to tell you how this case came out, because you’ll want to find out for yourself in the event that it is released as a major motion picture, but I will say, by way of a hint, that in the court’s opinion “neither party had actual knowledge of the specific deposit of dog feces on which White apparently slipped.”

Our next item comes from a release sent out by the Vodka Information Bureau, in New York City. The Vodka Information Bureau has learned that a whopping 42 percent of the women surveyed consider themselves “primary decision makers” in deciding what brand of vodka to buy. This raises in my mind, as I am sure it does in yours, a number of questions, primarily: What, exactly, do we mean by the verb “to whop”? So I looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary, and there I found—remember, this is the column where we are not making things up—these helpful examples:

“In less time than you can think whop comes a big black thing down. as big as the stone of a cheese-press.” “Mother would whop me if I came home without the basket.”

So I called my mother, who said, and I quote, “I always make the vodka-buying decision as follows: the largest bottle for the smallest amount of money.” So I called the Vodka Information Bureau and told them what my mother said, and they said, sure, you can buy the cheapest vodka if you don’t mind getting a lot of impurities, but if you want a nice clean vodka, you want a brand such as is manufactured by the company that sponsors the Vodka Information Bureau.

Finally, and sadly, we have received word of