Who is a cheap son? I AM!

Even though I am the first born, my mother never thanks me for giving her her big day, Mother's Day.  She shares her birthday with one of my brothers, so this is the one day that she hogs all to herself.  That's just fine.

When buying my mother a gift, one must remember two things.  She likes penguins and she likes murder mysteries.  It's easy to get her a gift since you are completely safe if you land in either one of those drop zones, to use a forced WWII metaphor.

Now, my parents just took me out for a $500 meal the other night, the night I defended my dissertation. How could I justify not buying her a large, I don't know, pony or something.  Easy.  I'm broke. But they say that the best gifts come from the heart.  (They, by the way, don't have lots of wealthy friends, I'm sure.)

So, I was faced with the problem of what to get her the other night.  I was talking it over with my roommate Animala, when I told her basically what I just told you: penguins and murder mysteries.  Then I had what can only be called either a stroke of genius or just a "stroke"--why not combine the two?  Animala came up with the title: "The Butler Did It: A Penguin Murder Mystery."  Then she went ahead and wrote the entire story, which is fine by me since I'm horrid at plot.  

About 3 hours of cutting and pasting (I mean, real cutting and pasting) later, we had invented an entirely new genre.  I imagine some clever Neanderthal way back in the day stepped back from the wall in his cave, looked at the buffalo he had just painted on it and nodded with a similar satisfaction.

HJ