Hospital Call

My friends, you are down to about five shopping weeks - around 38 days, depending on when you read this - before Christmas is once again upon us.

Here are nearly 500 toys and gadgets and gifts from Amazon to choose from while you still have time to allow for holiday shipping.

If someone would get me a Kindle, I'd appreciate it. Anyone? Anyone at all? Bueller?

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A friend of mine was in the hospital, about to give birth to her first child.

When I telephoned to see how she was doing and ask if the baby had arrived safely, the nurse said it had and my friend was doing fine.

"Did she have a boy or a girl?" I asked.

"I'm sorry," the nurse replied, "privacy laws will not allow us to give out that information."

"All right, I can understand that," I said. "Let me try this: Can you tell me what she *didn't* have?"

"It wasn't a boy," came the prompt reply.

[Top Greetings via Wit and Wisdom]

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WORD for YOUR WEEK: The other day someone we knew used a form of the word "synergy" in a sentence. Something like, "Well, we were certainly being synergistic, if nothing else." Not being a word my wife hears often, she was curious about its meaning and origin. It's a compound Greek word, originally used as "synergein," and made up of syn, meaning "together" and ergon, meaning "work." (You see the root of the word "ergonomics" in it.) So, when something is "synergistic," it means that two - or more - things are working well together.

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