There’s a respectable chance that you may find today’s joke of the week, “The Dying Teetotaler,” actually funny. Next Monday, by request, I’ll present the first in a series of “best of” jokes from the past.

If you managed to tear yourself away from the Internet over the weekend, you may have missed a couple of posts: “Sweating the small stuff,” in which I agreed with Jan Freeman that people get unduly exercised over minor spelling errors, such as it’s for its; “Major and minor,” in which I responded to some people exercised over “Sweating the small stuff”; and “Get out your thumbs,” in which I explained why I didn’t go past the first 650 words of a story published by some newspaper forty miles to the south—and why you shouldn’t, either.

Your word of the week, abecedarian, is posted.

And now on to the excitements of a day off from the paragraph factory: doing the laundry, paying bills, mowing the grass (it’s going dormant after the frost, but I want to mulch the oak leaves from my neighbor’s trees), prepping for tomorrow’s editing class, and, sevenish, heading to Liam Flynn’s Ale House for a cheerful pint or two with my former student Andrew Zalesky.