Well, Cultural Offering has named Sippican Cottage to their list of 25 Blogs Guaranteed to Make You Smarter. I hate taking umbrage, because even though you can easily fit plenty of umbrage under a winter coat, if I get caught taking anything again they’ll slap the beeping anklet on me, and it itches. But I feel I must become umbrageous. I can’t make you smarter.

There’s no use arguing about this. My opinion is dispositive. It’s downright decretive. I’ve been trying to make myself smarter ever since the nuns stopped drilling times tables into my head, with little success. How in the hell can you expect me to make you smarter if I can’t manage it myself?

Of course I do know things, several of them useful. I know how to hit my thumb with a hammer. The same thumb I hit three minutes before, generally. I know how to climb up to the top of a twelve-pitch roof in a gale to wonder where I left my hammer. I can count to eleven if my fly is down, which it generally is. I can teach a teenager how to tie a Half-Windsor knot if they don’t mind the skinny end dangling down to their dangly bits, and the wide part up under their chin. I can balance a checkbook, but only on the end of my nose.

I do know more than just old stuff. I pick up on changes in the zeitgeist daily. For instance, because I’ve been riding around in a car a lot since I sold my home without a Plan B in place, I know that the new Volvo wagons have the parentheses taillights, while Hyundais have sort of angry furrowed brows. I’m not sure of what make and model look like Cylons, but they’re out there. None of them vex me, as I’ve already survived driving behind 1970 Ford Thunderbird taillights.

If you’re a Zoomer and encounter these, I assume you assume the old-ass car in front of you is loading something from the operating system. We elders of the internet know it’s just an old fogey turning right. Forevermore, most likely. So maybe I just told you something you didn’t know. I still wouldn’t assess the outcome as “making you smarter,” unless you were pretty dumb from the get-go.

So I beg you. Visit the other 24 blogs guaranteed to make you smarter. Some of them feature writers smart enough to buy furniture from me, back before I moved three counties away from my table saw. And if you need any additional proof why all my advice is free, and worth it, I’ll admit something to my readers that I’ve always been too sheepish to reveal even to my confessor. You know, the one with the liquor license, not the one with the swinging thurible: I once accidentally put premium gas in a rental car. If that doesn’t scream caveat emptor for anyone looking for an information gooroo, I don’t know what does.

By the way, the Swinging Thuribles is the name of my Creed tribute band. But I digress.