May I borrow your eyeliner?
Back in the day, when I was a REAL reporter (sort of) I went everywhere with a little notebook and at least three pens on my person. I had a few dozen pens floating around my car, a few dozen more on my motorcycle and whole bunches of them stuffed in every pocket of every coat I owned. The result was that my house would become positively filthy with pens carried in from the outside. Like hundreds of them, stashed everywhere. Open a cupboard door and 20 pens would spill out. Reach for a roll of toilet paper . . . But you get the idea. Only now that I’m a modern weenie reporter, who uses a recorder to take notes, my supply has dwindled away to nothing and I can’t find a !#$!#! pen anywhere. The result is that when I need to take notes fast, I’ll use anything I can find, up to and including lipstick. Which totally isn’t mine, as far as you know. The other day I got an important phone call and, with no pen in sight, had to raid the refrigerator and write out my notes in mustard. If the caller had been more long-winded, I would have had to break into the Worcestershire sauce.

Another sketchy character
Got another beautiful sketch from elusive artist Bill Eldridge who has been chronicling my many misadventures since Hector was a pup. A great and only slightly twisted caricaturist, is Bill. This time, he’s created a sketch of my recent attempts to catch a bat that flew into my house. In “Saga of a Bat Hunter,” Bill correctly includes the broken knickknacks, frightened house plants and impromptu safety gear that was involved in the fray. He also painted my toenails red and blue in this one. I wasn’t wearing toenail polish that night, I swear. But now that I see how dazzling it looks on me . . . Bill just gets me, man.

I don’t like them odds
You know what I hate? Tag-less T-shirts. The printed tag wears out after one wash so for the rest of the shirt’s life, you’ve got to pull it on with a 50/50 chance that it’ll be backwards. Seriously, who can live with this kind of daily stress?

Get swole!
That new workout area at Simard-Payne Memorial Park in Lewiston seems pretty good. The other day I saw a scrawny, bedraggled dude, skinny as a string bean, shuffle up from the banks of the river. By the time he’d done his thing at the fitness court, he was yuge. I mean, arms like tree trunks, legs like tractor tires and abs that could stop a bullet. The funny thing was, he was also three inches taller, 10 years younger and had different colored hair. It truly is a magical place.

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Mark LaFlamme: Talk of the town — Fancy knots, underwater ghosts and my bathing habits