Amy Poehler

I read an interview with a 104-year-old man who attributed his longevity to pouring a shot of whiskey into his coffee every morning, so I thought I'd give it a try.

After one sip I realize that if you take something into yourself long enough, give whatever it is you've taken into yourself some time, you'll soon understand it, even the most difficult concepts, like those proposed in theoretical physics.

One of my goals as an author is to be interviewed by the owl I hear almost every morning somewhere in the trees behind my house. Failing that, I'd like to 'appear' on NPR's radio show, 'Fresh Air', so I could make the hostess Terry Gross laugh and giggle reverentially after I answered her breathless questions in Zen Koan's.

I once knew Amy Poehler when she was Hilary Clinton, but hadn't known she's also a fellow author until I heard her interviewed on 'Fresh Air' yesterday. I confess I turned the car radio on by accident and that the dial had somehow slipped all by itself from sports talk to NPR, but anyway there she was talking to Terry Gross.

Amy Poehler, author, told Terry Gross, the Fresh Air person, that when she won her Golden Globe she wanted to sit on the lap of George Clooney. I'm sorry, I was driving on 19th Ave. in San Francisco, but that's all I can remember of the interview, I must've turned the dial back to sports talk.

Amy Poehler's new book is "Yes Please." I know this because when I got home in the late afternoon I read the morning's New York Times and saw the full-page ad for Amy's book on the back page of the Main news section.

Having been in advertising in a previous life, I know the back page of any newspaper is a premium position, and buying it costs a pretty penny. A full-page ad in the New York Times runs about a hundred thousand dollars ($100,000), so I'm thinking the ad for Amy Poehler's new book probably ran at about $125,000, give or take.

Whatever; it's not a very good ad, it didn't create in me the desire to buy Amy Poehler's new book, but the cumulative effect of seeing the ad and of hearing, however briefly, Amy Poehler being interviewed by Terry Gross, aroused in me feelings of competitive jealousy, as author and publisher, that can only be mellowed by whiskey.