Uncle Al's Geezer Salad: A mixed bag of reports on overlong repair projects, smart remarks from dogs, and a whole lot of one man's decline into mental cottage cheese

For close to twenty years, Al Sicherman wrote a hugely popular column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Here he offers an assortment of those delightfully entertaining reports: The solution to the mystery of underwear in the gutter; tales of household and automotive repairs gone horribly wrong; peculiar insights into the world of finance; observations on increasing geezerification, and much more.Uncle Al is everyman¬ or everyman s uncle with unflagging overconfidence in his handyman prowess and an apparent inability to quit while he s not too far behind, but the good grace to write about it all hilariously. When he isn t making his third trip to the hardware store for what always appears at first to be a simple project, Sicherman unfailingly trips over outcroppings of the ridiculous in other areas of modern life, only some of which are his own fault: He ponders an ask-your-doctor TV ad for a liquid stitches product called Dermabond that encourages people bleeding all over emergency rooms to engage hospital staffers in a lively discussion of the merits of various methods of wound closure. He reveals the unbelievable details of the plaque that rocket scientists put on the side of the Voyager 2 spacecraft, in case it is met by an alien life-form (one highlight is a recording of Chuck Berry singing Johnny B. Goode ). And then there s the cheery tale of the day he hit each of his two vehicles once. With the other one.