Consider paper towel dispensers.

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Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a list of numbered propositions, each leading to the next. Number 6.4311 begins, “Death is not an event in life. Death is not lived through.”

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When we lived in the city, my wife and I would load our two small boys into a big double stroller I called “the bus” and roll on over to the Lincoln Park Zoo to see our friend Adelor, the lion. He would welcome us with a low reverberating roar that you’d feel vibrating your sternum. That was in the late 1990s.

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Dorothy Goldberg is fine.

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Ten years ago he wanted a plush toy dog for his birthday. We got it for him.

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Criminals are stupid. Not all of them, of course. I suppose there must a few Prof. Moriarty masterminds out there, living quietly in splendor in Monaco, having pulled off whatever heists they managed to get away with, unapprehended.

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Clint Eastwood’s new movie “J. Edgar” opens Wednesday, and anyone who saw its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, deliver his touching portrayal of the deeply weird Howard Hughes in “The Aviator” a few years back will be looking forward to what he does with another deeply strange figure in American history: J. Edgar Hoover.

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The United States has been the greatest country in the world for so long, many of its residents seem to think it’s the only country in the world.

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My mother-in-law owned six roasters. Six large oval covered pans, coated in black enamel with white specks.

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We’re all so into our electronics, all so caught up in the web, that we can almost fail to notice when an old-fashioned communications system, such as a very large horn, trumps them all.

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This story begins with a hairbrush and ends with a, umm, very different kind of personal care device.

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‘Good column today,” Neil Liptak, a reader in the far southwest suburban town of Elwood writes. “Made me want to ask you: What have you learned after writing your column all these years?”

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Everybody complains about ancient Greek poetry, but nobody ever does anything about it.

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“One hasn’t got time,” the great American philosopher Frank Sinatra once sang, “for the waiting game.” He was referring to girls, but that applies equally to restaurants. Thus I avoid all hot new eateries — who wants to stand packed with the fashionable for an hour, waiting to spend $400 on spoonfuls of foam and shot glasses of soup?

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arents say all kinds of dumb things, at least dumb to the ears of their children.

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On July 9, 1944, Corporal H. W. Crayton paused “somewhere in France” to write a letter to the parents of Raymond Hoback.

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Before you can remove a kidney, you first have to find it. Which is easy enough in a general sense — Dr. Yolanda Becker wrote her initials in purple pen on Rachel Garneau’s lower left abdomen, roughly above where her left kidney should be.

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Memory is tricky. Nothing is less reliable than to reach across the decades and try to pluck out a fact. Something can seem crystal clear, but really be a fuzzy fantasy and you don’t realize it.

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Walt Whitman attended the opera the night of April 13, 1861, and was walking home about midnight when a mob of newsboys came “tearing and yelling” up the street, waving extra editions announcing the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter.

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Beloved husband… loving father… peacefully passed… in lieu of flowers —  the solemn phrases in death notices are as time-worn as pebbles.

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When Jeff Bollengier began CaliBowl, he manufactured the colorful curled lip plastic bowls in China, where labor is famously cheap.

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Gilbert Gottfried was never my cup of tea. I prefer the cool paradoxes of Steven Wright, say, to Gottfried’s squinty, barking dog comic routine, though he was funny in the delightfully filthy documentary “The Aristocrats.”

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Ken, you’re 50? My God! Welcome to the club, old bean. I reached the big 5-O last June. Where does the time go? I hope you finally scored with Barbie and didn’t just spend the past half century squiring her from prom to mall in her pink Mustang, only to be shown the gate of that Malibu Dream House as soon as G.I. Joe stops by. Barbie seems the type.

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In Washington, the Obama administration is agonizing over how it was taken by surprise by the dramatic events unfolding in the Arab world, first in Tunisia, then Egypt, now Libya. Where was the C.I.A.? The State Department? Isn’t anybody paying attention?

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Some didn’t know.

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To the list of historic figures who have been to Chicago yet it is somehow hard to imagine walking the streets here — Oscar Wilde comes to mind, or George Armstrong Custer, or Golda Meir, who lived at 1306 S. Lawndale — we add Hu Jintao, the president of the People’s Republic of China.

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Many Chicagoans are familiar with the phrase, “We don’t want nobody nobody sent,” the classic stone wall blow-off that newcomers receive when trying to get their foot in the door for a job or political office. It means both: a) Who the heck are you? and b) Scram.

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Unlike you, I kept my New Year’s resolutions.

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Gaze at Mayor Daley’s face, I wrote earlier this year, “his clenched mouth a grim line of annoyance, stress etched into every feature, radiating a lifetime of ill humor and testiness.”

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The school board at Evanston Township High School, near Chicago, voted unanimously to eliminate a separate freshman honors track in humanities, because too few minority kids qualify. There will be humanities — “English” and “social studies” to us old-timers — honors, but students will pursue it within a general course. That is the idea, as best I can determine — conversations with ETHS officials tend to devolve into education theory jargon, and I hold a small candle of hope that this might be the best idea in the world — that it will, as they believe, inspire more students to do better work, and I just don’t understand it. But it seems predicated on the belief that a teacher instructing a room of excited students can operate the same as a teacher with a roomful of less inspired students. Is that so?

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Monday night was a lunar eclipse — the first at winter solstice since 1638. The earth went between the sun and the moon, turning it a blood red.

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The toy collection of Malcolm Forbes was auctioned off Friday in New York City. Toy boats, mostly, glorious pre-World War I dreadnaughts, their decks festooned with flags and turrets, and triple-stacked ocean liners with clockwork mechanisms.

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I’ve been to some of the places on earth where water is not a given. When I was in Haiti, years ago, Catholic Relief Services used bottled water in their toilets, which sounds like a luxury until you ask yourself how to make flush toilets work if the water is off. The answer is, you have a case of bottled water in the john and invite each user to fill the tank.

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