In the category of keeping my marriage happy, I have agreed to insert a correction to the “Malls, glorious, maaaalls…” posting. Apparently I mis-represented Ron’s offering of water to the taxi driver. He wants it to be known that he was not offering him a half-empty bottle of backwash, as I apparently implied. Ron said that we had a completely full, unopened bottle that he was offering. So I apologize for any misrepresentations my mistake may have created (and I honestly thought we only had a half-bottle left).

I tried to explain the theory of poetic license to Ron, and said that inadvertently tweaking the tale of the offered backwash because he was so worried that the driver was falling asleep, added not only comedic value but also stressed the sense of urgency at hand. Ron disagreed and said he had not signed anything that permitted me such liberties (though one could argue that it falls under the umbrella liberties of the marriage license). Luckily, though, Ron’s antics rarely require any poetic license enhancing so future tales will not be irreparably harmed.

However, in a PURELY FICTIONAL yet-to-be-written hardback best-seller about newlyweds in Cairo, you may read of a situation in which the husband, not named Ron, offers not only a half-empty bottle of warm backwash to a sleepy taxi driver, but then jumps into rousing choruses of “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” all the way to Tahrir Square. Please note that these stories will be a work of fiction, created entirely from creative brain cells, not memory ones, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons or husbands, living or dead, will be completely and utterly coincidental.