Chicks and ducks and geese better scurry when I take you out in the surrey, when I take you out in the surrey with the fringe on top!

It was with a karaoke machine at the Sharper Image store on West 57th street in New York City that Harry Burns (Billy Crystal) sang "Surrey With The Fringe On Top" to Sally Albright (Meg Ryan) in the 1989 movie, "When Harry Met Sally."

Sharper Image has not been setting the world on fire lately. Their sales have been dropping each year since 2003, and they filed for Chapter 11 protection on Tuesday. In ordinary Chapter 7 bankruptcy, a debtor's assets are sold off, and distributed among their creditors. Chapter 11 allows a company to reorganize, and the company will survive. Sharper Image wants to close about half of their retail outlets, and this filing may allow them to walk away from those leases. It's not a foregone conclusion, however, that companies survive Chapter 11; many of them later convert their filings to Chapter 7.

The company claims total assets of $251.5 million and total debt of $199 million, though, so the company might well survive.

The company launched in 1977, but by the early 1990s, it was losing money left and right. The stock had dropped to about $3 in 1998, but then they switched from retailing others' products to developing their own. An ionic hair brush was a modest success, and led to the Ionic Breeze air purifier. Their stock rose to around $20 in 2003. In 2005, though, Consumer Reports claimed the Ionic Breeze didn't clean the air, and might possibly present a health hazard. Sales dropped, and there's now a class action suit against Sharper Image by owners of the air purifier.

If you believe that Sharper Image has a future, you might want to invest in their stock. It closed at $1.44 on Tuesday, and dropped to $0.41 on Wednesday, after announcement was made of the Chapter 11 filing. It opened at $0.54 this morning.

If you'd bought $10,000 worth of Sharper Image stock at 41c, and sold it at 55c - the current price, you'd have made about $3400 after sales commissions. To quote Estelle Reiner line from that same movie, "I'll have what she's having".

I've never been in a Sharper Image store, but I used to love reading their ads in men's magazines. They used to have some really neat-o gadgets. Not quite as much fun as a piano, perhaps, in Tom "OK... but I get to be on top" Hanks' Big, but fun none the less. They'll never be the subject of a Great Literature course, but Sharper Image advertisements were great writing, none the less.

You know what they say, Blondie asked me, about men with big hands?

Of course, I said, winking. We have to hunt, to find gloves large enough to fit us. But it's also true that we who have big hands have difficulty using floss. Flossing front teeth is difficult enough, but trying to floss between molars is extremely difficult.

That's one reason the Plackers people have been successful. They make a little plastic gizmo that holds both ends of the floss on one end, and lets you put it in places where a couple of fat fingers won't fit.

According to patent 5538023, a placker is "a disposable dental floss holder for removing plaque and food debris from tooth surfaces and from the interspaces between teeth has a handle part, a bow and a length of dental floss spanning the bow. A movable element is provided which can cause a portion of the floss holder to move and tighten the strand of floss and thus momentarily reduce slack in the floss. The invention further includes methods for manufacturing floss holders with slack in the floss, and for manufacturing floss holders with operable components for momentarily reducing slack which was designed into a flosser or which developed in the flosser due to stretching of the floss. The floss holder designs vary to include multiple bows on a single device, and to reduce the slack by moving selected parts of the bow."

Somewhere along the line, though, the Plackers folks - they call themselves "Placontrol, Inc." - have forgotten the "disposable" keyword, and they're now pushing a model that has two bows for flossing, as opposed to the original model which has a bow on one end, and a pick at the other end. (The image shows an off-brand flosser between the original and "doubles" version of Placker. I actually prefer it to either of the Placker models.)

Imagine that you've opened up the package of "doubles" and you're ready to floss your molars. Can you reach them as easily as with the original model? No - not by a long shot.

Now, imagine that you're through flossing. What do you do with the flosser? It's still got one unused end. Do you stick it back in the package? If so, how do you keep the used end from contaminating the other flossers? Do you stick it in your pocket to use later? If so, how do you keep the clean end clean, and keep the used end from messing up your pocket?

Once in a while, my late first wife would say, "No shit, Sherlock!" when I screwed up, indicating that my failure wasn't due to muscular coordination or bad luck, but because I had failed to think things through before I started. That's exactly what she'd say to the Placontrol, Inc. folks.

The New York Times doesn''t normally engage in the kind of reportage as Faux News. John McCain has a problem.

In a way, allegations that John McCain had romantic leanings towards Vicki Iseman could help McCain. It was only a day earlier that David Letterman was pointing out that McCain was an old man, reminding us all of the greeter at WalMart. The fact that his staff thought him capable of an inappropriate relationship, even in the age of Viagra, makes McCain seem less grandfatherly and more manly.

On the other hand, it doesn't have to be a sexual relationship to be inappropriate. Vicki Iseman is a partner in the firm of Alcalde and Fay, lobbyists. She was lobbying for Paxson Communications, trying to get quick approval for purchase of what is now WPCB-TV in Pittsburgh. McCain was on the Senate Commerce Committee at the time. He twice wrote letters to the FCC urging quick consideration of the purchase.

Before McCain wrote those letters, Paxson executives and lobbyists gave more than $20,000 to McCain's presidential campaign, and lent McCain the corporate jet at least 4 times during 1999 for campaign travel.

"I've never done any favors for anybody

Faculty politics, they say, is often bitter because the stakes are so small. I think about that aphorism often as I listen to news programs.

Tonight, on MSNBC, after the results were in from the Wisconsin primary, they had representatives from both Senator Obama''s and Senator Clinton''s campaign. After they each gave their spin, Chris Matthews turned to the Obama representative, Texas state senator Kirk Watson, and asked for an itemization of Barack''s legislative accomplishments. Watson couldn''t list any, and when he demanded that Clinton''s legislative accomplishments be accomplished, Chris Matthews refused to do so.

That's why they call it "Hardball", Matthews crowed - and Keith Olberman remarked that they were broadcasting election returns, not Matthews'' "Hardball" program. Matthews brushed that aside, saying that it was still a good question to ask.

So what are their legislative accomplishments?

It''s pretty thin for Hillary. Her "35 years of experience" amount to a bill to increase nurse recruitment, one to aid respite time for Alzheimer

They say Barack is a great speaker. Listening to him on the television, it''s hard to disagree.

Tonight, though, I heard Michele on the stump for the first time.

She was speaking at the Capitol Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin, and they carried it on C-SPAN. There''s a webcast of her speech available. (It requires RealPlayer, and runs 1:05:15). I recommend it highly, if for no other reason than to learn how more about speechifying.

My lord, that woman can deliver a speech. I''m a conservative, and I''m probably going to vote for Ron Paul when we finally get to vote, here in Pennsylvania, but wow! Mrs. Obama talks from the heart. She''s utterly sincere, and devastatingly effective. I like her husband quite a bit, but I''d like to vote for her.

Some men hate to be outdone by their wife, but not the men who marry extraordinary women. (I speak from experience; both my late first wife and my present wife have been extraordinarily capable.)

In response to of Mrs. Obama''s statement that "Let me tell you something