lgranzyk, in a recent post about many subjects, tagged the post with a number of tags, one of which was "q-tips." I couldn't help myself, I had to click on the tag. And I found that was the only post using that tag.

Have you heard the term "googlewhack"? It means if you enter a two-word phrase in Google and get one and only one result in return, the result (i.e. the page it links to) is a googlewhack. Maybe we need a term for single-post topics, although it's much easier to achieve. 

Richard Brautigan's brilliant book Trout Fishing in America has a penultimate chapter -- only a note, really -- in which the narrator says he has always wanted to end a book with the word mayonnaise. Then the last chapter is a letter supposedly written from one rustic to another about a relative's funeral, ending in the PS: "Sorry I forgot to bring you the mayonnaise."

That's sort of how I feel about the q-tips topic, about which I have only one thing to say: I know you're not supposed to "insert into ear canal" -- but that's like saying "This vibrating massager not for use for use in the nether parts." Once you've had the peculiar pleasure of gently digging into your ear canal, it's hard to stop. 

Something else Brautigan mentions in "Trout Fishing" is a place called Elmira, Oregon where there is a bridge over the Long Tom River. When I first read this book in the 1970s as a teenager in Texas, I imagined a green steel truss bridge over a river deep in a forest -- maybe something like this:

Many years later I finally found myself driving through Oregon with time to make a side trip.  I found Elmira on the map and went looking for the famous bridge -- famous to readers of Brautigan, anyway. What I found was a little disappointing. It may have looked different during Brautigan's childhood in the 1930s, but today the bridge at Elmira over the Long Tom River is a simple viaduct:

It was a little hard to imagine a child standing on this short viaduct and thinking anything in particular, though the view from the bridge is nice: