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.