If you like to read about illness and vomiting, you’ll definitely want to check out “Coming Up,” which is this week’s “Snide Remarks” Classic. (We’re spotlighting one every Wednesday this year in celebration of the column’s 10th anniversary.) The column is #145 and was published Jan. 26, 2001. Keep that date in mind — just a couple months after the notorious 2000 presidential election — because one of the jokes refers to it.
The 10th anniversary graphic to the right is a new addition. I put it together a couple weeks ago. (You can click it to see a larger version.) Originally, my plan was to make the same grinning face for the 2007 photo and put them side by side. But every shot I took looked awful. My eyes would squint up, or my chins would multiply, or my mouth would look crooked. That bug-eyed, large-mouthed expression is best left to very thin faces, which I had in 1996, when the original photo was taken, but which I do not have now. So my vanity got the best of me and I went a different route, which was to look bad on purpose. The resulting similarity to the comedy and tragedy masks, pointed out by a commenter last week, is but a blessed coincidence.
