Photo courtesy of Free Images (pachd.com)

During its musical revues the old Fly By Night Club sometimes included a “Minor Celebrities” bit, inviting audience members to write down their furthest-removed brushes with fame. During intermission the cast would pick what they thought were the best – and again, the more tenuous, the better.

Thus we’d hear things like:

“I take dance class with Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon’s wife.

“My great-uncle invented Cheez Whiz.”

“I once heard Brian Keith belch when I walked past his house in Hawaii to go surfing.”

“I used to carpool a kid whose mother’s father embalmed Babe Ruth.”

All these snippets led, naturally, to a book. The title: “Elvis Presley’s Pharmacist Was My Sunday-School Teacher.” 

We were hanging out in our library earlier today, me at the desk and DF sorting paperwork nearby. When he asked if I could hand him a pen, I did so without thinking.

Then: “Oh my gosh – look! It’s working!”

I was referring to my right shoulder and arm, which had been more or less immobilized and causing me a fair amount of pain (especially at night) for a while now. Some range-of-motion exercises were helping. But last week I couldn’t reach to the right to pick up a glass of iced tea sitting on the table by my chair. I had to turn my body and reach for it with my left hand.

So this is huge. 

Picture yourself sitting in a coffeehouse and writing the Great American Novel. Or next year’s Pulitzer for Best New Play. Or just sucking down some java and pretending to be all sensitive and deep.

I can help.

This week I’m having a second Coffeehouse Cliche giveaway, with three essentials to literary pretentiousness:

A notebook. Not the electronic kind, obviously. This is a 5-by-7-inch navy blue book with lined pages and an attached pen. Go ahead. Fill it up.

Starbucks e-gift card. This is good for $10 worth of whatever caffeine you need to jump-start the muse.

Coffee mug. This stainless steel Cutter & Buck mug has a lid with a handle and a leather sleeve if you’re not a handle-holding kind of sipper. The sleeve bears a discreet logo for Bankrate Insurance — yep, I got it at last year’s Financial Blogger Conference.

Doing well on your current salary? If so, you’re lucky. According to a MetLife survey, anywhere from 12 to 25 percent of U.S. citizens are either freelancing or working a second job.

A handful of work-related books have come my way lately, offering help for the current or wannabe “solopreneur.” The best of the bunch is Kimberly Palmer’s “The Economy of You: Discover Your Inner Entrepreneur and Recession-Proof Your Life.” The senior money editor for U.S. News & World Report, Palmer isn’t immune to financial fears.

That’s because although she and her husband both have traditional jobs, they also have two kids and are staring at the same fears a lot of us face: Life is getting more expensive and no one is immune to layoffs. (Ask me how I know.)

So she started her own Etsy store, Palmer’s Planners, in the hopes of being able eventually to work for herself, at her own pace. “It was really about so much more than money. I wanted to be in control of my life,” she writes.

A blog post over at Get Rich Slowly asks readers which cooking  utensils/equipment they couldn’t live without. “In the kitchen: When less is more” posits that plenty of the things marketed as necessities end up as just so much culinary clutter.

“How much do you need to have a working kitchen?” asks writer Lisa Aberle.

Good question.

My comment on the post became pretty lengthy – so lengthy, in fact, that I realized I feel pretty strongly about the subject. While I understand that foodies and gadgeteers love their avocado slicers and their cheese straighteners*, I’d like to point out that:

• More isn’t necessarily better, and
• Specialization is the last refuge of marketers.

On Thursday, March 6, the Swagbucks rewards program is offering a “Solar Vortex” Swag Code Extravaganza – and from now until April 5 new Swagbucks members have the chance to earn a 500-point bonus.

From 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. PST the site will offer a sun-and-sand-themed giveaway of games and codes totaling 36 points. I’ll post any that I find on Surviving and Thriving’s Facebook page. 

Those of you who haven’t joined yet should consider joining through the above link, because it gives you a shot at that bonus. If you earn 1,500 Swag Bucks between now and April 19, you’ll automatically get 500 extra SBs.

Those 1,500 points can be earned through searching, watching video, shopping, answering surveys or any way you like. And the points can be used to buy gift cards, electronics or the various other items in the Swag Store. You can even donate them to charity if you like.

The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has its ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage on the first Saturday in March. People line the streets, which have been prepared by having snow put on them and which are aflame with barking, leaping, howling dogs.

If you happen to speak Canine, you’ll be able to hear what they’re saying: Let’s GO! Let’s GO! Let’s GO!

Come to think of it, you don’t need to know what a dog’s saying — just check his body language (See “barking, leaping, howling,” above.)

I hope to be there myself, although it will be a late night on Friday — I’m reviewing the touring company of “The Addams Family” for The Anchorage Daily News (my former long-time employer), and I’m expected to put the review up on the Arts Snob blog that same evening. The show probably won’t let out until about 10:30 p.m., which means I won’t even start to write until 11 p.m. Who knows what time I’ll get to bed?

I’ll be there in spirit if nothing else, having attended Iditarod starts in the past and enjoyed them hugely. I’ll also check out photos on the Daily News website of both the ceremonial start and then the next day’s re-start in Willow, Alaska. You should, too: The ADN shooters are masters of the art.

But that’s not what I came here to talk about. I came to talk about a hat.*

I just went shopping in our basement, bringing up several items that were missing in our upstairs cupboards: catsup and ibuprofen (both from Costco), a jar of homemade jam, a can of chicken soup.

It always tickles me to see how much we’ve got stored down there, from the kale we grew and dried to bedpillow-sized sacks of dried beans.

Since I live in a really seismic state, the stockpile also makes me feel safe and prepared. Well, as prepared as one can ever be for another Good Friday Earthquake. (And yes, I’ve thought about what might happen if the house collapsed into the basement: Anger, panic and finally rueful laughter.)

That’s probably why an Everyday Cheapskate post called “Don’t be scared, be prepared” resonated so much and got me thinking, once again, about food preparedness.

It’s all retirement, all the time around here lately. Ever since I posted a giveaway of Mary Hunt’s “The Smart Woman’s Guide to Retirement,” various once-you’ve-quit-working items have drifted my way. One of them, an upcoming TweetChat, could win you a nice big prize.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Personal finance writer Liz Weston is giving away two of her best-selling books to five lucky winners. Maybe one of them will be you, if you enter the drawing before Friday.

Each will receive both “The 10 Commandments of Money: Survive and Thrive in the New Economy” and “Your Credit Score: How to Improve the 3-Digit Number That Shapes Your Financial Future.”

Head over to this post on AskLizWeston.com to sign up. All you have to do is leave a comment on the post.

Newbies take note: Since Liz moderates all comments, it may take a little while for yours to show up if you’ve never left one before. Be patient.

The winners will be selected on Friday evening. Watch your inbox because Liz, like me, is a tough-love kind of gal: If she doesn’t hear back from you by noon PST on Monday, she’ll draw another winner.

Frugal tip: One or both books would make a good graduation gift.

This winter has been a real bear for much of the Lower 48. If you’re lucky enough to have the time and the money to plan a little break, it will feel soooo nice.

Except maybe when it comes time to pack. More of us are choosing to go carry-on vs. paying to check a bag — but that means you can’t take your giant economy-size bottles of shampoo and conditioner, or the big tube of toothpaste you got on sale.

This is one time when frugality is frustrating. Why pay big bucks for teeny toiletries?

Win this bag instead and you’ll have that much more to spend on wherever your spring break takes you.

The snow is clean and new, the temperature is 18 degrees, daylight is increasing (we get 9 hours, 43 minutes today) and the annual winter carnival known as “Rondy” (short for the Anchorage Fur Rendezvous) is underway. When I lived here before, February was always the month when winter turned around. Still is, even though it’ll be months before we can garden.

The carnival includes a three-day dogsled race that starts and ends downtown. As I’ve noted before, Anchorage is the only city I know of that puts snow on the streets. And they’ll do it again on March 1, when the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race has its ceremonial start downtown.

Yep, it’s a weird place.

I haven’t posted anything particularly deep lately due to having first a virus and then a head cold (still got it, yay), and also having accepted a magazine assignment and been in negotiations with another magazine editor. The latter involved a long phone conversation and then sending a fairly lengthy outline on a very personal subject, only to be told this wasn’t specific enough: What did it feel like?