1. Bad gumbo.

2. While walking down an alley, Upper East Side, film-noir/cartoon-splat!: a pea-green piano falling from a fourth-floor window or thereabouts.

3. Falling from a fourth-floor window or thereabouts.

4. Eighty years old, at home, with friends, conversation about Rasputin.

5. Sponge-diving.

6. My son driving, in a Republican funk: exuberant splurt of guano on the windshield (ploughs into truck trucking dildos, or perhaps produce).

7. While barbequing ostrich: a minor forest fire, soon contained.

8. Swallowed the widget.

9. Son’s first boyfriend. Democrat. Thank God. Ironic heart attack.

10. Bludgeoning, proving fatal, at the heavy end of a pool-cue brandished by an academic luminary on a kick about language.

11. Arithmetic.