Ikea'd you not.

Mem-sahib has taken the boys to see their grandparents in Virginia for the long weekend, so I selflessly use the time to fix her bed.*

Here's the problem. She has a mattress base that's 59 inches wide. She has a bed frame from a well-known budget furniture store that has a 59-and-a-half- inch gap between its supporting flanges. Result: collapse of not-at-all-stout party and slope sleeping.

My brilliant solution -- bolt some lengths of 1 x 2 to the flanges to extend the supporting surface and thus reduce the gap by bringing the sides closer together. They should use me in the Mid-East peace talks. Elegant and effective. But enough about me, so too is the workaround. And I get to go to Home Depot and squint critically along lengths of lumber, which is good for my testosterone. Not that I have any use for it.

Of course, this shouldn't have happened in the first place. Nor should the simple act of tipping the frame on its side to tighten the nuts cause the whole thing to fall apart because of a bagful of cheapo, ill-conceived, ad hoc fastenings, developed by the same Scandinavian sadists who called the montrosity "Fljrt" or "Bjork" or "Grimble" or some equally ludicrous name that looks like the detritus of an unlucky Scrabble draw.

So my question is, when the air is blue because -- in the absence of my children and the presence of my dog -- I'm screaming about the "stupid f***ing useless piece-of-s*** bed," does it make me a racist if I throw the adjective "Swedish" into the phrase?

*Her bed? How can you claim to be so "selfless" when it's surely your bed, too, you slimy limey? Well, I've believed for ages that the secret of happiness is having your own bathroom, and for one brief shining Manhattan moment, I had that. After marrying someone whose cure for insomnia was to reach for the remote and turn on the television at three o'clock in the morning, I extended that to separate bedrooms, and I'm now up to residences. Long story, don't ask. Oh, wait, you didn't -- that was me.