Dear Abby no longer offering advice

By Mona Goldwater, Society Editor

Pauline Friedman Phillips, under the nom de plume Abigail Van Buren offered advice on love, lies, marriage and in-laws to millions of newspaper readers around the world has died at the age of 94. She was sister to another famous advice columnist, Anne Landers. . .

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An open letter to Grist on the propriety and greenness of urination

Dear Grist:

It may not be "cool," but what do you think about urinating in the great outdoors? Say it's 12:30 AM and nature calls. Rather than go to the bathroom, you slip outside in your backyard and relieve yourself there? Discretely, of course, and perhaps shifting the target area nightly to prevent nitrogen burn?

Certainly you've saved at the least 1 gallon of water. Or is there some kind of enviro blowback from depositing urine with its various chemicals, untreated, onto the earth, where it will inevitably end up, in my case, in Puget Sound? Over the course of a year, you may well save, say, 500 gallons of water. Or is that 500 gallons nothing compared to the impact on the earth of performing this act?

Anxiously awaiting your word, I am

Holding It In Ballard,

Jack Brummet
Seattle, Wash.