Coffee grounds in the garden: You’ll be in like Flynn

Today’s question: My parents used to dump their coffee grounds on their plants as a fertilizer. Does that really work? Sure. That’s why a lot of coffee shops will sell you a bag of used grounds. Coffee grounds are a good slowrelease source of nitrogen. They also add phosphorus, potassium, magnesium and copper.

Spade the grounds in good and deep — 6 or 8 inches or so.

Coffee grounds are especially good for plants that like an acidic soil, such as tomatoes or azaleas.

I enjoy watching the players in the big tennis tournaments, but I absolutely hate it when the men and women start that grunting as they hit the balls. Why aren’t they warned or told not to make all that noise? Just seems so annoying to have to listen to that.

Why don’t you just turn the sound off? It’s not like you would be missing a lot of sparkling commentary.

Where did we get the expression “in like Flynn?”

“In like Flynn,” meaning easily accomplished, is an Americanism from the mid-1940s that referred to Errol Flynn, the actor who made a lot of swashbuckling movies and had a reputation as somewhat of a ladies’ man.

It is possible the phrase was popularized by pilots who would say they were “in like Flynn” after making a difficult landing look easy, just as Flynn made his cinematic daring deeds look easy.

Flynn’s reputation as a horndog also gave the phrase a sexual connotation, enhanced by Flynn’s own braggadocio and his 1943 trial on a charge of statutory rape involving a teenage girl. He was acquitted.