Because I'm on vacation from my newspaper reporter job this week, I've been eating breakfast at my favorite diner every morning. Eggs. Pancakes. Hash browns. Bacon. Ham. Steak. Toast. Coffee. Not all at once, of course.

And because my father liked diner breakfasts, I've been thinking of him. Though he's been dead for 27 years, he is much with me.

He was a child of the Great Depression. A non-nostalgic World War II combat vet, a bartender and, later, a midlevel manager for a huge corporation where he strove mightily at a job he didn't like.

And he gave me advice, strange quirky advice I could really use. After breakfast this morning, I drove around town a while, puffing a pipe and repeating some of Pop's advice. For all I know, he "borrowed" some of the advice from other sources, but I heard them from him. Here's a list.

"They call a guy 'the underdog' because he's probably going to lose."

"When I was tending bar, a bookie he used to come in. He drove a new Cadillac every year. The guys who bet with him drove used Fords. That tell you anything?"

"If you let your wife buy your clothes, you're gonna like look a guy whose wife buys his clothes."

"If you're in a Chinese restaurant and the place looks kinda iffy, order the shrimp. Nothing looks like a shrimp except a shrimp."

"Keep an eye on those guys who smile all the time but never laugh."

"No man drinks anything with more than two ingredients. And ice counts."

"You know how I got to be a sergeant in the Army? Because there are so many idiots in the Army that if you got anything going for you at all, you get a rank."

"Never carry a pen in the pocket of your sport coat. Put in your shirt pocket. If the pen leaks, it's cheaper to replace a shirt than a jacket."

"If you owe a guy $50, don't try giving him $10 a week for five weeks. Who wants money that way?"

"Never tip a bartender with change. It's cheap."

"Want to know if a guy has money? Look at his shoes."

"There's no place so poor that it doesn't have one rich person. Somebody's always got more."

"I never belonged to a union in my life, but I never crossed a picket line, either."

"Any man who hits a woman might as well be a woman."

"You can talk your way out of fights because people who want to fight are stupid. They get confused when you start talking."

"Women don't care what you do, as long as you do it at home."

"I understand a guy who gets divorced and never gets married again. He just didn't like being married. I don't understand a guy who gets divorced and marries somebody else. What's the point?"

"I don't like baseball. Somebody says to me, 'That pitcher can throw a ball 90 miles an hour,' I say to him, 'Can he do it while somebody's punching him in the face?'"

And always, "Be a brave little boy. Don't cry."

To find out more about Marc Munroe Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www.creators.com. Dion's book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated columns, "Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America," is available for Nook and Kindle.