The corniest controversy of all

If the reader(s) of this column have come to expect anything, it’s probably regular disappointment. But after that, it’s probably white-hot controversy, stirred up by my special brand of hard-hitting journalism that’s not afraid to shake up the establishment with daring exposes on the cuteness of my puppy.

Last week, though, I’m afraid that even by this column’s semblance of standards, I took things a little too far, and one line in particular drew the attention of that vigilant media watchdog, the Corn Refiners Association. Some people will tell you that, as a pretend journalist, you’re not really doing your job unless you’re occasionally getting under the husk of Big Corn, but I can’t help but feel that there might be a kernel of misunderstanding on the cob of this dispute.

Here’s the statement from last week’s column that perked up the ears of Corn: “This [the allure of Swedish Fish] is either due to the lasting appeal of an age-old recipe, or the fact that high fructose corn syrup can turn your average child into a less-discerning gourmand than your average goat.”

As you might have guessed, the main purpose of that sentence was to show off that I could use the word “gourmand” in context, once I’d looked it up on dictionary.com to make sure it didn’t mean some kind of fancy gourd.

But a short time after the column ran, I got an email from my editor on a non-deadline day, which didn’t seem right. Emails from my editor usually go like this: “Mike, I needed your column three hours ago. Please send me whatever you have.”

To which I’ll respond, “It will be there momentarily. I’m very close to starting it.”

But this time, he was forwarding me a letter from Audrae Erickson, the president of the Corn Refiners Association, who was worried that my column “may mislead consumers about high fructose corn syrup,” which is the last thing in the world I’d ever want to do, besides watching another episode of America’s Next Top Model, no matter how much my wife insists that I’ll like this one.

As a lifelong aficionado of high fructose corn syrup, mostly in Skittle form, it was never my intention to mislead anyone into thinking that the consumption of this delicious (and nutritionally equivalent to sugar!) sweetener could be harmful, or should be moderated, in any way.

Due to my carelessness, casual readers may have arrived at the conclusion that high fructose corn syrup could, in some instances, turn children into goats. To my knowledge, this usually does not occur, though I have seen it turn them into raving lunatics who can’t seem to stop spinning in circles while singing the only two words they know to “La Cucaracha.”

If I have learned anything from this experience, it is to finally heed the advice of the wise folks who told me to stay away from sensitive topics in this column, topics that people may very well never agree upon, like the death penalty, abortion and Swedish Fish. Some people just won’t see the humor in jokes about Swedish Fish, especially people who make a living by not seeing the humor in jokes about Swedish Fish. These people apparently live in Washington, D.C., not Sweden, as you might have expected. They are also probably having dinner with your senator right now.

So I hope you, as a consumer, are now more educated about high fructose corn syrup, and will start demanding it in keg form at every opportunity. For me to believe that high fructose corn syrup is anything other than an enhancer of life’s simple joys, I’d have to be dumber than ethanol subsidies.

In the interest of drumming up more controversy for next week, let me just add that soybeans are kind of gross.

You can lead Mike Todd through the maize at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Standing next to famous people: Dave (Frickin!) Barry

Kara and I just got back from seeing Dave Barry (AKA the rich man's Dave Barry) perform as the inaugural guest of SUNY New Paltz's Distinguished Speaker series a few hours ago. I'm sure I'll squeeze a column out of the evening soon, but I couldn't wait to post this picture:

Famous people just love standing next to me and smiling. What can I do? Actually, we had a special moment there, as Kara and I accosted him in the hallway. Here's our conversation, in its entirety:

Me: Dave, I've been writing a humor column for four years. Can I get a picture with you?
Dave: Yes.

In any event, I hope I absorbed some of his funniness, like Peter Petrelli from Heroes or Rogue from X-Men or Bounty from the paper goods aisle.

Banana Laffy Taffy as family heirloom

All that’s left of Halloween now is memories and Jolly Ranchers, the candy made of fruit-flavored glass. The little zombies and gangsters took all of our good candy, like the peanut M&M’s and the Reese’s cups, leaving us with a bowl full of petrified candy that only organisms with shark-like rows of expendable teeth could ever possibly enjoy.

Last year, our hard-sell candy was banana-flavored Laffy Taffy, a large mound of which still sits, calcifying, in a basket in our laundry room, celebrating its first birthday and serving as a testament to our inner twelve-year-olds, who recoil in horror at the thought of throwing away perfectly good somewhat-edible candy. Somehow, banana candy, like coffee soda, just doesn’t quite work. I imagine we’ll pass the Laffy Taffy on to future generations of our family, along with our drawer full of near-dead batteries in the kitchen.

On Halloween night, I was amazed at how the words, “Go ahead and take a small handful,” could turn a small child’s hand into one of those magnets that pick up cars at the dump. Several of the five-year-olds in our neighborhood could probably palm regulation-szied basketballs.

I was most surprised, though, at the enduring popularity of Swedish fish, a candy that was coveted when I was a kid, but which I figured had probably been supplanted over the years by some sort of futuristic sweets with LEDs that lit up when you chewed them. When we mixed the packets of Swedish fish into our big bowl of attention-deficit enhancers, I thought the first kid would come to the door and say, “Swedish fish? Hey, guys, get a load of these old fogies! They think Swedish fish are still cool!”

But the Swedish fish were the first to go. This is either due to the lasting appeal of an age-old recipe, or the fact that high fructose corn syrup can turn your average child into a less-discerning gourmand than your average goat.

Our puppy Memphis didn’t know what to make of her first Halloween. The bursts of excitement at the door, during which she wriggled with glee and smacked pillowcases full of candy with her tail like they were piñatas, would end quickly, and then she’d be stuck with her boring old housemates again. The door would shut and she’d look at us with eyes that said, “How could you let those little pirates leave?”

At least she didn’t have to suffer the indignity of being dressed up in a doggie costume, if only because the little red lobster outfit we bought for her had a manufacturer’s defect that accidentally transformed her into a bucking rodeo bronco instead. Besides, Memphis can effectively portray a magician without any costume at all; she can just walk into a room, say, “Gaaaaaaack,” and make a wet tube of Chapstick appear out of thin air.

My wife Kara and I briefly joked about the idea of resuscitating the Laffy Taffy to give away this year, but then figured that if we did that, we might as well run around the yard toilet-papering our own trees. Little ghoulies, especially teenaged ones strapped with eggs in their ankle holsters, are not to be trifled with on confectionary issues, lest punitive measures be faced.

As we drove through the neighborhood the following day, we saw a few of our neighbors’ trees that had been toilet-papered.

“I guess we know who was giving away Necco wafers last night,” Kara said.

We also noted that our mailbox had been spared the shaving cream treatment it had received last year, which, while making our cleanup a little easier, also made it that much harder to shave that little hard-to-reach spot under its flag.

You can make Mike Todd smell your feet or give you something good to eat at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Yip Yip Yip Drink Yip Yip Yip

Here's a shot from an upcoming episode of "Sesame Street Goes to College":

Much respect to Jeff Bisti for the best old person's Halloween costume last weekend.

Keeping things in perspective

Here's an email I received shortly after the column below ran in print. I found it touching and thought I'd share it...

hi mike,

you don't know me, but i read your column all of the time in the roxborough review. i love it! it is the one column i repeatedly turn to when i get my new paper each week. i always find them interesting and often find myself laughing out loud. i literally just finished your column,"20,000 beers over the sea" and i loved it as usual.

but this time it really struck a chord with me. what i got out of your column this week was a great lesson for everyone, life is short! don't put off anything and make the memories and life experiences now. this is a lesson i have learned very well this past year, you see almost a year ago - nov. 20, 2007 my husband was killed in a car accident. only 34 yrs old, married just shy of 9 years, 2 days before thanksgiving. then only 4 short months later my dad died after battling ALS- Lou Gehrigs Disease for 4 1/2 years. only 57yrs old, married just shy of 25 yrs, 2 days after easter. it has been a life changing year to say the least and i have learned sooooo many things and lessons from my experiences.

but the biggest lesson i have learned and maybe the most important is that life is short and very surprising! i try to pass this lesson to everyone i know and everyone i meet. i believe it is that important! i fortunately was able to spend lots of time with my dad before he died and was with him when he passed. my husband and i talked briefly a couple of minutes before his crash ending our conversation with the usual " I love you!". i am confident in the love my husband and father and i all shared in our individual relationships. however, they both missed out on things they always wanted to do. my father because he was diagnosed with a dibilitating disease that prevented him from doing so much for 4 1/2 long years. my husband because his life ended in an instant. both of these events prompted me to think about the things i knew they had wanted to do in life and never would.

i realized then how precious our days on earth are and how grateful i am for the ones i am given. i began to write my "life list" then finishing it with 97 things i want to do in my life. with small things like learning to eat crab legs by myself without the help of my husband to larger things like doing the polar bear plunge (which i did in february in sea isle) to really big like visiting italy and ireland which i will do soon!

anyway i now live my life with the attitude that each day is a gift! i really want to share moments with my family and friends as much as possible, as well as accomplish as much of my life list as possible. no regrets. so if going to a family dinner at my grandmothers with all of the craziness and little kids running around and people shouting over each other doesn't seem fun i remember that it is moments like those that i will cherish in years to come. well you get the idea..... and when i read what your friend grampy said,"if not us, who? if not now, when?" i smiled. because he is soooo right and he's got it! it's an important lesson everyone should learn. before they are forced to learn it. thanks for that column today, i really appreciated it and i am so happy you got to learn the lesson too.

thanks for "humoring me" and reading my ramblings. i really just thought you should know that some of us out here really appreciate your column. it really is great! thanks again! have a great day and keep making those memories and life experiences!

sincerely,

christy williams

roxborough, pa

20,000 beers over the sea

“Ahoy, Cap’n Grampy! Don’t forget to pack your sextant,” I emailed to my friend Johnny, two days before our group of five high school buddies was to reunite at the Jersey shore for a weekend of beer drinking, coincident with a fishing trip.

Johnny’s nickname has been “Grampy” since high school, due partially to his lifelong love of golf, but primarily due to the sheer number of times he’s fallen asleep on the couch two hours before the end of the party. What else do you need to be a grandpa, really, besides two generations of offspring and a bowl of Werther’s Originals?

Inspired by too many episodes of “Deadliest Catch” on Discovery Channel, the show in which the toughest and facial-hairiest of fishermen pit themselves against the Arctic seas to try to haul in the bounty destined to supply the next Red Lobster ‘Fest, Grampy decided to organize a trip to let us test our own mettle on the open seas, generating responses such as: “Dude, I can get fish cheaper at Pathmark,” and, “Am I going to have to touch worms?”

Grampy then fired off the email that would launch a thousand dollars out of our collective pockets. The email began like this: “I guess you guys didn't realize that this trip is really about hanging out with your friends and doing a guys’ trip, and was not meant to start a cost benefit analysis on the price per pound of fish.” It ended with this inspiring note: “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

We realized that he was right. If not us, who would overpay to charter a boat to catch fish that none of us have ever even bothered to order in a restaurant, preferring chicken parmesan instead? If not now, in late fall in the Northeast, when would we get a chance to go, besides in the spring or early summer when the weather might actually be amenable?

In the end, the spirit of adventure and Grampy’s electronic eloquence got the better of us, and we found ourselves at the Belmar Marina last Sunday morning, where I witnessed the first post-sleep sunrise I’ve seen since my family went to the Grand Canyon twenty-five years ago.

Never having been on a chartered fishing boat before, I didn’t realize that the main expense of a charter doesn’t go towards the Strategic-Petroleum-Reserve-dwarfing amount of gas that a large boat goes through in a day, but for the services of the Boat Dad who does all of the undesirable and gross stuff for you, just like a dad might do on a trip to the local pond with his five-year-old.

Wes, our Boat Dad, wore rubber overalls and performed nearly every act of what one might refer to as “fishing” for us, except for the reeling-in part, which was just fine by us. We turned out to be pretty good reeler-inners for the first couple of hours, until our hands got tired and our backs started acting up.

“Fish on!” Wes would yell, holding onto the wildly bending rod and looking for a volunteer to come to reel it in.

“Dude, I just cracked a beer. It’s your turn,” one of us would say.

“What? I just started eating my hoagie. Why don’t you go do it?”

By this point, Wes would be shaking his head, wondering how any of us had survived into our thirties.

Over the course of the day, we (and by “we” I mean Wes) threw most of the fish back, keeping enough for dinner and a few take-home freezer bags. In the end, you’re paying for the life experience and the camaraderie, not the fish. Which is good, because the fish cost about $63 per pound.

You can throw Mike Todd back at mikectodd@gmail.com.

All you need is love. And ventilation.

When it comes to helping my dad with home improvement projects, nobody holds a candle to my skill at holding the flashlight. After spending the better part of my life helping him with projects, I’ve become something of a Jedi, and my light saber takes double-As.

“Shine the light over here,” he said last weekend as he knelt on the joists in my attic, ripping out insulation and straddling the bathroom fan that we were installing together, equally, using his skill, hard work and craftsmanship and my flashlight. OK, it was his flashlight. It’s a good thing he lost the headlamp we gave him for Christmas three years ago, or I’d be totally obsolete.

Dad’s good with things like drills, keyhole saws and needle-nose pliers, while I excel in the softer skills, like environmental illumination and choosing the right tunes to play on the nearby iPod. I don’t know how Dad gets by at home; there’s no way that he can count on Mom to put on the new Coldplay album while he’s staining the deck.

My folks were motivated to drive four hours to help us get some projects done around the house mostly because they couldn’t work their way through a mental image of me holding three bare wires in one hand and scratching my head with the other hand without soon after picturing the Eastern seaboard enshrouded in darkness.

For just over a year, my wife Kara and I have lived in our house without benefit of a bathroom fan. What can I say? We’re survivors. Life can get rough in the suburbs, and sometimes you have to adapt. But we’d begun to grow tired of the routine, after Kara’s marathon showers at earth-core temperatures, of wandering around blindly in the tropical steam and shooing toucans out the window while hacking our way to the mirror that wouldn’t be visible until we’d stood there sweating for so long that it would be time to take a shower again.

To remedy the situation, Dad and I ventured with a bucket of tools into the attic, being careful not to impale ourselves on the ceiling. There must be some imperative that requires roofers to use two-inch nails on wood that’s half-an-inch thick, resulting in attics that resemble iron maidens. Or the iron maiden’s poor cousin, the plywood maiden.

After Dad was able to complete the wiring on the new fan, thanks almost entirely to his expertly illuminated hands, we headed down to the bathroom to find that the fan worked on the first flick of the switch. I’d never seen such a thing. When I’d wired the ceiling fan in our old place, after my first attempt, the only way to get it to stop was with a thrown fuse or a broomstick.

As Kara happily marveled at the new fan, imagining scenes of using her hair dryer on her actual hair instead of her mirror, I started coughing.

“I have that pink insulation all down my throat. I can’t breathe,” I said. “But on the plus side, I’m probably much more energy efficient now.”

“We have dust masks. Why didn’t you put one on?” she said.

She’s so silly sometimes. Didn’t she realize I was looking for sympathy, not sound advice?

As Mom and Dad packed up to leave the next day, I asked for recommendations on how to run electrical wire out to a new lamp post in the yard.

“You have to bury the line at least six inches deep,” Dad said, apparently not realizing that this sounded like hard work.

“Can’t I just lay the wire on the ground and kick some dirt on top?” I asked.

“That probably wouldn’t be up to code,” he replied.

My dad’s generation is so cute with its fondness for codes, like chivalry and municipal electrical ordinances.

You can offer to fix Mike Todd’s wiring at mikectodd@gmail.com.

For whom the lobster rolls

As we drove north on the interstate last weekend, whipping through states like we were campaigning, my wife Kara asked, “Don’t you want to know where we’re going?”

“Cape Cod? Vermont? The North Pole?” I guessed. Truthfully, I didn’t want to know. We’d just unloaded our puppy for a long weekend with our friends Julie and Sergey, whose Rottweiler met the news, and the constant nips on the face, with an impressive, if resigned, stoicism. All I needed to know was that, for just one weekend, responsibility was something that other chumps (namely Julie and Sergey) had to worry about.

Kara surprised me on my thirty-first birthday with an announcement that we were going on an adventure, which was perfect, because a thirty-first birthday needs a little spicing up. Some birthdays don’t need any help. For instance, the twenty-first birthday provides its own fun, as society turns over the keys to everything but its rental cars. A decade later, though, the thirty-first birthday does little more than bring you one year closer to your first colonoscopy.

It wasn’t until we’d crossed the Maine state line that Kara revealed that she’d booked us at a bed and breakfast in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, a beautiful little coastal town that happened to be one of the few places in the world where lobster was a verb.

Upon our arrival, Kara and I quickly set to work expressing our appreciation to the locals for all the lobsters they’d lobstered. At our first dinner, where a lobster dinner with two sides cost $12.99 each, we realized that not being as gluttonous as possible would have been a sin.

Over the next two days, we divided our time evenly between exploring the rough coastline, taking pictures of lighthouses and stuffing down as many unfortunate crustaceans as we could get our claws on.

Driving through a small town called Wiscasset, we passed a roadside stand called “Red’s Eats” and decided to stop for a quick bite, as it was getting late for lunch and we didn’t want to waste daylight sitting in a restaurant. We hesitated as we walked up, though; the line for Red’s wrapped around the stand and down the sidewalk like they were giving out last year’s 401(k) balances.

“Is this place good?” I asked the last man in line.

“It’s an institution. They have the best lobster rolls in Maine,” he said.

The guy in front of him turned around and said, “I came 3,500 miles to eat one of these. I read a newspaper article in Los Angeles about this place, and decided I had to have one.”

The two people in front of them nodded and said they had come from Colorado and Nova Scotia. Red’s Eats, it seemed, had inspired more expeditions than Antarctica.

Kara and I decided we couldn’t miss out and quietly stepped into line, which scuffled along almost imperceptibly. We looked at our watches and worried about wasting the day. Across the street, a nearly identical lobster roll shack sat lonely and unloved, a high school kid propped up on his elbows in the window, waiting to take the orders that never came.

“Maybe we’re involved in a sociology experiment right now,” I whispered to Kara. “They’re seeing how long we’ll stand here.”

“Yeah, maybe they don’t even have lobster rolls here,” she said. “We’ll get to the window, and there’ll just be a couple of grad students with clipboards and stopwatches.”

But sure enough, they did have lobster rolls at Red’s Eats. When they handed us our tray, it looked like they’d used a backhoe to drop a mountain of lobster meat on top of two poor, defenseless hot dog buns.

I’m still not sure whether those lobster rolls would have justified a pan-continental odyssey, but I’d gladly stand around and complain for forty-five minutes for another one.

You can serve Mike Todd with mixed greens and a baked potato at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Don't Point at my Pemaquids

There will be a semi-coherent column about it next week, but Kara took me to Boothbay Harbor, Maine for my birthday last weekend. Question: How cool is that? Answer: Pretty darn.

Here's a shot of the woman at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse:

I'd post more, but I'm still in a lobster coma.

Surviving acts of puppies and Congress

It can be hard to discuss your puppy when all anyone wants to talk about is the economy.

“We taught her to roll over!” I might tell somebody.

“I’m worth $5,000 less than I was yesterday!” they might reply.

It’s tough to appreciate the little things in life when a graph of your net worth resembles a ride at a water park, the kind that sends screaming kids skipping across a pool of water at the bottom.

Still, you should see how cute our puppy Memphis has become, with her big floppy ears and her perpetual-motion tail. When we first adopted her about six months ago, we tried to teach her to play fetch, but the only game she has really developed a knack for is “run circles around your owner,” the rules of which are fairly self-explanatory. She plays with such zeal that we actually have to replace divots in the yard afterwards; Memphis digs in so hard when she rounds corners that she kicks up dirt like a little galloping Seabiscuit.

When I tried explaining this to my friend Johnny, he replied, “Dude, what do you think of the bailout deal?”

Nothing good can be happening when my friends want to talk about acts of Congress.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seems like a terrible way to spend our money, but maybe not spending it would have been worse. Does anybody really understand what’s going on right now? And did I mention that Memphis snores when she sleeps? It’s like she’s a little person sometimes.”

In any event, the bailout will have been successful if it at least keeps the phrase “too big to fail” out of the news for a little while, even though it’s kind of exciting that the government keeps buying all these really big companies for us. But it would be even better if we, as taxpayers, could get into the business of bailing out companies that aren’t stupefyingly boring. What are we supposed to do with a bunch of insurance companies and investment banks? Underwrite ourselves?

We should get our hands on some businesses like Rita’s Water Ice or Eastern Mountain Sports. Ooh, or a hibachi place, where they flip the shrimp right into your mouth. Is that too much to ask?

Even with the economy crashing like my sister for the first five years of owning a driver’s license, it’s still possible to find some people who are in the market for discussing puppies.

A co-worker I hadn’t seen in a couple of years stopped by to see me last week. He’d heard that my wife and I recently adopted a pooch, and he couldn’t decide if he really wanted a dog, too, or if he was just telling his wife that so she’d stop talking about getting a cat.

“I’ve never had a puppy before. Would you recommend the experience?” he asked.

“Oh, no. It’s awful,” I said.

In truth, I love having a young dog, but I hated having a tiny puppy. I mean, perhaps it’s impossible to actually HATE having a puppy. That would be like hating vanilla or Miley Cyrus or bubbles. But having a little excrement-producing machine running loose on your new carpet, chewing the power cord on your laptop and waking you up three times a night to go stand in the backyard in your underwear, shivering and swatting mosquitoes as the suddenly non-excrement-producing machine pounces on leaves and taste-tests every stick under the big maple tree, that part definitely took a little getting used to.

“But you do it out of love,” I explained to my co-worker, “And also so you don’t end up with a pixilated face as they raid your house on an episode of Animal Cops.”

You can bail Mike Todd out at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Invention is the mother of excuses

Ordinarily, the purchase of a six-pack of socks wouldn’t warrant further discussion, but the pack I just bought came in a re-sealable plastic bag, which raised issues too important to ignore. I could understand the usefulness of re-sealing a bag of socks if the socks were made out of, say, crab bisque. But this was not the case. These particular socks were made of New England clam chowder; I could tell because they were white.

To the sock-packaging professional, a re-sealable bag must have seemed like quite the innovation, but I just can’t fathom a single situation under which a person would need to re-seal a bag of socks. Socks have never gone stale before I got a chance to wear them. I’ve never heard of anybody using a bag of socks to hide a jar of honey from a sniffing bear. Under ordinary circumstances, I’d feel just as comfortable keeping socks in an unsealed bag, or even – and perhaps this is because I wasn’t raised correctly – not in a bag at all.

Not every innovation is destined to be a winner. I learned this the hard way, after inventing the self-drilling screw while mangling a household project a few months ago. “Why don’t they just put tiny drill bits onto screws so you don’t have to pre-drill all the holes?” I thought.

It was the greatest idea I’ve ever had, besides attaching a generator to an exercise bike so that you can run your house off your own energy, which, in retrospect, would never work, not least of all because your average exercise bike sees less playing time than your average bread maker. In fact, the idea was so good, you can go onto Google right now, search on “self-drilling screws,” and buy my awesome invention from a wide variety of jerks who preemptively stole it by unfairly inventing it first.

The discovery of the existence of self-drilling screws wasn’t nearly as crushing for me as it must have been for my visionary friend Johnny to see other people getting credit for his two inventions, Facebook and the iPhone.

“I totally invented those first,” he complained recently. “I was like, ‘How come nobody has a site where you can post pictures of yourself and connect with old friends? And also, why don’t they put an iPod into a cell phone?’ The Man is always sticking it to me. I deserve royalties.”

My old college roommate had an invention idea about which he swore me to a pinky-swear level of secrecy. It’s been ten years, though, so I think the statue of limitations has expired. Either that, or I’m a terrible friend. Nonetheless, he invented a pencil that wouldn’t have to be turned over to switch into eraser mode. Never mind that if flipping a pencil ranks as one of your day’s most onerous tasks, your life is already pretty awesome, but I’m fairly certain that pencil sales these days are dwarfed by sales of Kerry ’04 bumper stickers.

For one of her college classes, my wife Kara invented a microwave that comes equipped with a barcode reader, so that you’d just have to scan the UPC on your food to have it nuked to perfection. Some jerk stole this idea, too, and preemptively invented it, saving Kara the hassle of losing her own life savings on it.

I wish someone would steal this idea: let’s solve the energy crisis by putting exercise bikes connected to the power grid all over metropolitan areas. If you ride the bike until eleven cents worth of electricity gets created, a dime comes out. Forgot your subway fare? Just ride the bike until you have enough dough. Of course, it might be exponentially quicker just to walk home. If that’s the case, you’re welcome to borrow some of my fresh socks.

After you invent email, send one to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.