Forget about it

Whenever my wife Kara and I venture into conversations about the expensive and stinky world of child-having, people who have already taken the sippy-cup plunge inevitably offer us some variation of this advice: “Go see movies. Go out to dinner. Go to the Eiffel Tower. Do everything you ever hoped to do before you die, and do it all before you have kids.”

This might sound like reasonable advice, but you have to keep in mind that it’s usually coming from people who have throw up on their shoulders. Besides, I don’t really understand why having kids has to keep you from doing the things you enjoy. Our ferret easily takes care of himself for long weekends when we’re away, and he doesn’t even have thumbs or Dora the Explorer DVDs. I just can’t imagine how a baby with a full water dish, a remote control and a big salad bowl full of apple sauce wouldn’t be good to go until at least Sunday afternoon.

Also, if you give a ferret a raisin and run out the door while he’s still chewing, he won’t even notice that you’re leaving. When taking off for the weekend, you’d probably have to do something like that with a baby, too, if you’re going to be a responsible parent.

I think people are advising us to do all of these things because there’s just no point in taking kids on vacation. They won’t remember any of it. When my sister Amy recently told my parents that she was finally going on her first trip to Hawaii, Mom said, “But we took you to Hawaii when you were a kid. Don’t you remember?”

“I was two!” Amy said.

“Well, you had fun,” Mom replied. I can kind of see Amy’s point, though. I bet a luau is much more fun when you can handle solid foods.

Not being a parent myself, I can only imagine the frustration of shelling out copious amounts of money for trips that, as far as your children are concerned, barely even happened. Kara’s family took a couple of Disney cruises when she was little, and she can’t even tell me anything about what they did or saw while they were there. All she remembers is her younger sister Sarah fleeing in terror from Mickey Mouse, which, to a three year-old, must appear to be the logical thing to do.

Traumatic events like that seem to be the most memorable, so I’ll have to be sure to work them into our future family itineraries. Kara may not remember meeting Goofy, but she sure recollects her cousin Doug stomping on toads in the Poconos, or the time she proudly held up a garter snake to show her parents, insisting that she had just discovered a really big worm.

If you’re unable to schedule in trauma to make sure that your vacations get remembered, sometimes fellow travelers will pitch in to supply it. While I just vaguely remember the scenes of natural beauty from our family trip to the Grand Canyon when I was little, I can still vividly recall this one man with a camera around his neck offering his infant a better view by picking the child up under the armpits and dangling him over the railing, with nothing under the infant’s bottom but a diaper and about a thousand feet of desert air.

Everyone in our group froze, watching, stunned, until the infant was safely back on our side of the railing, blissfully unaware of his father’s casual experimentation with Darwinism. My memory is a little spotty, so I can’t be positive, but I’m pretty sure that the kid’s father later went on to write several hit songs, invent the moonwalk and become an androgynous punch line.

You can cancel your babysitting appointment with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

About me

Since February of 2005, I've been writing a weekly column for some small newspapers in the Philadelphia area, near where I grew up. It's a hobby that helps subsidize my lavish extra value meal habit.

I use this blog mainly as a repository for the column, posting new ones every Sunday night. This has become a weekly ritual for me, like brushing my teeth.

The column is called "Just Humor Me" in most of the papers, though the Chestnut Hill Local calls it "Over the Top," perhaps in reference to my third-favorite arm-wrestling movie of all time. "Just Humor Me" has won first-place Keystone Press Awards in 2006, 2008 and 2009, which are given every year to the 14^th caller.

My wife Kara shows up in just about every column. I always call her "my wife Kara" the first time I mention her, 'cause I have to assume that newspaper readers are reading the column for the first time. And probably the last.

The cast of characters also includes our dog Memphis, our son Evan (born June 15, 2009) and assorted other family, friends and unsuspecting passersby.

Here's a picture of our little family, right after Evan was born (eight weeks early):

And here's Evan a couple months later:

And of course the pooch:


And Don Rickles:

So that's pretty much the story. If you know of any newspapers that would like to pay me for stuff I put on the Internet for free, that would be awesome. You can reach me at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Otherwise, thanks for dropping by, and I hope you enjoy the columns!

I ain't afraid of no 80's reference

A few weeks ago, I posted a guy's picture that won the Ghost Photo Contest put on by the SciFi channel. For reference, new folks and pot heads, here's the winning picture again:

I suppose there is a face-like thing going on up there in the corner window, but if you'll pardon my cynicism, methinks I may detect a wee bit o' the Photoshopping in that ring of light surrounding the ghost/curtain.

My Aunt Sister (yes, that name does rock) wrote me shortly after that posting and said, "Have you not seen the photo at Uncle Gene's place with the Confederate soldier reflected in the window of the old kitchen?" Mary Eleanor, my Mom's first cousin, had apparently snapped a pretty good ghost shot several years ago.

Uncle Gene's place is an old plantation house in North Carolina where my cousins still live. A couple, two three years back it served as a makeshift hospital during the Civil War. I hadn't ever seen the picture that Mary Eleanor took, and I honestly wasn't expecting too much, especially given the pictures in the photo contest that looked a whole lot like, well, not much.

So Aunt Sister graciously dug up the photo and gave it to my mom, who scanned it and sent it over. See if this ghost photo doesn't kick the Casper out of the ones in that contest:


The mofo's still wearing his hat! See it? This picture kinda gives me the willies. He looks like a pissed-off Ninja Turtle. Or maybe it's just a funky reflection. Still, I'm bringing my blankie with me next time we go to Uncle Gene's house.

For whom the toll tolls

To get from his place to mine, my buddy Gimp needs to hop on the PA turnpike for about two exits. I am referring to Gimp by his nickname, which he’s had for a good ten years, in part to protect his identity, and in part because I can’t for the life of me remember what his real name is. That is, of course, the mark of a quality nickname, though still short of the highest honor that can be bestowed upon a nickname, which is to get the person’s mother to start using it. Gimp has been a tough sell in this regard, perhaps because his mother has seen Pulp Fiction, but I think we’re getting close to sealing the deal with Eyeball’s mom.

On Gimp’s first visit here, he called from the turnpike and said, “Was I supposed to do something at that toll booth? There was nobody there to take my money. I just drove right through.”

“Do you have EZ-Pass?” I asked him.

“No. But I purposely didn’t go through the EZ-Pass lane,” he said.

“Was there a ticket hanging out of the machine?” I asked.

“A ticket?” he said, as if I’d just asked him something completely off topic, like the best way to make tartar sauce from scratch or how to train a cat to flush the toilet.

“Dude, did you just get on the turnpike without taking a ticket?” I asked. There was silence on the other end.

Gimp is still holding out on getting an EZ-Pass, a device that could have averted the situation altogether. I can certainly respect his obstinance. I used to pride myself on going through the full-service lane at toll booths. I thought EZ-Pass was for people who had so lost perspective on life that they thought they couldn’t afford the extra few seconds to interact, however briefly, with an actual human being. A grumpy, wrong-change-giving human being, but a human being nonetheless.

I’d do the same thing at gas stations, never using pay-at-the-pump, instead hoofing it inside to pay the cashier. Besides allowing for one more small personal interaction instead of dealing with a machine, it helped to keep me up-to-date with the latest trends in jerky-flavoring. Teriyaki’s doing big things.

But eventually I got to thinking. No, seriously. How many toll booth attendants did I invite to my wedding? How many gas station cashiers leave messages on my answering machine saying only, “Dude, call me back,” knowing that I can tell from their voice who called? Despite many years of interacting with toll booth attendants and gas station cashiers, I had not made lasting relationships with any of them, prompting me to rethink all the time I’d been wasting by not just surrendering to the Matrix and letting the machines win.

Besides, if you were to make the attempt to start a relationship with a toll booth attendant, here’s probably how that would go:

Toll Booth Attendant: Seventy-five cents, please.

You: You look like a nice person. Want to come camping with me?

Toll Booth Attendant: Seventy-five cents, please. You’re holding up the line.

You: Forget about all of them for a moment. Let’s get to know each other. I could be the “exact change” you need in your life.

Toll Booth Attendant: I’m radioing the cops.

So it’s probably just as well to zip on through in the EZ-Pass lane, like Gimp should be doing by now. That day on the phone, I said, “You might as well turn around and drive to Ohio, man, because you’re about to pay like you did.”

“No way,” he said. “I’ll be able to sweet talk ‘em.”

When he finally showed up at my place, I asked Gimp how much the trip had ended up costing him. He didn’t want to talk about it. The turnpike had really taken its toll on him.

You can tell Mike Todd why your nickname is Stinky online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

The fabric of our lives

The second wedding anniversary is the cotton one. I know this because Kara just sneak-attacked me with a beautiful new cotton shirt. She is thoughtful and wonderful, though she is also two days early, so of course I haven’t gotten her anything yet. As soon as she gets in the shower, I’m going to jump in the car, run down to the drugstore and buy her the finest Q-tips in the whole place.

Earlier last year, I found out that the first anniversary is the paper one, so I decided to get Kara a cool paper present. This decision led to most lopsided gift exchange in which I’ve ever taken part.

I got Kara these cute little paper flowers from the stationery store. The flowers were the same colors as the bouquets that Kara had picked for her bridesmaids a year earlier, so I was hoping that the fact that I actually remembered this would score me some extra points, and she honestly did appreciate the gesture. The flowers are still in a vase in our living room. They’re still there because all you have to do to keep paper flowers alive is to try your best not to set them on fire, making them the only plants we’ve ever owned that will live to see their first birthday. Maybe we’ll take them to Chuck E. Cheese’s to celebrate, though we probably won’t let them play in the ball pit, ‘cause it’s always wet in there for some reason and I don’t want to find out why.

Then Kara gave me an iPod. Can you believe what a lopsided gift exchange that was? An iPod doesn’t consist of paper at all, except for maybe the warranty card. I definitely gave her the better present. The more technically savvy reader may be tempted to point out that iPods hold way more songs than a bunch of flowers made of 10% post-consumer product, but then you’re also much less likely to get mugged for your paper flowers. I’m always looking out for her safety.

Arbitrarily buying presents based on the material that is supposed to represent each year’s anniversary is kind of fun, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stuff You Have No Choice But to Buy for Your Spouse industry is trying to get us hooked in early with the cheap ones. Paper. Cotton. Cardboard. It’s only a matter of time before they hit us with the Faberge Egg Anniversary or the Diamond Paperweight Anniversary. I hope next year is the Bacon Anniversary. That sounds tasty. For now, though, cotton will do. It seems appropriate for us in our second married year – nice and comfortable, and not wrinkly yet.

When you’re a kid, two years is an eternity. For a marriage, though, two years means that the gates are open but the horses haven’t even started running yet. Or maybe, instead of starting gates, it means that the bathroom door is open even if somebody’s in there, because without even thinking about it, I’ve been taking some questionable liberties with the Open Door Policy. Perhaps it is possible to get too comfortable around someone. Funny what can happen to one’s sense of propriety in just two years.

But we’re still really just getting started. People like my parents, who have been married for almost forty years, are probably reading this and thinking: “Two years? That’s nothing. I could do two years standing on my head.”

At weddings, when they do that thing where all the married couples come out on the dance floor and the DJ keeps having the most recently married people sit down until somebody’s grandparents who have been married since Appomattox are the only ones still out there, Kara and I are back in our seats before Louis Armstrong can even tell us what he thinks to himself.

You can tell Mike Todd what you think to yourself online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Plumbing the depths

A couple of weeks ago, I sauntered into our local plumbing supply store and swung my plastic grocery bag full of crusty, fifty-year-old valve stems onto the counter. St. George did not have to work as hard to remove the dragon’s head as I did to remove those valve stems from our shower.

“It took me a lot of swear words to get this far,” I told the guy behind the counter.

He glanced down at the contents of the bag, looked at me and said, “I bet it did.” I’m still trying to figure out exactly what he meant by that.

Of all the things I’ve learned to do through trial-and-error (heavy on the error) around the house, plumbing scares me the most. If you mess up painting a room or installing a new ceiling fan, you don’t have to call the fire department to come drain out your basement. My specialty around our house is more along the lines of light bulb changery, a task that can ordinarily be accomplished by just one of me.

But I fear that I may have inherited my plumbing acumen from my mom. About fifteen years ago, she took a brief but eventful foray into the world of household plumbing. She had been asking Dad to fix the loose handle on the kitchen sink for ages. Their conversations went something like this: “Maurice, when are you going to fix the handle on the kitchen sink?”

“This weekend,” Dad would reply every week.

I love that my dad’s name is Maurice. That’s a strong name. Steve Miller made it even cooler in his song “The Joker,” with that little “wow woooww” on the guitar after he sang, “Some people call me Maurice.” It may surprise you to learn, though, that my dad rarely, if ever, speaks of the pompitous of love.

Anyway, in Dad’s defense, he did buy the replacement parts for the kitchen sink, and he told Mom that all he had left to do was remove the old handle with his wrench and replace it with a new one. In retrospect, he probably should have mentioned something about shutting the water off first.

One day, when Dad was going to be coming home late from work, Mom decided that there was no good reason that she couldn’t just fix the sink herself. The good reason would present itself shortly. She grabbed Dad’s wrench out of the garage and went to town on the faucet handle. After a couple of turns, the handle shot into the air, propelled by a geyser the likes of which are normally not seen outside of Wyoming.

I was downstairs watching “What’s Happenin’?” reruns (and Rerun) when I heard the shrieking from the kitchen.

“Get towels! How do you turn it off? Get towels! Aaaaaahhh!”

The water was shooting hard into the ceiling, spraying in every direction, puddling on the floor and running down the steps into the living room. At thirteen, I had absolutely no idea how to turn off the water without the handle, which was last photographed soaring over rural Maryland. While I was little help to resolve that particular situation, if Mom had needed me to supply her with the cheat codes to get thirty lives in the Nintendo game Contra, she would have been all set.

Eventually, we piled enough towels on the geyser that the water started flowing down the sink for the most part, until the neighbor’s teenage kid came over, went straight to the basement and shut off the main water valve. Showoff.

Plumbing is just one of those things that works out great in theory but doesn’t always pan out in the execution, like those fake wooden gardeners’ behinds that people put in their lawns or the strategic missile defense system.

You can send Mike Todd your wrenching stories online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Just a stone’s throw

The most important thing I learned during my six years as a Boy Scout, besides how to look awesome in a kerchief, is that you should always set up your tent as far away from Mr. Coe as possible. Mr. Coe was a fine man with a good heart and poor hearing, and his favorite activity was clanking pots and pans at 5:30 in the morning as he cooked up what must have been a ten-course breakfast. Why he couldn’t just eat Slim Jims and Fruit Roll-ups for breakfast like the rest of us, I have no idea. But if you had the misfortune of setting up camp anywhere in his vicinity, you’d jolt awake at daybreak, convinced that someone was filming a Braveheart battle scene outside of your tent.

I thought of Mr. Coe recently as I browsed homemade videos on the website YouTube.com. YouTube is a horrible, hypnotic waste of time. Most of the videos that people post there are poorly recorded, utterly pointless and otherwise have little redeeming quality, which makes the hours that evaporate away while you’re watching them all the more inexplicable.

One of the videos, titled “Skipping Record,” showed a middle-aged man, looking like a skinnier version of Jerry Garcia, step up to a river bank and wing a flat stone out across the water. The man stands and watches as the stone pitter-patters on top of the water until it is so far out that all you can see are the tiny little splashes and the barely-perceptible wake that the stone has left behind. The man turns, pumps his fist once and walks off camera. This was the Guiness World Record-breaking stone skip, thrown by Kurt Steiner of Emporium, PA. If you’d like to try to beat it, you’ll have to skip a stone forty-one times. And if your personal record is closer to ten like mine is, you’ll probably need to talk to your local major-league ballplayer about performance enhancement.

Mr. Coe’s son Andy wasn’t too big on stone-skipping, but he was the best overall rock-thrower I’ve ever seen. When you’re on a week-long canoeing trip and the fish aren’t biting, there’s not much else to do at the end of the day but to stand on the river bank and chuck rocks, which we all did enthusiastically. There’s the old legend that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Potomac River, which might well be true, especially if George enlisted the aid of a cannon, but I’ve personally witnessed Andy Coe easily clearing the Upper Delaware River when most of the other kids were doing good to plunk their rocks halfway across.

One day, we pulled under a bridge near Narrowsburg, PA to eat lunch. Mr. Coe walked up the bank and out onto the bridge, which was a considerable height up from where the rest of us sat.
“Hey Andy, bet you can’t throw a rock all the way up here!” he yelled down, as he turned and shook his behind to taunt his son.

Andy stared at his father for a moment, picked up a walnut-sized rock, tossed it to himself just to get the feel of it, then hurled it up towards the bridge. Too late, Mr. Coe tried to jig out of the way, and he howled as the rock careened off of his shin.

That throw made Andy the Pecos Bill of our scout troop. Every year, the bridge got higher, the rock got bigger and Mr. Coe’s howling became more profane.

I picked up the paper yesterday and saw that Andy just got called up to pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals. OK, I made that part up, but if this story ever gets made into a movie, that’s how it should end.

You can bean an email off Mike Todd’s eyes online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Update: In case anyone gives a hooey enough to check it out, here's the world-record stone skip. This is a different angle than the one I described above, but you can see it better here:

Did you see all forty skips? I might have missed a couple of 'em. But if this guy's nickname isn't the Skipper, something is seriously wrong.

Something offal

While we were at breakfast with my parents at a diner near their house recently, my wife Kara pointed to the side order section of the menu and asked, “What’s scrapple?”

A hush fell over the table as my family tried to think of the most delicate way to describe the local delicacy. Kara grew up in New York State, so she’s unfamiliar with some of the things that make Southeastern PA so special, such as Tastykakes and scrapple, two Philadelphia favorites that have somehow managed to stay mutually exclusive all these years, at least until somebody works out a palatable recipe for Scrapple-Filled Krimpets or Honey-Glazed Scrapple Buns.

We happened to be in town because we were visiting my parents for the weekend on our return trip from a beach vacation with Kara’s side of the family. My folks graciously agreed to ferret-sit while we were away. The varmint loves visiting Grandma and Grandpa, and as soon as we open his cage, he wastes no time burrowing into their couches and making his own little forts out of them. I’m sure Mom and Dad were sad to hand him back over to us.

Now that we’ve burned our shoulders as well as our vacation allotment for the year, Kara and I have several months of frolicking about the hallways at work to look forward to, basking under the light tubes and soaking in the fluorescence. Honestly, it’s a bit of a relief that beach season has ended for us. I have a difficult time foreseeing any potential situation over the next nine months that may require having to take my shirt off in public, assuming that I continue my several-year streak of not catching on fire or being apprehended on the show COPS. Without the Specter of the Swimsuit hanging overhead, ordering French toast, bacon and eggs for breakfast, and slathering all three in syrup, is much more enjoyable.

“Scrapple is a pork kind of thing,” I said. “It’s like sausage. They only make it around here because it’s so good that nobody will share the recipe. You should order some. You’d like it.”

“Oh no. Scrapple’s nasty,” Mom said, “It’s the stuff they won’t even put in hot dogs.”
Kara scrunched up her face. Getting rejected from a hot dog for being too gross is like getting kicked out of Hooters for not being dressed tastefully enough.

“When they’re making scrapple, they use everything but the squeal,” Dad offered, in case the point had not yet been made.

Perhaps the most persuasive argument I can muster for not eating scrapple is this: I’ve never seen my dad eat it. This is the man who, when we were on Boy Scout camping trips many years ago, used to roll open packets of raw, oily sardines and place the little fish on Ritz crackers.

“Ew, Dad, what are you going to do with that? It reeks like cat food,” I’d say, watching with horror. He’d just smile serenely and pop the whole shebang into his mouth as I ran off to get the other kids to come over and watch, like a little carnival barker: “Step right up, kids! Come see the Incredible Sardine-Eating Man… He doesn’t even care that they are obviously not meant for human consumption!”

Believe it or not, when the waitress came back to take our orders, Kara passed on the scrapple. But the experience piqued her curiosity enough that she looked up more information about scrapple on the internet when we got home.

“Scrapple is typically made of hog offal,” she read.

“What’s offal?” I asked.

As she continued to read, her face lost all of the color it had gained at the beach.

“Oh, that’s just awful,” she said.

You can send Mike Todd your favorite scrapple recipes online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Something annoying in the air

If anybody deserves a raise, it’s the person who invented stadium seating in movie theaters. Next in line would be the person who decided to put Cranium on airplanes. Last week, the short flight that my wife Kara and I took from Philadelphia to Charlotte featured a silent slideshow of trivia questions from the popular board game, which kept me so entertained that I completely forgot to defend my turf by bracing my knees against the seat in front of me after take-off, allowing the lady in front to recline her seat until her Aqua Netted hair was tickling my nostrils.

I hardly noticed, though. Trivia is the supreme outlet for a lifetime’s worth of useless information, and there’s no better time for it than when you’re a captive audience, strapped to a tiny chair with a screen directly in front of your face, the only thing separating you from the guy in Clockwork Orange being a lack of eyeball clips, and maybe a tiny bag of pretzels. Two bags if you’re a charmer.

Kara entirely failed to appreciate the genius of this perfect time-killing diversion. She was too busy reading a novel with half-naked (a pessimist would call them half-clothed) people on the cover striking suggestive poses, the suggestion being that the other half of the clothing would be removed by page three.

Tapping her on the shoulder, I said, “Hey, did you know that Massachusetts is bigger than New Jersey? I would’ve thought it was the other way around.”

“Really? That’s interesting,” she said, without looking up. A few minutes passed quietly.

I said, “The Skipper from Gilligan’s Island name on the show was Jonas Grumby. Did you know that? They only said his name in the first episode. I got that one wrong. Do you think the Professor had a real name too?”

“Uh huh,” she said. How could she not get excited to learn the Skipper’s real name? She has no appreciation for the fine arts. A couple of years ago, we saw Mark Linn-Baker, the guy who played Cousin Larry in the sitcom Perfect Strangers, at the grocery store, and she didn’t even care. I was like, “Cousin Larry’s over there by the bagel bins! Let’s go do the Dance of Joy!”

And all she could say was, “Who’s Cousin Larry?”

Who’s Cousin Larry, indeed. Don’t be ree-diculose.

A few moments later, I turned to Kara and said, “Did you know that the wingspan of a 747 is about one hundred feet longer than the Wright Brother’s first flight? That’s just crazy.”

“Baby, I’m in the middle of my book,” she replied.

“Sorry. Are people making out in it right now? I didn’t mean to interrupt them,” I said. I’m allowed to make fun of her trashy romance novels about once a month. After that, I’ve spent all my tokens, and any comments about barrel-chested men and almost-ready-to-love-again maidens must be kept to myself.

All of a sudden, Kara said, “Oh, the flight attendant’s coming with the trash bag. Quick, drink the rest of my cranberry juice or I’ll be stuck with the cup until we land. Chug it. Chug it!”
I downed the cranberry juice, and as I dropped the cup into the trash bag, I looked up and saw a question about Greek mythology pop onto the screen, a subject that Kara took a few classes on in college.

As I started to point up at the screen, she said, “It’s Bacchus,” while fiddling with her tray table. She had already seen the question, and she wasn’t even going to say that she knew the answer. What’s the point of knowing a trivia answer if you aren’t going to let everyone around you know that you know it? Modesty has no place in the trivial pursuits.

Did you know that the brown-throated three-toed sloth can reach Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com?

On physics and sausage

As my wife Kara and I were driving down I-95 recently, she pointed to a billboard and said, “Ooh, look! It’s only $89 to fly to the Bahamas!”

The number 89 had an asterisk next to it, of course. An asterisk is a symbol commonly used in advertising to tell the reader: “all of the words preceding this symbol are not true.” Sure enough, as we cruised past at seventy miles an hour, I caught the small print at the bottom of the billboard that said “each way.”

So while it was true that it cost only $89 to fly to the Bahamas, it also cost $89 to fly FROM the Bahamas. That’s still not a bad deal, but unless your game plan is to fly to the Bahamas to start a new life with only one checked bag, one carry-on and one personal item to your name, the price of your ticket will be much higher than the number on the billboard, which was tall enough to win a fight with the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.

Most airline fares are advertised one-way now, often with the condition that the one-way price is only offered when purchased as part of a round-trip ticket. This makes perfect sense, especially if the airlines are so concerned about our nation’s declining math skills that they’re making us multiply everything by two to help keep us sharp. While I appreciate the gesture, I don’t have the spare mental cycles to spend practicing my times tables while I’m driving. I’m too busy wondering about things like why my head feels like it’s going to implode when only one window is cracked open.

A few years ago, I started noticing that driving around with one window cracked open exactly replicated the feeling in my ears of being twelve feet underwater. I slept and drooled through most of my college physics classes, but I’m pretty sure that the effect has something to do with momentum, air pressure and hypochondria. I’ve never heard anyone else complain about this phenomenon, but I’m still pretty sure it’s real, like Global warming and the guy whose job it is to make sure that the Wizard of Id is never funny.

So while I’m not inclined to work out the math in my head, I do agree that only advertising half the price sure does make things look cheaper. Maybe the world would sell more stuff if everyone started doing that. Here’s how it would work at the veterinarian’s office:

“That will be $120 dollars, Mr. Johnson.”

“$120? But the sign out front says that you’d neuter my cat for $60.”

“Ah, yes. Did you see the asterisk?”

Anyway, my favorite sign along I-95, besides the South of the Border billboard with the giant hot dog on it that says, “You never sausage a place! You’re always a weiner with Pedro,” is the one between Philly and Baltimore that informs you of the Decoy Museum coming up at the next exit. What exactly should one expect to find at a Decoy Museum?

I picture a big empty parking lot with a wooden museum at one end. When you walk up to the front of the building, you see that the door is not a door at all, but a painting of a door. So you walk around the side of the building, where you find that the front of the museum is just a huge painted sheet of plywood propped up by 2x4’s. That’s when the rope snaps tight around your leg and flings you upside down, hanging you by the ankle from a nearby tree and shaking all the money out of your pockets.

Or maybe it’s just a museum full of wooden ducks. Either way, I’m not going there.

You can send Mike Todd half an email online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Driving the Mrs. crazy

Yesterday at work, I hit myself in the eyeball with a drinking straw. It was a souvenir Mickey Mouse bendy straw that a co-worker brought back from Obligatory Appeasement of the Children World, so it was a good deal beefier than your average disposable straw. I was bending the straw backwards and then releasing it, so that it would go “twaaaaannnng” like a miniature diving board. I greatly underestimated the kickback that Mickey was packing. He should really come with a warning label: “Don’t be an idiot around this drinking straw.”

Luckily, it was the soft curve of Mickey’s ear that bounced off my cornea, so there was no need to alert any medical professionals, which worked out well because I doubt there would have been an applicable check box on the worker’s comp form to describe what I had just done to myself.

Also, while I was mowing the lawn recently, a wood chip hit me right in the eye before I even had time to flinch. The frequency of things bouncing off my bare eyeballs is becoming somewhat alarming. A complete lack of reflexes in middle school might have done me some good, back in the Two for Flinching days. But now I’m worried that my eyelids’ slow response time is somehow age-related. I’m not twenty-five anymore, like I was three years ago.

Maybe I’m feeling sensitive about getting older because something very disturbing happened last weekend. My wife Kara and I went to a high school graduation party because we’re friends with – the horror, the horror! – the parents. We’re parents’ friends now. That’s going to take some getting used to. Seems like just a few days ago, we were the ones graduating from high school, so much smarter than we are now.

Regardless, I was fiddling with the Mickey straw yesterday because Kara wouldn’t let me leave work, and my enthusiasm for being productive had long ago expired. Kara and I carpool together in the mornings, so if one of us gets stuck at work in the evening, the other is held hostage as well. Fortunately, instant messaging technology lets the aggrieved party harass the productive person on the very computer screen upon which she is trying to get some work done.

I saved the chat we had yesterday around quitting time. Here’s how it went:

Me: You ‘bout ready to head home?

Kara: hey... doubt it... my job is crazy right now. I’ll get back to you in a few.

[Ten minutes pass.]

Me: Dude, it’s late! I have to be in early tomorrow. Should we just sleep here tonight?

Me: I gather from your silence that you do not share my desire to depart. I guess I’ll start making a blanket out of Post-it notes.

[Fifteen minutes pass.]

Me: I just injured my eyeball with a Mickey Mouse straw. Do we have any goggles lying around? I’m thinking of going with a James Worthy goggle kind of thing. Would be safer that way.

[Ten minutes pass.]

Me: I can’t remember what our house looks like. Do you think we’ll be able to find it?

[Ten minutes pass.]

Me: Losing...will...to...live...

Kara: OK OK! We can go now. Jeez.

Me: Hang on. I’m working on something -- be ready in an hour or so.

Kara puts up with the aggravation of carpooling with me for the same reason that rich people put up with having chauffeurs in their cars: I drive, and I don’t complain while the boss is around. We used to split the driving 50/50, but after we got married, whenever I tried to hand her the car keys, she acted like I was offering her a dead squirrel.

You can punch Mike Todd in the arm online at mikectodd@gmail.com.