Getting Rob'd

Here's a shot my buddy Rob took in Australia:

Rob's shooting a behind-the-scenes jaunt for some movie over there. I only mention that so that you'll think I'm a little cooler by association. Did it work?

Giving thanks and wedgies

It’s that time of year again for cranberry sauce, unbridled gluttony and finally getting a chance to use that awl on your Swiss Army Knife for poking new holes in your belt. Oh, and for high school reunions. If you’re a geezer like me, that last one might apply to you. I’m still in denial about the whole thing. “I can’t believe I’m old enough to be having a ten-year high school reunion this weekend,” I said to myself this morning as I poured cream and Geritol into my Metamucil.

People plan their high school reunions for this time of year because all the scattered ex-high schoolers migrate home for Thanksgiving, much like geese, which is why geese are so much more deserving than turkeys to be the mascot for this holiday. I think it’s time we gave the turkeys a break and started chowing down on some good ol’ down home American Canadian geese.

I came up with this idea earlier today on my out to my car from work, as I carefully navigated through the minefield of sundry goose-related debris. If you haven’t noticed, the geese are taking over. They already have our golf courses, parks and Wawa signs. Now they want our parking lots. Who do they think they are, sea gulls?

A few years back, my wife Kara and I lived in an apartment complex that featured a rather large and quite algified pond, a verdant lagoon that stirred romance in the heart of every mosquito and was rivaled in beauty only by the Love Canal. Every morning around three o’clock, the resident geese would begin their enthusiastic and cacophonous honking; they were either fighting or making down-covered romance, but either way they kept us up all night. On beautiful, breezy Spring nights our closed windows would rattle in their frames.

“Make them stop,” my wife Kara would say, pulling her pillow over her head.

“Please stop it, geese,” I’d mutter, making a mental note to pick up a pellet gun on the way to work in the morning.

Not that I’d actually shoot a goose from an apartment window, but I’m pretty sure I’d have no problem putting goose meat right at the top of my personal food pyramid. Or at the bottom. I don’t understand the food pyramid anymore since they turned it into a rainbow and put a little stick person walking up the stairs on the side of it. It looks like a cross between a Skittles commercial and an M.C. Escher painting now.

I feel bad about eating most animals; it’s not their fault they’re so delicious. But I could go on an all-goose diet with no qualms at all. Goose flakes for breakfast. Peanut butter and goose sandwiches for lunch. And snacking on some Goose Combos would really honk one’s hunger away.

Regardless, there’s no time to convince the rest of my family about the merits of eating goose for Thanksgiving. Mom starts cooking three days before big gatherings like this, though I also do my fair share by carrying the dirty dishes ten feet from the dining room table to the kitchen, where Dad washes them. It’s quite the equitable system we’ve worked out.

And I only have a few more days to fret before my ten-year reunion. I hope everyone who didn’t give me a wedgie in high school is doing well.

“Hey, how’s my bald spot looking back there?” I asked Kara today. I haven’t held up a mirror to look at the back of my head since I was about twelve. I don’t want to know what’s going on back there. I’ll just assume that the back of my head still looks as lush and hirsute as Pierce Brosnan’s chest.

“Babe, it looks fine. You don’t have a bald spot,” she said. She always knows how to make me feel better.

Then she said, “But don’t get your hopes up for your twenty-year reunion.”

You can fight Mike Todd for the last slice of pecan pie online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Missing the estrogen train

My wife Kara left me this afternoon for a woman. Incidentally, the previous sentence will probably be the title of my first country song, if I ever write one. And if I ever get around to writing a second one, I think it should be about salvation and the benefits of aluminum recycling, because “Redemption Song (got my five-cent deposit back)” is a really good title for a country song, too.

But the truth is that Kara left me for not just one woman, but several. Fortunately for me, the situation is only temporary; she’ll be back tomorrow after her big girls’ night out in the city, an event to which my invitation was neither proffered nor desired. Kara and her friends have dealt me the terrible fate of having to stay home playing video games instead of spending the evening in front of better-dressed people showing off both of my signature dance moves: “Bounce up and down, with the beat if possible” and “Blend in, blend in, oh man I hope I’m blending in.” The world will be deprived of these innovations in modern dance because this evening’s party train is to be powered entirely by estrogen. In any event, it’s safe to say that there won’t be a toilet flushed or a tooth brushed around here for at least another twenty-four hours.

It’s interesting to me that a group of girls can go out in the city without any male accompaniment and plan to dance just with each other. This is, of course, roughly analogous to dumping chum into a shark tank. Which is why, just before she leaves for girls’ night out, you should tell your wife, “Hey babe, you’ve got a little makeup smudge on your cheek.” Then as you’re gently wiping her cheek off with one finger, write “BACK OFF I’M MARRIED!” on her forehead in permanent marker. Magicians call that misdirection.

Guys cannot dance by themselves in a big group. A circle of dancing guys is universally a pathetic sight, unless the guys really know what they’re doing and also they’re part of a performance of Fiddler on the Roof.

When I went to a bachelor party in Atlantic City a couple of years ago, we were all having a fine time hydrating ourselves in an Irish Pub when some of the single guys got the fine idea to drag everyone to the night club next door. Fortunately for us, no self-respecting club even allows a bunch of guys to come in without any women in their group. The bouncers saved us from ourselves, though a couple of my buddies pleaded their cases enough to ensure that we still got to shed some dignity before we left.

But now that I’ve got some quality alone time this evening, I finally have a chance to sit down, relax, listen and really get to know The Battle for Middle Earth II while the radio plays in the background. I’ve started listening to the pop station lately. If you don’t listen to pop music, you might not have been informed that Justin Timberlake is single-handedly bringing sexy back. That should be a major relief to those of you who thought you were going to have to bring sexy back all by yourselves. You have to admit: even if you decide to continue laboring over your sexy back-bringing efforts, it will be good to have some star power behind your cause.

Some people might be asking themselves, “Where did sexy go, anyway?”

This is a valid question, and if you had to pinpoint the exact moment when sexy left, it would probably be about the time that Bob Dylan showed up in those Victoria’s Secret commercials, which were less sexy than your average episode of the 700 Club. Still, those commercials did beg the question: “How many butts must a thong ride up, before you call it a thong?”

You can show Mike Todd how to do the worm online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Other people's pictures

It's been a while since I've posted any Guatemala pics. Here's another shot from the Jeff Hofer archive:

I think this shot should be on the cover of a magazine, like maybe National Geographic or Masonry Modeling for Kids.

Down for the count

A few nights ago, I sat on the couch in the living room, minding my own lack of business with my laptop located in what I thought was a perfectly sensible place: atop my lap.

My wife Kara walked into the room and pointed at me. “You should put your computer on the dining room table and go work in there,” she said. “Some people at work today were talking about how typing with your laptop on your lap messes with your physiology.”

“My physiology?” I asked.

“Well, they said it lowers your sperm count,” she replied.

I stopped clacking on the keyboard and looked up at her, scooching the computer towards my knees. Even though I’d never heard any such thing in my life, and I sincerely doubted that there could possibly be any truth to what she was saying, better safe than sterile.

Back when I was single and living in my own place, the only female influence in my apartment was Mama Celeste, and she hardly ever strolled into the room to randomly start discussions about male fertility. She was too busy providing dinner seven nights a week. Since getting married, though, I’ve found that reproductive conversations will just pounce on you, like Hobbes greeting Calvin at the front door. Not that Kara was necessarily bringing up reproduction as it pertained to the two of us, but her concern for my gametes sure seemed to be heading in that direction.

To find out if there was any real reason for her concern, I did a quick Google search from the safety of the dining room table. It turns out that some researchers did recently reach the very conclusion that Kara passed along to me. I was relieved to discover, though, that the problem wasn’t due to any sort of radiation. Electric things kind of freak me out like that. I don’t even like sleeping with the alarm clock too close to my head.

It seems that computers’ prophylactic effects are related to the heat that comes off the bottom of the laptop, so there’s no need to fashion any radiation-blocking aluminum foil underpants for your loved ones. Those would probably just make the problem worse, anyway, like you were preparing them to be a baked potato. If anything, asbestos underpants would most likely be the best investment, if you can find any; check with your local fire department.

Computer use does seem to be getting awfully hazardous lately. Not only do computers turn perfectly normal people into infertile, orc-slaying nerds, but some laptop batteries can catch fire rather spontaneously. You may have caught that news item on your way to the emergency room. The article I read regarding laptop use and its effects on fertility didn’t mention what happens if one’s laptop bursts into flames while resting on one’s lap (probably because they couldn’t get anyone to sign up for that study), but I think, regardless, it might be time to turn the laptop into a tabletop.

Kara continued, “Not that it’s any big deal now, but, you know, someday. We might as well not take any chances.”

I said, “You know what the people in my office were talking about today? The best way to change diapers and the semantic differences between spit-up and throw-up. Apparently, spit-up is the good kind.”

The most disturbing thing out of all of this is that Kara apparently has much more interesting conversations at work than I do. Even if I’d known the little tidbit about male fertility and laptops, I just can’t imagine how I would have broached that particular topic with my co-workers.

“So, Vernon, did you notice that the boss seemed a little testy today? Speaking of testy, guess what my wife told me?”

You can shoot Mike Todd with a fire extinguisher online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Popping an election

Have you caught '06 midterm election fever? Here are some of the early results:

*75% of precincts reporting. (Image source here. Update: Image ain't accessible there anymore. Much respect to whoever came up with it, though. Word.)

The Big Scary Real World

My wife Kara and I decided to host a little get-together for some of our work friends last Saturday night. We do this every so often just to prove to ourselves that people will still voluntarily hang out with us even though we’re married and boring. Also, the bathroom will never get cleaned if the threat of a co-worker forever associating us with toilet scum doesn’t loom near.

When you’re an adult and you have people over, guests bring stuff with them: chips, beer, wine, even homemade salsa. I’m still getting used to this idea. When friends used to come over in high school, they’d head straight for the kitchen, calling over their shoulders: “Your folks got anything good in the fridge?” Mom had to bury our good food in the backyard.

A couple of interns joined our regular crew this time. These guys are taking a semester off from college to see what life is like in the Real World, a term that I find myself using occasionally even though it’s awfully condescending. “Ooh, you have no idea what it’s like in the Big Scary Real World, little college children,” we say, holding flashlights under our chins and waving our adjustable-rate mortgage statements in their faces.

In many ways, the Real World is actually a lot nicer than school. In the Real World, nobody forces you to stay up until three in the morning trying to figure out what a Bernoulli equation is or why Avogadro’s number isn’t 867-5309. And you never have to use Bookman Old Style font to make your papers look half a page longer, mainly because you don’t have to write any more papers.

As far as I can tell, though, the biggest difference between college and the Real World is that in the Real World you get paid for doing things you don’t want to do. This helps you to afford the things you couldn’t in school, like pepperoni on your pizza. And when you decide that maybe Milwaukee’s Best just isn’t good enough anymore, you can usually upgrade to a better six-pack for less than 50% of your net worth.

As those interns sat in our living room on Saturday night, I wondered what our lives looked like to them. I pictured myself at nineteen, looking through our living room window, watching the goings-on inside like Scrooge watching the Cratchits eat dinner.

“They’re just sitting around telling stories. Only one person is talking at a time. Wait a minute, what’s that big red box they’re taking out?” I’d ask, my nose pressed against the glass.

“Oh, please, no. Merciful Heaven, what is this? It’s…it’s…Scattergories! On a Saturday night!”

Turning to the Ghost of Saturday Nights Yet to Come, I’d ask, “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?”

Actually, the Scattergories game was kind of fun. That’s a good game for anyone considering a run at law school, as it was designed with the sole purpose of making people argue with each other. Days later, I’m still making my case to Kara, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Scattergories Court, that some of my answers should have been counted.

“K, of the Special variety, is a perfectly good answer for breakfast foods that start with the letter K, you know,” I told her.

“No way,” she said. “That’s worse than kumquat omelettes.”

“Well, I think it should have counted. And everyone else came up with regular old personality traits that started with the letter M, like moody and melancholy. I think I should have gotten extra points for coming up with something as original as make-friendy.”

“Make-friendy? That doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sure it does. Hey, everybody really likes the new guy at work. He’s very make-friendy.”

Kara replied, “You’re about to feel very got-punchedy.”

You can write something make-friendy to Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Purple sky nurple

My buddy Rob's in Australia right now, so that means I can steal his pictures and put them on the internet and there's nothing he can do about it.

Check this one out:



I hope he brings back a wombat.

Cinema juvenile

My wife and I finally went to see Jackass: Number Two. This was completely her idea, of course. I wanted to see Marie Antoinette, but Kara insisted on watching grown men hurtle projectiles into each others’ crotches for an hour and a half instead.

Before we decided to go see it, I read a review that said, “Ask yourself this: Did the title make you laugh? If so, you’re probably the target audience.”

I hadn’t realized that the title was a joke at all. But when I went back and looked, yes, I did laugh. But I stopped laughing when I realized that I had just placed myself in the most unenviable of all categories: people who find toilet humor funny, but only when it’s explained to them. So I was indeed the target audience, only dumber.

I wouldn’t say that watching the movie has made me any smarter, but I will say that I look at life a little differently now. Being a homeowner for the past few years has made the world seem like such a fragile place. Everything breaks. Nothing withstands the test of time. Doorknobs fall off. Pipes transport water only when they feel like it. Nietzsche was probably a cheerful guy before he bought his first house. I bet he came up with the whole “God is dead” thing very soon after his roof sprung its first leak.

But Jackass has proven to me that the world is not nearly so fragile. You can stand blindfolded while a Siberian yak hits you in the shins so hard that you flip through the air and land on your face, and then do you know what happens? Nothing. You have a hearty laugh and then cut to the next scene, which probably involves getting attacked by a shark or being stuffed into a grocery cart and having your friends slingshot you into a closed garage door. But still, the people don’t die, like they obviously should. They don’t even seem to get seriously injured.

Darwin did not predict these people. The laws of nature do not apply. I can’t for the life of me figure out how the Jackass folks are all still alive. Chipping an occasional tooth seems to be the worst thing that ever happens to them. Requiring minor dental work after giving the Grim Reaper a wedgie seems a fairly small price to pay.

In reality, stupidity is not treated so charitably. When I was at summer camp as a kid, my friend Chris and I were hitting rocks into the woods with broom handles. We’d pitch the rocks to ourselves and swing away.

“Oh, there’s a perfect one,” Chris said, walking over closer to me and picking up a rock right by my feet.

At that moment, as Chris knelt down to pick up that rock, I thought we had an implicit understanding: I wouldn’t wait for him to get out of the way before hitting my next rock, and he wouldn’t stand up. To me, that seemed to be an agreement we could both be happy with.

Unfortunately, Chris didn’t hold up his end of the bargain. He stood up just as I started swinging, putting his head where nobody’s head ever wants to be: somebody else’s wheelhouse.

Most people go through their whole lives not knowing what it feels like to hit someone in the head with a broom handle as hard as they possibly can. But I found out exactly what it feels like, and it’s not good, though it’s probably a good measure better than being on the receiving end. I sure didn’t appreciate people laying all the blame at my feet, though, when Chris was clearly the one who reneged on our unspoken contract. It made his funeral really awkward for me.

Actually, after a brief bout with a medical condition commonly known as “being knocked senseless,” Chris enjoyed a full recovery, even graciously offering to help knock some sense into me.

You can strap Mike Todd to a rocket and fire him over a lake online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Respect the bovine bandana

On my way into the hardware store the other day, a guy stopped me in the parking lot to talk cars. Nobody ever stops me to talk cars. That’s like stopping Tucker Carlson to talk foxtrot. I can change a tire, refill the windshield washer fluid and rotate the radio stations, and that’s about it.

Thankfully, this guy asked the only three questions about my car (a Toyota “Don’t Call Me a Station Wagon” Matrix) that I could answer: what kind of mileage did it get, how old was it and how did I like it. It was nice of him to lob me some softballs. I’m glad he didn’t ask more difficult car questions, like why the letter V is used to signify how many cylinders a car has, because that just doesn’t make any sense. A cylinder looks nothing like a V. My car should be an O4, or maybe an I4 if you’re looking at it from the side.

I usually don’t do conversations with strangers very well. I never know how much I’m supposed to pry. Not prying enough makes it look like you don’t care, but too much prying makes it look like you’re interviewing the person to be a congressional page. Luckily for me, this guy did most of the talking. But his son finally indicated that our boring adult conversation had gone on long enough by aiming his space man action figure at me and going, “Pyoo, pyoo pyoo!”

“You got me!” I said. If I were in a sitcom, I would have clutched my chest and acted like John Wayne during a protracted death scene, perhaps tripping backwards over a pile of garden hoses or something, but you have to be careful when you’re hamming it up for a little kid in the presence of other adults. If the kid doesn’t laugh, you don’t get back the dignity you just spent. That’s a little more power than I’m going to give a kid who just murdered me in his imagination.

Now I’m tempted to go out and get one of those action figures for myself. Every time I want a conversation to end, I could just take it out of my pocket and go “Pyoo, pyoo pyoo!” and that would be that.

“Baby, would you mind rinsing off those dishes and…”

“Pyoo! Pyoo pyoo!” I’d reply.

“Mike, I didn’t see the report you were supposed to turn in last…”

“Pyoo pyoo pyoo!”

The applications of this technology are limitless. It mustn’t fall into the wrong hands.

I’ve noticed that people are much more likely to chat me up on the rare occasions when I’m wearing my ridiculous cow bandana, as I was on that day. People are really nice to me when I’m wearing that thing, perhaps because it makes me look deserving of sympathy. It’s just a black-and-white bandana with cows printed all over it, but it seems to have magical powers, like the Great Tiger’s turban from Mike Tyson’s Punch Out!!, except that instead of telling you when I’m going to fly around the ring and punch you in the face, it makes you be nicer to me.

Still, I don’t wear it that often because it pushes my hair back like baseball caps do, and people have told me that baseball caps are the number one cause of baldness. People have also told me that slicing through fingers in the attempt to slice through bagels is the number one cause of trips to the emergency room. All of this information seems slightly suspect to me. In my personal experience, the number one cause of trips to the emergency room is igniting model rocket engines in one’s bare hands, and I’m pretty sure that baldness is the number one cause of baseball caps.

You can borrow Mike Todd’s cow bandana before your court date online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Spring back, fall face forward

The end of daylight savings time is one of my favorite days of the year. It should be called The Clock in the Dashboard is Right Again Day. For six months, many of us have been mentally subtracting an hour from the clocks that we were too lazy to adjust back in April. But all that hard laziness is finally about to pay off. As a bonus, you get an extra hour of sleep, and it magically becomes okay that you left the snow tires on all summer. What an awesome day.

In case you’re thinking that The Clock in the Dashboard is Right Again Day isn’t happening this week, you’re probably right. I have no idea when it is. Every year, people like me depend on people like Mom to call and inform us that it’s time to change the clocks, hopefully before we accidentally get out of bed before noon on a weekend.

This fall is an especially significant one for me, as my fifth service anniversary at work is coming up (the Ergonomic Mouse Pad Anniversary). I think it’s true what they say: you’ll never forget your first half-decade of servitude.

Five years ago, right after I started working, a couple of my college buddies came up to visit me in my new apartment. On Saturday night, some of my co-workers joined us, we all walked across the grocery store parking lot that was right next to the apartment complex, ending up at the corner bar and grill, where we performed the public service of ensuring that none of the restaurant’s ice went to waste in any non-margarita applications.

On the walk home, my buddy Rory crawled into an abandoned shopping cart, squatted down and said, “Push me!”

Never being one to turn down a friend in need of locomotion, I obliged. “Faster!” Rory said, smacking the sides of the cart. So I pushed faster.

Before long, we were tearing across the parking lot, the wheels of the cart madly clacking back and forth, my co-workers wondering who the heck had interviewed me in the first place.

“Faster!” Rory said, clapping, but my RPMs were already maxed out.

And then we both saw it: the curb. There was still plenty of time to stop, or to go around it, but it sure looked to me like the curb was shaped, fatefully, like a ramp. The last thought (and I use the term loosely) that I remember having was this: “We’ll be fine if we just hit it fast enough.”

“Oh, man,” Rory said, ducking lower into the cart, but I knew that his misgivings were unfounded. Anyone who’s seen Bo and Luke Duke ramp over rivers and construction vehicles knows that they didn’t leave Roscoe P. Coltrane in the dust by slowing down right before the ramp. No, they hit the gas. Fast = yee-haw. It was simple physics.

I remembered later that physics was one of my worst classes. Applied physics turned out to be even more painful, which I learned the moment I physically applied my face to the handlebar on that grocery cart.

From the official accounts, Rory sailed through the air far enough to clear two school buses and a helicopter end-to-end. Somehow, he managed not to even skin his hands. I, however, hit the trifecta of minor facial injuries – black eye, bloody nose and fat lip. Lady Luck graciously allowed me to keep my teeth, even though we both knew I didn’t deserve them.

On Monday morning, I stealthily darted past my boss’s open door.

“Good lord, what happened to your face?” she called after me. Legend has it that even to this day, if you listen closely enough on some of our conference calls, you can still hear co-workers saying “shopping cart” when they cough.

You can take Mike Todd through the express checkout lane online at mikectodd@gmail.com.