Jack Frost’s cold shoulder

I can’t believe Christmas is almost here. It seems like just last weekend that I was out in my T-shirt mowing the yard, mainly because last weekend, I was actually out in my T-shirt mowing the yard. Last Saturday was beautiful, sunny and almost sixty degrees despite being less than a week shy of the winter solstice. Hearing a lawn mower awakened from its hibernation in the middle of December is incongruous, like seeing pictures of clothed people on the internet.

My original intent with the mower was to chop up the stubborn leaves that had refused to blow into the neighbor’s yard over the past couple of months. As I pushed the mower along, though, I noticed that the grass had actually grown taller since the beginning of November, when it was last mowed. Maybe global warming isn’t as bad as every reputable scientist in the world seems to think, but from the looks of things, Frosty’s silk hat is going to be spending the vast majority of this winter sopping up a jolly old puddle.

While I was outside mowing, my wife Kara was inside painting the bathroom. We’re trying to make our house look presentable so that we can sucker someone into buying it. I hope it sells quickly so that we can go back to being slobs. Being clean takes way too much energy. The universe wants entropy, and entropy is what I aim to give it.

As I hopped into bed on Saturday night and pulled the covers up, a wave of sickly wintergreen scent smacked me right in my olfactory epithelium. Or in both of my olfactory epitheliums, if I have two of them. Wikipedia is somewhat unclear on this point.

Kara saw the look on my face and laughed. I knew right away what she’d done: she’d busted out the Icy Hot.

“Ew, dude, did you roll around in Pepto Bismol?” I asked.

“It’s Icy Hot. It makes my muscles feel better. I’m all sore from painting today,” she said.

If you’re not familiar with Icy Hot, it’s a cream that is manufactured entirely from Pepto and wintergreen gum, then it’s enriched into an isotope that, when applied to the skin, emits odors so powerful that muscle pain suddenly drops way down on the list of things that are bothering you. If you’re sitting in the same room with someone who has just put on some Icy Hot, you can actually watch the vapors ruffling the curtains.

At least I assume that’s how it works. I’ve never tried the stuff before. I’m a lotion-phobe. Even as a kid, my parents would chase me around with suntan lotion at the beach as I ran and cried, my face turning red to match my shoulders. If I’d been one of the people in Buffalo Bill’s basement in Silence of the Lambs, the scene would have gone like this: “It rubs the lotion on its skin.”

“Oh no, it doesn’t!”

Bringing up Silence of the Lambs in the context of what honestly started out many paragraphs ago to be a discussion of the holidays may seem a little strange, but I’m not the first to make such a connection. Have you taken a good listen to the lyrics of “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” lately? I just noticed this line as the song was playing on the radio a couple of days ago: “There’ll be scary ghost stories and tales of the glories of Christmases long, long ago.” Scary ghost stories? Really? That must be a tradition my family’s been missing out on: everyone sitting around on Christmas Eve by the fire, eating cookies, as Dad tells us our favorite story, Rudolph the Vengeful Reindeer.

It sends emails to Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Getting housed

The news these days is littered with stories about the impending crash of the real estate market, which is why my wife Kara and I are going to move into a different house as soon as possible: we want to make absolutely sure that we don’t miss out on the opportunity to lose our life savings. So tomorrow, we’re going to drive one town over to meet with a seller’s real estate agent, where we’ll sign a piece of paper that says that we’re all allowed to stop lying to each other. Until you sign the paper signifying that everyone has agreed on a price, the lies just fly around from all sides like we think we’re running for office.

“We don’t want to play back-and-forth over this like a game of tennis, so here’s the lowest we can possibly go,” their agent told us recently.

“That’s refreshing,” my wife Kara replied. “We don’t want to play tennis either, so here’s the highest we can possibly go,” throwing out a much lower number and leaving us all staring into the vast void in between the two. If you had dropped a rock into that void, you could have fixed yourself a cup of hot tea before it hit bottom.

Fortunately, everybody was lying, so after several grueling sets of tennis, we finally arrived at a number with which we were all mutually unhappy.

Kara has been our chief negotiator over the past couple of weeks. I don’t have the stomach for it. She’s our Simon Cowell; I’m our Paula Abdul. This much was obvious even as we took our first walk-through of the house, when you’re supposed to pretend that you would sooner challenge a porcupine to a Greco-Roman wrestling match than live there. Even though you don’t want the real estate agent to smell enthusiasm on you, I still just can’t muster up the guts to say anything bad about a perfect stranger’s house. “Good job, house. You came out here and you did your thing. I’m proud of you,” I’d say, standing up and clapping using only my palms, seeming vaguely inebriated.

Then Kara would chime in: “Oh, this is terrible, simply dreadful. If this house was a lifeguard, a lot of people would be drowning.”

Kara’s strategy was of course the better one, so I tried to keep my mouth shut as much as possible. Besides, it’s just a house. It’s not like it’s a video game or anything, where one false move could be responsible for the destruction of entire civilizations. You need to keep these things in perspective.

So now that we’ve agreed on a price, we just have to worry about what the market’s going to do, which of course nobody can really predict. Several years ago, I was convinced that I had psychic abilities, which would certainly be useful now. Like all the great clairvoyants, my original psychic inspiration came from the old Fox show Joe Millionaire. See, I guessed on the first episode that Joe would end up with Zora, which he eventually did, thereby convincing me of my great powers, which I then used to predict that we were just bluffing about the whole Iraq thing.

So while my powers might be lacking in the realm of the consequential, I can still divine that the next reality show you watch on Fox will go like this: recap of last week, five minutes of new show, Taco Bell commercials featuring people who seem inordinately surprised that they’re full after consuming a 730-calorie burrito, ten minutes of recap of the previous five minutes of new show, GEICO commercials that are better than the show you’re watching, attractive woman’s emotional breakdown, recap of the emotional breakdown for anyone who suffered a severe head trauma in the past ten seconds but is still watching the remainder of the show, then a teaser for next week, which will be a recap of this week.

You can share your chalupa with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Ferret rustling

My favorite thing about this time of year is going into the basement, brushing the fuzz off of the Christmas decorations and bringing them up to the living room, where our ferret Chopper will romp through all of the plastic bags filled with fake pine things and red candles that we’ll never burn, spreading his fuzzy little holiday cheer and scratching his left cornea on a glittered ornament.

Actually, that last part is a trick he just picked up this year. I don’t suppose we’ll turn it into an annual tradition.

If we had waited to name Chopper until he was a little older, we probably would have named him Russell after his favorite thing in the world to do: rustle. I guess if we’re still thinking that the onomatopoeia thing is cool in a couple of years, we can name our first kid Buzz or Kerplunk.

But a few days ago Chopper embarked on one rustle too many, opening the ornament box with his nose and putting an eyeball, literally, onto one of the glittering globes.

When he came romping across the floor a little while later, he only had one eye open, which I attributed to him just waking up. Every time you see him, he’s just woken up. He could beat a teenage koala in a sleeping contest.

“What are you, a pirate now?” I asked him. Then I held him up towards my wife Kara. “Arrrr, matey, I be makin’ me poop deck wherever I dern well please. Yar!”

“Baby, I think his eye is bothering him,” she said, simultaneously proving her viability as a candidate for Household Pet Optometrist while knocking me out of the race altogether.

I’m a big wimp about taking our ferret to the vet. We’ve been very fortunate over his five years that he hasn’t required very many visits. The first time I took him there, it was just for a little bug bite that turned out not to need any treatment, but the vet took Chopper’s temperature anyway, which didn’t really go over very well. You should have seen his little legs churning when he realized what was going on back there. He looked like Scooby Doo when he and Shaggy see the phantom coming towards them.

Eventually, Chopper gave up, standing there on the metal table and looking up at me like, “You’re just going to stand there? Why don’t you DO something about this?”

So that trip cost us forty dollars to find out that our ferret doesn’t like to have metal things shoved up his rear end, something I’m guessing I could easily have discovered at home for free.

But this time, sitting in the waiting room, I felt relieved that a professional was going to check our little varmint out and help make him better. As I sat on the bench, a guy with a large plastic crate next to him leaned towards me and said, “I found these little black flecks all over my house. Turned out they were falling off of my cat. So I picked up one of the flecks and looked at it under a magnifying glass, and it looked like some kind of insect larva. You believe that?”

“That’s very interesting,” I said, shoving Choppy’s crate away from the infested Larval Cat so fast that the crate left burning tracks on the bench like the Delorean in Back to the Future.

It turns out that Chopper is going to be just fine. We just have to give him some eye drops for the next couple of days. Incidentally, we’ve recently found that giving eye drops to a squirming ferret is every bit as easy as painting a self-portrait on the blades of a spinning windmill.

You can send your 1.21 jigowatts to Mike Todd’s flux capacitor online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Some good grass

This is what whole grain looks like in its natural environment:

Cute, right? That's why you should eat pork chops instead.

The state of the reunion

Last weekend, some friends and I mustered up the courage to attend our ten-year high school reunion. I still don’t exactly understand why this took any courage at all, but somehow just thinking about high school brings all the inherent social anxiety rushing right back at you, and instead of all the good times, you can suddenly only remember the time you watched your date making out with your ex-friend at the Homecoming Dance. But one good thing about getting ready to hang around with former classmates when you’re pushing thirty is that you don’t really have to worry about zits anymore, which works out nicely because you need the extra time to focus on your bald spots.

Everyone knew roughly who would be in attendance at our reunion thanks to eVite, the ubiquitous internet invitation site that lets people post whether or not they plan to attend. My favorite eVite response was from my buddy Gimp, who let everyone in our class know: “I’m coming and I’m available.” Perhaps he’d be better able to capitalize on his availability if his buddies stopped calling him Gimp. But we’ve been friends since the first grade, so at this point, I think we’re all a little embarrassed to ask what his real name is.

Another classmate made the trenchant eVite observation that “10 years ago, they didn't have eVites.” Which got me to thinking, ten years ago I’d never even been on the internet, which means I hadn’t yet received that fateful email from Bill Gates asking me to help him beta test his new email tracking program, a favor for which he was willing to reward me handsomely. I’m still living off the residual income from the first time I forwarded that email to ten friends; I just work because I like complaining and fluorescent light bulbs.

It was almost exactly ten years ago when my college roommate demonstrated the power of the internet when he pulled a folded piece of paper out of his duffel bag and taped it to the inside of his closet door. That paper was a photo printout of Jenny McCarthy, who at that moment was so enthralled with the bubbles floating around at the car wash that she apparently forgot several important pieces of clothing.

“Where did you get that?” I asked him.

“On the internet,” he said.

“They have pictures like THAT on the internet?” I asked, as Ed McMahon burst through the door to give me the giant novelty check accompanying my Most Naïve Question Ever award.

But as I found last Saturday night, even though much can change in ten years (most prominently the collective girth of the class of ’96), much also stays the same. Walking into that room filled with familiar faces that I hadn’t seen in a decade was so surreal that it felt like a dream, a feeling that was exacerbated by the fact that about halfway through the reunion, I realized that I’d shown up wearing only my underwear.

I also discovered that even though a picture is worth a thousand words, a baby picture normally comes accompanied by the thousand words anyway.

After we’d been there for a few minutes, Gimp tapped me on the arm and pointed across the room with his eyes.

“Dude, check out Lawrence over there,” he said. Lawrence was the first kid in our grade to have armpit hair, a fact many of us noticed while he was administering headlocks to us in front of the girls’ gym class. Lawrence brought bullying to a high art form; his armpits were his brushes and our heads were his canvas.

While I’ve been greatly anticipating letting myself get fat and bald after the reunion, it does seem to indicate some degree of justice in the universe to have seen that Lawrence, once again, has a head start on the rest of us.

You can ask Mike Todd to help beta test your new email tracking program online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

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.

Biffed it big time

Hey McFly, here's a video that makes Youtube worth $1.6 billion all by itself:

Organic panic

You might think that becoming a hippie would cost a lot of money, what with the investments you’d need to make in hacky sacks, bongos and patchouli oil, but my wife Kara and I just discovered that you can transform yourself into a hippie down at the grocery store for only a buck. We recently did just that by paying a whole extra dollar for organic milk. Buying organic things automatically makes you a hippie, like how adding McGee to the end of a nickname automatically makes it funnier.

We decided to become hippies shortly after we heard a news report on the radio that linked growth hormones injected into milk cows with twinning rates in Americans that have nearly quintupled. The hormones are banned in Britain, where twinning rates are much lower. But in the U.S., we shoot up our cows like we think they’re going to play Major League baseball, even though we know full well that most cows perform their best on the baseball diamond as mitts.

Kara looked at me and said, “I’m never drinking milk again.” Seeing as how we eat cereal for dinner several nights a week, this news report was clearly going to pose a problem for us. There’s just not a good way to prepare cereal without using milk; it’s really tough to get the Rice Krispies onto the skewer without breaking them.

So we decided to go the organic route. It’s worth a buck for the peace of mind. We’ve seen what happens to people when they have twins. My cousin Dana had twins a few years ago, and her two children are spectacular, a pleasure to be around and splendid in every way. But about two months after they were born, we visited Dana and her husband Dave, and they were green. I don’t mean that they were really pale-looking, or that they had a slight tinge of green about them. They were green and they were beat up, like they had gone ten rounds in a bare-knuckle bout with the Jolly Green Giant.

“We’re in Survival Mode right now,” Dana said. They hadn’t slept in months. They didn’t even have the benefit of outnumbering their babies. Survival Mode didn’t look like much fun. Given the choice, I think I’ll stick with Sleep ‘Til Noon on Saturday Mode.

Kara and I would still be buying regular old milk if having twins was more like how it looks on Everybody Loves Raymond. I never watched that show when it was on prime time TV, but now that it’s on syndication, you can actually change channels and watch Everybody Loves Raymond during the commercials for Everybody Loves Raymond. You have to flip to the Food Network to find something that isn’t Raymond or Law and Order.

Now that I’ve finally seen a few episodes, I might suggest that more appropriate title for the show would be: Everybody Occasionally Chuckles at Raymond When They’re Not Marveling at What a Terrific Harpy He Married. Man, she’s mean. The grumble bunny never goes back in the hole in that house.

During about the fourth episode Kara and I watched together, a kid wandered onto the screen and referred to Ray as “Dad.”

“Where’d that kid come from? They don’t have kids in this show, do they?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen any kids before. That’s weird,” Kara said.

Then another kid came hopping down the stairs. Then another.

“They’re supposed to have three kids? No way.”

Then Ray referred to two of the kids as twins. I could get used to having twins like that. They come downstairs every fourth episode to move the plot along, then they go back upstairs and play silently for a month.

You can fortify Mike Todd with Vitamin D online at mikectodd@gmail.com.