A tisket, a casket

This week is fixing to be full of four-clickers. I rate the impending stressfulness of my days by the number of estimated deodorant clicks it will take to get through an entire day without looking at any point like I just swapped shirts with Ruben Studdard after he went through a carwash with the windows down.

Saturdays are usually two-clickers. Regular work days are three-clickers. Days where I have to stand up and speak in front of an audience bigger than my bathroom mirror are four-clickers. That’s the maximum on the click scale. I don’t know what would constitute a five-clicker, but it would probably have to be a day something like the kind Jack Bauer has about once a year.

Speaking of which, why isn’t Jack doing deodorant commercials? “When I’m methodically shocking somebody I was friends with three minutes ago with a stripped wire from a hotel lamp, I need to make sure I’m dry. And it doesn’t hurt if I smell like a Mountain Breeze, too. ZZZZZAP!”

The click scale is per-armpit, of course, so a four-clicker is really a total of eight clicks, for those who might be thinking of trying this at home. Sometimes I accidentally click too many times on a side, in which case I try to do the majority of my sweating on the side that has more deodorant, which would be easier to do if I wasn’t so dang bilaterally symmetrical.

I’m traveling for work this week, attending a conference that requires me not only to extract my shampoo from tiny little bottles, but also to overcome my irrational fear of speaking at the front of a room while a bunch of people stare at me. Public speaking is something that I look forward to almost as much as I look forward to Eddie Murphy fat suit movies. That is to say, I do not look forward to it all that much.

When people find out that you’re traveling for work, they like to say things like, “Oh, the company’s paying for you to take a little vacation, huh?”

They’re right. Traveling for work really is almost exactly like a regular vacation, except that your friends and family can’t come with you and you have to do work the entire time, and occasionally you have to do things that terrify you.

I’m reminded of the old Seinfeld bit in which he notes that most people are more scared of public speaking than of death, which means that at a funeral most people would rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. I don’t think I’d take it that far, but if there’s one thing that can be said for Seinfeld, it’s that he’s never driven across the country wearing diapers to pepper spray an astronaut. I love that about him.

I’ve found that the key to surviving public speaking is just to practice as many times as possible beforehand, and also to give away free T-shirts if you can. If I have to speak extemporaneously, the sensation is similar to driving off the road into a cornfield, with ears of corn bonking into the windshield as I desperately try to find my way back onto the road without saying some boneheaded thing that spectators might later describe as “Oedipal.” Practice is always of the utmost importance, unless you’re a really famous professional athlete, in which case skipping practice will just make you more famous.

When I have to leave for these trips every now and again, my wife Kara and I like to make a big deal out of saying goodbye, like it’s the last scene in Casablanca. That only problem is that I’m the one getting on the plane, so I think that makes me Ingrid Bergman.

You can picture Mike Todd wearing only black socks online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Can reading this column increase your virility?

Several perfectly good commercials were interrupted last weekend by the Super Bowl, a game which pitted the Not the Philadelphia Eagles vs. the Also Not the Philadelphia Eagles. One of those teams probably won, though the big winner of the night in my eyes was most definitely the artist formerly known as the Artist Formerly Known as Prince. How cool is that guy? He’s almost old enough to get movie tickets at a discount and he’s short enough to get cut from the Shire’s basketball team, yet everything he touches turns to cool. Teal suits? Cool. Dude wearing a bonnet? Cool. Mick Jagger couldn’t even pull that off.

The biggest disappointment of the game came when the final whistle blew without Gillette introducing a razor with six blades. How long are they going to make us wait? I’m not going to make the jump from my Mach 3 just to buy a razor with a measly five blades. If they sweetened the pot just a little, so that my razor started to resemble a wheat threshing implement, I’d be in there like swimwear. In any case, the day can’t be far off that we’ll be spending more on razor refills than we do on gas or mocha choca latte yayas.

I’m still hoping that Gillette will step up to the plate, as the Great Hair Migration from the top of my head to the rest of my body is causing me to have to shave more than twice a week. Five o’clock shadow used to be two days late, but now it’s starting to show up on time. I still haven’t gotten any better at shaving since I was thirteen, though, and my morning forays in front of the bathroom mirror usually result in unspeakable carnage. Incidentally, Hamburger Helper makes an excellent aftershave. The women can’t resist the Cheddar Cheese Melt.

I have a decent electric shaver that allows me to mow my face, but it doesn’t really get all the stubble, plus I remember an old news story asking the question, “Can radiation from electric shavers raise your risk of cancer?” Of course the answer is no, but the thought still sticks in my head, even though a quick Google search finds that the only people who lend any credence to such a story also think that wearing a hunk of quartz around their necks improves the mental well-being of anyone other than the person who sold it to them.

Besides, when the title of a news story ends with a question mark, the answer will never be given in the story. A question mark at the end of a news story title means, “We were jus’ wonderin’. We dunno, either.”

The most important thing I learned during the Super Bowl is that Grissom is coming back to CSI, which means, as you probably have already figured out, that he left it at some point. Anyway, it will be good to have him back. Judging from the commercials, he took some time off to either be a mall Santa or to enter a Hemingway look-alike contest. In any event, someone should get that guy a six-bladed razor.

Did you see the Snickers commercial where two dudes kissed Lady-and-the-Tramp style? The implication seems to be that Snickers is so good that it has the power to temporarily alter your sexual orientation. If this is true, you would be well-advised to seriously consider your company before consuming your next Snickers bar.

The most heartfelt moment of the Super Bowl came after the game ended, when Cadillac donated a car to the MVP. If there’s anyone who could use some free wheels, it’s definitely the richest guy in the stadium. I bet he’ll be glad to not have to take the bus to practice anymore.

Mike Todd is open! You can hit him with an email at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Don’t just stand there, bust a myth

I recently stood in the kitchen, holding the refrigerator door open with my knee, staring mournfully at the items therein while contemplating the paradox of our times: the fridge is full but there’s nothing to eat.

Even so, I like to consider myself a survivor. Come dinner time, even when we haven’t been grocery shopping in weeks, I can almost always scrounge a meal together as long as I can find something from one of the four main non-perishable food groups: peanut butter, popcorn, Bavarian pretzels or Lucky Charms.

Bear Grylls, my new hero, wouldn’t need any of these things to survive. For those who haven’t seen him, Bear is the star of the Discovery Channel show “Man vs. Wild,” a series that stacks the odds in favor of “Man” by bringing a Mt. Everest-climbing British Special Forces commander to the fight. This hardly seems fair, as “Wild” would have a much better chance of winning against your average clean-fingernailed humor columnist. In each episode, Bear skydives into a different remote location and has to survive, carrying only a canteen and a knife, until he can find his way back to civilization or Wal-Mart, whichever comes first.

What’s striking about the show is how quickly man must remember to act like an animal when he’s no longer in the vicinity of his TiVo. Bear climbs up to birds’ nests so that he can steal the eggs and eat them raw. He catches fish with his bare hands and kills them with his teeth, eating a very graphic sushi lunch that my wife Kara and I could only watch through our fingers.

Bear also goes the extra mile, flinging himself into quicksand pits and icy lakes on purpose, just to show you what to do if you should ever find yourself in a similar situation, like when you can’t find your car in the mall parking lot.

Tough as he may be, I still suspect that if he ever accidentally skydives through the skylight into our house, Bear will probably starve to death.

In any case, it’s tough to find Bear on TV lately because the Discovery Channel plays “MythBusters” twenty-three hours a day. MythBusters is a show that carefully and methodically attempts to shatter the myth that tough guys shouldn’t wear berets, continuing Rerun’s ground-breaking work from “What’s Happening!!”

Actually, the MythBusters do perform some interesting experiments. In the most recent episode, they proved, by building a gelatin mold of an average-sized human male and welding coat hangers to a SCUBA tank on its back, that Achilles’s heel was actually his crotch. They have also proven that Zeus did not throw thunderbolts, because there’s no such thing as a bolt of thunder. Those guys know how to bust a myth.

Also, if you were just puttering along like I was, wondering how Howie Mandel got back on TV again, you may not have noticed that they changed the rules about punctuating the possessive form of words that end with the letter S. When I was a kid, we learned about Achilles’ heel. Now it’s Achilles’s heel. I didn’t know that grammar was allowed to change, and it’s frankly a little unsettling. The second comma in a list of three items has also met its demise. I think that one is the fault of the British woman who wrote a book about panda bears called “Eats, shoots and leaves.”

You don’t see physicists running around changing the laws of thermodynamics on us. “Okay, everybody, we changed our minds. Energy can be destroyed now.” That just wouldn’t be fair. It’s tough enough to learn things once. If you learn it in second grade, it should be true forever. Also, it would be cool if ice cream cones were still be thirty-five cents.

You can start a fire using only birch bark, Mike Todd and a lighter online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

[Note: Apparently, there's still some disagreement about the apostrophe thing, so there's no need to rap my knuckles with your APA handbook. Some sources say it's okay to say it like Achilles's, while others suggest that I'm a complete tool for even bringing it up.]

Something to fret about

My wife Kara and I have been taking our minds off of selling our house by taking turns thrashing on the game Guitar Hero II. If you’re not either a complete loser or twelve years old, you’re probably not aware that Guitar Hero II is a video game that uses a PlayStation2 and a fake plastic guitar to simulate the experience, for those who have no chance of ever doing it themselves, of being cool. I’ve come to terms that this is the closest I will ever get to being a rock star, but I’m still looking forward to the next game in the series: Heroin Overdose.

Guitar Hero II replicates the feeling of playing the guitar in front of a fickle but easily excitable crowd, requiring you to become embarrassingly proficient at punching the big colorful buttons that represent a guitar’s frets while you strum a switch that serves as the strings and pull down the blinds that serve to keep the neighbors from seeing you.

While it’s awfully fun, there’s something about wailing away on that plastic guitar that seems eerily reminiscent of the little plastic Fisher Price lawn mower that I had when I was a kid, the one that went poppity-pop-pop when pushed across the kitchen floor.

“Wook at me, Daddy! I’m mowing the wawn! And shwedding out some ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ by Guns N’ Woses. Wock on, dude.”

But now I can add “Pretty good at playing a pretend guitar” to my resume of useless skills, right under “Can sometimes catch things behind my back” and “Used to know how to play Chinese checkers.” Incidentally, in China, they call that game “Marble Receptacle.”

The saddest thing about being a wannabe fake guitarist is that there’s a very real guitar sitting in my basement, its case acting as more of a sarcophagus. That guitar has seen less sunlight in the past two years than Dracula or Dick Cheney. I swear I’m going to start playing that thing again one of these days, but really, what’s the point of playing the guitar after you’re married? All the motivation is gone. You’ve already got a groupie for life.

My groupie is also quite a talented fake guitarist. This is the first video game she’s ever really enjoyed. Now I’m regularly greeted by riffs from the Allman Brothers and Black Sabbath when I walk into the living room, as Kara rocks back and forth and says things like, “Aw, yeah, who’s the man?”

It’s odd to find her playing video games of her own accord. I’m not sure quite how to react to this behavior. She’d probably feel the same way if I suddenly picked up an interest in, say, painting toenails. We’d certainly have more common experiences to talk about, but would she have to worry that I’d start hogging all the little foam toe separator thingies?

Regardless, it’s too bad kids don’t learn how to play guitar in school. Rocking out is much more useful than fractions. When I was in the fourth grade, I chose to learn the trumpet because it seemed like the coolest choice. I pictured myself playing in a Dixieland band on a riverboat somewhere. But there aren’t that many riverboats in suburban Philadelphia, at least none that I could bike to. And the world just doesn’t need that many bad trumpeters. Ska isn’t even cool anymore, and I never once scored a date because I could play the theme song to Indiana Jones at a volume that would knock books off a shelf.

I should have at least picked the drums. Choosing an instrument is just too big a decision to place with someone who consumes Jell-o through a straw just because it sounds funnier that way.

You can trash a hotel room with Mike Todd online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Cleanliness is next to impossible

Note: The following column makes a few jokes at the expense of our house. Kara thinks that making fun of one's house on the internet is not necessarily the most prudent thing to do when one is trying to sell said house. Of course, she's right. So I'd just like to make absolutely clear that our house has nothing wrong with it that couldn't be solved by removing the current occupants. Seriously. We've taken excellent care of this place, and I'd sell it to my own mother (if she came close enough to our asking price).

I’ve developed an appreciation for clean people. Involuntarily, of course. As my wife Kara and I continue trying to trick some unsuspecting, loaded soul into buying our house, we actually have to clean up our messes directly after we make them. Otherwise, somebody will show up at our front door unannounced and say, “Here, let me give you this check for your asking price – wait, do I see a pair of jeans slung over a chair? Never mind. I guess I’ll go buy a Ferrari instead.”

Our home used to be this awesome obstacle course, like the last event in American Gladiators, except with less steroid-addled androgynous woman-like creatures hurling medicine balls at you. Walking to the bathroom in the dark without mashing your toes into anything gave you a real sense of accomplishment. But now our place is a total fun vacuum, where cereal bowls that once contained dinner are only allowed to stay on the coffee table until the next commercial break and the floor is sterile enough to perform surgery upon.

Still, no matter how much you try to stay on top of things, there’s always dust settling, mildew procreating and ferrets excreting just a couple of rooms over. It’s not good enough just to clean up after yourself; entropy is constantly on the attack. You know those old dilapidated buildings on the side of the road with caved-in roofs and holes where windows use to be? Those happen in like six months. Somebody just says, “You know, I don’t think I’m going to clean up around here anymore,” and a few weeks later the first wall collapses.

It’s strange living in this state of suspended habitation, where the house doesn’t really feel like ours anymore, but it isn’t anyone else’s yet, either. As we sat on the couch last weekend during our first open house, we turned on the TV to distract ourselves from the lack of bidding wars occurring in our living room.

“Oh, sweet, zombie movie!” I said, switching the channel to arrive at something far more ghastly: a Sandra Bullock romance. I still hadn’t fully recuperated from the suffering endured during a recent rental of The Lake House, a movie in which the viewing experience would benefit greatly from the audience being as inebriated as the screenwriters. The lesson to be learned from the whole experience is that there is an enormous difference between 28 Days and 28 Days Later, even though one could argue that both movies involve heads from which brains have been removed.

We finally did have some people come for a walkthrough of the house, and as I walked a small family around, the mother took to calling me Todd. If I had a dollar for every time somebody thought my first name was Todd, we wouldn’t even have to sell the house; we could just airlift it onto our private island.

So I let her keep calling me Todd, figuring that we had a sort of sports team relationship thing going on, like, “Hey Todd, you just scored on the wrong goal!” or “Yo, Todd, I just left a surprise in your gym bag!”

But then Kara joined our tour and called me Mike.

The lady looked confused. “Oh, I’ve been calling you Todd all this time.”

Then she looked at me as though I’d lied to her, which I really hadn’t, except for every word that had come out of my mouth regarding the condition of the house. Now I’m just kidding, of course. The house really is in excellent condition, and you’d be silly not to offer at least the asking price for it. Oh, that bucket under the skylight? That’s there to catch rays of sunshine.

You can remind Mike Todd not to leave his underwear on the stairs at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Half the couch it used to be

Back when we moved into the house that we’re now trying to sell, my wife Kara and I made the inexplicable decision to keep her decrepit old couch from college despite the fact that it would have been far more compassionate to have taken that thing out behind the dumpster to quietly put it out of its misery. Besides the threadbare floral print that had yellowed to a hue reminiscent of the BEFORE picture in a Polident commercial, the couch was so worn out that once you settled into it, you needed a Land Rover with a winch to pull you back out.

Our thinking at the time was that we could put the couch in our unfinished basement so that, in a pinch, we could have B-list guests sleep down there.

“Don’t think of it as a nasty, dank basement,” we’d tell them. “Think of it as a really awesome crawlspace with all the amenities. You’ll find ample water in the dehumidifier tray, and if you need us for anything, just tap Morse code on the pipe that goes up to the toilet.”

Of course we never made anybody sleep on that couch. But we did torment our friends by having them help us move it into the basement in the first place. It took six grown men driving that couch like a battering ram down the tiny basement stairwell to finally get it down there, with much cracking of railings and uttering of cuss words accompanying the proceedings. When it finally turned the last corner and we set the couch on the floor in the basement, I realized that we’d just added a permanent fixture to the house. And there it sat for three years like a ship in a bottle.

We should have just left that couch on the sidewalk in State College, where it would have only had to wait until Penn State won (or lost) a football game before rioting students would have set it ablaze. I don’t know if they’re still doing the rioting thing at colleges, but the trend sure seemed to be catching like couch fire when I was in school five years ago. College kids were probably just rioting all the time to seem more cosmopolitan, like French people. But nobody can truly riot like the French, who make the best Camembert, Bordeaux and La-Z-boy flambé.

When we decided that we were going to try to sell our house, though, it dawned on me that the couch was somehow going to have to come back out of the dungeon. It had become even more of an eyesore, as the mildew and floral print had combined into a tie-dye gone horribly wrong. We’d also need to get that couch out of there without help from our friends, so that we could save our moving tokens to spend on them later.

At about this time, my thoughts turned to the reciprocating saw sitting out in the garage. Sure, our stairwell was too small to maneuver a big couch. But why not two smaller couches?

As I passed Kara in the living room on my way to the basement with the saw in my hand, she asked “What are you doing?”

“We’re going to give that couch downstairs to a nice family,” I said. “They live on a farm. They’ll take really good care of it, and it will have lots of room to sit around all day long.”

If you’ve never cut a couch in half before, you’re really missing out on quite an experience. It’s actually easier than you might think, as long as you let Black and Decker do all the work for you. And moving those two halves out of the basement was a dream. We could have drop-kicked them up the stairs. Man, I love that saw. And it reciprocates.

You can offer Mike Todd a sip from your dehumidifier tray online at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Washing my hands of the whole thing

A buddy of mine recently told me a cautionary tale that I feel compelled, in the public interest, to pass along. You probably haven’t heard this story yet because, unlike most cautionary tales, this one doesn’t involve Taco Bell, spinach or Mel Gibson.

At a recent rock concert, the band stopped playing mid-song as a spotlight suddenly beamed down onto a poor young soul coming out of the men’s restroom.

The lead singer pointed at him and asked, “What color is the soap in the men’s bathroom?”

Frozen like an unhygienic deer in a single giant headlight, the kid couldn’t come up with an answer, revealing to the entire concert-going crowd that his grooming habits left a wee bit to be desired. The merriment enjoyed by the audience at this kid’s expense will likely live on through years of intensive therapy.

So now you have a great question to ask, say, your father-in-law the next time he comes back from the restroom. And if anyone ever nails you with that question, you should probably guess pink, unless you actually know the answer, which of course you wouldn’t unless there was another person in the bathroom for whom you were showing off.

More people would know the correct answer if public bathrooms were entirely foot-operated. Unless you happen to be in a restroom on the turnpike with magical, sometimes-functional sensing devices, you are still faced with the issue of touching the sink again to turn the water off after you wash your hands. We can stage putting a man on the moon, but we can’t invent a foot-operated sink? People have already proven themselves ready for such a technology. We’ve mastered flushing and even putting the seat up and down using a technique similar to the one employed by the Karate Kid to knock out the blond dude from Cobra Kai.

I guess I’ve been thinking about hand washing more than usual lately, as I just spent the holidays hanging out with family. To say that our families are a bunch of sick individuals was even truer than usual this time. Disease was the gift that kept on giving this Christmas. Giving phlegm, I mean. Just as I was considering renting scuba equipment so that I wouldn’t have to keep sharing air with those people, my immune system finally surrendered. As I walked into the kitchen and sneezed, there was a moment straight out of a zombie movie.

“Oh, no. He’s been infected, too. Get away! Get away!”

Colds weren’t even the worst thing going around. The snifflers were the lucky ones. Both my dad and mother-in-law came down with what we suspect to be a norovirus, a particularly nasty little gastrointestinal bug named after the location of one of its first known outbreaks: Norwalk, Ohio (Welcome to Norwalk! Keep a clean trash can by the john.) It’s never a good thing to have a malady like that named after your town. Just ask the residents of Old Lyme, Connecticut or Diarrhea, Nebraska.

My mom was about the only one who never came down with anything. She attributed her good fortune to a vitamin supplement called Airborne, which looks exactly like what would happen if scientists successfully got algae and an Alka Seltzer pill to fall in love. Airborne claims to help keep you from getting sick if you just drink a cup of green nasty froth every day.

As I watched Mom down a glass, I cringed and said, “I’d rather just be sick.” I got my wish. But my wife Kara also took Airborne every day, and she was one of the first among us to get zombified. So I still don’t know whether the stuff works or not. But I suspect it’s at least as effective as Dumbo’s magic feather.

You can try to catch Mike Todd with chopsticks online at mikectodd@gmail.com.