Quantify my love

I just popped a little gizmo from outbrain.com on this blog that allows the reader(s) to rate each post, under the assumption that my fragile ego will be able to handle the assault. This should help me figure out which columns to send to random editors when I'm in the mood for rejection.

The default star system goes from 1-5 (Bad, Boring, Okay, Good, Excellent). That seems like a tough grading scale to me. Excellent? This isn't the Economist. Let's use the following rating guidelines instead:

1 – The column came out of the screen like the girl in the Ring and ate my face off. (And also, please install a crippling virus on my computer.)
2 – The column outed me to my grandparents.
3 – The column made me watch that movie with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson.
4 – The column put the toilet paper roll on backwards.
5 – The column was legible.

Also, if you notice that every post already has a five-star rating when it's posted, it's probably just a glitch in the software. And if there are two five-star ratings every time, it's probably a glitch in my mom's software, too.

When the cat’s away, the mouse sits on the couch

When my wife Kara recently announced that she was planning a girls’ weekend in New York City with some of her friends, my thoughts immediately turned to the provisions I’d need to sustain myself in her absence, namely video games and Harvest Cheddar Sun Chips.

To those who might think that video games do not qualify as survival necessities, I submit the following story.

Kara’s good friend from college, who for the purposes of this column will be named Martha, once decided to seduce her college boyfriend. She bought lingerie and spent a bunch of time in the bathroom doing, I don’t know, whatever girls do in there to make themselves look better in their own minds when they look perfectly good already.

When she slinked into the living room to suggest her ideas for the evening’s itinerary, her boyfriend didn’t look up from the TV screen.

“Not now,” he said, mashing the buttons on the controller. “I’m in the middle of a really good part.”

After some more discussion that really could have benefited from the application of the pause button, the evening ended with her exit from the apartment as he continued playing.

“I got turned down for sex because of a video game,” Martha complains whenever her long gone ex-boyfriend becomes the topic of conversation.

Upon hearing this story, every one of my guy friends has the same reaction. They’ll shake their head in disbelief, pause for a moment, then ask, “What game was he playing?”

When they ask this question, they’ll already be fishing in their pockets for their car keys, getting ready to roll through all the stop signs on the way to Best Buy. Surely, a game that good warrants at least a rental.

To anyone who worries that the current generation of young males is too obsessed with video games, may you at least take some solace in the fact that their chances of procreation are looking pretty slim.

Even though I’d miss Kara while she was gone, I was looking forward to getting some quality time with my much-neglected PlayStation 3. While some men may have taken offense at getting ditched by their wives for the weekend, I was glad that she’d have the opportunity to dance at a nightclub with her friends without involving me, potentially getting it out of her system.

In my life, I’ve seen maybe two guys who would qualify as good dancers and an equal number of girls who would qualify as bad dancers. The reason for the inequality is not immediately evident, but it’s my hypothesis that women have an extra hinge in there somewhere.

The objective for any male on the dance floor is to dance well enough to keep his partner (oh, please say there’s a partner) entertained, while blending enough to become invisible to everyone else. I’m 6’4” tall, which makes blending very difficult. When I’m dancing, I feel like one of those cell towers that’s been done up to look like a tree. Standing meters above all the other trees, I just keep saying, “See? I’m a tree, too. Please don’t look too closely.”

After Kara and her friends departed for the big city last weekend, a couple of my buddies came over for an Assassin’s Creed marathon. Sometimes we ordered pepperoni, sometimes we ordered half-pepperoni-half-plain. It’s important to have variety in your diet.

After one particularly gruesome kill, blood spraying all over the screen, my buddy Allen said, “So was Kara excited to get away for the weekend?”

“Yeah, but she was worried that her clutch didn’t match her outfit,” I replied.

“Her clutch?” he asked. I assume he was raising one eyebrow, though I didn’t press pause to look.

“It’s, uh, a little purse,” I replied, ashamed.

“Where I come from, a clutch is something that engages a transmission,” he said. That used to be where I came from, too.

You can do the Hustle with Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Deflating Valentine’s Day

**Dear Internet -- I'm going all Jack Bauer and falling off the grid for a bit. I'll be back with a regular column next week. Until then, take care of all these electrons around here for me. Peace! We now return you to your regularly scheduled inane blathering.**

With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, now might be a good time to turn to your significant other and say, “Baby, you’ve won the primary for my heart, and you’re polling very well for the general election.”

Or if you’re someone who doesn’t like professing your love on a particular day because Hallmark told you to, you can just buy heart-shaped stuff instead, which you’re going to have to do anyway. “Isn’t it enough to just give my love?” you may be thinking. No, no it is not. Take that love, go to the mall and convert it into something heart-shaped, chocolate or heart-shaped and chocolate.

I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. Every year, my wife Kara and I agree that we’re not going to do anything special for Valentine’s Day, then she pounces on me with a heartfelt card or a bottle of cologne, at which point I say, “Oh, that’s so nice. Hey, is our milk bad? We need new milk. I’ll give you your present right after I get back.”

But this year, Kara’s not getting King Size Twizzlers for Valentine’s Day. I have no idea what she’s getting yet, but it won’t be from a store that sells prophylactics in the bathroom.

I recently resolved to be more romantic after we spent the weekend at a friend’s apartment for her birthday celebration. We’d never met most of the other people who gathered there that Saturday night. After everyone performed the mandatory shoe removal, the conversation turned to socks, prompted largely by Kara’s jack-o-lantern socks that she hadn’t intended to flaunt.

Another girl sitting on the couch held up her colorful socks for inspection, at which point her apparent boyfriend said, “Hey, those are nice!” as he grabbed her feet and commenced giving her a tickle torture, an interrogation technique that hardly ever yields credible information.

She laughed and kicked, and they collapsed in a cuddly puddle on the floor. It went on like that all weekend. They could usually be found standing in the center of the room, hugging, talking quietly and kissing. After a couple of hours with them, it hit me: these people must have met about three weeks ago.

“How long have you all been together?” I asked.

“Since around Thanksgiving,” she said. It was disconcerting to me that I already knew they hadn’t been together for long. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly; they just still had that new couple smell.

On Sunday morning, I deflated our new queen-size Aerobed to start packing it up, still marveling at how little beer the bed required to give a comfortable night’s sleep.

“Did you read the instruction manual?” Kara asked.

“The instruction manual? It’s an air bed, not a model rocket.”

“If might get a hole in it if you fold it up wrong,” she said. I continued folding it incorrectly, working faster as Kara fished the instruction manual out of the box.

It was a classic dispute between labor and management. I considered going on strike, but the only other room in the apartment contained the new couple, giggling and giving each other massages.

Of course, in the end, it was ten times easier to fold up the bed according to the manual. After almost eight years of being together, I should know by now that we get the best results when we’re working as a team, though I suspect, on our team, we both know who’s wearing the whistle.

In any event, I hope that the new guy is smart enough to at least splurge on the King Size this Valentine’s Day. And if they’re still enjoying themselves as much as we are after eight years, they’ll have plenty to keep on giggling about, even if he’d rather curl up with a good norovirus than read a than an instruction manual.

You can bite a chocolate and stick it back in the box at mikectodd@gmail.com.

To everything, a Turnpike

My buddy from New Jersey once complained that everyone thinks of the Garden State as just a big turnpike. “It’s not all toll booths and smokestacks,” he said. I agreed, noting that there is also the Molly Pitcher Service Area, where one can rub elbows with one’s fellow motorists, especially and unfortunately if the men’s room is crowded.

While everyone knows full well that New Jersey is chock full of beautiful places, it’s hard to ignore the importance of the Turnpike. While my buddy deplores the NJTP as the unofficial mascot of his state, the first question he asks when he meets somebody else from New Jersey is, “What exit are you from?”

I thought of this last weekend, as my wife Kara and I drove through Jersey en route to a friend’s birthday party. Our GPS unit, Jill, kept trying to steer us onto the Turnpike, her voice growing irritated with our continued refusals to comply.

“Recalculating,” she’d say after we blew past one of her suggested routes. Determined to put us on the Turnpike, I swear her voice started sounding snippy. “My algorithms were programmed by a team of engineers with advanced degrees, but you probably know the better way. Knock yourself out.”

Jill doesn’t know how good she has it. Kara completely coddles her, refusing to leave her alone in the car even if we’ll be back in a minute.

“Babe, we can leave a window cracked,” I tell her.

“It’s so nobody steals it!” she says. Sure it is. I’m starting to worry that Kara is going to switch Jill’s voice to Bruce, the Australian male, and run off to Sydney with him, though he’d probably insist that they take the Turnpike.

As we drove through the state, I noticed that the “wipers on, lights on” rule is especially well-documented in New Jersey. These signs don’t do much for me in the way of a reminder, as Toyota no longer allows drivers the ability to turn their headlights off in the first place. My headlights, like Law and Order reruns, are always on.

I’m glad that this safety innovation took place after I got through high school, as sneaking back home at four in the morning with the headlights blazing through my parents’ bedroom window might have been an insurmountable challenge, though pushing the car up the driveway every Saturday night might have been a workout regimen that I could have actually stuck with.

Even with the “car on, lights on” policy, Toyota still gives you a headlight switch on the multifunction knob, which is basically the vehicular equivalent of a Neuticle, the silicon implants that fake a dog into thinking it hasn’t been neutered. The switch makes you feel like you still have all the old functions that you’re used to having, but that’s actually its only purpose. The rigging’s all there, but it’s not connected to the mast.

Incidentally, in researching this column, I discovered that a single large Neuticle costs $79. If you’re going to go that far, though, you might as well spring for the pair at $129. That’s a savings of $50 on the second Neuticle, which can then be applied to some desperately needed therapy.

Speaking of being stripped of one’s manhood, it amazes me still that I am still not allowed to operate a gas pump in New Jersey. That’s the one car-related thing I actually know how to do, and the state has taken it away from me. Next, it’s going to come into our houses and open all the pickle jars for us, rendering people like me completely useless. How does that law stay on the books? It must have something to do with the powerful orange reflector vest lobby.

You can push Mike Todd into your cranberry bog at mikectodd@gmail..com.

Stripping isn’t for everyone

After spending the past week stripping wallpaper from our kitchen, I have become something of an involuntary expert on the subject. If you’re considering taking on such a project, the best advice I can offer is to throw out all your old scrapers, scorers and steamers. You’d be surprised how much easier it is when you decide to just douse the wallpaper with kerosene, set it ablaze and rebuild.

Of course, you may decide you’d rather do things the hard way, actually removing the wallpaper without destroying the house around it. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. People will tell you wild stories, passed down through the generations, of wallpaper that just pulls off, like you’re unpeeling a giant floral banana. This type of wallpaper probably exists in places where the streets are paved with gumdrops, but in the real world, the average sheet of wallpaper has been applied with more paste than resides in the collective digestive system of our nation’s kindergartners.

We should have known what we were getting into. A few years ago, we rented a steamer from Home Depot to remove some small pink borders in our old house, thinking that, worst case, it would take about an hour to take them all down. We slid head first into the rental department twenty-four hours later, exhausted and totally steamed.

Maybe we felt cocky this time around because we had our very own steamer. Turns out that, while it costs about forty bucks to rent a steamer for the day, you can buy one outright for fifty. Also, buying two four-piece McNuggets off the dollar menu is cheaper than buying a single six-piece. I’m afraid I just told you everything useful I’ve ever learned.

Before steaming a wall, you have to go over every inch with a scoring tool that pokes tiny holes in the paper. Never has so much scoring produced so little fun. But at least my wife Kara bribed me with food to get the job done. “I’ll cook if you strip,” she said. I rarely get solicited to strip, so I immediately set about stripping harder than I’ve ever stripped before.

Our steamer had this orange label stuck to it: “WARNING: This machine produces live steam and/or scalding hot water which could cause severe bodily injury.” I think it should have been a guarantee instead of a warning. After I started attempting to take the wallpaper down, I realized that I was really giving myself the third degree. The third-degree burns, I mean. I’m pretty sure that my wedding ring is now soldered to my finger.

When I mentioned this to some of my married friends, I found out that other guys take their rings off when they’re performing manual labor. That seems like it’s breaking a sacred trust. You should only take your wedding ring off when it’s absolutely necessary, like when you want to spin it like a top on a restaurant table or flip it like a coin as you walk over a storm drain.

My buddy Allen explained to me that he never takes his ring off because, “If you wear through your wedding band, that means you’re free.”

I don’t know about that, but I do know that it’s probably a whole lot easier to just decide that you like having a million repeating berries and flowers plastered around your kitchen than to actually do something about it. Why anyone has put up wallpaper since the invention of paint, I just can’t understand.

But somewhere, somebody is putting up wallpaper right now, hopefully not in a place that you or I will ever live. For every sheet that comes down, one must go up. It’s required to keep the universe in balance.

You can steam Mike Todd off your walls at mikectodd@gmail.com.

Can’t get there from here

When you ask my dad for directions, he’s likely to respond with something like, “Oh, that’s seven miles southeast of here,” as he points towards the living room wall. What you are then to do with this information, I’m not exactly sure. I suppose it would depend on whether or not you remembered to grab the sextant when you came in off of your frigate.

My wife Kara and I won’t be bothering him or anyone else for directions anytime soon, though, now that we have Jill in our lives. Her arrival in our household marked an abrupt close to the era of asking for directions. She is the voice of American Accent (female) on the GPS unit that Santa-in-law gave to us. If you’re not familiar with GPS devices, just watch the Super Bowl commercials this year and you’ll be all caught up. A little bit dumber, but all caught up.

We chose Jill out of a list of several accents and genders. We originally thought we’d stick with Daniel, the British male voice. Right after Christmas, we drove around with Kara’s sister Sarah and her boyfriend Brad in the backseat while Daniel calmly guided us along.

“This is awesome,” Brad said. “I feel like I’m Batman and Alfred’s up there telling me where to go.”

There is something upper-crusty about having a British guy giving you directions, like you’re driving to a place where meals are served under big metal doohickeys. Unfortunately for Daniel, he was programmed to say “R.T.” instead of “route,” and he couldn’t tell the difference between an “I” and a “1,” which made him less than ideal as a guide for dispensing our particular dark brand of vigilante justice.

As Brad looked through the list of available accents, he said, “Too bad they don’t have any fun accents in here, like a drunken Irish dude or James Earl Jones.”

I pictured a family in a minivan driving down a quiet country road as their GPS unit suddenly barked, “Oy! Turn lef’, ya bloody wankah!”

Still, maybe Brad was onto something with the James Earl Jones suggestion. Who wouldn’t like to take a road trip with James Earl Jones? Also, if you called him James Jones, would anybody know who you were talking about? It would be like saying John Booth or Kermit Frog.

I’m a big fan of James Earl Jones, despite being wronged by him a decade ago. When I was a student at Penn State, he came on campus as part of a Distinguished Speakers tour. I went with some of my friends to see him in the packed auditorium. It was surreal to hear the first few words out of his mouth, like we were all starring in a movie that he was narrating.

Then he proceeded to give a canned speech on giving more money to the arts that I’m pretty sure he downloaded off the internet. As the novelty of hearing his voice wore off, the only thing one could do to stay awake was to picture him in his role as Thulsa Doom, evil tyrant and beheader of Conan the Barbarian’s mom.

At the end of his speech, he allowed time for a short Q&A. A brave student walked up to the microphone in the aisle and asked, “Could you say ‘Luke, I am your father’ for us?”

We all leaned forward in our seats in anticipation. James Earl Jones hesitated for a moment and then said, “Oh, you could do it better than me,” before moving along to the next, much more boring, question. The curtain behind him billowed with the disappointed exhales of a thousand college students.

Regardless, it would be really cool to have him tell me the fastest way to the mall. I can just imagine how awesome it would sound to turn on the car and hear him say, “It’s seven miles southeast of here.

You can tell Mike Todd where to go at mikectodd@gmail.com.

When a house becomes an igloo

The day before guests were set to start arriving for the biggest party we’d ever attempted to throw, my wife Kara and I came home to find our first floor entirely without heat. Apparently, we had done something to anger the universe, like not inviting it.

“What’s the thermostat set to?” Kara asked, casting a suspicious eye on me as she hugged her jacket tighter. I have been known, on occasion, to turn down the heat without the express written consent of other parties in the house, parties who think that a heating system should regularly be cranked up to such a degree that it can perform other duties, such as browning potatoes on the kitchen counter.

“I swear, it wasn’t me this time,” I said, looking at the display panel on the thermostat. It was registering 49 degrees, a temperature perfect for preserving meat but not marital relations.

I pulled together all of my knowledge about heating, cooling and refrigeration systems to perform a complicated diagnostic procedure known in the business as “flicking the thermostat and cussing.” After that, the only thing left to do was shrug, cuss a little bit more and call a professional.

I’m always a little hesitant to call in for backup. Contractors can pretty much do anything they want once they’re invited into your home, like old college friends and vampires. But this was an emergency, and we were feeling fortunate to have a cavalry to call.

As we waited for the repair van to show up, icicles began to form on our vast collection of remote controls, each of which has exactly two buttons that we ever actually press. The temperature continued to drop. Packs of wolves tracked elk across our couch. While we had been intending to vacuum the entire house just before the party, it was becoming increasingly evident that we’d need a Zamboni instead.

After the contractor showed up and poked around for a few minutes, he used his best funeral director voice to inform us that we probably had a frozen pipe in our baseboard system.

“I expect there’s already some damage. We’ll have to get in there and warm up the pipes individually to flush out the blockage. It’s 600 dollars for the first two hours, 250 for each hour after that,” he said. “And we’ll probably have to cut into your walls.”

A single tear froze on my cheek. But without switching to a heating system based on whale blubber, we saw few other options. As the contractor and his crew worked in the basement, I went back to cleaning while Kara chopped vegetables in the kitchen with her jacket on.

Few things in life are universal, but it’s a pretty fair indication that good things are not happening when a contractor working in your basement comes running up the stairs and barreling through your kitchen, yelling, “Follow me and bring towels!”

The blockage and corresponding burst pipe had been in our laundry room. When the pipe was heated up and the ice melted, gallons of water poured onto the floor, down the wall and into the basement. As we ran into the laundry room to discover our newly installed (if somewhat shallow) indoor pool, a house spider surfed across the floor on a dryer sheet.

The water, having been enclosed in our heating system for quite some time, had a distinct aroma.

“It smells like asparagus pee,” Kara’s friend Curry, who had come early to help us get ready, observed as she draped towels over the mess. Fortunately for us, the cleanup went pretty smoothly. The contractors fixed the pipe in short order. We have yet to find out if our homeowners’ policy will cover any of the expense, but it has been my general observation that insurance doesn’t cover things that actually happen.

At least the heat was on before party time. Next time, we’re inviting the universe.

You can cuss and flick Mike Todd at mikectodd@gmail.com.