Is a 20 percent discount worth the humiliation?

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and I just got back from vacation. We were gone only a week or so, but it was wonderful. Nice hotels, great meals, nothing but sunny skies the whole time. Sounds perfect, doesn’t it?

And it would have been, save for one incident, an incident that—for me, at least—cast a pall over the entire trip. I blame Mrs. Taylor.

We were pulling into St. Ignace after crossing the Mackinaw Bridge (for us acrophobes, the scariest structure in the world). I was trying to get my knees to stop knocking while Mrs. T kept an eye out for inexpensive accommodations.

Now, hunting for a hotel with Mrs. Taylor is an object lesson in patience. She desires—no, requires—all the luxuries of a four-star resort, but at prices comparable to those charged at “Crazy Moe’s Transients Welcome Motel & Grill—Rooms Let by the Night or the Hour.” Therefore, in each new town several hotels must be visited before she’s satisfied that a decent room is going to cost over a hundred bucks after all.

We’d just made it across the bridge alive when Mrs. T shouted excitedly, “There’s one! Look!”

I looked. It was like any of a hundred other nice hotels we’d seen this trip.

“So?” I said.

“Look,” she repeated, pointing to the establishment’s lighted sign.

Rooms $49.95 and up, it read. They all say that, by the way, but they don’t really mean it. That elusive $49.95 room is located in the hotel basement behind the boiler and is available only to blue-eyed, one-armed triathletes visiting from Guatemala who have three forms of notarized documentation proving that they do, indeed, have only one arm.

Everyone else has to pay around a hundred bucks.

I was surprised that Mrs. Taylor hadn’t caught on to the scam yet.

“So?” I said again. “Are you a one-armed triathlete?”

“No, not that,” Mrs. T said. “What it says below.”

I looked at the sign again. In smaller letters, beneath the main sign, was a banner stating, “20 percent discount for seniors over 50.”

“We can get a deal!” Mrs. T enthused.

And we could, I realized. I am over 50, though just barely. But a senior? I haven’t been a senior since my last year of school, and that was the good kind of senior, the kind one actually looks forward to being.

The hotel sign was talking about the sort of senior who watches television ads for “Rascal” and “Hoveround” scooters with avid interest; who tunes in regularly for episodes of “Matlock” and “Murder, She Wrote”; who yells at neighborhood kids to get the hell off the front lawn, already!

To her credit, the girl at the reception desk didn’t take my word for it when I told her I was a geezer. She looked skeptical and made me show her my driver’s license. I could have kissed her, but she was younger than my daughter and might have taken it the wrong way.

The Lovely Mrs. Taylor, who won’t be a senior for nearly two decades, thought the whole thing was great fun and quite hilarious.

I have plenty to say about that, but later. Right now, I’ve got to go chase those kids off my lawn again.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Looking for love in robotic places

I’ve been lucky in love. Since turning 16, I’ve usually had a girlfriend, significant other, wife or lover. I’m not especially irresistible; but in my younger days, I was one of those guys willing to settle for whatever happened along. That, I’ve found, increases dramatically one’s chances for finding companionship, though not always suitable companionship.

Also, I played in a rock band. If you play in a rock band, even a bad one, you can get a girlfriend no matter how hideous you are. Quasimodo could have bagged Esmeralda if he’d traded the church bells for a drum kit.

Despite all that, there have been times in my life when I was sans a love interest, times when I was lonely. It happens to everyone and when it happened to me, I was as miserable as the next lonely guy.

But never, ever, did I consider the “solution” being marketed by Japanese toymaker Sega. Sega’s latest offering is—according to company executives—geared toward men over 20.

E.M.A. (pronounced “Emma”) is a 38-centemeter tall robot. Though only slightly larger than your average Barbie, and not nearly so realistically crafted or voluptuously, um, appointed, Emma is designed to interact “romantically” with her owner.

Emma blows kisses. Emma flirts. Emma dances seductively on a tabletop. Emma snuggles, or tries to; snuggling ain’t easy when you’re just over a foot tall and made of hard, blue and silver plastic.

E.M.A.—short for Eternal, Maiden, Actualization (which in Japan is considered “sexy talk,” apparently)—also sings romantic songs. Badly. But in the country that invented Karaoke, bad singing is a way of life. Emma’s just trying to fit in.

At any rate, executives at Sega seem to believe that Emma will sell like rice cakes—at just under $200 each—to lonely guys who have tired of the dating scene and just want a nice, plastic girl they can take home to mother (in a suitcase).

But maybe I shouldn’t poke fun. I, after all, am happily settled in with The Lovely Mrs. Taylor. And though Mrs. T doesn’t blow kisses, flirt or dance seductively on a tabletop (unless she’s had a couple margaritas) she does occasionally snuggle.

It’s easy to be a smart ass when you’re in a relationship. But if Mrs. Taylor did ever wise up and leave me for a tennis pro? Would I be tempted to purchase an Emma of my own?

Well, probably not. Not the Emma model, anyway. The technology’s still in its infancy, and let’s be real—Emma would never be your first choice for a blind date. Your buddy’s wife would describe her thus: “She’s a little plastic, but she has a cute face and a nice personality.”

And we all know what that means.

But once the folks at Sega get past the android Barbie phase of development and move into “Stepford Wives” territory, who knows?

I wonder if they’ll offer financing options.



More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Life insurance policy may not be healthy for teenagers

Let me preface this column by stating clearly and for the record: I love my teenage stepson. We’ve been sharing space beneath the same roof since shortly after his first birthday, and I feel the same way about him that I did about my two older, biological children—I can’t wait for him to grow up and move away to college, trade school or prison.

When James was younger, we spent a lot of time together; fishing, hiking, doing yard work. The activity didn’t matter; if I was doing it, James wanted to do it with me. It was great.

Then he—like my older son, Jordan, before him—turned 14 or so. Suddenly, doing things with the “old man” was no longer a “good time,” but instead, “cruel and unusual punishment.”

Also, his intellect grew immensely about this same time. Almost overnight, James went from knowing only a few things about life to knowing everything. I would say this impressive increase in wisdom was unprecedented, but it wasn’t. Every teenager experiences this phenomenon. For my own part, I was a flippin’ genius from age 14 to 25, after which I grew stupider by the minute until devolving finally into the mental midget whose column you’re reading now.

What I’m saying is; James is pretty much a typical, 17-year-old boy. This is why I’m anxious to get him out of the house.

Also, once he’s gone, I will, for the first time in my life, have my own bathroom. But that’s really a peripheral issue.

My belief is that God (or Darwin—fight it out among yourselves, I’m not interested in the debate) created the teen years as a way of making “empty nest syndrome” a little easier to handle. When my kids were young, I couldn’t imagine life without them. They were my reason for being, period.

By the time they were well into their teens, I could not only imagine life without them, I frequently fantasized about it. I fantasized about a peaceful, quiet house; a house whose walls didn’t rattle with the thump of 15-inch, 900-watt subwoofers pumping out 2 Pac and Public Enemy at levels guaranteed to sterilize frogs at 200 yards. I dreamt of the day The Lovely Mrs. Taylor and I could have a conversation over dinner that didn’t include graphic descriptions of the “gross thing” that happened the previous afternoon in the school cafeteria.

Then, one by one, the older kids grew up and moved out, leaving me two-thirds of the way to that blessed goal, that Xanadu. Only James remained.

But he’s only 17, with his senior year still ahead of him. After that, who knows? He may hang around another year. Or two. Three? It could happen.

He’s a good kid, and as teenagers go, he’s … tolerable. (That’s meant as a compliment, by the way.) But he’s still a teenager. And I want my own bathroom.

That’s why I’m a little nervous about the piece of junk mail I received the other day; an offer from an insurance company to take out a life insurance policy on my teenage stepson. The premiums are cheap, there’s no physical exam involved.

The mailing didn’t mention whether the policy pays out if the aforementioned teen’s demise is of a “suspicious” nature, but I’m guessing it does. Why else would they mail the thing to the kid’s stepfather instead of his biological mother, who is constrained by her sex and natural instincts to love and nurture him no matter how annoying he gets?

Don’t think unkindly of me; I won’t take out the policy. Or the kid. But, if he’s still living here two years from now, I intend to leave the insurance company’s offer lying around where James can see it.

He’s a smart kid. He’ll get the message.


More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

In a perfect world, our pets would outlive us

We just added another one to the Pet Cemetery. Our faithful pooch, Kipper, went this past weekend to the Big Fire Hydrant in the Sky. We held services out at the farm and laid Kipper to rest alongside his old pals Egypt, Speck, Vincent and the numerous bunnies, guinea pigs, parakeets and goldfish that have shared our home over the years.

Kipper was a great dog, one who had been with us a long time, and many tears were shed at his passing. He was a member of the family and will be missed.

The only critters still occupying the Taylor home are Stanley—Mrs. T’s Siamese cat—and two finches, Sid and Nancy. It seems mighty lonesome around here just now, but we’re going to try to get used to it rather than immediately restocking the menagerie.

It’s just too hard to say goodbye when our pets die, which they always do, eventually. Also—and I hesitate to say this with Kipper so recently in his grave—this is the first time in years I’ve able to walk across the back yard without keeping an eye out for “land mines.”

On top of that, Kipper was a one-dog defoliant. Wherever he lifted his leg, grass died. He was the furred equivalent of Agent Orange.

Over the years, we tried changing Kipper’s diet, feeding him doggie treats laced with charcoal, encouraging him to drink more water. Nothing worked. Whatever passed through him remained toxic to all growing things.

If I could figure out the exact chemical composition of Kipper’s whiz, I could make a fortune selling it to the military or Dow Chemical.

Next weekend, I plan to reseed the dozens of patches laid bare by Kipper’s frequent bathroom breaks. I don’t know if I can get grass to grow there again in my lifetime, but I intend to try.

I love having a dog around, but as I said, we’re going to try to remain canine-free, at least for a while. We may make it, we may not. It all depends on how successful we are in avoiding pet shops, humane societies, and front yard “pooch corrals” with signs saying “FREE PUPPIES!”

At the moment, The Lovely Mrs. Taylor is adamant: No More Dogs! The grief over losing Kipper is still too fresh; an experience she is understandably reluctant to repeat any time soon.

But I know her. Eventually—maybe sooner, maybe later—she will stumble across a bundle of fur with a broken leg, or big, sad eyes, and that’ll be that. We’ll be re-dogged.

I hope to be in my late 90s by the time that happens. Just once, I’d like to have a dog outlive me.
More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.