Don’t sue me for what I say, @#$*!!

For some reason, I’ve always sort of believed that crazy lawsuits, and the sleazy lawyers willing to handle them, are somehow indigenous to the United States. I’m not sure why I thought this madness was limited to the U.S., but I did.

Maybe it’s because most of the cases we read about are handled in U.S. courts.

My favorite is the case in which a burglar, who fell through a skylight and broke his back while trying to break into a house, successfully sued the homeowner for having a skylight that would not adequately support the full weight of a burglar and his burglary tools. Yes, really.

Of course we’ve all heard about the lady who made a fortune spilling hot coffee on her lap at a fast food drive-through. There weren’t enough warning labels on the cup explaining that, yes, coffee is indeed hot.

My own sister was once sued by some idiot who, during a party, climbed over the railing of her second-floor balcony and fell to the ground, breaking his arm. Alcohol, as the police say, was a factor. Still, the nitwit received a $10,000-plus settlement from the insurance company.

Finally, who can forget the guy who ran into a pole while jogging in a park, and then proceeded to utter the expletives one might expect at such a moment. A woman walking on a nearby path heard the utterances and was so unnerved that she felt compelled to sue. The jury awarded her several hundred thousand dollars.

The last time I fell out of my boat (it happens a couple times every summer; I am neither graceful nor nautically adept) I made a few comments that might have offended, for instance, Mother Theresa or Queen Elizabeth. Had either of them been present, I would have immediately regretted the comments and been a little embarrassed, but should I be sued for what is, in essence, the vocal equivalent of an involuntary muscle reaction?

Personally, I don’t think so. Apparently the law disagrees with me. It often does.

At any rate, my point (alluded to way back there in paragraph one) is that other countries are just as stupid, when it comes to lawsuits, as we are.

A court in Italy recently awarded damages to a man who had sued another man for implying he lacked two elements typically included with the male anatomy. These elements generally are found in pairs, though it is rumored Adolph Hitler had only one.

Regardless, in Italy it is now actionable to claim a man has none at all. At least two of my ex-wives have made similar claims about me, but you don’t see me calling some ambulance-chasing shyster in an effort to exact revenge in the courtroom.

Germans are equally sensitive to naughty words, apparently.  A court in Hamburg ordered a man to pay about $75,000 to another man because he had called him an “aschloch.” (You can look that up if you want, but I should warn you, it translates into something unpleasant.)

Now, I have employed the English version of that word on hundreds of occasions, and have been called that word at least twice today alone. And it’s not even noon.

It’s a good thing my co-workers and I don’t live in Germany, or a lot of money would be changing hands.

Frankly, it’s getting so I’m afraid to leave my house for fear of offending someone and ending up in court. But if I do, I’ll have a few choice words for them. In German.

BUY MY BOOK!  Looking at the Pint Half Full is available at Amazon.com in eBook format or in paperback by clicking on the link over on the left side of the screen there!  Shipping is FREE!  mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com (616) 548-8273

For the sake of the congregation, please choose another speaker

I’m not sure why, but lately I’ve been asked to do a lot of speaking engagements. Well, not a lot, but many. Not many. Five.

For me, five is a lot.

I’ve been asked to speak at schools, hospitals and, just this morning, a church. According to the pastor, his wife thinks I’m “as entertaining as Don Rickles.”

I only wish this were true. This column may be mildly amusing (or not) but in real life, I’m about as entertaining as socks drying in a laundromat. Gray socks.

It’s a real problem. Regular “Reality Check” readers (both of ‘em) are always disappointed when they meet me in person. In real life, I’m just not all that funny. In fact, I tend to be long-winded and boring. If you don’t believe me, just ask any of my ex-wives, whose phone numbers and addresses I will happily provide, assuming you’re not some sort of crazed, psycho killer (nudge, nudge, wink, wink).

But the “boring” thing is just the tip of what is, I fear, a rather large iceberg. Far worse is my utter and undeniable inability to speak like a rational person when standing in front of an audience. I stutter, I repeat myself; for all I know I drool, but I wouldn’t know for sure because I’m so terrified I lose all sense of feeling in my upper body.

And that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is, I blurt. My blurtings are usually wildly inappropriate, inaccurate, or outright obscene. I have some sort of stress-induced Tourette syndrome.

Over the years I have tried the usual public speaking “tricks,” such as picturing members of my audience in their underwear. I don’t know who came up with this bit of lunacy, but it has never worked for me. It might, I suppose, were I addressing an audience of Swedish stewardesses or a convention center filled with Victoria’s Secret models. But the last picture I want rolling around in my head is that of a bunch of Rotarians in polka-dot boxer shorts and wife-beater T-shirts eating donuts and drinking bad coffee.

A doctor I went to while living in Detroit prescribed a double-shot of Jameson just prior to any speaking engagement. There’s a reason I chose this doctor. But the idea of standing in front of an audience of nice, decent church folk while half in the bag is not one I really want to entertain.

While it’s true that a generous shot of good whiskey does calm my nerves, it also has the unfortunate side-effect of making me think my every utterance is brilliant, hilarious and otherwise on a par with the teachings of the Buddha. This is fine for a Saturday night at Driftwood Bar & Grill, but probably not the state of mind one should aspire to when speaking in a church.

Also, booze only worsens my blurting problem. After the application of even a couple drinks, my address to the congregation would probably go a little like this:

“Hi folks! Thanks so much for asking me to be here today. I’m nervous, so I’m a little bit drunk and picturing you all in your underwear. Hope you don’t mind. I wish you could all see what I’m seeing right now, in my head. You, especially, ma’am; I mean, whoo-ee! I didn’t even know Frederick’s of Hollywood was still in business!

“Um, anyway, I could go on forever about the underwear thing, but I can tell by the torches and pitchforks I should probably move on to my main topic, which is, um … the debilitating effects of Jameson on nervous columnists.

“No, wait, I mean, writing. Yeah, I can talk about writing. But really, the whole underwear thing is SO MUCH more interesting, right? Let’s get back to that for a minute…”

Things would go downhill from there.

I know this because I have done a few speaking engagements in the past. I am never invited back for an encore performance.

So, Pastor Baynai, for the sake of both your reputation and my own continued popularity with your wife, I’m going to have to decline your offer to speak at the pancake breakfast. I hate to disappoint, but honestly, this is for the best.

However, if those Victoria’s Secret models are still looking for a speaker…

mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com

(616) 548-8273

No amount of research will make me Jack London

Working at a newspaper, one is often called upon to write on topics about which one knows little or nothing. 

As a reporter, I’ve covered politics and crime (the two being inextricably linked), education, religion, business and entertainment. I’ve written about natural disasters, man-made disasters, good deeds, heroes, villains, murderers and saints.

All in all, it’s an interesting way to make a buck and I have few regrets. But I am often forced to expound at length on a variety of unfamiliar subjects. This requires research. Sometimes a lot of research. I hate research, though I will admit it has forced me to learn a little bit about a great many things. In conversation, this makes me seem smarter than I really am, so it’s not all bad.

At the moment, I’m working on two stories for an upcoming outdoors magazine; one on fishing, one on hunting. I’ve been fishing for decades and know my way around a lake. Research required: zip.

The story on hunting, however, is going to take a little more effort. I’ve gone hunting just once in my life and the experience, though memorable, did not provide the material required for, say, a Jack London novel.

The year was 1975; outdoorsman Euell Gibbons was on TV telling people some parts of a pine cone are edible; John Denver was extolling the virtues of a Rocky Mountain High; soccer teams were surviving plane crashes in the Andes by snacking on their dead teammates. Men were men, women were women, and small woodland creatures knew enough to keep the hell out of the way when they heard the sound of a pair of Vibram-soled hiking boots tromping through the woods.

I was caught up in the whole back-to-nature movement and spent most of my free time backpacking in places like the Bruce Trail, Porcupine Mountains and any stretch of Michigan shoreline not crowded with beach homes, condos and shops selling T-shirts.

However, naturist though I was, I had never really lived off the land. I had yet to take that final step into complete self-reliance. And I wanted to.

So I bought a sharp knife and a cheap paperback that explained how to catch, clean and cook small game and, thus armed, headed into the woods. I had no guns at the time, so I settled on fashioning a deadfall trap from a hank of rope, a section of log and a branch that overhung a well-traveled deer trail.

I won’t go into the mechanics of a deadfall trap here other than to say that — if all goes well — a bunny is supposed to wind up squished beneath a falling log. The design is essentially Roadrunner-esque and when I saw the finished product, I realized it had about as much chance of catching a bunny as Oprah has of catching Lance Armstrong.

Which is why I was surprised when, less than two minutes after walking away from the trap, I heard the log come crashing to the ground. Sure enough, a dead bunny lay beneath it.

It was the first time I had intentionally murdered an animal. I was determined to honor the bunny’s spirit (or some such other new-age baloney I adhered to at the time) by cooking and eating it.

How-to book in hand, I carried Bugs’ earthly remains to the lake, where I proceeded to skin it, gut it, behead it and otherwise prepare it for cooking. My efforts in this regard bore almost no resemblance to the tidy drawings in the book, and what was left of that poor critter by the time I got it skewered and roasting over a fire would have been considered too gory even for inclusion in a Sylvester Stallone flick.

I cooked it anyway. And tried eating it. My bunny flambe tasted like the deodorant liner from a ninth-grader’s gym shoe. I choked back three bites before giving it up for a bad business and boogieing to the nearest pizza parlor.

So ended my foray into the world of Grizzly Adams. Too bad. If I could have stuck with it, I’d have less research to do before writing my upcoming hunting story.

But really, pizza tastes SO MUCH better than bunny, and the research is so much more agreeable.

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or (616) 548-8273.

Hell hath no fury like a woman moused

Sometimes it is the smallest of things that lays us low. Even the bravest person, someone willing and able to fight the good fight against difficult, if not impossible odds, can find himself at the mercy of something no larger than, say, a mouse. Or a bat.

Mice are rodents, bats are mammals; both have the ability to utterly creep out roughly 80 percent of the adult human population living on this planet.

Why? I’m not sure. I am a member of the 20 percent that do not get it. Neither bats nor mice hold any sort of emotional or psychological terror for me. I’m not scared of something whose life I can legally end with a tennis racket or well-placed boot heel.

Not that I would. I don’t kill bats or mice if I can help it. 

At my old house in Lakeview, I was frequently visited by both. The bats I caught in a fishing net and released into the cemetery on the north end of town. The mice became playthings (briefly, after which they became snacks) for the two resident Siamese cats. This was kind of a shame, but ultimately, the mice were uninvited guests and knew the risks. And it gave the cats something to do with their otherwise meaningless lives.

Some folks consider mice and bats to be the terrorists of the animal kingdom, disgusting little disease-ridden vermin no better than snakes or Republicans. (Kidding, kidding, kidding! No angry letters, please! Some of my best friends are snakes.)

At any rate, I genuinely feel sorry for those who suffer from acute chiroptophobia or musophobia, which, as everyone knows, is the fear of chiropractors and mustaches. I mean, bats and mice.

I have seen grown men (my editor, Scoop, for one) run squealing from a house, sounding very much like the bats they’re running from. Now, if a manly-man like Scoop can be that intimidated by a 3-inch long rodent (sorry, mammal), it’s little wonder my girlfriend, Sweet Annie, flipped out when she discovered mice had invaded her previously vermin-free home.

By all accounts, Annie’s home should not have mice. It is only a few years old, for one thing. It was ridiculously expensive. It is located in a fancy-schmancy, private community in Ada, where — according to the Ada Chamber of Commerce — mice are not allowed without a special permit and the proper documentation filed in triplicate at the mayor’s office.

The few mice in Ada have good jobs and are required to carry proper I.D. at all times.

So when a half-dozen renegade rodents turned up at Annie’s house and invaded her treasured and closely-guarded industrial-sized bag of M&Ms, things got ugly fast.

Annie’s first response was wholesale terror; she spent two nights at my place, afraid to sleep in her own bed. But Annie comes from hardy, Irish stock and never runs from a fight, at least not for long.

Like any good general, Annie strategized her attack with care and deliberation. She went online and researched the topic; she read first-person accounts from others who had experienced similar mousy incursions. If she had been able to capture a mouse alive, she would have water-boarded him in an effort to learn his plans and vulnerabilities.

On the topic of mice, Annie went to a very, very dark place.

When she returned home, she went armed to the teeth; poisons, traps of varying sizes and types, baits, sprays, and something with a label claiming to be the rodent equivalent of Sarin gas. I couldn’t believe she’d been able to purchase all this stuff without attracting the attention of Homeland Security.

In the end, Annie prevailed. Her mice were captured and summarily executed, one by one; no trial, no last meal, no chance to tell their side of the story.

One might think Annie now rests easy at night, but this is not the case. She remains vigilant, like Poland in the years immediately following World War II.

The sanctity of her home has been violated once, and it will be a long time before she again feels completely secure.

I’m guessing the mice who managed to escape her wrath feel much the same.

mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com

(616) 548-8273

The man-purse is never going to catch on

I need a purse. Every few years I realize this, usually after adding some new piece of technology to my pocket arsenal; a new cell phone, beeper, or GPS device. Or when my wallet becomes over-stuffed with business cards, family photos, receipts and, well, pretty much everything but money. Money seems to be the one thing that doesn’t proliferate in there, for some reason.

Anyway, every so often I notice my pants weigh more than I do, thanks to all the crap jammed in the pockets. In addition to the wallet and tech stuff, I usually carry a pocket knife, my car keys, my house keys, eight bucks in change, a couple guitar picks and my “lucky” Petoskey stone from an up North vacation ten years ago.

I look like a smuggler trying to sneak grapefruit through an airport customs check. I don’t walk, I waddle. If I break into a run, I sound like a mariachi band falling down an escalator.

So I need a purse.

Sweet Annie carries a purse; sometimes a small one, sometimes a large one, sometimes (though I will never understand why) two purses at once. Sometimes she puts the small purse in the big purse and carries that. She assures me there is a “science” to this, but if so, it’s one no man can begin to comprehend.

The point is, unlike me, she never looks lumpy. Part of this is because, again, unlike me, she is not naturally lumpy. But mostly, it’s that purse.

Annie can wear skinny jeans, form-fitting gowns, bicycle shorts or — should she choose to — Spandex pedal-pushers, and through it all she looks great. Sleek, smooth and lump-free. Annie does not jingle when she walks. Her pants do not fall prey to gravity’s inexorable grasp. She can go up a flight of stairs without stopping midway to tighten her belt.

All because of that purse.

Well, then, you may ask, why don’t you stop whining like a little girl and just GET a purse already?

Two reasons: One, I am a man. Two, I am an American man.

American men do not carry purses.

Oh, sure, every ten years or so, some fashion designer will decide there should be purses for men. Pierre Flippadoccio (or somebody with a similar name) will come up with a man-purse made from distressed leather, heavily-studded, with sharp angles, manly clasps and big pockets for manly things like knives, cell phones and lucky Petoskey stones.

Then some poor, misguided schmuck (let’s call him Kevin, since that’s the name of the guy my last wife ran off with) will actually go out and drop fifty bucks on one, put all his stuff in it, and then make the terrible, terrible mistake of leaving the house.

Eventually, one of Kevin’s friends will spot him sashaying around town with his man-purse. This friend will not tell anyone, however, because he will have died laughing before getting the chance.

But word will get out. Oh, yes.

“Dude! Did you hear? Kevin’s — get this — carrying a PURSE!”

“What? No way, dude!”

“Yes way!”

A surreptitious photo will be captured, maybe video, and will be posted to Facebook and YouTube. At this point, Kevin may as well put his manhood in a Mason jar and bury it quietly in a shady spot down by the stream. Life, as he knows it, is over.

So, despite the fact I could really use a purse, I will never carry one.

I’m just glad Annie does. When we go out, she lets me put my wallet, car keys, pocket knife and lucky Petoskey stone in HER purse.

Hmm … maybe there’s a reason she sometimes carries two.

mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com

(616) 548-8273