Barbie’s resume is one big, fat lie

I’ve written about Barbie before. Once when my daughter was 10 years old and again when my oldest granddaughter was the same age. They both went through their “Barbie years,” and both times it nearly landed me in the poor house.

Barbie’s companionship is not for the faint of heart or the light of wallet. Everything about her screams “future trophy wife who’s definitely comfortable living in a style to which guys like me can afford only on a doll-sized scale.”

She drives a “dream car.” She lives in a “dream house.” She hangs out with Ken, the “dream date,” who not only does not speak, but lacks the anatomical equipment which might, on occasion, prompt Barbie to lie about having a headache. He’s the perfect match for that narcissistic little minx.

I’m probably skirting the edges of misogyny here and for that I apologize. But I just don’t like Barbie. I never have. I resent her. She gets all the breaks and never seems to work for any of them.

Despite the fact there is absolutely no record of Barbie’s school years – no diploma, no transcripts, no paperwork showing she was ever a member of the National Honor Society – she has had over 200 careers since 1959. That’s right, 200 different jobs, most of them either fun or glamorous in some way.

I know this because of an article I clicked on while wasting my morning on Facebook instead of writing this column, which is what I should have been doing.

In the past 60 years and with no special training, Barbie has been employed as an astronaut, news anchor, firefighter, pilot and soccer star. She’s even worked as a politician, the only job for which she may actually be qualified. Possibly even over-qualified.

Now somehow – though she does nothing but shop and lounge around her “dream pool” with Ken and Skipper – Barbie has developed a partnership with the real-life National Geographic Society. This has opened up to her jobs such as wildlife photojournalist, polar marine biologist, conservationist and even entomologist.

I subscribed to the National Geographic magazine for 20 years and they never offered me so much as a manure-hauler position at the organization’s annual Yak Fest picnic.

If that weren’t enough to explain my lifelong dislike for this 11-inch-tall piece of plastic responsible for giving generations of young women serious body image issues, her newest “job” is that of astrophysicist. That’s right, somehow Barbie is now qualified to work side-by-side with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking. (OK, not Stephen Hawking, but only because he’s dead.)

How did Barbie land this cushy, high-profile gig? Did she spend 15 years paying off her student loans? Heck, no! I did, but you don’t see NASA beating down my door. Well, OK, admittedly, NASA doesn’t have a lot of use for an English major, but still.

The Astrophysicist Barbie – coming soon to a store near you – comes complete with a telescope, star chart and (of course) a fashionable T-shirt featuring a graphic of a nebula. Let me tell you something, Barbie, it takes more than a 4-inch refractor scope to make an astrophysicist.

I don’t know what that “more” might be, but that’s because I don’t know anything about astrophysicisting. But neither does Barbie. That’s my point!

Just dressing up in a lab coat isn’t enough.

Mattel, the evil corporate overlord that created Barbie in the first place, says Barbie’s latest careers are designed to inspire young girls to strive for greatness, to reach that unreachable star.

Personally, I think it cultivates even more unrealistic expectations in girls. Now, not only is little Suzy expected to maintain a perfect physique that exists nowhere in nature, she’s expected to somehow earn multiple PhDs in fields generally requiring years of laborious study.

And she’s supposed to do all this while balancing her extensive social life, her fashion career, her relationship with Ken … the list goes on. And who’s going to keep little Suzy’s Dream House clean while she pursues her career? Ken? Fat chance. He’s interested in nothing but surfing and trying to hide the fact he’s anatomically incorrect.

No, this whole Barbie “dream world” has to stop and stop now. Or at least before my youngest granddaughter, now only 3, hits her Barbie years.

As God is my witness, I’m not buying another Dream House.

Let’s send these pickles to Mars!

When it comes to neighbors, I struck the mother lode.

I moved into my little lakeside cottage last fall. It had everything I was looking for. Appliances that work and a view of the lake, amazingly at a rent a writer can afford without resorting to the horror of finding a real job.

John and Susan live one door to the east and Aaron just to the west. They’re three of the nicest folks I know; fun, interesting, helpful, considerate.

But of the three, it’s John I find most fascinating. He and Susan (who doubles as my landlady) are both retired, so they drop by from time to time just to chat. I’m always glad to see them.

Before I go on with this story, it’s important I mention John is a very intelligent guy. He worked as an engineer and was instrumental in developing NASA’s Mars Rover project. I don’t know if that makes him a rocket scientist, but on his worst day he’s still a helluva lot smarter than I’ll ever be.

His engineering and science roots run deep. Stuff like badly-rigged wiring (of the sort the cable guy left laying all over the yard), drippy faucets, squeaky pumps and, well, basically anything done in a haphazard manner drives him flat-out bonkers.

Despite the fact John is undeniably smarter than me, I’m still reasonably well-educated, well-read and (as Garrison Keeler used to say) above average, if only slightly. So you’d think between the two of us, we could open a jar of pickles. You’d be wrong.

Yesterday I was sitting on the porch reading when John dropped by with the pickles. Some kind of fancy, spiced dills of the sort retired NASA engineers can afford. They looked good. But John had been unable to get to them, owing to the fact the lid had been (I assume) screwed onto the jar personally by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his prime and then sealed with a welding torch.

“I tried running hot water over it,” John said. “Nothing.”

At last. Here was my chance to return the neighborliness I’ve been enjoying since last fall. Also, if I could twist the lid off with no visible effort, word might get around that I’m still young, strong and virile. A lie, yes, but what the heck.

Some of us fade more reluctantly than others.

“Let me give it a try,” I said.

Trying to maintain a composed expression, I twisted the lid. Or tried to. Slowly, my face revealed in ever-increasing measure the strain under which I was laboring. Words not printable in a family newspaper passed my lips.

“Well, ----,” I said. “This ------ is really on there!” (See? I told you the words weren’t printable.)

We went inside so I could run some more warm water over the lid. It hadn’t worked for John, but maybe my water was warmer.

The lid remained doggedly affixed to the jar. I tried using one of those grippy silicone pads developed specifically for opening stuck lids. Again, nothin’. I’ve wrangled some seriously stuck lids with those silicone pads and couldn’t believe it wasn’t working this time.

I began to suspect the people at the fancy pickle company were not only fancy, but sadistic. What sort of sick, twisted individual would grow, pick and process pickles that looked so utterly delicious and then seal them in a container more formidable than that cave from which Indiana Jones swiped artifacts?

I half expected arrows to shoot from the cupboards or a big, round stone to roll out of the bathroom and chase us around the lake.

Still I remained undaunted. I grappled, I gripped, I grunted. I continued to swear under my breath, which almost always works in these situations.

And yet, nothing.

Thoughts of my toolbox, and of the ball-peen hammer it contains, began to float through my mind. Maybe John and Sue wouldn’t mind picking shards of glass out before snacking on these elusive cukes.

And then I noticed the all-but-invisible plastic safety seal covering the lid.

I peeled it off with a paring knife, after which the jar opened with ridiculous ease.

So. A rocket scientist and a college educated writer. Outsmarted by a jar of pickles.

There might be a moral to this story, but if so, I’m not wise enough to know what it is. Ask John, maybe he knows. He worked for NASA.

Civilization is OK, but let’s not get too prissy

We’re becoming a society of effete dandies bent on transforming every aspect of life into an upscale fern and chrome shopping mall experience that smells faintly of lilacs and Chanel No. 5.

Maybe this is simply the next logical step in human evolution, maybe a byproduct of the sexual revolution, or maybe the change is fueled by Madison Avenue and simple economics. Whatever the reason, we seem determined to “deluxe-ify” pretty much everything.

Yes, everything.

Good enough is no longer good enough.

What am I talking about? To tell you the truth, I’m never quite sure myself. But it’ll be easier to explain if I first cite a few examples.

Garbage cans. When I was a kid (back in the early Mesolithic) garbage cans were metal, dented and, usually, very, very stinky. They served two purposes; holding garbage and breeding flies. 

Using one was simple. You lifted the lid and dumped in garbage. Then, once a week, you hauled it to the curb and the garbage man came by, removed the garbage and left the can.

It was a fairly simple system. Not any more. Now, trash (the part that isn’t recycled) is placed in strawberry scented plastic bags, securely sealed and placed in colorful (pink, if you give a damn about breast cancer) plastic dumpsters. The dumpsters — which never actually touch garbage — are emptied weekly by a sanitation engineer.

It’s basically the same system as the metal can, but it smells better, looks better, and — if you don’t count the millions of tons of non-biodegradable, strawberry-scented plastic trash bags — is better.

Then there are the burger joints and other fast food-type eateries. These used to be non-franschised, mom ’n’ pop establishments with questionable cleanliness standards and burgers to die for. They weren’t fancy, but the food was real good and real cheap.

These days, even the fast food joints are trying to go upscale. The other day I dropped nine bucks and change at an incongruously-named “cafe.” For my money, I received a burger that tasted like greasy sawdust and an order of fries that had been under the heat lamp so long they’d begun to develop melanoma.

But since the restaurant shoehorned the word “cafe” into its name and added a couple hanging plants, I at least knew I was dining in style.

Sweet Annie lives in a pretty, upscale neighborhood where folks really, really aspire to the genteel lifestyle. They upscale everything there, and then charge you for it big time.

She recently moved from her home into an apartment there. Not just any apartment, but an “apartment home.” It says so right on the sign at the complex’s manicured entrance. To me, they look just like apartment-apartments, but nope, they are “homes.”

Apartments are for poor people, apparently.

Down the street are even nicer “condo homes.” The condo homes also look exactly like apartments, but they’re not. They’re condos. If you doubt it, just look at what one costs.

The foo-foo factor that really got me, though, was the neighborhood’s store & lock storage facility. You know, the kind of place guys keep all their home theater equipment when they’re between wives.

In Annie’s neighborhood, these are called — and I kid you not — “storage condos.” Really? You’re telling me the junk you can’t fit in your new condo — sorry, condo home — needs a condo of its own?

I’m guessing these people park their cars in a “condo garage” and store their unmentionables in a “condo underwear drawer.” 

Where will it end? Will we eventually gift wrap our garbage with silken bows and ribbons to make our curbsides more appealing come trash day? Will we find a name for toilet paper even less offensive than “bath tissue?”

Look. I’m not a savage. I’m not advocating a return to the stinky, dented garbage can days of yore. On the other hand, those burgers from mom & pop’s greasy spoon were sooooo good…

More Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

The days of the mosquito are numbered

Since addressing the topic of mosquitoes last week, I’ve done a little research.  It turns out that not only are mosquitoes annoying, they also are the deadliest creatures of all time, even when one factors in the people who manufacture Twinkies and Pauly Shore movies.

In the history of the human race, about 46 billion deaths have been attributed to illnesses transmitted by mosquitoes.  This equates to roughly half the people who have ever lived.  Half! Ever!

Well, I say, enough is enough.  Of course, when I say it, the mosquitoes just laugh, or at least they make little buzzing noises, which I assume to be the mosquito equivalent of laughter.  But just recently, geneticists have taken up the battle cry and mosquitoes won’t be laughing much longer.

Anthony James, a scientist from UC Irvine, has figured out a way to genetically “hack” mosquitoes in such as way that the females hatch without wings.  Since it’s the girl mosquitoes that bite, this renders the entire population harmless.

The boy mosquitoes then go their way, find new mosquito girlfriends, mate (after dinner and a movie, presumably), and thus create yet more generations of wingless, harmless mosquitoes.

Eventually, the blood-sucking, vile little … it’s hard to describe my feelings toward mosquitoes in a classy, family-oriented newspaper like this one.  Suffice it to say that the mosquitoes all eventually become extinct.

Cage-based tests have shown that if you turn loose enough gene-hacked male mosquitoes, the entire population is decimated — with extreme prejudice — in just a few months.  This could, theoretically, be done (insert evil laugh here) worldwide.

So far, James’ experiments have been conducted under strictly controlled conditions. But Luke Alphey, one of James’ former colleagues — and one, in my opinion, with more vision — has taken the tests to the field, releasing the hacked males into the environment.

This would probably violate all sorts of laws and rules here in the States, but Alphey released the mutant bugs on the Grand Cayman island in the Carribbean, where no such laws exist.

If some of those altered skeeters manage to get off the island, well … these things happen.  And believe me, they will get off if I have to row there and get them myself. 

Now, under ordinary circumstances, I — along with most other right-thinking, bleeding heart liberals — would question the morality of exterminating an entire species.  I mean, who are we to play God?

But we’re talking mosquitoes here, man!  

Sure, I know, what about the impact on the environment, right? Will killing off all the skeeters create some sort of domino effect?  Will flies follow?  Then mice, cats, dogs, cows and eventually, us?

According to researchers, nope, that won’t happen. It turns out that, to quote one study, “…the complete eradication of mosquitoes would have limited, if any, adverse environmental effects.”

And that’s good enough for me!  I say, nuke ‘em and let the bug-free barbecue begin. 

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or visit mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

In the war against skeeters, victory is not assured

It’s on. The war. The one between myself and the mosquitoes.

So far this summer, the mosquitoes have been winning. I’ll occasionally assassinate one of the bloodthirsty little vermin, but for each bug that falls, 100 leap in to take his place. 

Or rather, her place. Only female mosquitoes suck blood and bite people. The males live on flower nectar and listen to a lot of music by The Grateful Dead. I will not comment on the significance of this fact with regard to male/female relationships in general.

Regardless of gender, mosquitoes are nature’s way of getting back at humanity for global warming, deforestation and the music of Justin Bieber.  That doesn’t mean we have to take it lying down.

I know I’m not. Not any more.

At heart I’m a pacifist. I maintain a live and let live attitude, even when it comes to nature’s least likable creatures; bats, snakes, mice, ex-wives … if they leave me alone, I don’t go out of my way to bother them.

But this year mosquitoes seem more intent on world domination than Kim Jong-un, and they’ve been at it far longer than the stubby Korean dictator with the bad haircut. Though mosquitoes haven’t developed a nuclear weapons program, they’re at least as annoying as Jong-un.

For me the war started last weekend as I went about the annual business of setting up my lawn furniture, backyard canopy and tiki lamps. I no sooner got into my backyard than a horde of mosquitoes (I consider anything more than a dozen a horde) descended on me out of a clear, blue sky like WWII kamikazes. 

Without regard for their own personal safety, they covered my arms, neck and face with a blanket of questing skeeter proboscis (proboscises? probosci? — whatever the plural of mosquito snoots is). With a wave of my mighty human hand I killed dozens, but more flew in, wave after wave after ceaseless wave; like zombies in a George Romero flick, they just kept on coming at me.

I was hopelessly outnumbered. Six or seven skeeters stuck to me as I escaped into the relative safety of my apartment. These I killed out of hand, but not before they’d all feasted on my blood, which based on all evidence, must be the tastiest blood in the county.

Then yesterday afternoon I struck back with a ferocity rivaling Luke Skywalker’s blasting of the Death Star (non-nerds try to stick with me here).

Armed with every available anti-mosquito weapon known to science, I reentered my bug infested yard. First, I fogged the area with some chemical that — had it been used in Vietnam — could have changed the outcome of that war. Mosquitoes dropped by the hundreds.

Then I filled the tiki lamps with a citronella-based oil and lit ‘em up. I also lit three mosquito repellent coils and set them at strategic locations around the patio.

Finally, I doused my body with a spray made up of 45 percent DEET. I’m not exactly sure what DEET is, but it burns like battery acid, smells like sin itself, and is not recommended for use on children under the age of 75.

I opened a cold beer, sat down in my most comfortable lawn chair, and surveyed the carnage. I couldn’t actually see the dead skeeters covering the lawn, but I knew they were there, thousands of ‘em, their creepy, little spindle legs pointed skyward.

Sure, the still-foggy air reeked like the aftermath of an Agent Orange bombardment and the smoke from the tiki lamps and burning coils made it difficult to see the lake without squinting. 

But humanity had triumphed over mosquito-dom. 

For about 25 minutes. Then the skeeters started coming back; first one, then two — scouts, I guess — then the horde.

My sofa’s more comfortable than the lawn chair anyway. And I can always use my patio again come October.

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or read more Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Maybe it’s time for men to evolve, right after the Stooges marathon

This is going to come as a surprise to only a few men and absolutely no women: girls are more sophisticated than guys. 

Sure, sure, I know there are a few artsy-fartsy New York gents who’ve read biographies of Andrew Wyeth and get all teary-eyed during Mimi’s death scene in “La Bohéme.” But they’re the exception, not the rule.

At whatever social stratum a man finds himself, his female counterpart is likely to be more mature, more sensible, more … civilized. This isn’t always the case, of course, but often it is.

I’m thinking about this at the moment because of a conversation I had last night with Sweet Annie. We were sitting around the fire and I quoted from an article I read over 40 years ago in Mad Magazine; you know, with Alfred E. Newman on the cover? Published by William M. Gaines?

If you’re a guy, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re a woman, chances are you never cracked a copy open.

The Mad quote I referenced had to do with “Famous Failed Businesses,” in particular, a drug-store that advertised Instant Urinalysis and Hand-made Sandwiches. 

Funny, right? I thought so, too, and so did Annie. She was also mildly repulsed by the idea. Her comment was that it was “a little crude.”

When women say something is “a little crude,” they mean that to be a bad thing. It’s different with men. Crude can be good. Funny, even.

We grew up with Larry, Moe and Curly, were weaned on Abbott and Costello. While young girls were reading classics like “Little Women,” we boys were filling our heads with comics in which Sgt. Rock blasted Nazis and the Incredible Hulk laid waste to Manhattan office blocks during a moody moment.

But the male penchant for primitive, juvenile behavior can’t be blamed solely on the influence of popular media. Call it divine intervention or evolutionary circumstance, but men are just different.

It goes back to our prehistoric forebears, I believe. When a saber-toothed tiger came sniffing around outside the cave, it was the man who went out, club in hand, to dispatch the beast or die trying. His cave-wife, meanwhile, sat inside reading a copy of “Little Women” and listening to NPR.

When medieval bandits waylaid hapless maidens on the road between the village and the palace, it was the king’s knights who bolted on armor and plodded into the forest to do battle with the varlets.

In fact, men throughout history have been responsible for most of the fighting, heavy lifting, and mindless grunt work that needed doing. Sure, women had their fair share of grunt work as well, whether in the home or field, but it was generally work that allowed them the freedom to discuss ideas with their peers, to converse as they worked, to become more civilized.

Meanwhile, we guys were hunting wild beasts (or each other) through the woods, stumbling around in the dark, the rain, the cold. A man’s life was more solitary, more brutal, more … crude.

Is it any wonder women evolved faster than men? We never stood a chance.

Of course, things are changing, and changing fast. In our modern, technological world, women are every bit as capable as men of performing the present day equivalent of killing that saber toothed tiger.

So guys, maybe this is our chance to catch up with the fairer sex, to develop a little refinement and class. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time.

Then again, there’s a Three Stooges marathon on cable next week. We’ve put off evolving this long. I guess another seven days won’t kill us.

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or visit his blog at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com. Buy my book!  Just click the link over on the left there.  Do it!  I need beer money, dammit!

Voice mail does not require instructions

It is my firm belief that anybody too stupid to leave a voice mail without first hearing detailed instructions explaining the process should not be making phone calls in the first place. 

Like everyone else in the world, I am no fan of voice mail. Though I sound (at least to myself) reasonably intelligent and articulate most of the time, when faced with the prospect of leaving a message on what we referred to in the Dark Ages as an “answering machine,” I turn into Bill Cosby’s “Mush Mouth” character. You know the one I mean: “I-buh don’t-buh know-buh wha-buh to say-buh.”

Though I prattle like an idiot on voice mail, I generally manage to stutter out a message containing all the pertinent information. 

Most times when I’m leaving a message, it’s for one of my kids. Neither of them seem quite sure what to do when their cell phones ring. The idea of actually answering the thing and saying something clever, like, “Hello?” does not occur to them.

They prefer to text. Or email. Or pound out messages on a hollow log. Anything but speak on the phone.

On more than one occasion, I’ve called my daughter, only to have her text me WHILE I’M STILL LEAVING A VOICE MAIL with a “Hi Daddy! What’s up? :)” message. 

My response usually is, “I’ve had a massive heart attack and have only seconds to live. Please call me so I can tell you where the money is buried.”

To which she replies, via text, “OMG! That is SO sad. :( Let me post it on Facebook.”

“Sinking fast,” I text back. “See a bright light and your dead Uncle Ed telling me I should follow him into it. Seriously, there’s a lot of money buried out there in the yard; you should call now.”

Eventually, she weakens and phones me to find out what I really want.

My son is smarter; he just pretends he’s dropped his phone in the toilet again and calls back a few days to a week later, generally from a noisy bar in New York or Chicago (he travels a lot for work).

I also encounter voice mail during my work day. My kids, it turns out, aren’t alone in their disinclination to answer the phone. These days, if you want a real person answering your call on the first or second ring, you better be dialing 9-1-1. Everybody else lets it go to voice mail.

The problem for me, however, isn’t leaving the message. I’m used to that, and like I said, I can and do manage it a dozen times a day.

What I hate is all the time I have to spend WAITING to leave a message.

Here’s all the information we NEED: “Hey there! I’m not available to take your call right now, sorry. Wait for the beep. BEEP.”

Here is what we GET: “Hey there! I’m not available to take your call right now, sorry. Wait for the beep.” Then the robot voice comes on: “The (insert carrier here) customer you are trying to reach is unavailable at this time. If you would like to leave a message, please wait for the beep, then clear your throat twice, organize your thoughts into a linear narrative and speak clearly into your handset’s mouthpiece. The mouthpiece is the little hole at the end of your phone opposite the one you’re holding to your ear. After that, you may simply hang up or press 2 to erase your message, press 3 to hear your message played back to you, press 4 to hear your message played back with full orchestration added featuring the London Philharmonic, or you may press 1 for more options.”

More options? What “more options” does anyone really need at this point? Translate the message into Sanskrit? Post it to Facebook and Twitter? Send a duplicate message to your congressman? 

Has anyone EVER, in the history of the telephone, pushed 1 for more options? If 1 were ever pushed, would anything really happen?

If I had my way, pushing 1 would send a strong electric shock back through the line to the person who wouldn’t answer his or her phone in the first place.

And yes, my bright, beautiful, phone-impaired children; I am talking about you.

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or visit Reality Check online at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

Life on the farm is just too violent for city slickers

I’ve mentioned my old man in this column before. He died a few months ago and I still miss him every day.

Bob was a man rife with contradictions; he could be loving, he could be hard, he could be fair, he could be unfair. But one thing he could never be, at least when it came to life on a farm, was competent.

My dad’s feet never were comfortable without sidewalk beneath them. Raised exclusively in big cities, his idea of roughing it was tossing a couple sleeping bags in the back of the Country Squire and then sleeping out “under the stars,” which, parked as we were at the curb about 20 feet from our front door, were entirely obscured by street lights.

To my dad, this was “camping” and no, I am neither kidding nor exaggerating. He was the quintessential city boy.

So it was particularly hard on the old man when every couple years my mom decided we should visit Great Grandma Kelly in Indiana. Double-gramma lived on a farm, kind of. It was no longer a working farm, but gramma still maintained an extensive vegetable garden, a dozen chickens and the occasional goat.

All these things were as alien to my father as might be visitors from Venus or a three-headed, fire breathing dog.

His anxiety would settle in as we drove the final 20 miles to gramma’s house and would not fully abate until we were safely back in downtown Detroit, or Phoenix, or whatever metropolis we were living in at the time.

I was just a kid and to me the farm seemed a place filled with exotic wonders; live, undomesticated animals, food growing straight out of the ground, nameless, dangerous-looking tools whose purpose was shrouded in mystery. I couldn’t get enough.

My old man, on the other hand — he couldn’t wait to leave. I’m not sure why. Maybe his airways would start closing up without their regular infusion of carbon monoxide fumes.

For whatever reason, he hated and openly distrusted rural life. He just wasn’t good at it.

The event that came to be known as the “chicken episode” typified my old man’s trouble with the agrarian lifestyle.

It was a Sunday afternoon, sunny, filled with the somnambulant August hum of cicadas and slow-hovering bumblebees. My dad was contentedly perched in gramma’s backyard hammock, reading a history of WWII. I was back by the chicken coop watching the chickens peck at their feed, each other and pieces of gravel, which they ate right along with whatever it was my gramma threw out there for them every morning.

“Bob,” Grandma Kelly called from the kitchen doorway. “Can you fetch me a chicken?”

Sighing, my dad reluctantly vacated the hammock and spent the next five minutes chasing chickens around the yard until, after much colorful verbiage and heavy breathing, he caught one and delivered it, angrily squawking, to the house. A few seconds later he reappeared, chicken still in hand and struggling fiercely.

“She means a dead chicken,” he told me, managing to look both sick and embarrassed at the same time.

My gramma’s rusty old Son House axe hung from a nail in the shed. Still fighting the chicken (which seemed to be winning) my dad grabbed the axe and dragged both it and the struggling poultry to a big oak stump on the other side of the yard.

Now, my old man had about as much skill with an axe as a chimpanzee has with a laser scalpel. Once, twice, three times the axe fell, each time missing the neck of the now-apoplectic chicken by at least six inches.

My gramma’s voice, old and rusty as the axe, again cut through the afternoon air.

“Bob! What are you doing?”

My dad glared back over his shoulder, sweat standing out on his fevered brow. “Killing your damn chicken!” he muttered.

“Oh, for crying—“ My gramma crossed the yard with a quickness which belied her age. “Gimme that.”

She reached past my dad, and with gunfighter-like speed, grabbed the chicken by the head. A quick flick of the wrist and the chicken flopped to the ground, it’s neck neatly broken.

The mortally wounded fowl took a minute to realize it was dead, but eventually stopped stumbling around and peacefully expired. It was the single most violent act I had ever personally witnessed. I think my dad felt the same way.

A few hours later, we sat down to a nice, roast chicken dinner. Corn, homemade biscuits, string beans from the garden; the old man and I both concentrated on the corn and biscuits. Neither of us felt much like chicken that night.

For my part, I couldn’t eat anything I’d seen murdered earlier in the day. I was something of a city boy myself, it seemed. As to my dad? I think he was just marking time, waiting to again eat chicken when he was back in the civilized world, where he could get it served the way the good Lord intended; in a bucket with Colonel Sanders’ picture on it.

Mike Taylor’s book, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available at Robins Book List in Greenville, and in ebook format on Amazon.

When it comes to Barbies or zombies, we must remain armed and vigilant

I recently covered a story about an ammo shortage that has affected not just this area, but the entire nation. Apparently, folks are stocking up big time on shells, mostly in .22 and 9mm calibers.

Why? Reasons vary. Most of those reasons are predicated on Internet rumors, like:

• Homeland Security has purchased 62 billion rounds in preparation for an upcoming class war in which guns will be taken away from ordinary citizens.

• The government is hiding the fact an asteroid is headed toward the Earth and after (pick a date and time) our planet is going to be a zombie-laden wasteland in which only the strong (and those with lots of ammo) will survive.

• Obama is evil and where is that birth certificate, anyway?!

• The government (insert conspiracy theory here).

In most of these rumors, the government fills the roll of Darth Vader, the nefarious, dark force against which we common men must remain ever vigilant and — more importantly — heavily armed.

Now, before you go blathering on about that whole “liberal media” thing, let me just say, I own guns; yes, handguns. Granted, they are of the cheap “Saturday Night Special” variety, but they do shoot bullets and are for most part accurate to within four or five feet.

My guns are far better suited to zombie apocalypse purposes than, say, hunting squirrels. I bought them years ago to go plinking with my son and stepson.

We used to take my daughter’s discarded Barbie dolls out to the shooting range and blast away until the ammo was gone. Dumb fun, man fun, but fun none the less.

Since the boys grew up and moved out, I haven’t had the guns out of the lock box. But I know where they are, should I ever have to face down a horde of deranged, killer Barbie dolls. God knows those Barbies have reason enough to lust for revenge, and quite possibly, long memories.

Problem is, because of those stupid Internet rumors, I can no longer get ammo. So I’m helpless to protect myself from rampaging 12-inch action figures.

And personally, I think problems with zombies or killer Barbie dolls are every bit as likely as is the government suddenly showing an inordinate interest in my inaccurate firearms. Frankly, I just don’t think the government — as an entity — is nearly smart enough to pull off something like the disarming of gun-totin’ America.

Sure, there are some very bright folks working jobs in the public sector. But somehow, when you put them all together in Washington, they are quickly absorbed by the lumbering, clueless, bureaucratic blob that is our federal government and become every bit as ineffectual and incapable of any real action as is the rest of the administration.

In short, there aren’t enough wingtip-wearing nerds in Washington to cause me to lose any sleep about what they might do. For the most part, I believe they’ll probably continue to do what they’ve done for decades: nothing.

They will make a lot of noise, blame each other for their inaction, and then vote themselves a juicy pay raise. The world will go on pretty much as it has for a generation, the ammo shortage will abate, and I will be able to re-arm myself for the coming Barbie/Zombie apocalypse. 

Mike’s book, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available in eBook format at Amazon.com and in paperback at Robbins Book List in Greenville. Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com.

Honesty is difficult on a self-evaluation form

Can’t believe it’s been a year since I started what I continue to think of as my “new” job. I’m still loving every minute of it. Most days, I actually look forward to getting to the office.

Sure, I’d rather be fishing. Or having hot wings and domestic beer at a sports bar. Or even sitting in my back yard watching the geese fly onto the lake. But as both Ecclesiastes and The Byrds have noted, to everything, there is a season.

If one must work, it should be at a job one loves.

Still, every so often I’m charged with a task I’d rather avoid. This happened last week, when the managing editor sent me the dreaded one-year “self-evaluation review” form.

I hate these things. 

I’m basically an honest person. Yes, really. But when faced with a self-evaluation form — one which might one day be a determining factor in future raises or even employment — I’m tempted to lie like Satan in the Garden of Eden.

Then I worry … what if the form is meant to determine whether I’m honest? Won’t all that lying just confirm what management must already suspect? But maybe a willingness to lie just to hang on to my job is exactly the sort of “go get ‘em” attitude the boss is looking for.

There’s no way to know for sure.

Still, when faced with one of these things, I usually just tell the truth and hope for the best.

This is probably not a brilliant strategy; but I am not a brilliant guy (though I typically say I am on self-evaluation forms).

Some of the questions are easy, like: “How knowledgeable is the employee of the principal areas of their position?” I assume this means, do I know how to check my voice mail and write an article.

The answer, happily, is yes. Yes, I DO know how to do these things.

However, when answering the next question: “How knowledgeable is the employee of operations and/or practices in other areas of the company?” all I can come up with is, “There are other areas? Who knew?”

I’m guessing this is not the response they’re looking for. But honestly, as long as the paper gets printed, the website gets webbed, the Facebook page gets faced, the Twitter account gets twitted and payroll manages to locate me on payday, how much do I need to know about these other departments?

The next section of the form deals with judgment and whether mine is the good kind. Do I show good judgment? I have four ex-wives. What do you think?

Then there’s the section that wants to know how decisive I am. I can’t even decide whether to lie on the self-evaluation form. Again, the answer seems self-evident.

The form also asks how I manage “delegation of duties.” I think they’re asking how often I try to push my work off on others. The answer is: Always. Sadly, my coworkers are generally too smart to allow this to happen.

Then there’s all the baloney about “cooperation” and “teamwork” and “conscientiousness” and so on. Basically, all the stuff I had to lie about a year ago to get the job in the first place.

Finally, at the end of the questionnaire there’s a formula for figuring your overall rating. The instructions read as follows: “Following the completion of all the ratings in section II, the manager should total the ratings and divide that total by the number of items rated. This becomes the Outputs Score. This score is then weighted by a factor of 7, for the Section Summary Rating.”

If I had 100 years and unlimited access to a Cray supercomputer, I still couldn’t figure this out. As I’ve mentioned here before, I hate math, and frankly, this formula sounds suspiciously like a “story problem,” which as you probably know, is all they have on the shelves of the library in Hell.

At any rate, on the actual evaluation form I did my best to be honest and I hope that doesn’t cost me my job. I really like it here. My coworkers rock, the boss is nice and the work is genuinely interesting.

I would hate to get canned. 

After being a respected columnist, there’s no way I could go back to stripping.

Mike’s book, “Looking at the Pint Half Full” is available at Robbins Book List in Greenville and in eBook format at Amazon.com. Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com or from his blog at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.

A fertile imagination is a good thing, except at 3 a.m.

Tap. Tip tap. Tap tap tap tap … tip tap.

Whatever it was, it was behind me, though I couldn’t see it. A blanket-like, 3 a.m. fog had settled over Baldwin Lake, its outriggers oozing across the road like tenebrous fingers, wrapping themselves around half-buried tree roots, obscuring the decaying remains of autumn’s expired leaves.

Caught in a dank breeze, leaves scudded across the shrouded pavement, etching out sounds like death watch beetles — chitinous, skittering. 

Tap. Tip tap tip.

Definitely behind me. Closer now.

I stopped and stared back into the darkness, trying to pierce the fog. The tapping suddenly ceased. I waited, but it did not start up again.

I thought of my bed, waiting in my apartment on the other side of the lake. Cozy. Comfortable. I should be there now, I thought, not out strolling through this abominable, impenetrable fog! Insomnia or no, what was I thinking?

I started walking. A few steps and I heard it again, faint but unmistakable: tap, tip tap, tap.

The next street lamp was 500 steps ahead, a tiny, glowing pocket of light in this misty, musty blackness.

I wasn’t exactly scared. Not yet. This is Greenville, not 17th Century London, not Transylvania. A nice, quiet neighborhood, nestled up to a small lakeshore. Bad things don’t happen here. Not REALLY bad things.

And though I’m older than dirt I can — or could, at last check — still bench nearly 300 pounds. I’m not helpless.

But … tap. Tip tip tap.

What WAS that sound?

I stopped again. Tap tip tap t— It stopped, too.

I waited. Nothing. Then … tap … then nothing again.

Why hadn’t I brought a flashlight? I often do when walking around the lake after dark. But this October night was unseasonably warm and inviting. When I had set out 30 minutes earlier, the fog had seemed sultry and secretive, an opportunity to spend a little time in my own private, late night world, all alone.

Except … I wasn’t alone. Someone was out here with me. Behind me. Keeping pace with my steps. The streetlight still seemed a long way off.

I thought about calling into the fog, “Is anyone there?” But what if nobody answered? I knew someone was behind me. Following me. Walking when I walked, stopping when I stopped. Pacing me. Stalking me.

If they didn’t answer, what would that mean? That they didn’t WANT to answer? And if not, why not?

Gooseflesh rippled to life on my arms, crawled up my shoulders, traced stealthy, cloying fingers over the back of my neck.

Tap. Tip tap.

I walked faster. It didn’t escape my notice that the cemetery was coming up on my right. I sometimes walk there, under the light of a noonday sun. Even then it seems pleasantly gothic, a throwback to the days before the sterilization of death, to a time when the dearly departed were laid to rest beneath imposing monoliths of granite and stately oak trees. It’s a cemetery to which the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come might accompany Ebenezer Scrooge, or from which Igor might harvest a few human organs for the experiments under way back at Castle Frankenstein. 

On a sunny day, the cemetery is pleasant and peaceful. On a foggy night, with something tip-tapping in your wake, it becomes stage dressing for a B-movie horror extravaganza, one in which you are to be the ax wielding maniac’s next victim. 

But at least the cemetery’s entrance is near the street lamp. I halted beneath its glow and waited. Here, I decided, I would make my stand and face down whatever it was that tip-tapped behind me.

Tap. Tip tap tip. Closer now. From within the billows of fog, a shadow detached itself and moved forward. Tap. Tip tap. T—

It stopped. Less than 20 feet from my feeble circle of light, something stood still. Tall. Dark. Waiting. Then, when I thought the standoff would go on indefinitely, it lurched forward, its right arm held stiffly forward.

“I’ve got mace!” Not the guttural growl of an ax wielding maniac, but a quavering, tremulous contralto. 

Out of the fog stepped a slender young woman, maybe 30, vaguely pretty, led by a small, leashed dog of indeterminate genus. The dog’s toenails clicked against the macadam. Tip tip tip tap.

“I thought you were an ax wielding maniac,” I said as she passed. I meant it to be funny, but she didn’t smile. She clutched the dog’s leash like a lifeline and hugged the opposite side of the road. 

As she disappeared into the fog ahead of me, the tip tapping gained speed and soon faded. I breathed out, back in, out again. I started walking.

One by one, the muscles in my back unclenched and I relaxed. The streetlamp’s glow fell behind me and I was again swallowed by the fog. 

In any decent horror movie, I realized, it would be at precisely this point that SOMETHING would reach out of the fog; something with gnarled, misshapen hands, with perhaps too many fingers, or too few. And those hands would not caress, but grab, rend, squeeze.

That last mile home seemed to take a long time.

Contact Mike at mtaylor325@gmail.com or at mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.  Mike’s paperback, “Looking at the Pint Half Full,” is available at Robbins Book List in Greenville or online at Amazon.com.

Banking the math atheist way

I’ve heard rumors that some people keep a running tally of the balance in their checking account. Can this be true?

To the best of my understanding, this would require doing some sort of math every time one initiated a transaction. Either adding (deposits) or subtracting (purchases or withdrawals).

Sometimes I use my little debit card thingy five or six times a day. That would be a LOT of math! For a guy like me.

For the past 40 years I’ve been trying to disprove my ninth grade algebra teacher’s Big Lie that I would “need math in everyday life.” For the most part, I’ve been successful in this endeavor. I don’t try to figure out how many miles per gallon I get with my beat-up van; I don’t try to calculate how long I’ll have to work before I can afford to retire (though rough estimates put that figure at another 73 years); and I never, ever, ever reconcile my checkbook with my monthly bank statement.

All my ex-wives did this and I noticed it never made them happy. Just the opposite, in fact.

Through careful planning, I’ve managed for decades to keep all the math in my life “fuzzy.” I usually know I have “about” this much money, or that much gas left in the tank. I know “about” when the oil needs to be changed in the aforementioned beat-up van.

The word “about” figures prominently in my life.

This philosophy — this math atheism — extends into traditionally non-mathematical areas, like birthdays. I know my daughter was born May 10 and I was born Nov. 26. That’s it. My son was born sometime in November (maybe the 13th); my step-son was born sometime in December (probably the 21st, but maybe not; that might be his mother’s birthday).

“Sometime” is another of those words I use a lot.

My parents, siblings and close personal friends … their birthdays I usually find out about after the fact. It’s not that I don’t care, I do. It’s just that my mind won’t hang onto numbers. I’m not just a math atheist, I’m a numbers atheist, or at least a numbers agnostic. Numbers may exist, they may not; who am I to say?

Cooking is another area in which I manage to avoid math. I’m a pretty good country cook, having grown up in the restaurant business. But I’m one of those cooks that just kinda throw things together based on whatever’s in the pantry; there’s never any rhyme or reason. And there’s certainly never any math. 

I have a measuring cup — with FRACTIONS printed on it — but I never use it. Those fractions — two-thirds, one-half, three-quarters; they count as math.

But back to that checking account thing. I never know the exact balance I’ve got in there. However, I usually know the “fuzzy” balance. Nine times out of ten this system works just fine.

It works like this: I stuff a bunch of money into the account, and then I buy stuff with the debit card. When the debit card stops working, I stuff more money into the account. It’s an elegant system, with no flaws that I can see. Oh sure, every so often, the bank will find a flaw and charge me thirty bucks for doing so.

To me, it’s worth it. I’ll gladly pay $30 once or twice a year if it means I don’t have to do any math.

Now if I could only find a way to get out of geography…

mtaylor@staffordmediasolutions.com (616) 548-8273