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.

It’s hard to have fun when someone loves you

When we first met, Sweet Annie didn’t seem to care much what I did, what I ate, where I went. That was nearly four years ago. These days, she cares about all that stuff. A lot.

I first noticed the change a couple summers ago, during a backyard barbecue. I was telling my daughter about my plans to try skydiving, something that’s been on my bucket list for more than ten years. I’m not typically a thrill-seeker type, but skydiving just looks like SO much fun.

My grandfather was a paratrooper during both WWII and Korea. He made dozens of “drops” through fusillades of Japanese and Korean bullets. My own skydiving experience, as I planned it, would not involve anybody shooting at me with anything scarier than a camcorder.

Even so, Annie gently suggested my best skydiving years are probably behind me and that — even without enemy combatants trying to pick me off — I could still land myself (so to speak) in intensive care.

She made similar comments when she caught me a few months later perusing hang gliders on Ebay. I didn’t actually have my credit card out, but I was thinking about it.

I live on top of a hill overlooking Baldwin Lake; I figured I could get a running start and cast myself out over the waves, maybe dropping water balloons on swimmers at the beach. Again, hang gliding is one of my bucket list items.

But every time I bring up the topic around Annie, she goes all quiet and introspective, a sure sign of feminine disapproval. 

She seems to have similar, unfavorable, opinions regarding my desire to one day compete in a real demolition derby; about sleeping with a pistol next to the bed (“You’ll shoot your own toe off” was the actual comment); about … well, you get the idea.

She never actually comes out and tells me I CAN’T do something; she knows me better than that. Instead, she lets me know how worried she would be IF I did this or that. In other words, if I love her, I won’t engage in potentially life-threatening activities.

Considering all the aggravation I cause her, you’d think she would be less determined to keep me alive indefinitely. But women are mysterious creatures and I gave up long ago trying to figure them out. 

I know I should be flattered by her concern.

But just lately, this “looking out for me” thing has begun to get entirely out of hand. Whenever we dine together, she goes out of her way to push the vegetables. Seriously, you’d think the woman owns stock in a carrot company.

Then the other day, she came over to my place with vitamins. Vitamins! I’ve never taken a vitamin in my life, and now at this late date, Sweet Annie decides I need ‘em? Adding insult to injury, she purchased the kind with the word “Mature” on the label. This despite the fact she frequently claims I am anything but!

That’s OK. I’m pretty crazy about Annie, and I know she’s only looking out for me because she loves me, too.

But I swear, if she tries to get me to wear galoshes next fall, I’m buying a hang glider and a handgun.

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

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.