It pains me whenever my wife goes out and buys any type of new electronic device. This is because she, being probably the most electronically-challenged person on the planet, will be totally dependent on me to figure out how the thing works.

For instance, a few years ago she got a portable DVD player as a Christmas present. My wife has a bit of a streak of independence, so, as she is usually wont to do, she struggled on her own for a whole afternoon trying to figure out how to get the thing to work. Afterwards, she turned to me in despair. I looked at the player for a few seconds and flicked a switch on the side. The device immediately came to life and began playing the disc that was loaded into it. “See this right here,” I showed her. “That’s the ‘on’ button”

“Oh”, she replied, “I didn’t get that part.”

I bring this up because last week she came home with a new contraption to totrure herself with- a small digital camera. This time, however, she had no delusions of being able to figure out how to operate this one on her own.

So I whipped out the quick start guide, showed her the basic controls, being careful to point out the location of the “on” button, and off she went merrily snapping shots of just about everything that even vaguely captured her interest, even down to the stack of last week’s newspapers.

Then, it came time to upload the newly taken images onto the computer, a task which, to her at least, was as daunting as finding proof for the Unified Field Theory.

I showed her the few basic steps for this, which pretty much amounted to drag-and-drop, and off I went to my own business of watching classic episodes of the Hooters Annual Bikini Contest on hulu.com on my own laptop.

I had barely gotten through the opening credits before I herd her call from the other room. “The picture of my ring came out blurry!” she lamented. “Help me!”

Getting a good, sharp picture of such a small object I knew would be somewhat of a challenge with this particular camera. After all, this type of camera was not the equipment of, say, a crime scene investigator. Still, I knew I had to at least make an attempt at solving this problem, and to do this i needed to go beyong the Quick Start guide and into the User’s Manual.

The CD that came with the camera contained versions of the manual in quite a few languages, including some that I’m sure have been dead for centuries. Fortunately, English was one of these- surprising given that it’s the official tongue of the country of purchase. However, I was grieved to discover that the manual for this puny little camera seemed to have more pages than a bill being debated in Congress.

This manual I’m sure covers how to take just about any kind of picture imaginable, that is, except how to photograph small objects so they don’t come out all washed out and blurry.

So, I, the Great Tech Whiz-kid of the house, (by default since no one under the age of fifteen lives with us) was stumped on that particular question.

This did not stop her, however, and about every five minutes or so for the rest of the evening I had to answer one after another desperate plea for help. By the time I was done, I was qualified to tech a college-level course on how to operate this particular model of camera.

I still don’t know how to take a picture of something that remotely resembles my wife’s ring, but someday I will. I have to; I don’t think I’ll get through a single episode of the Hooters’ Bikini Contest until I do.

I read a story in the newspaper recently how researchers at Yale University have developed a car that will actually warn the driver of conditions that might result in an accident.  For instance, if another car moves up into the blind spot on your left, where you can’t see it in the mirrors, a probe comes out from the driver’s side door and gives you a sharp poke in the ribs as a warning.  If a car comes up and starts tailgating you, you get jabbed in the lower part of you back by another probe in the seat back.

This may be a good thing to give warning to a driver of impending accident-causing situations of which he may be otherwise unawares, due to the fact that he is busy chuckling over the latest dirty jokes that were sent to him by text message from his co-workers down at the loading dock.  However, if you routinely drive in rush hour traffic or, say, any school zone, you are bound to emerge from your car following each trip with more bruises than a New Orleans Saints lineman on Monday morning.

Me, I’d prefer to have a car that automatically sensed when some sunnavabitch cuts you off on the expressway. It would then automatically shoot a mechanical arm out the window to give him the finger and while at the same time firing off some choice words over a loudspeaker at a volume high enough that it could be heard at the other end of the state.  I’d prefer that option well over a satellite radio.

Hello, I’m still here.

Yeah, I know it seems like the last time I posted was shortly after Al Gore invented the Internet. But, honestly, do you all think I got nothing else to do all day but sit around on my computer coming up with stuff to amuse people who surf the Internet? No, contrary to what my family thinks, I have a life.

“I have a life”- when you think about it, it’s kind of a useless phrase. If you can say it, isn’t that proof that you have one? Our society today is really great at coming up with meaninless phrases like this. Doesn’t anybody these days ever have anything important to say? Like, something along the lines of, “excuse me, sir, but a pile of bricks just fell from the top of that building, and you’re standing right under them.” Now that would be important, but you rarely hear people saying things like that these days.

Of course, it’s entirely possible that I don’t actually have a life. I could just be a computer endowed with artificial intelligence, or, in the case of this column, artificial stupidity.

A corrolary to “I have a life” is “Get a life.” People always seem to be telling each other to get a life. I get that all the time.

What you never hear people tell each other is to “Take a life”. Of course, “taking a life” has an entirely different meaning now than “getting a life”. But that is really odd when you think about it. The difference in meaning between the words “take” and “get” is really quite subtle, isn’t it? So how come there’s such a big difference in meaning when you put the words “a life” after them?  It doesn’t really seem to make sense, does it?

This is why I make it a point to never tell anybody to “get a life”. How do I know that the person that I say that to won’t misinterpret my suggestion and promptly go out and brutally murder some innocent shopkeeper somewhere? This is a real possibility considering the types of people you usually say “get a life” to. They’re usually a little bit shakey to begin with. You never say that to somebody who’s got his shit together.

No, I would not want to have that blood on my hands. Furthermore, it could leagally make me an accessory to the murder. Can you imagine- the cops haul this guy in, who is probably a few deuces short of a full deck in the first place, and when they ask him why he did it he answers, “well, Mike McHugh told me to, that’s why!”

So I get hauled into court, and my only chance at a successful defense is to be able to explain to the judge the grammatical difference between the words “take” and “get”. I don’t think that even Johnny Cochran if he were still alive would be able to get me out of that one.

No, I’d most likely rot in prison, right along there with Charles Manson, just another madman who enticed folks to go around killing people.

I don’t know what sort of plague has befallen me of late, but I seem to have suffered here lately from spate of experiences with inferior customer service by several companies that I’ve had the misfortune of choosing to do business with. I don’t understand why this has come on all of a sudden. I really hadn’t experienced such a bad run of poor service before in my life. Maybe it’s because only recently I decided to stop beaing such a cheapskate all the time and actually go buy some stuff.

I’ll discuss the least distressful one first, and after you read this and realize that the others must be worse, you’ll wonder how I haven’t found myself a semi-automatic and gone postal at some company’s customer service center by now.

This first episode involved a prescription that I had purchased at the pharmacy of a major discount store which shall remain nameless but rhymes with “fart”. Upon my arrival home with said prescription, I quickly noticed that it had come with no instructions as to the dosage. I looked all over the package, and all it said were “refer to enclosed dosage instructions”, of which there were none.

So, I called the main number of this major discount store, and explained my issue to the person who answered. She put me on hold and then transferred me to the automotive department. I explained to the person who answered how I had been misconnected, and he said he would transfer me back to the operator. In the transition, the line went dead.

Following this slightly aggrivating incident, I came up with what I thought to be a clever ploy to circumvent this harrowing system. I called back, this time explaining to the operator that I had a problem with the tires I had just purchased. Surely this would get me connected to the pharmacy so that I could obtain the vital instructions that could very well prevent my death by a drug overdose had I tried to guess how much of the medicine to take. No such luck- my call was transferred to sporting goods.

Now, this was starting to become a game for me, and I was bound and determined to reach the end of this telecommunications maze and claim my prize- “Take twice daily with water before meals”, or something like that. So, in my next call, I explained that I had a problem with my new fishing pole. Off to hardware.

Called back to say they mixed the wrong color paint- off to lawn and garden.

This pattern repeated itself for a few more rounds until it all came to an abrupt end with a transfer to lingerie. I simply could not bring myself to calling back with the explanation that I had a problem with my bra strap.

I was beaten!

As for the prescription? A few minutes on the good’ ol Internet and I find what I need at the pharmacutical company’s web site.

Some say that computers are no substitiute for people. It appears that, at times, the opposite is also true.

Stay tuned for more hair-curling customer dis-service stories!

I’ve got to apologize to you, dear readers, for not having posted for the past week or so. Not wanting to go on public assistance and thus add to the already-burgeoning National Debt, I had to take some time to attend to my other career- the one that actually pays me money. After all, I do consider myself to be a patriotic sort, and so I couldn’t bear having the sole responsibility of having thrown our tenuous economic recovery completely off-track.

What has happened is that I’ve been assigned to a new project “team” at work.

“Ok, so what’s the big deal?” you might ask. Well, in the corporate world, “teams” are considered to be a very big deal indeed, and thus it becomes important to invest the time to build the quality relationships that are essential to the team’s functioning as a cohesive unit. Otherwise, open hostilities of the magnitude seen in congressional hearings or on episodes of “Survivior” are bound to erupt.

In order to build an effective “team”, it is necessary to invest countless hours in “team building” activities. These activities have to be held after regular working hours, outside of the office setting. This way, so the theory goes, you can get to know what everybody is like when they’re not engaged in the details of conducting actual business. In practice, though, you sometimes become exposed to too much information, if you know what I mean.

In order to do effective “team building”, the first thing you have to do is find some common interest shared by most, if not all, team members. It does no good, for instance, to go on a hunting trip when half the members have never hunted for anything more than the morning paper after the delivery boy had lodged it into a tree limb.

Now, ours is a multi-cultural “team”, representing countries as diverse as The United States, South Africa, and Texas. Thus, finding something in common was a particular challenge in our case. However, after much deliberation, we were able to find one activity that we all equally enjoyed- that of drinking beer.

So, as you see, with all of this time I have had to invest at the Fox and Hound Tavern downing pints of Shiner Bock so that our new team can become a harmonious entity, it has cut into my time for writing. It’s tough sometimes, but one is forced to make these types of personal sacrifices for the greater good.

Now that things have pretty much gelled into some sort of amorphous blob, I can now turn my attention back towards posting those articles that keep you, dear readers, informed of the important news items from around the state. I realize that you all have been in a complete state of bewilderment during this lapse, but don’t worry. I promise you, things in the state haven’t gotten any less bizarre since my last post.

The Lake Charles Ravens Gang at Reliant Stadium in 2008

Ah, finally, the weekend I’ve been waiting for since January- the start of a new NFL season! Yes, I’m an addict, with a monkey that apparently doesn’t succumb to cold turkey, as you’d think seven months of withdrawl would be enough to cure any addiction. Maybe if I’d avoided watching the April draft and the preseason, I might be cured, but I just don’t want to kick the habit.

Transplants like me tend to remain stubbornly loyal to our old home town teams. We’re like old hippies who never left the sixties. It’s a difficult existence, since our games are rarely on local television. To get out fix, we march lemming-like to the nearset sports bar every Sunday to watch our beloved Ravens. For us, that means Buffalo Wild Wings.

My wife and I, along with another family transplanted from Baltimore, are there every week from September to December.

Here in Southwest Louisiana, it’s evident from the clientele at the local Buffalo Wild Wings that the Dallas Cowboys are by far the most popular out-of-town team, as about nine out of temn tables are filled with their fans. I firmly believe that this particular location would go out of business if it were not for the Cowboys.

I particularly hate it when the Cowboys game is on at the same time as ours, especially when they win, as happened today. When they lose, you hardly know that they’re there, but when they win, the restaurant takes the tone of a town hall meeting that’s being held by a congressman who supports heath care reform.

I suppose, however, that I am being a bit hypocritical here. We, too, like to make noise when out team does well, but there’s only five of us.

On this particular day, I happened to jump out of my seat on one particular play where the Ravens scored a touchdown to break a tie. I was promptly met by stares from the 10% of the patrons who weren’t watching the Cowboys. It turned out that the Ravens had scored at exactly the same moment as did the Saints’ opponent in their game. I actually considered myself lucky; I could have been the Cowboys’ opponent who’d scored. If that were that case, I would have certainly been greeted with a hail of chicken wing bones and little plastic containers of bleu cheese.

It’s amazing to me that our wives are as entheusiastic as my friend and I about football. The game has really attracted a lot of women in recent years. On this particular day, there were as many women as men at Buffalo Wild Wings. It’s possible that they tag along just to make sure that their men don’t embarass themselves in a public place, and if it wasn’t for the example of my mother, I’d believe that.

Yes, at 81, even she now makes it a point never to miss a Ravens game. In the old days, she used to berate my father and I for wasting out Sundays (and Saturdays, if you count college football) watching a “stupid game”. After all, we could be be engaged in more productive pursuits, like cleaning out the gutters. What she didn’t understand was that the very reason we parked ourselves in front of the tube all weekend was to avoid such tasks.

Nowadys, whenever I call my mother on a Sunday evening in the fall, the first words out of her mouth are, “Did you watch the game?” Then she launches into ten minutes of post-game analysis that I find to be amazingly on the money. She should take a seat next to Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long on the post-game show.

I think that she will outlive me if she ever starts talking about how her fantasy picks did. I’d suffer a heart attack right there on the spot.

I have been going camping at a folk festival in Texas for the past several years. This year, I decided to bring my wife along. I’d like to say she got a rude awakening, but that would be a mis-statement, because she got no sleep to wake up from. I tried to warn her.

She is used to camping in state parks, where they are anal about keeping the campgrounds quiet after dark. There, if you’re out walking at night, and you step on a twig, the noise thus created will cause the guy in the fifth wheel across the road to call the park ranger on you for disturbing his viewing of the World War II battle scene he’s watching by satellite on the Hitler-y Channel.

The experience of camping at a folk festival is quite the opposite. This is because you are camping out with musicians, which are known to be a nocturnal species. Here I think they will evict you from the campground if you are too quiet at night. The guitars here play until, and sometimes past, sunup.

We pitched our tent where I usually do, near a place called “The Crossroads”. The Crossroads is ground zero for the all-night song circles, because it is under a big street lamp. Itattracts musicians the same way it does moths.

I understand the situation at the folk festival, and I somewhat like camping at the Crossroads, as the music and laughter lulls me to sleep after a hard night of drinking at Camp Tequila Mockingbird. There, I play guitar until the tequila makes me forget where my fingers are; then it’s off to be serenaded to sleep- not too difficult in my condition.

One one particular evening during this festival, however, my wife had apparently gone too light on the tequila. As we retired to out tent at some hour that begins with an “f”, the music from the Crossroads Gang was a bit too much for her.

“Go out and tell them to stop playing; it’s late!” she complained.

“No, actually it’s early,” I replied. “It all depends on how you look at it.”

Now I knew full well that trying to get these musicians to stop playing would be about as effective as waling up to a pack of hungry lions who are feasting on their latest kill and tell them to stop eating. However, for the sake of preserving my marriage, I went anyway.

The result was as I expected. After returning to the tent, I noticed a subtle shift in the repertiore at the crossroads from Simon and Garfunkel to Guns ‘N Roses. Oh, well, at least I did my duty for the good of the marriage.

The moral of the story is, if you want to sleep while camping at a folk festival, either drink a lot of tequila at night, or take a nap in the afternoon, if the Texas sun will let you.

When you get to the age where you are officially over the hill, there’s two things for sure that happen. One, gravity works a lot better. (This is true for both sexes.) Secondly, doctors start performing more and more tests on you so that they can better monitor your slow but sure demise.

During my last annual physical, my doctor informed me that I was now at the age where I should get a colonoscopy for precautionary measures. Now, the procedure itself didn’t seem so bad, but the preparation sounded like sheer hell. They put you on a diet where the delicacies are chicken broth and popsicles (and even then cherry is taboo), and you spend all day on the throne. You become, as Larry the Cable Guy puts it, “King of the Poopers.”

He referrerd me to a specialist who performs these procedures, and I managed to ignore the messages from the nurse who called several times to schedule the appointment. I could not, however, ignore my wife’s encouragements to get the deed done. I must say, she looks out for my health a lot more than I do myself. I like to think it’s because she loves me so much, but I really believe it’s just a sign that I’m not carrying enough life insurance.

I managed to procrastinate for about six months, but, seeing that my lady wouldn’t let up, I finally caved. Today was the big day. So, yesterday was “the prep”. The instructions are to drink a half gallon of this concoction that’s supposed to clean you out. I hadn’t drank so much fluid so fast since I was on the eight man keg team for my college fraternity. I felt like I had swallowed Lake Ponchartrain.

That wasn’t the worst part of it, though. That evening, it was our turn to work the bingo for the Knights of Columbus. I have a ritual for this duty. I start off in the kitchen cooking the cheeseburgers. Being the chef, I always treat myself to a nice big double cheeseburger, smothered with fried onions, mustard, and lettuce. So here I am cooking and smelling these cheeseburgers, denied my usual pleasure. I glance back to see my wife at the other end of the kitchen, snickering as she prepares the popcorn (which is my normal desert, another pleasure that I am denied on this particular evening).

So today I go through the procedure, and I’m given a clean bill of health. That doesn’t surprise me, given the special high fiber cereal that she always feeds me for breakfast. It tastes like I’m eating pine bark mulch with a few nuts tossed in.

On my way out, the nurse warns me to consume light meals for the next day or so. Screw that; I made a beeline out of the clinic straight to Logan’s Roadhouse for a big steak and french fries.

Having endured this ordeal, I think that I’m going to go out and get a supplimental life insurance policy. That way I ought to be able to smoke and drink to my heart’s content, and avoid the doctor’s office without my wife’s objections.

What can I say? I like to live my life according to the lyrics of Jimmy Buffett songs. There’s one that goes:

“I’d rather die while I’m living than live while I’m dead.”

Well, school is back in session here in Louisiana. And we all know what that means. Alright, yes, there is high school football. Who doesn’t relish the return of delightful Friday nights where we yell at the coaches for not giving our own fledgling star the ball, thus forever ruining his chances at an LSU scholarship?

No, I am talking about the return of driving through the school zones. These are the zones that lie somewhere outside the space-time continuum- where multi-tasking soccer moms put on makeup, scold Jimmmy for calling his sister a name, and remind hubby on the cell phone to pick up the dry cleaning after work, all while maneuvering through a maze of traffic cones, buses, and crossing guards. I bet any one of them could give Tony Stewart a run for his money on the NASCAR circuit.

The thing I wonder is why public officials decide to build schools where they do. They seem to be strategically located so as to give commuters the maximum amount of anguish. Do they actually plan it that way, or did those places just happen to be where the politically-connected owned land to sell to the school board?

They always put signs in the school zones telling you to slow down to something like 20 miles per hour, although you’re lucky if you could get up to about 5 when you’re going through. The parish can save the money they spend to put up these signs. Instead, they can put to better use by, say, building a new golf course where we commuters can let out or frustrations by smacking a little white ball into a pond.

In my district they even had a dry run last week, as if we had forgotten the hell we’d gone through just a few months prior. The soccer moms were nowhere to be seen for this drill. They know better; they only venture through these black holes when it’s absolutely necessary.

Times sure have changed. When I was a kid, I used to walk to school. No, it wasn’t uphill through the snow both ways like my father used to do, but still I walked. No wonder there’s such a problem with obesity among the youth with today’s 21st Century American School-day Ritual. This consists of prying the video game controller out of the kids’ hands, shoving them into the Ford Expedition, and chauffering them to the front door of the school via the McDonalds’ drive-thru.

Okay, now that I’ve vented, I’ll see you on the golf course, or, more likely, in the woods beside it.

There sure is a lot of discussion these days about the health care reform bill that congress is currently working on.

I don’t think I’ve seen so much public debate on any topic since opinions flared over who should have won the last American Idol.

The only thing about this bill that everybody agrees about is that it’s got a lot of pages. It’s got so many pages, in fact, that not a single member of Congress has had time to read it. For all they know, it could require a patient to get a second opinion from a witch doctor before undergoing any surgical procedure. Or, dread the thought, it may even contain a provision that places a cap on the size of breast implants. (We wouldn’t have had to worry about that under any Clinton plan.)

This would be a direct threat to our American way of life. We might as well be living under the rule of the Taliban.

So, there is intensive argument from both sides of the aisle regarding a bill that none of them know anything about. That’s nothing new; to do it any differently would break from decades of American tradition. After all, congressmen are very busy people. They have to attend many important hearings, like the ones where they scold auto executives for not coming from Detriot on bicycles. And when they’re not doing that, they have to pour through brochures from Lear and Cessna so they can make an informed decision on where to spend the next $500 million that they’ve borrowed from the Chinese for new congressional jets.

One argument that you hear a lot is that the bill would lead eventually to nationalized health care, and if that happened, it would seriously jeopardize the quality of care that we enjoy here in the U.S. This is a legitamite concern. After all, it’s well know that, among other things, our doctors’ offices are equipped with the most high-tech tongue depressors in the world. The way I hear some people talk about it, with nationalized health care, we might end up having recycled popsickle sticks shoved down our throats whenever we say, “Ahhh.”

On the other hand, I, for one, don’t think I’d be a happy camper if the government were my only option for health insurance. Judging from the tax form I have to fill out every year, I could just imagine what the insurance application would be like:

“Enter on line 28 the number of prescription medications that you take. If the number is two or more (three if you are married and applying jointly), fill out the worksheet on page 62 of the instructions to determine if you are required to submit form 3307A with this application.”

No thanks; I think I’d rather die young. On second thought, I think it’s too late for that.