You bet your halibut

Word here in Santa Cruz, CA, is that the halibut migration that results in hauls of the yummy fish has arrived early this year. I'm no fisherman, but this news did remind me of one of my favorite Home Front columns from a few years ago. Read it here.

Re-reading it made me miss my sons. Hope it makes you laugh.

Boys will be chefs

Nothing says “Merry Christmas” like a young boy playing with his new train set, his baseball glove and his toy kitchen.

That’s right. Kitchen. As in junior-sized appliances, where the lad can pretend to cook and do dishes.

According to an article from The Associated Press, boys increasingly are playing “chef” with toy kitchens, even though the thought of it can make uptight fathers dash out into the yard and roll in the flowerbeds.

Many modern dads are OK with their sons playing with toy kitchens, the article said, partly because the dads themselves spend more time in the real kitchen. Boys see their fathers whipping up dinner, or they see male chefs on the many food shows on TV, and they want to emulate those activities. Toy companies are catering (ha!) to that interest by making gender-neutral kitchens for kids, the article said.

“Men are reshaping and rethinking their roles,” said Dr. Michael Kaplan, an assistant clinical professor at the Yale Child Study Center. “They are doing much more (cooking and housework) than they ever have.”

Kaplan said boys shouldn’t be discouraged from playing with toys usually associated with girls because it can lead to self-esteem problems.

That’s where he lost me. I’m a living, breathing example of a man who played with a toy kitchen, over his father’s objections, and, as anyone who knows me will tell you, “self-esteem” is the least of my problems. Just the opposite, in fact.

My toy kitchen was a little turquoise-colored number -- a stove, a sink and a refrigerator with food items and condiments painted on the inside -- where I whiled away many hours making mud pies that I insisted all the grown-ups actually eat.

I was 4 years old at the time, which would’ve made it around 1961. Not an era when men spent much time in the kitchen.

I vaguely recall my dad expressing concern over his firstborn son spending so much time baking mud pies and what that might do to my developing male psyche. At least I think that’s what he was saying as he rolled in the flowerbeds.

Clearly, everything turned out fine, as I grew up to be a housewife. Kidding! I grew up to be a work-at-home dad, who doesn’t mind spending time in the kitchen. Still not much of a chef, but at least I don’t serve up mud pies anymore.

Today’s toymakers can appease all the worried dads and still make a buck off the toy kitchen market. It’s simply a matter of tailoring the appliances to men.

For instance, toy kitchens for boys shouldn’t come in colors like pink or turquoise that might “feminize” them. They should be made of stainless steel. Like a DeLorean.

Manufacturers could make macho dads happy by designing a toy fridge that holds nothing but beer. For the garage.

Microwave ovens didn’t exist when I was a child, but now we can’t get along without them. Every boy’s kitchen should come with a microwave, preferably one that can actually make live cats explode. (Kidding some more! Take it easy, cat-lovers. Sheesh.)

Even the most manly man thinks it’s OK to cook outdoors. Most will, in fact, hip-check their wives away from the barbecue grill so they can char their own steaks.

If toymakers want to make a really authentic barbecue grill, they should rig it up with a 10-foot-tall blaze that will singe off hair and eyebrows. Then Junior can look just like Dad.

To extinguish the flames, they can roll in the flowerbeds together.

Advice for Father's Day

This Father’s Day, let’s remember the best of all parental admonitions: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Sure, that sounds hypocritical (especially to smart-aleck kids who think they know everything), but it’s really the only way for dads to approach parenting.

Fathers are deluged with advice about setting good examples for our children. We’re told that we’re role models, that we should have no bad habits, or at least should keep them carefully concealed. Otherwise, the children will grow up to be just as messed up as we are.

This puts a lot of pressure on guys. Good behavior goes against our nature. If you don’t believe me, check out any group of guys watching the Super Bowl together. Men quickly devolve into hooting primitives when they’re not observed by those who might disapprove, particularly if violent sports, beer and/or cheerleaders are involved.

This bad behavior can be overlooked when men are young, single and free-spirited. The very word “bachelor” comes from the Latin root for “keg party.” Which explains the origin of the “bachelor’s degree” on college campuses.

But once we become dads, we’re expected to chuck all our bad habits and behave. Especially if the kids are watching. And they’re ALWAYS watching, even when you think they’re asleep.

Let’s say, for example, that you smoke cigarettes. Your children will hold this against you. They will nag you to stop, complain about the smell and leave you newspaper clippings about the health hazards. Even if you only smoke outside when the children are asleep in a location miles away, they’ll still nail you. They will wear you down until you quit smoking, even if it takes years.

As soon as you’ve adjusted to the idea that you’re no longer a smoker, the kids will take up the habit. Guaranteed.

Why? Because you were their role model and you misbehaved. Plus, they know it’ll drive you crazy.

No matter that you told them all along that they shouldn’t smoke. No matter that you said all the right things. They’ll do as you do, not as you say, because it’s the shortest route to the Asylum for Insane Parents.

The whole say/do conundrum is even worse for fathers like me, who work at home. For more than a decade, I was the one who spent the most time with our two sons, ferrying them to school and overseeing homework, while my wife brought home the bacon. If our sons had a role model, I was it, which explains a lot about how they turned out.

No matter what I say to our teens, they call my bluff because they’ve seen how I’ve behaved over the years.

I’ve told them they should get jobs and dress nicer and think about careers. But how can I expect them to take me seriously when, for most of their lives, they’ve seen me working at home in my pajamas?

Why should they have a regular job, the argument goes, when dad doesn’t have one? Why should they go the suit-and-tie route when their barefoot father takes great pride in the fact he hasn’t worn a necktie in a dozen years? And a boss, what’s that about?

I’ve set a bad example. If only the boys had listened to me instead of watching me. As it is, they’re in danger of becoming work-at-home types themselves. Which translates to “poor.” Who will look after me in my old age?

On the other hand, no one will give me a necktie for Father’s Day. How can I be sure? Because I said so.

Horseplay U.

"College prep" means something completely different for teen-age boys.

Sure, boys need the same preparation as girls when it comes to academics and ambition. But they also need something more, and they get it from their dads.

This came to mind recently as my wife and I watched our two teen-aged sons chase around the kitchen, popping one another with damp dishtowels. My wife said to me, "You've prepared them well for life in a dorm."

I felt so proud.

The past generation or two have represented a grand social experiment, with dads taking on more of the child-rearing responsibilities. These days, millions of kids (including mine) grow up with dads who work at home. Who knows how these kids will turn out?

Most dads didn't grow up focused on the idea that we'd someday care for rugrats. We didn't necessarily learn the skills to be good parents. We assumed our wives would take care of all that.

Babies arrived, and we found ourselves adrift in an ocean of bottle formula and amoxicillin and dirty diapers. That's enough to send most men screaming back to the nearest traditional workplace, but some of us continued to stay home, only to find that toddlers can effortlessly cause insanity in others.

The school years are pretty much the same for all parents. We work like crazy, trying to keep the little beggars in groceries and clothes, then spend whatever time is left on nurturing and housework and driving to soccer games. The only difference for us stay-at-home types is that it's usually easier for us to structure our workday around orthodontist appointments.

Overall, the Dad Experiment is working. Our houses may be dirtier, our kids may be wilder, and more meals originate in the microwave, but we manage, week to week, to keep the household healthy and intact.

If fathers excel in one area, that's in the horseplay department. When you have a dad who's home all the time, horseplay rules.

When the kids are both boys, as at our house, well, let's just have a moment of silence for poor mom. She's been outnumbered since the get-go. She's forced to act as the one sane person in a loony bin of rambunctious males.

When the kids were little, my wife smiled serenely while they sat on my back and I galloped around the room on all fours. She kept that look frozen on her face as the kids and I wrestled on the hardwood floor. She sighed as we played "monster," chasing through the house, crashing into walls and leaping over furniture.

As they got older, our horseplay grew up, too. Slap fights and tickle torture and insulting patter and armpit noises and water balloons and booby traps. When mom's not around to moderate this testosterone madhouse, we males quickly devolve into The Three Stooges. It's a wonder we don't spend more time at the emergency room.

Other dads teach their kids to fish or fix cars or shoot free throws. I've taught mine how to wield a towel in locker room fights. Our boys both pop a mean towel, and I've got the welts to prove it. The sacrifices we make for our children…

When our sons go off to college, they'll have the skills necessary for dorm life. They can hold their own when towel fights erupt. They know how to use a microwave and a toilet plunger. They know how to play poker (so your kids better hold tight to that tuition money). They can short-sheet a bed. They know more insults than Don Rickles.

I've done my daddy duty. Nyuk-nyuk.

Read this resolution

New Year's resolutions are the triumph of optimism over memory.

We forget how long we stuck to last year's resolutions (average: 3.6 days), and instead look to the future with a positive outlook and the absolute belief that we can change for the better.

Most of us make the same resolutions every year. Eat less, exercise more, earn more, save more, be a nicer person, kick a bad habit, pay better attention to our, you know, whatayacallem, uh, families.

Worthy aspirations all, but the sad fact is that these become our annual resolutions because we fail at them. Again and again.

That's why, this year, I've come up with a new resolution, one that hasn't been tried and abandoned over and over. I'd suggest that Americans everywhere attempt the same. Pick something new and give it a try.

Here's mine: Read the instructions.

I know it doesn't seem like much of a goal. But for me to read the instructions every time requires me to overcome many personal shortcomings:

A) I am a guy.
B) I am a know-it-all.
C) I have no patience.

Why am I this way? I refer you to "A" above.

We guys hate to read instructions, the same way we famously hate to ask directions when we're lost. To do so proves there's something we don't already know.

Better to go through life by dead reckoning than to show any sign of weakness. Better to ignore a problem, in hopes that it will go away on its own, than to consult the instructions and fix it properly.

Here's an example: Recently, our garage door was giving us fits. It has one of those automatic openers, which means we never have to get out in the weather. Punch a button and -- vrr-rrr-rr-rr! -- the door opens or closes, as needed.

One of the great inventions really, right up there with the TV remote control. Until it stops working.

Then, when you try to close it, you get this instead: Punch the button. Vrr-rr. Door stops halfway down. Punch button again. Vrr. Door lowers another foot, then stops. Punch button. Vrr-rr. Door starts going UP. No, no, DOWN, you rotten $*%@! Punch button repeatedly. Vrr. Vrr. Vrr. Door, terribly confused now, moves inches at a time. Up, down, up, down. Finally, catch the door going down and HOLD the button until the door rattles all the way to the ground.

This went on at our house for weeks, until my wife finally got fed up and ordered that I get the garage door fixed. The implication being that if it wasn't fixed when she got home, I would be sleeping out there with the cars.

I went into the house, grumbling, and looked in our household files and found the instructions for the garage door opener. A quick perusal uncovered these facts:

1) This is common problem.
2) It can be easily fixed by two tweaks with a screwdriver.

Five minutes later, the door was working like a new one. All that frustration vanished. And I got to be a hero to my wife. Because I finally bothered to read the instructions.

This solution has arisen repeatedly. The dishwasher. The DVD player. My cell phone. All of these electronic gizmos that drive me crazy can actually enhance my life if I'll learn to operate them by reading the instructions.

So that's my resolution for the new year, and I plan to stick to it. Now I must go. I've got a ton of reading to do in the next 3.6 days.

Deck the halls

With the leaf-whump arrival of autumn, it's time to snuggle indoors in front of a hearty fire and notice that you've never really liked the way the living room is arranged.

That's right, it's Home Decorating Season. The season of thumbing through catalogs and designating a place for the Christmas tree and locating "just the right thing" to dress up that naked corner before relatives arrive to visit.

It's too cold to plant anything else in the yard, so the women of America move indoors and start rearranging the furniture. Just in time for football season.

Across the nation, men are sacked out on sofas, watching ESPN and trying to avoid raking leaves, and their wives stand in front of the TVs with fevered eyes, saying, "Put down those Chee-tos, and help me nail these pine boughs to the mantel."

Sorry, ladies, but guys are blissful idiots when it comes to making the house look nice for the holidays. It's all up to you. As long as you don't stand a lamp in front of the TV, we're OK with whatever you want to do. Just don't expect us to know anything, to have any opinions or, frankly, to care about slipcovers or potpourri or tinsel. Not with the playoffs coming up.

To understand how little the subspecies "guy" thinks about interior decorating, look at the basic bachelor pad, the nest of the undomesticated male. There are three rules for home design in bachelor living:

1) The sofa shall be parked squarely in front of the TV. No matter what.
2) The fewer the steps from sofa to fridge, the better.
3) A bed is nice, but not absolutely necessary.

Beyond those precepts, guys simply don't care. We could live in a cave as long we get cable TV. Or, we can live in a room where all the rickety antiques are draped in matching frilly chintz and every square inch of every wall is covered in holiday finery. It doesn't matter to us.

Men who settle down soon learn to pretend to care about how the home looks. We learn to murmur appreciatively over new purchases and to have the right opinions about "window treatments." We learn to go into hiding if we see our wives cooing over "Sunset" magazine.

Most of all, we learn to notice when our wives place little decorative touches around the house. If we know what's good for us.

This busy time of year, guys should make a cursory reconnaissance of the home every night, in search of new stuff that has been hung by the chimney with care.

First of all, you can mention how nice it looks (be specific!) and score much-needed Home Decorating Season points. Secondly, you can keep track of how much is spent spiffing up the place and consider working some overtime. Most importantly, a quick nightly check of the home's current status might prevent you from later falling over a table in the dark.

Beyond simple "noticing," guys should try to get into the spirit of the season. Grunt up off the sofa and help nail some stuff to the walls. Move some furniture. Bring some leaves in from the yard and arrange them into a colorful centerpiece.

You can get a lot accomplished during halftime.

Guys embrace cheeky humor

My family was dining in a swank restaurant when the waiter, in his best Inspector Clouseau accent, recited "today's especiales."

My sons and I listened politely, minding our manners, until the waiter said the seafood special was "halibut cheeks." We didn't hear the rest -- how the halibut cheeks were prepared or what accompanied them. We were too busy snorting, trying not to laugh.

The waiter looked puzzled. My sons and I exploded into laughter. The waiter looked more puzzled. I explained, in my best Beavis-and-Butthead snicker, "You said 'hali-BUTT CHEEKS.'"

My wife blushed and rolled her eyes and said, "Oh, my God." My sons fell out laughing. So did I. The waiter -- and this is the key thing here -- violated all swank-restaurant rules of conduct and erupted in laughter, too.

Why? Because he's a guy, that's why. Say "halibut cheeks" to any guy in America, up to and including Vice President Dick Cheney, and he'll at least smile. Say it in a swank restaurant with a stuffy foreign accent, and he'll laugh so hard that a recent beverage will shoot from his nostrils.

It's different for women. Say "halibut cheeks" to a woman in a fancy restaurant, smirkingly await a response, and here's what you'll get: "I can't take you anywhere." Which is, of course, the truth.

The scientific name for this basic difference between men and women is "The Three Stooges Standard." If you enjoy the slapstick comedy of The Three Stooges, this theorem goes, then you are male.

(Yes, yes, social scientists recognize that this is a blatant generality. Somewhere there is a woman who loves the Stooges, who runs around her house going "whoop-whoop-whoop" and throwing cream pies. And somewhere there is a snooty male intellectual who looks down his nose at the antics of Moe, Curly and Larry. Our only hope is that that woman and that man find each other and get married. Then they'll see what the rest of us are up against.)

My wife, who is not male, has a great sense of humor, but she doesn't care for the low-brow stuff. She is, in fact, often embarrassed by the behavior of her husband and sons, particularly in swank restaurants. As the only woman in the household, she's constantly surrounded by three testosterone-fueled goofballs who find hilarious any mention of, say, the planet Uranus.

The boys and I try to rein ourselves in when my wife's around, but we often fail. Someone will mention the hirsute actor "Harry Pitts" and we're off to the races.

When she's not around, we guys completely devolve into lower primates. We tease and curse and belch and make crude anatomical references, all in an attempt to make the other guys laugh. We behave much worse than The Three Stooges ever did. We're Beavis and Butthead and Butthead Jr.

I know I should set a better example for my sons, but I'm as goofy as they are, and can't seem to stop. I secretly take great pride in their comedic talents, no matter how unseemly. For instance, Butthead Jr. can burp the entire alphabet, but don't tell Mom.

Our locker-room behavior is, of course, inexcusable. My wife is correct when she says she can't take us anywhere. In particular, she's learned she can't take us to swank seafood restaurants.

Because the Appetizer of the Day was "crab balls."

Caped crusaders

American males, particularly those in Washington, D.C., often are accused of taking a simplistic worldview, one of "good guys vs. bad guys" or "us vs. them."

Where does this naïve attitude come from? Comic books.

We grew up heavily influenced by comic books, in which it's not just heroes vs. villains, but superheroes vs. archvillains, and it's always easy to tell the difference. Good guys wear form-fitting tights and have secret identities. Bad guys want to rule the world and they sneer a lot.

As kids, we comic book readers knew we could become superheroes ourselves by knotting one end of a bath towel around our necks. Once we had this "cape," we could do anything, including "fly" around the house until our mothers screeched that we were driving them crazy with "that whooshing noise."

Guys yearn for those simpler times, which is why full-grown men spend actual money to sit in movie theaters for turkeys like "Daredevil" and "The Hulk." And why we still need to make archvillains out of our enemies.

Why not embrace this simplistic thinking? It might give an easier "read" on people. In your workplace or neighborhood, you can find folks who need only a caped uniform to show off their super abilities. And, you'll find plenty of sneerers who belong in the other category.

I, for instance, work alone at home and spend much of each day playing cards with my computer. This would make my secret identity Solitary Man. (Quick, think of something else before that Neil Diamond song sticks in your head all day. Whoops, too late! Sorry.)

As a lone writer, my special ability is making things up out of thin air. Only my positive outlook and the occasional paycheck separate me from my evil counterpart, Liar Man.

Superheroes often have multiple abilities -- they can fly AND they're more powerful than a locomotive AND they can leap tall buildings in a single bound. Villains tend to be one-dimensional, which is understandable considering they're probably getting killed off in the next issue anyway.

So, a hero named Paper Boy can ride a bicycle like the wind AND throw newspapers into shrubs AND demand a tip at Christmas, whereas someone named Blabbermouth is almost certain to be a bad guy.

Soccer Mom combines fertility with driving skills AND incredible scheduling powers. Yard Man can generate incredible amounts of noise while making your own property look crappy in comparison. That guy who can't stop talking about his job? Company Man. Your nosy neighbor? Snooperman, of course.

I'm sure you can think up plenty of these yourself. Come on, it's fun! It is so, dammit.

Here are a few workplace superheroes to get you started:

--Yesman. With the big "Y" on his chest and his agreeable nature, this superhero can shoot right up the corporate ladder.

--Sales Woman. Able to smile and look you right in the eye while simultaneously calculating profit margin and gullibility.

--Stuporman. Has the amazing ability to sit at the same desk, doing the same tasks, year after year.

--Wondering Woman. The boss who never demands anything. Instead, she says, "I wonder if you could . . . "

--Webmaster. Every computer nerd's favorite. Faithful sidekick is Reboot Boy.

--Hindsight Man. With his ability to see only backward, this superhero is never wrong.

--Gossipmonger. Knows everything about everybody, but is often wrong. His kid sister is Whispering Girl.

--Bigbossman. Can loudly intimidate and "downsize" while drinking his lunch.

And don't forget the one-dimensional villains: Backstabber, Goldbricker, Bootlicker, Ms. Cliché, Odiferous Man, Whippersnapper. The list goes on and on.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to go find my bath towel.

Whoosh.

Holy communication

Ask any marriage counselor the secret to a happy union and the answer will be "communication."

To keep relationships healthy and lively, couples simply must communicate their needs and desires. Unfortunately, many people (that is to say, "guys") aren't that good at um, you know, communicating.

The main obstacle to communication is the way the two genders think. Women can entertain many thoughts and feelings simultaneously, while men tend to be linear thinkers, considering one item at a time.

If a man asks a woman, "What are you thinking?" (it could happen!), she may answer with a convoluted string of connections and relationships, totally losing the man, who probably isn't listening anyway. When a woman asks the same of a man, truthful replies tend to consist of one word: "Beer" or "trucks" or "football." If the man is a deep thinker, the answer may be as complicated as "the infield fly rule." But the answer is unlikely to center on feelings or a thorough diagnosis of the relationship.

This puts men at a disadvantage. When a woman inquires about a man's thoughts, she doesn't want to hear "beer." She wants something meaningful. Put on the spot, the man scrambles around, trying to come up with a sensitive, diplomatic answer, and usually says exactly the wrong thing. Sometimes, he's so caught up in his linear thinking (see "football" above), he doesn't realize he's made a mistake until a saucepan bounces off his head.

What follows is a quick quiz to help men who are faced with traditional relationship situations. The quiz is for guys, but there's a note for women at the end.

Question: Your wife says, "Are you happy?" What do you say?

A. "I'm always happy when I'm with you."
B. "I'd be happier if my team made the playoffs."
C. "I'd be happier if you didn't stand in front of the TV."
D. "Compared to what?"

Q: Your wife says, "You're awfully quiet tonight. Is something wrong?" How do you answer?

A. "Not at all. I was just thinking about how happy you make me."
B. "I can't find the remote."
C. "We're out of beer."
D. "Gas pains."

Q. Your wife bursts into tears for no apparent reason. How do you respond?

A. "Aw, honey, what's wrong? How can I help?"
B. "Now what?"
C. "Got something in your eye?"
D. "Where did you hide the remote?"

Q. At a restaurant, she asks, "Do you think that waitress is attractive?"

A. "What waitress?"
B. "That skinny thing? Nah, I like a woman with some meat on her bones."
C. "Hubba-hubba."
D. "I wouldn't kick her out of bed for eating crackers."

Q. Your wife trots out that old favorite: "Does this dress make my butt look big?" How do you answer?

A. "You look beautiful."
B. "I like a woman with some meat on her bones."
C. "No bigger than usual."
D. "No, your butt makes that dress look big."

Q. When your wife reveals her innermost thoughts, you're thinking about:

A. The right thing to say to show you care.
B. Baseball.
C. Fishing.
D. An attractive waitress.

Scoring: The correct answers are labeled "A." If you picked anything else, you might as well start packing. And call a good lawyer.

(Note to women: It's probably clear by now, but you're better off if you never surprise your man with any of the above situations. For example, if you want a serious discussion of the relationship, sit him down, make sure you have his undivided attention and say: "We're going to discuss our relationship now." Give him a few minutes to align his linear thinking before you begin. Also, you might want to hide the remote first.)

Hair today

I think I speak for the fathers of America when I say: Individually, and collectively as a generation, our children have weird hair.

We dads mostly keep this opinion to ourselves, knowing the slightest spark could set off unwinnable Hair Wars. But secretly, we wince every morning as our children emerge from bathrooms, ready to face the world with hairdos that look like "mixed-media" art, something entitled "Industrial Accident at the Weed-Whacker Factory, Preserved in Scented Gel."

We smart, modern dads have learned to keep our mouths shut. We've learned that criticizing or arguing or even simple hysterical giggling will only make matters worse.

It's the No-Win Parent Paradox: Any parental signal about a new hairstyle -- even the merest grunt -- will cause heartbreak and yet another new hairstyle.

If parents voice approval, the child will know the hairstyle is a dud and will hack it off. If parents admit they hate it, the kid will find a style they hate even more.

(If parents voice no opinion whatsoever, Junior will do something weird to his hair anyway, in the spirit of free experimentation. But at least it won't be the parents' fault.)

Hair, like other fashions, suffers from "generational creep." Each generation must find styles more outrageous than the last, to keep up the cycle of rebellion. This escalation in elaborate hairstyles requires more and more time and attention. Eventually, children will get up in the morning, spend the day doing their hair, then go right back to bed again.

Upping the ante these days is the ready street availability of hundreds of hair-care products. Kids feel compelled to buy and try every form of mousse and gel and spray and dye. At our house, one whole bathroom counter is buried under bottles and jars of such products. And we have BOYS.

You see whole herds of guys running around today with hair cropped short as Curly Howard's. These boys have easy, buff-and-go hair. These are not my sons.

My sons like to experiment. They like to make a fashion statement. They think people gawk and point at them because they're "cool."

My older son, who has curly blond hair beautiful enough to make you weep, wants a black, jutting hairdo that could put somebody's eye out. Since he hasn't managed that yet, he sometimes just puts goo in his hair and pulls it in different directions, so portions stand straight out from his head. This is supposed to look like a rock star. Most times, he ends up resembling the victim of a "swirly."

My younger son wears a spiky flat-top with a long "rat-tail" in the back. At our house, this style is called "Definitely-Not-A-Mullet." This son likes to spray-paint his "Definitely-Not-A-Mullet" with colors not found in Nature. Fortunately, these dyes are temporary. So far.

To my sons, such hairdos send a message: "Hey, dude. You're looking at one hip, rebellious individual."

To me, the message is: "Hello. I am an idiot."

But I can't say that. I can't voice my chagrin without raising the stakes. So I say something neutral, like, "Is that how you want your hair to look?" And the answer is always, "Yes."

To me, these boys are missing the whole point of being a guy: You don't have to do anything creative to your hair ever. Pick one simple style when you're, say, 12, and you're set for life.

(Naturally, this style will be the one your father hated.)

Maybe that's what my sons are doing now. Experimenting before settling on their own personal lifetime hairstyles. I only hope they don't pick the "swirly."

(Editor's note: This column first appeared around 2004. Now that they're older and more mature, the 18-year-old wears dreadlocks and the 16-year-old has long, straight hair past his shoulder blades. So things are very different now . . . )

FAQ on BBQ: Call 911, go to ER

Any fool can hurt himself in a modern kitchen, but to really get some third-degree burns, you need a barbecue grill.

Summertime is cookout season. Time to go out in the yard, stand under the broiling sun, and char some artery-clogging meat. Create a mushroom cloud of oily smoke that'll have your neighbors dialing 911. Enjoy the sizzle of spattering grease hitting your howling dinner guests.

For eons now, since the day our humble ancestors discovered fire, people have used open flames to turn simple animal flesh into crunchy, bleeding, chew-proof repasts. Cavemen squatted around fires on the ground, but we've come so far since then. Now we have barbecue grills, which stand on legs, putting the flames even closer to your face and other anatomical regions that react poorly to burning.

The barbecue grill was invented by the ancient Romans. In fact, the word "barbecue" comes from the Latin "barbecus," which translates to "my apron is on fire." Those fun-loving Romans knew nothing makes a meal more enjoyable than watching the host prance around in flames.

In contemporary times, cookouts have become synonymous with summer, as American as apple pie and fireworks and paper plates. When it's already 100 degrees outside, why not go out and start a big, hot fire? Heat stroke is a good excuse for steaks that are poorly cooked.

Outdoor grilling has become the province of men. Big, sweaty guys who wouldn't be caught dead whipping up something in the kitchen will push others out of the way to get to a barbecue grill.
Why? Because of the element of risk involved. There's something manly about poking and prodding among roaring blazes. Men bring their charred offerings to the table, their chests puffed out, the hair singed off their arms, and they feel they've proven something. They've proven they can produce a meal without setting the lawn on fire -- this time.

At our house, my wife has taken over the grilling chores. It's part of our whole role-reversal thing, plus it gives her the opportunity to cook burgers that don't come out like hockey pucks. This resolves a conflict that has plagued us through our married life: I like meat well-done to the point of inedibility, she wants rare, rare, rare. Her idea of cooking a steak is to show an unlit match to a live cow.

I don't feel usurped now that she's the one sweating over the grill. Better for me to sit in a lawn chair a safe distance away, swilling beer and offering advice such as: "Hon, your hair's on fire."

There may be those among you who haven't yet savored the joys of cooking outdoors. What follows is advice on properly using a grill. Take this advice seriously. I'm a barbecue veteran, and I've got the scars to prove it.

Choosing a grill

Barbecue grills come in a vast array of sizes and styles, from the big Cadillac models with side burners and aloe vera plants, down to the lowly "hibachi," (from the Japanese for "my kimono's on fire.") When selecting your grill, the main question will be: charcoal or gas? Gas grills are easier to use, but they're essentially just outdoor stoves. Charcoal gives meat a wonderful smoky flavor, and the risk is high. Ask any impatient cook who's decided a little more charcoal starter should be spritzed onto the sputtering coals. Nothing's as satisfying as the whoompf of sudden flames 20 feet high.

Cleaning your grill

You're supposed to clean them? Haha, just kidding. A wire brush does a nice job of removing ash and blackened meat bits. Don't worry about cleaning the outside of the grill. Just leave it outdoors over the winter and let Mother Nature do the work. Once it rusts out, it's time to get a new one.

Grill safety

Surely it's clear by now that "safe grilling" is an oxymoron. You want safe, you should go to a restaurant. Tell the waiter you want your steak just like you eat them at home: Black on the outside, bloody on the inside, covered in ashes and bugs. While you're at it, see if you can get him to set his apron on fire.

Flipping out

If you want to see the average American male go spiraling into squirming insanity, take away his television remote control.

Men feel it's our inalienable right to hold the remote. It gives us a sense of command, of standing at the helm among the day-to-day storms of life. We might relinquish every other responsibility around the house, but when it comes time to turn on the TV, we men want to be in charge.

Take my household, for instance. My wife is a smart, capable former executive. She manages our household, competently dealing with accountants and utilities and government entities. I believe she essentially can master anything she attempts. I, on the other hand, am lucky to find my way out of bed each morning.

But when it comes to flipping through TV channels, she doesn't do it right. She leaves the sound on, for one thing, so we're exposed to blaring snippets of every passing program. She lingers on the wrong channels, such as the one that shows disgusting surgery 24 hours a day and causes me to run screaming from the room. She skips ahead at crucial moments, such as when a basketball game is going into overtime.

When she's flipping channels, I get itchy all over. It's all I can do not to snatch the remote control away from her. If she'd just hand it over, I think, I could zip back to the important programs necessary to being an informed adult, such as "SportsCenter."

To her credit, my wife recognizes that I feel this way and she usually gives me the remote rather than torture me. I think it's all the sighing and fidgeting I do.

But that's not the case in every household. Some women insist on running the remote, no matter how much it disturbs their spouses. If sociologists studied the root causes of domestic discord and divorce, they'd find that a substantial number of marriages hit the rocks because of the remote control.

It's a matter of tempo. When you're in charge of the remote, you pause on each channel just long enough to register the program in your brain. Then, bam, it's time to move on because -- let's face it -- there's never anything good on TV. The amount of time you stay on each channel depends upon your own interests, and those are different for each person.

Most guys, for example, can't hit the button fast enough if we land on "Oprah," while a woman might at least pause to see if the talk show topic is relevant. If a man hits a sporting event, he'll stick around long enough to check out the score, even if he has no interest in the game. And if he lands on a program that features women in bikinis, he'll probably hang around at least until the next commercial interruption.

It's not merely an issue of gender, however. Men typically don't share the remote with each other, either. The average man would no more let other men handle his remote than he would let them give his wife a bath.

We recently had a houseguest who wanted to watch TV and, as a matter of courtesy, I let him flip the channels. Within minutes, I was going nuts with thoughts like these: Why are we stopping on this station? They've never got anything worth viewing. Wait, go back, that was my favorite show. My God, he's watching commercials! And listening to them! Doesn't he know you only do that during the Super Bowl? Doesn't he know the damned remote has a "mute" button?

I had to leave the room before I throttled him. When I returned, he'd fallen asleep on the sofa. I gently removed the remote from his limp hand. Once it was back in my possession, all was right with the world. I turned off the television and hid the remote under the couch cushions. Better to live without TV than to let some other guy run the show.

To sum up, most men see it like this: You can have our remote controls when you pry them from our cold, dead fingers. And then -- finally -- you can watch whatever you want.

Auto fixation

The two most chilling words in the English language: Car Trouble.

Oh, sure, more terrible things can happen to you. A sharp stick in the eye comes to mind. But for all-around frustration and gut-wrenching panic, not much comes close to "car trouble."

In America's automobile-oriented culture, we're all dependent on our cars. We're always in a hurry to get someplace, and we need reliable transportation. When faced with a grindingly uncooperative starter or the forbidding silence of a dead battery, we know our lives have -- at least temporarily -- taken a turn for the worse.

Car trouble means we're not getting where we want to go or, at best, we'll be late. Naturally, we don't discover the problem until we need to depart -- right now. The car just sits there, a big hunk of inert steel, as mobile and helpful as a rock.

Beyond the immediate delays, though, is the aftermath. Getting the car towed or taking it to a garage. Making alternate transportation arrangements while some guy named "Butch" takes his sweet time fixing the problem. And the expense: Butch won't even look under the hood for less than $600.

It's a short ride from "repair" to "despair."

I don't know about you, but I always envision the worst: The car's ruined forever. It'll spend the rest of its metallic life "in the shop." All my money will be poured into the worst investment of my life -- a "lemon" -- when I should've known better. I'm stranded, forlorn, doomed.

These flights of imagination result from guilt. If only I hadn't neglected the car, maybe it would never have succumbed to this ailment . . .

Most of us treat our cars the way we do our physical health. We take them for granted, doing only minimal maintenance. We pay no attention until something goes wrong. Even when the car's making a funny noise (or that hacking cough won't go away), we try to ignore it until, whoops, we've got a major problem. And life grinds to a standstill.

Many of us tend to drive cars way beyond their expected lifespans. We keep replacing parts until, eventually, everything under the hood is as good as new, and Butch's kids have earned their doctorate degrees on our dime.

Perhaps that's why we have so many auto accidents -- totaling your car is the only way to justify the purchase of a new vehicle.

But this extended lifespan means lots of "car trouble." Parts wear out. Hoses burst. Gaskets dry out. Telltale oil spots appear on the driveway. Then, one day, you've got a car that's going nowhere fast.

Car trouble is rough on anybody, but it poses special problems for guys. Many guys feel they should have some innate understanding of how to fix cars. It's one of those native skills that real men can intuitively master -- like plumbing or reading road maps or burping the alphabet.

The sad truth is that most men think "internal combustion" is something you get from eating jalapenos. We're not qualified to empty the ashtray, must less replace an alternator.

But we feel compelled to try. We open the hood -- if we can remember how -- and study that serpent's nest of belts and hoses and wires and we don't have the first idea what's wrong.

Of course, we won't admit it, not at first. We'll go find our scattered tools and we'll poke around under the hood, hoping against hope that some part of the engine will scream out: "Me! Me! I'm the problem." We'll check the oil and the water and the windshield-washing fluid. We'll jiggle battery cables. We'll tap things.

Finally, after hours (or even days) of tinkering, we'll sigh and shrug and phone Butch. And he'll tell us to come on down to the garage, and he'll remind us to bring our checkbook.

Because while we may not be going anywhere for a while, Butch is planning his vacation. In Tahiti.

How many light bulbs does it take to change clothes?

Sometimes, illumination isn't such a good thing.

I recently changed a light bulb (insert joke here), and it's going to end up costing me money.

That's because the light bulb was in my walk-in closet. When I replaced it, I discovered that the dead bulb dated from before we moved into this house, four years ago.

The previous homeowner had used a dim bulb -- 40 watts, something like that. I installed a new 100-watt bulb and the closet suddenly was filled with bright light.

Here's what I discovered in this newly illuminated space: None of my clothes match. And many of them bear the faint traces of old food stains.

I also found the closet was covered in dust and pocket lint and other litter that had accumulated there in the half-light. Much of this detritus was on my clothes.

How did this occur? Well, for one thing, I've essentially been dressing in the dark for the past four years -- who knew? For another, I work at home, which means my clothes don't get trotted out into the daylight very often.

Those of us who work at home tend to wear the same items over and over. A bathrobe, for instance. A favorite pair of ratty jeans. Ancient T-shirts announcing tours by long-dead rock stars. Sweats. If no one is going to see us all day, what difference does it make? Why not be comfortable?

On occasion, we work-at-home types must go out into the greater world, and this requires decent clothing. Then we have to sort through our closets for shirts and slacks and dress shoes. Preferably, these garments will have no major holes or stains or depictions of beer. But that's not easy to detect in a tight space lit only by a dusty 40-watt bulb.

Now that I've gotten a 100-watt look at my wardrobe, I find I must buy new clothes. This raises a fresh problem -- shopping.

I hate to shop for two reasons. One, I am a guy, and everyone knows guys have a genetic disposition against any kind of mall-trolling. Two, I'm a very large guy and my sizes are hard to find.

A typical clothes-buying excursion for me consists of frantically rifling through folded garments, trying to find something, anything, in size extra-large/tall, or XLT. (Doesn't XLT sounds like a racy car of some sort? Never mind.)

Stores don't carry that size. Oh, they might have a few items, but all the other XLT guys out there -- the ones who buy clothes more than once every five years -- have already snapped them up. As an XLT, I'm too large for your standard rack of clothes and not big enough for the Big-and-Tall men's stores, where you're required to have at least two XX's to even enter the wide door.

Shopping -- for an XLT guy who really wants to wear only rags anyway -- can be a frustrating, time-consuming experience that often results in the ingestion of large quantities of consoling beer.

My wife suggested I shop on-line, but I've had bad experiences there, too. Last winter, I splurged on a sweater on-line because it was on sale for half off. The color I selected was called something like "harvest gold." When the sweater arrived at my house, it turned out to be more like "autumn sneeze." Under fluorescent lights, it becomes "ultraviolet phlegm." It's not a garment I wear much, at least not anywhere that might have electric lights.

Since XLT clothes that aren't in funny colors tend to be expensive, changing that light bulb means I'll have to spend hundreds of dollars on new clothes if I ever expect to go out in public again.

But I've come up with a cheaper plan. I'm buying some 40-watt bulbs. Better to curse the darkness than to go shopping.

In fact, I think I'll put low-wattage bulbs throughout the house. Perhaps, in the resultant gloom, visitors won't be able to see the dust.

Ladders, adders and TV cameras

"Extreme" sports are all the rage these days, feeding an ever-growing hunger for fast-paced action, sudden violence and crass "reality."

In case you've been living in a nice safe bomb shelter for the past decade, let me explain: "Extreme" sports (also known as X-sports, X-treme sports, X-tra Crispy sports and various other near-names) are those televised athletic "events" that involve elements of danger.

For example, a show called something like "Real Triple-X-Treme Real Sports Challenge of the All-Stars" might feature real juvenile delinquents on skateboards flying high off a plywood "half-pipe" at breathtaking speeds, performing various twirling moves in the air and almost landing in a pit of irritable vipers before being yanked to safety by a bungee cord attached to their feet. The show's shouted advertising slogan will be something like: "WHO'll still be standing at the END?"

This kind of programming is irresistible to a large, mouth-breathing audience composed entirely of those who wear their baseball caps backward. Since that's the perfect market for Zima, motor oil and other such products, these shows have proven to be commercial gold mines.

Naturally, such a restless audience grows increasingly desensitized to fake suspense and "real" mayhem, which means the shows must keep ratcheting up the level of risk so the goobers will keep tuning in. Before long, extreme sports will feature athletes who, at breathtaking speed, fashion their own bungee cords out of irritable vipers before leaping directly into a pit of bubbling lava.

Extreme sports is changing the whole definition of sports. Many of us remember when a "game" usually involved something called a "ball" and was played by professional athletes with recognizable names. Extreme sports feature athletes you've never heard of doing dangerous, unseemly things with strange combinations of equipment, such as a downhill snowboard race through a forest fire with each participant simultaneously lifting weights and playing the nose flute, all while being pursued by angry National Rifle Association members on snowmobiles.

So far, network producers have overlooked one area of real everyday risk-taking that should be considered an extreme sport -- homeownership.

American homeowners regularly take our lives in our hands, working around the house. We use dangerous, unfamiliar tools to attempt repairs we're not qualified to make. We use whirring blades and whipping plastic line to trim our lawns. We perform complicated aerial maneuvers involving aluminum ladders and overhead power lines.

What's riskier than mowing a yard dotted with hidden metal sprinkler heads? Is anything more dangerous than a power saw in the hands of a klutz? What's more thrilling than a fat man climbing a rickety ladder while wearing sandals and trying not to spill his beer?

Such everyday events may seem catastrophic in real life, responsible for property damage, divorce and overcrowded emergency rooms, but let's face it: They'd make good television.

All it takes is a little organization and a video crew, and we could take TV by storm. We could call the show "The Real Extreme All-Star Homeowners Challenge." Plenty of homeowners would volunteer to play, particularly if free beer is involved. We'd stage the events in the participants' own homes, recording their every move with handheld video cameras. Their critical neighbors would eagerly volunteer to be judges.

Participants would race the clock while facing extreme challenges, such as an overflowing toilet with rusty parts flooding a carpeted bathroom. Each barefoot homeowner would be armed with only a monkey wrench and an electric hair dryer. Imagine the possibilities!

Sure, much of the work could be boring, but careful editing would result in clip after clip of homeowners skinning their knuckles and tripping over live wires and doing backflips off parapets while holding TV antennas. That, folks, is entertainment. If you don't believe it, ask your neighbors.

If such basic competition fails to keep our show's audience loyal, we can always elevate the risk and add to the gear involved. Imagine high-speed ladder-climbing by cigar-smoking men carrying buckets of combustible roofing tar and wearing heavy tool belts and funny hats.

Now that's extreme. If that's still not enough, we can always throw in a few vipers. Particularly if free beer is involved.

Basketball jones

Can they still call it March Madness when the tournament spills over into April? Will we recover from our madness on Tuesday, before the semifinals, etc? Will we watch the finals in a state of perfect sanity?

I'd answer those questions and more, but I'm busy watching televised games.

Pass the cheese dip.

Shop 'til you flop

It's always dangerous to speak in generalities, but here's one now: As a rule, men don't like to go shopping.

Sure, there are exceptions to this rule. Gadgets, for instance. Put a man in a pro shop or a hardware store or a computer store, and he'll happily shop for hours, comparing prices and capabilities and shooting the breeze with sales clerks. Discussing the intricacies of titanium ball washers and electric screwdrivers and who has the biggest gigabyte. But these men's interests are usually pretty narrow, and they're uncomfortable drifting through the endless variety found in malls.

Women recognize that men will never truly enjoy shopping, but they expect us to play along. They expect men to relate to the thrill of the hunt, the adventure of seeing what's out there. But men don't get it. We no longer have those pioneer genes. We already know what's out there; we saw it on TV. Now we'd rather be home on the sofa.

Most men cave in from time to time and go shopping with their wives. You can recognize these men in the stores by a certain dimming of their eyes, a foot-dragging listlessness. Plus, they're usually holding their wives' purses while the wives try on new dresses. When freed of purse duty, these men wander over to the TV department, where they watch whatever's on the many screens, while sighing and sharing sympathetic glances with other browbeaten men.

Out at the malls, you sometimes see herds of young men who seem to be aimlessly shopping. But they're not shopping. They're trolling for women. Trust me on this. If it weren't for their youthful hormones working overtime, they'd be home on the sofa, watching TV.

Guys shop on the basis of need. When they really need something, when they can no longer put it off, then they go. But they don't call it shopping. They call it "going to the store." And they treat the event like a raiding foray into enemy territory.

These men march directly to the department they're seeking, looking neither left nor right. They locate the items they need, try them on if necessary, buy them and hurry out of the store, mission accomplished. And they don't go to the mall again until something else wears out.

This is particularly true of clothing, which is why some men have underwear older than their children.

A man buys a new white shirt and he wears it until it's the color of spilled coffee and his elbows are poking through the sleeves. Throw it out? Wouldn't dream of it. Because once he admits the shirt is a goner, he validates his need for a replacement, which means he'll have to go shopping for another one.

Some men develop an entire hierarchy of clothing. Shirts and pants that go up and down the scale of stains and disrepair. For these men, the closet is a barometer, measuring how soon they'll feel pressured to shop.

Take that new white shirt, for example. It's so pristine, the guy doesn't even want to wear it for fear of ruining it somehow. He keeps it set aside as a Special Occasion shirt.

But accidents happen, particularly at special occasions with free booze, and pretty soon the Special Occasion shirt starts to show some wear and tear. Then it becomes an Everyday Shirt, one still suitable for business occasions, but the guy has stopped worrying about spills.

Once the shirt is frayed and worn and no longer fit for public inspection, it becomes the one his wife hates: His Favorite Shirt. Perfect for Saturdays on the sofa.

Eventually, after duty as a Yardwork Shirt, the shirt has so many holes you can see through it, and it becomes a Retired Shirt, relegated to the back of the closet.

These shirts sometimes are called out of retirement (usually by his wife) and they find second careers as Dust Cloths.

And, the final stop, the end of the line, is when that shirt becomes a Garage Rag. The man will be using it to clean grease off a wrench and he'll recognize that old favorite shirt and he'll get a little misty.

Because he knows it's time to go shopping for a new one.

Bringing home the bacon

Among TV commercials, one rings the most true: Two slacker dudes are in a store with limited money, trying to decide between beer and toilet paper. They choose the beer, then respond in unison to the question, "Paper or plastic?"

We laugh not just at the follies of youth or because we've been in similar straits ourselves. We laugh because they're guys. Buying groceries. And we all know what a hoot that can be.

Supermarkets don't cater to men. The logic of the layout escapes us. The competing brands and colorful labels and computer pricing are confusing. We don't care about comparison shopping. In fact, we don't like shopping at all. We like buying. And we want it all to be finished quickly.

If supermarkets were designed for guys, they'd offer one type of each product, labeled generically in black-and-white. "Beer." "Chips." "Cereal." We wouldn't even care what was inside the boxes, so long as we could just grab one, throw it in the cart and move on to the next. If we got home with a box marked "Cereal" and it turned out to corn flakes rather than organic, honey-nut Prune-de-Ohs, that would be fine. If it turned out that all the boxes contained beer, that would be even better.

I took a course in college called "Industrial Psychology." One of the marketing strategies we studied was supermarket layout. Store designers intentionally put the things you need most often -- milk, meat, coffee, beer -- in the far corners, so you must pass all those loudly labeled products to buy the staples. They're hoping you'll buy things you don't really need at inflated prices. Guys fall victim to this syndrome, which is why pork rinds and canned chili are now considered food.

This knowledge has come in handy. I took over the grocery shopping for our family after I left the 9-to-5 world to work at home. It wasn't a smooth transition, but I feel I've got it mastered now. My secret is that I always go to the same store, even though it's miles away from my home. It's a smaller market, and I've learned where everything is kept. I can do a week's shopping there in less than an hour, zooming up and down the aisles like a contestant on "Supermarket Sweep."

Here are some other tips to help guys who are doing the family foraging:

--Don't waste time selecting the best shopping cart. They all have one wheel that goes waga-waga-waga. Just take one and go.

--Buy whatever's cheapest. Forget brand loyalty or family favorites or what might make a lovely dinner a week from Tuesday. Buy lots of cheap stuff. Fill the cart with it. Later, in the kitchen, you can piece together the different products into something resembling a nutritious meal.

Some supermarkets recognize the "buy cheap" philosophy and cater to it. Those are the markets that sell those tiny boxes of detergent only good for one or two loads. Guys -- especially bachelors -- buy those little boxes, even though they cost only pennies less than a big box. This means much of the laundry will be done soapless, of course. Eventually, all the clothes will be a uniform gray and you can eliminate detergent from your shopping list altogether.

--Make excuses. Guys famously refuse to ask directions, which means they can wander up and down supermarket aisles for days, holding their tattered lists, searching for the one item their wives insisted that they buy. You can avoid this problem with a simple answer when you get home: "I forgot." This will lead to a certain amount of eye-rolling and an even lower opinion of guys in general and you in particular, but it will save time.

--Get the eggs last. No matter where the supermarket Easter bunnies hide the eggs, make that your final stop. Then you can set the eggs on top of everything else and they won't get crushed. Until the bag boys get hold of them. They'll put them in the sack with the beer and the motor oil and you can have an omelet as soon as you get home.

Don't be too hard on the bag boys when this happens. They're guys.

Repairmen to the rescue

A recent TV ad shows a woman desperately phoning locksmiths because her husband accidentally locked himself in the bathroom. As with most clever advertising, I have no idea what they were selling. I only remember chuckling the first time I saw it because the guy was killing time by putting some kind of green cosmetic gunk on his face.

Advertising and the media in general portray the American male as being inept. We can't fix anything around the house without causing a minor explosion. We're embarrassed to talk to our kids about sex. We wear stupid "Kiss the Cook" aprons while charring burgers on smoky backyard grills. We think Air Guitar is a spectator sport.

This stereotype omits a huge chunk of the male population, those savvy types who know how to fix things. Handymen, plumbers, locksmiths, carpenters, boxing promoters. Some men are never more comfortable than when presented with a knotty problem to solve.

I'm not one of those men. Faced with an emergency repair around the house, I curse and mutter and fume. I make feeble attempts that usually result in skinned knuckles and a worse problem, maybe even a minor explosion. I've learned that the best tool to use in times of crisis is a ballpoint pen -- for writing the check to the real repairman who rides to our rescue.

A case in point: We recently needed a locksmith because a bathroom door was locked and we had no key. Unlike the TV commercial, no one was locked in the bathroom. We were all locked out. One of my sons slammed the door behind him as he exited, the latch caught and we were stuck. Might not seem like much of a crisis, especially since other bathrooms were available for the most urgent reasons people need a bathroom. But this was the master bathroom, which contains all the cosmetics and hair dryers and razors and magazines. We needed in there.

I write crime novels in which people are always picking locks. They insert a couple of little metal doodads, give them a twist and -- voila! -- the door opens. The real world doesn't work that way. After twenty minutes of scratching up the doorknob with Allen wrenches and straightened paper clips, I called the locksmith. He arrived at our house, went directly to the door and, using a gizmo that looked like a pistol with a nail jutting from the barrel, had the door open in one minute flat. I wrote him a check for $42.

An hour later, our idiot dog Elvis mistook a large plate-glass window for an exit. The window shattered, surprising Elvis and everyone else in the house. The dog was unharmed, but jagged shards went everywhere. After the initial shock, I was pretty calm. Here was a repair job I knew I shouldn't even attempt. Phone calls were made. Repairmen arrived. We wrote a check for $200 and the window soon was good as new. The dog forgot all about the trauma. We put a potted plant in front of the window as a preventive measure. Next time, when Elvis excitedly heads that way, maybe he'll stop to smell the flowers before lunging through the glass.

We were so grateful for the quick repair that the cost didn't even matter (much). That's the way it always is when repairmen are summoned. We're just happy that someone, somewhere, has the know-how to fix the sudden leaks and the plumbing disasters and the nights without heat.
And we're not alone. The country is full of homeowners tensely awaiting the next major repair, checkbooks in hand, ready to do our part to support the service economy.

So the next time you see the media depicting American males as incompetent boobs, remember that there are those who greet every catastrophe as a challenge, those who are well-paid to fix the problems we can't conquer on our own. Maybe I should even mount my own media campaign, one in praise of repairmen everywhere. But not right now. I'm too busy. I've got to put on my apron and smear green gunk on my face.

Cooking for guys

With more of us guys working at home, it's becoming more common for us to be put in charge of cooking meals. This is a grave mistake in most cases, one that could lead to outbreaks of nutrition-related ailments like rickets and scurvy.

I speak in generalities here and the usual exceptions apply. I know at least two couples in which the guy is a gourmet chef and does most of the cooking. But in general, guys seem to be missing the cooking-nutritious-meals gene. Apparently, it's in the same DNA strand as the stopping-to-ask-for-directions gene.

The problem isn't that cooking is so hard or that guys are too lazy to do it right. It's just guys are like dogs: To us, pretty much everything is food. If you can eat it, it must be good for you. And the easier it is to get, the better.

This was built into our genetic code during the caveman days, when men went around foraging for things to eat. Men would wander the wilderness, picking up things and sticking them in their mouths to see if they tasted good. It was mostly a matter of trial-and-error. If a rock broke out Trog's teeth, then Trog wouldn't eat any more rocks. If Trog found a dead animal, he'd gnaw on it and take it back to the family because it was good.

It was just a short step up to Trog going around killing animals for the family to eat. I suspect he got tired of waiting for roaming animals to fall over dead from old age. He had to take matters into his own hands.

But it was the woman in this scenario, I believe, who discovered that meat held over a flame got even tastier and was less likely to give the Trog family a screaming case of trichinosis. Mrs. Trog was left back at the cave, whittling new teeth for her husband, and she had time to experiment with the food he brought home. It was Mrs. Trog who learned which foods tasted best together and which ones kept the family healthy. It wasn't long, I suspect, before she was demanding a spice rack and a kitchen island.

Trog, meanwhile, was still out there hunting and gathering. Being a guy, Trog would eat almost anything while he was on the road. This mentality, which eventually would lead to the proliferation of fast food joints along our nation's highways, allowed Trog to eat new and different foods, including those forbidden by Mrs. Trog. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how pork rinds came to be.

A modern guy still carries around those Trog genes. Left to his own devices, he will forage for food rather than plan a well-balanced meal and prepare it. Why cook when Taco Bell has a drive-thru window?

When a guy is forced into cooking or (God forbid) grocery shopping, he still will produce odd combinations, many of them involving beer. And he still wants an element of danger in the process, which is why barbecue grills are so popular.

If you doubt these generalities, check with most any bachelor. When I was a single guy, I started thinking about dinner the moment I got off work. No advance planning, no thawing something ahead of time. I got in the car, picked up fast food and zoomed home to eat it before it got cold. My refrigerator was stocked with condiments and Pepto-Bismol and a few mystery leftovers that would stay safely wrapped in foil until a biohazard team happened by.

Now that cooking is part of my job description, I've learned to prepare simple meals and -- most importantly -- make good use of the microwave. "Heat and eat" is my middle name.

But foraging still is in my genes. My best cooking tool is a car.