THE FALL GUY

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-24-24)

     Every fall when I walk outside the house I smell that smell in the air, and I panic for a fleeting moment. It's the smell of overdue homework, of menacing teachers, of disappointed parents. Even after all these years I still feel a twinge of guilt for having made teachers work so hard for such meager results. 

     To my Dad, good grades meant a smooth four years of college, which meant an on-time graduation, resulting in potentially one less kid cluttering up the house. When you have six children, churning out college graduates is like an assembly line, and I was threatening to hold up the works like Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory.

     Teachers told my parents that I wasn't applying myself. But certainly neither of us would have benefitted by a more liberal application of me. They told me I was a smart-ass, correctly identifying the most intelligent part of myself. They would call my parents in for a conference, and I can only imagine how it went: "Your son is not taking his work seriously," the teacher would say. "Yes, we notice the same thing at home- he does his chores un-seriously." "He's becoming a disruption in class." "There too? He's a disruption around the house also." "At school, he complains about his homework." "Oh really? At home, he complains about his schoolwork." "Well, I'm glad we had this chat, it seems like we're in total agreement."

     My parents, teachers, guidance counselors, all said the same thing in different ways: I was a slacker not living up to my potential. I told them that they couldn't be more wrong, because they had vastly overestimated my potential. So they sent me off to a BOCES vocational testing facility, where I undertook a barrage of tests meant to derive suggestions as to what career path I might undertake, based on my intelligence and interests. I was expecting the results to show that I was best suited to become whatever the opposite of rocket scientist is. I definitely was not expecting the outcome I got, a recommendation of "flower arranger" (I'm not kidding about this). To this day, whenever I see an arrangement of flowers, I think, "Those were probably arranged by someone who did not apply themself in math class."

     I'm not sure where it started to go wrong, since I began as a gifted student. Excelling in blocks, coloring and the alphabet, my academic career was off to a rousing start. In middle school I was a promising pupil, but by high school nobody believed my promises anymore.

     It's too late now, but if I had studied harder in science and mathematics, perhaps I could have become part of the team that developed artificial intelligence. I would have had the most to gain from any intelligence that didn't have to come from me. But I am conceptually retarded in math. I couldn't put two and two together, and what if they don't even want to be together? People assume that traffic and weather want to be together, and both of them keep getting worse, so look how that turned out.

     Finally, just when it seemed like my academic career would come to a grinding halt in the 12th grade, I figured out the key to writing a credible term paper. All this time I had focused on finding a clear-sighted, intelligent thesis and supporting it with dumb analysis. After my moment of awakening, I realized that a ridiculous, far-fetched premise would be much easier to prop up with my fatuous arguments, and I blossomed as an scholar, getting accepted to one of the premier communications schools in the country.

     In college as a serious student, I prepared myself for the first job in my 44-year career at the most famous of the broadcast networks in the world: watching television for eight hours a day. There was never a job more suited to my talents and training. I understood that eventually I would marry an intelligent wife and let her do the thinking.

     And that has worked out spectacularly. My wife is well-read, quick-witted and wise. She provides me with half of an insightful conversation in many subjects. I'm supposed to supply the other half. For my part I like to think of myself as the "yang" to her "yin," a perfect counterpart who provides what she might be lacking at the time: a steady barrage of one-liners during sensitive parts of a movie (which in my defense are the boring parts). 

     And yet, that smell of fall still has the same effect now as it did then, and with a fresh jolt of anxiety I realize why it's so strong: I never handed in my final high school term paper. If my teacher gets a hold of me now, he's going to throttle me within an inch of his life, because he must be really old by now. I bolt back inside the house where the only smell in the air is the cat box, and dealing with that is long overdue also.

A FITTING TRIBUTE

 

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (10-10-24)

     This is how I shop for clothes: I bought six pairs of Lee jeans from Amazon, 34 waist, 34 length. Can you believe that after all these years I'm still a 34-inch waist? Okay, 35. 36, but that's my final offer. How do I keep my slim waistline? By tightening my belt with a chain wrench before zipping up my pants. The waist is a terrible thing to mind.  

     The truth is that I don't know much about how to shop for clothing. Manufacturers should realize that most guys don't put a lot of thought into it. They should just decide what we want, produce it, send it to us based on the sizes we tell them (such as, "oh, pretty normal-size I guess," or "just round it off to the nearest whole number"), ship it to us, debit our bank accounts and leave us completely out of the process.

     And do it periodically, because guys never throw out clothing. I have a pair of jeans that has a rip above the knee that's eventually going to go all the way around, and then I'll have to decide if there's such a thing as half a pair of shorts. 

     I ignore terms like "the rise" when shopping for pants, because it sounds like something that's none of my business. "Inseam" I guess is pretty self-explanatory, but I'd like to be able to measure my pants without turning them inside-out. I wear my jeans pretty long, in case I have cowboy boots on, but when I wear sneakers the cuffs scrape along the ground, picking up all kinds of things that may later be introduced as evidence.

     I haven't bought any shirts for a long time, because shirts are hard. Xtra-Large usually means tall and portly, whereas I am not extra-tall but I am extra-whimsical, and that's a very hard size to fit. Tee shirts aren't much easier. If I buy a Large it's sometimes too small. If I buy an Xtra-Large it's usually too large. If I buy a Medium, sometimes it's TOO medium.

     It's even worse for women, where the sizing isn't based on empirical measures, such as inches, but on an inscrutable foundation of magical premises, the most important of which being that no woman is satisfied with her actual size. EVER. So clothes-makers jump through hoops trying to find phrasing that dances around the reality of the facts. When clothing designers coined the term "plus size," they were trying to be sensitive to the idea that it's sometimes hard to lose weight. "Plus size" sounds like an asset: there's just more to love. "Multiplication size," even if often more accurate, would not service this purpose. "Petite" is an honorific that makes an appealing term for women who can't reach any of the kitchen cabinets. Some "petites" are so petite that they end up in the "juniors" department, wearing styles that their Moms wouldn't let them out of the house wearing, except that THEY'RE the Moms now. Shopping in the "Misses" Department at your age tells you up front that you're way off the mark. 

     Confounding it all are the sizes themselves. The numbers are often inconsistent between manufacturers, not to mention internationally. You can still try to force reason upon the issue. To accurately determine your waist, wrap the tape measure around the narrowest part of your torso, just above your belly button. The tape should be snug but not tight. Okay, ease up a bit, you're turning blue. You seem to have keeled over. Let's move on. Numerical sizing for women is supposed to take into account her proportions, and provide a tailored fit, taking into account her various feminine attributes. If, as she ages, there is an  inverse proportion, complicated math may be involved. "Can you believe that after all these years I STILL wear a size zero?!" "Wow, that's  the same size as before you were born!" 

    Some sizes run small. Well, if they were actual inches they'd have no choice but to run in place right where they were. Maybe you want something with a "fuller cut?" Don't overfill it or you might spill something. Maybe you'd like something "curvy" and "off-shoulder?" If so, the road I live on might be perfect for you.

     I've gone shopping with my wife, and it's a very frustrating experience. She wanders from one rack to the next, and picks up each sleeve and rubs it and goes "Hmmm." Women have a special way of divining whether a garment fits/ is the right price/ looks good on her just by touching it once, whereas it might take her several years to figure out that her boyfriend doesn't fit at all.

     I just thought of THE PERFECT THING for you! It's asymmetrical, bat-wing, boat-neck, box-pleated, patch-pocket, notch-collar, puff-sleeved, adjustable-suspension, automatic-transaxle and self-leveling, and you can drive it off the lot today with only 20 percent down! The bottom line, which should fall somewhere near your bottom, is this: If you dress well, and everything fits, you may finally be taken seriously at work. And as a humor writer, that's the last thing I need.

PAST TENSE

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-26-24)

     You may say I'm a relic, you may say I'm a troglodyte, you may say I'm a Neanderthal, just because I think that there are some things that are automated that maybe shouldn't be. You may also think I'm a circumlocutionist, but I'd have to look that up before agreeing with you. 

     I'm not saying I want to go back to washing my clothes in the river, because who knows where the guy up the river's clothes have been? I don't want to return to the days before automatic appliances came along to save us so much time that now we were free to go to the gym and work off all the extra pounds we gained when automatic appliances started doing all the work for us. No, I want a refrigerator with a "Shelvador!" I want a dishwasher with "Faucet-Flo!" I want a washing machine with a "Surgomatic" push-button control!

     I'm just saying that automation isn't everything. Did you ever go on the "people mover" at the airport? It's a treadmill-type device that offers you the chance rest your tired feet while it moves you AND your suitcase at a speed somewhere between "mosey" and "inert," for a stretch of distance roughly the equivalent of 20 feet or so. The fact that a snail could beat me to my seat and get slime all over my blanket makes me crazy.

     Music streaming services have taken away the artists right to bury a song in the middle of an album that you hate at first but eventually grow to somewhat tolerate. And because of streaming, nobody makes "mix tapes" any more. That's where I took all the best songs from all my albums and put them all on a tape for you. If I made you a mix tape, that meant that I love you. I love you, but I hate your taste in music, and I'm hoping that you'll play it when I'm around, even though you don't like it, because you think that I will because you love me too, now that you realize how much I love you. Do you think your Spotify algorithm would go through all that? Your Spotify algorithm would dump you for a whole lot less than I've put up with so far. OH, and I want my mix tape back.

     We have a water cooler at work that activates by a proximity switch that senses your body heat and emits water into your cup when you get close to it. It was introduced during the pandemic, when people thought you were going to get cooties by touching something that somebody else touched who had cooties. My sister used to wash everything in her grocery bag when she got home because I guess maybe she heard of soup cans dying during the pandemic. Anyway, the fact that the automatic water cooler doesn't work very well is disappointing, because I thought it would be one of the few things that got turned on when I was near it.

     My wife has an automatically adjusting driver's seat in her car. All you do is press a button and PRESTO! About five minutes later, my knees have almost disengaged from the steering wheel. I ask my driver's seat, "Is this going to take much longer?" "Nooooo. This is what I do. It's my jam." "That's okay, I'll just do it myself, I'll just-" "No, no, no, I got this! It'll only take a few more minutes." "Really, I'll just use the lever and-" "Nonsense, now you just sit back and relax." "Those are the only two things I seem not able to do right now."

     And in my car, there's a setting for the headlights that automatically turns on the high beams when I don't need them, and switches to the low beams when I can't see well enough. Someone probably stayed up all night thinking of that, then got into an accident on the way home testing it out.

     My Dad loved gadgets, especially automatic gadgets that would eliminate the drudgery of everyday tasks, such as brushing your hair. If you were to brush your hair 200 or 300 times a day, imagine the time you would save if you had an automatic hairbrush to do it for you? Well my Dad managed to unearth just such a device, and I have four sisters who, when this hair-eating menace yanked out their delicate follicles, barely escaped with their lives. HOWEVER, if you are a brother with four sisters and you pull their hair out 200 or 300 times a day, imagine the time you would save if you had an automatic hairbrush to do it for you?

     Why can't somebody invent something REALLY useful, like a device that senses that a "Kars for Kids" commercial is about to air, and mutes my radio or television automatically for exactly 30 seconds?

     I think the worst offender is the auto-fill function of word processors. All you have to do is start a sentence, and it will figure out what you want to say and say it for you. At least I think that's what it does, I broke it by trying to make it guess what I was going to say.

     I guess I'll never really have a "smart home" as long as I happen to be living in it.

WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU ONLY MAKES YOU FATTTER

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-19-24)

     Is it my imagination or is it getting harder and harder just to maintain my current weight? As I get older I have to watch what I eat, because if I don't I might stab my fork into a vegetable by mistake.

     I weigh myself every day before my shower, and I subtract a couple pounds for my pants, a pound for each sock and one for my tee shirt, My hair is long right now so that's another couple pounds, and 50 pounds for my knapsack. If I notice an uptick in my weight, I just take a couple more things out of the knapsack. After the subtraction I weigh 120, which pretty good for a woman my weight.

     I never want to go on a diet because my doctor tells me I have to, especially if he's overweight, too. And if he tells me I need to go on a low sodium diet, I take the advice with a grain of salt. But if it turns out I need to alter my approach at the table, how to go about it?  Each diet has its pros and cons. With the paleo diet you eat the same things someone from the paleolithic era would have eaten, such as vegetables, fruits, possibly a Glyptodon. The pros are, you eliminate all processed foods, and it's simple to follow. The cons? Name me one person from the Paleolithic era who's still alive. Also, Glyptodons are chewy.

     There's the keto diet which, by starving the body of carbohydrates, "tricks" the body into producing ketones, which then fuel the body instead. It may be effective for short-term weight loss, but also has its pros and cons. Pros: You can eat all the Brussels sprouts and cauliflower you want. Cons: You can eat all the Brussels sprouts and cauliflower you want.

     There's the Mediterranean diet, which tries to emulate the eating habits of countries that use olive oil, fish, potatoes, fruits and vegetables. Cons: It's expensive to eat healthy. Pros: The Mediterranean is really nice this time of year.

     There's the Mayo Clinic diet, which is high on foods with a lot of mayonnaise. I didn't actually look that one up but it seems pretty obvious.

     The doctor is just going to tell you not to go in for any fad diets, simply cut down on portions, eat sensibly and exercise more. And you start to think, well, that makes sense, maybe I can do this. Then he says all that stuff that they say really quietly at the end of a commercial, only it's so fast you can't really make it out, and you just hear fleeting snippets, like, "use responsibly," "do not take during pregnancy, or before, or after," "not liable for your problems," "don't be such a baby," "suck it up," "may cause death" and "you do a lot of other even dumber things." And you say, "What?" and he says, "Oh, nothing." Yet they always take your deductible in advance in case you don't make it through the consultation.

     My wife drives me nuts because she can order a salad with just about anything in it, and then rave about how great it was for the rest of the night, and she never puts on any weight. She could order a salad made out of bar bells and never gain a pound.

     I am a hound for chocolate, and I smuggle it away like a dope addict and eat it in private. We had a dinner party and Margaret and Gene brought this great chocolate cake with a ton of chocolate frosting on it. The fact that I could have my cake and eat it too was just the icing on the cake (Okay, I'm done now). When I finished the last crumb there was still icing all over the plate, so I waited until my wife went into the kitchen and started licking the plate. I glanced over at the doorway and there she was, with a smug look on her face where the shocked and disappointed look usually is. She said, "I bet myself five dollars that you would do that and you did." I said, "Well, if you use the money to buy more cake we can do this again and eventually you'll have a million dollars. That's why they describe cake as 'rich.' By the way, exactly which rule of etiquette says that you can't lick icing off a plate?" I doubled down. She said, "The rule of etiquette that says you can't lick icing off a plate."

     I feel like restaurants have my back by making it so expensive to eat out that you could lose a couple quick pounds every time you go, just from your wallet. Recently I ordered a chicken sandwich and asked for extra mayonnaise. They cheerfully provided a tiny cup of it, and even more cheerfully added an extra .75 cents to the bill at the end. If they start charging me when I ask for a straw, that will be the last straw. And in New York there's a bar I go to that when I ask for a beer, they won't tell me how much it is, as if such things aren't discussed among civilized people. Instead they bring the check in a little tray, as if I'm going to try to deduct it on my tax return.  

     That reminds me of the 1040 diet which, every April, when you realize much you're going to lose, spoils your appetite. You think I made that one up? We'll see in seven months.

PLANE TO SEE

  ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (09-12-24)

     This year we attended an air show over the beach in Ocean City, Maryland. I'd never been to one before, and it was quite spectacular. The hardest thing to get used to at an air show is looking up and noticing a huge A-18 Growler silently flying disturbingly close to you. A second or two later an Earth-shattering noise rolls through, unaccompanied. 

     There were stunts, intricate formations, aviatrics (I made that word up) and a lot of really cool hardware. The dedication and precision of man coming together with machine was awe-inspiring. It's a demonstration, a symbol of and a tribute to the brave men and women working to support us in the air as well as on the ground. Present were aircraft like the F-22 Raptor, a supersonic fighter that went straight up into the air and let out an array of glowing, smoking flares. An A-10C Thunderbolt is a twin-engine jet designed to support ground missions. It can fly with high maneuverability at low speeds and low altitudes. For this particular operation it caused a high degree of anxiety as it buzzed about 200 boats viewing the proceedings from off shore.

     The C-17 Globemaster transport plane is a behemoth that looks like it just came from the all-you-can-eat smorgasbord at Shady Maple, then ate the Shady Maple. It's made to carry people and materiel during combat flights as well as humanitarian missions. The highlight of the event was a performance by the Frecce Tricolori demonstration team of the Italian Air Force. Painting the sky with plumes of red, white and green smoke, they performed tight maneuvers in crowd-pleasing patterns.

     Who exactly is in charge of discovering just how far you can push these nimble giants? I'm glad it's not me. "We tested out some great new stunts at the lab, and I have some good news and some bad news about how it went. First, the good news: There's free coffee at the commissary until 1400 hours. The bad news is we've lost a couple of planes. Fourteen, to be exact. They were flying in formation, but the formation they were flying in was the 'infinity' symbol, which we've never actually tried before. We're pretty sure they're still out there somewhere. They're solar-powered, and it's taking forever to find them."

     I couldn't help fantasizing that I was a stunt pilot in the air show. I'm not sure why I was chosen for this fantasy, someone who is as vehicularly-challenged as I am: when I was younger, in my parents car, I thought we would get in trouble for passing a sign that said, "No Passing." I also suffer from motion sickness. Even if I'm watching a courtroom drama on television and somebody files a motion I get a little queasy. But in a fantasy, you can do a lot of stuff that common sense, law, and the rules and regulations of the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleading squad would normally prevent you from doing.

     In the wild blue yonder I perform a perfect "barrel roll." The plane goes up and continues upside down, before righting itself in its original direction. Picture the path of a corkscrew, but don't forget to take the cork out before I do this thing. Next I do an aileron roll, which turns the plane 360-degrees on its lengthwise axis. Then I fly straight up about a thousand feet and go into a stall. That's because the keys fall out of my ignition and land somewhere in the back of the plane, and I have to dig around and find them in the rear. Some of my internal organs are also back there so I collect those, too. I can almost hear the cheers on the ground. Wait until they find out that I did all of this by mistake, trying to land.

     Soon it becomes apparent to Air Control that I don't know how to fly a plane. I should have received at least the bare minimum of training for this fantasy. The boys in the tower are going to have to "talk me down," like they do in the movies. An Air Force colonel grabs the microphone and calls into my earpiece. I had taken off the headphones to listen to my iPod, but now that I hear him chattering away I put them back on. The Colonel yells, "MELÉN: You're too high." I reply, "It only seems that way." "Back off the throttle. NOW." I grab the only two things that move and pull them back. One of them is my knee, so that does nothing. The other, luckily, is the throttle. The Colonel yells, "I don't like the  attitude of your fuselage." "Me neither," I reply, "I'm grounding it for a WEEK if I ever get it on the ground." "Bring your nose up, NOW." "You're right, that's better- now all I can see is the ceiling." 

     But then I land the plane perfectly, and as my fantasy would have it, beautiful actress Catherine Keener is in the tower. I ask her to dinner, and she says, "Thanks anyway, but I have a date tonight with the Colonel. He's quite a man!. OH- also, some other great news! I won your fantasy football pool!" I'm woken out of my daydream by a voice coming over the PA at the Stunt Flight Test Lab- turns out they just invented a new version of the "barrel roll," and this one has poppy seeds AND sesame seeds on it!

THE APPRENTICE

 

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-24-24)

     I guess that when the television industry has had enough of me, I'll need to find something else to do with myself. Maybe I could work in a trade, since I like to work with my hands. Is acupuncture a trade? I think I could kill at that job. Glass blower? How hard could it be? Even if you blow it, things went pretty well. Yoga instructor, as long as I can just explain what to do rather than showing you. When we discuss the cat pose, I demonstrate by sitting on a newspaper and knocking all your pens off the table. Maybe I'll get into consulting, if there's a business model where I ask the questions. How about horse groomer? "You look fine, but you could do with a little horse-scaping. That will be $40.00."

     I had to hire an electrician to come over and re-wire the ceiling fan that I hooked up using a YouTube video, and I realized that being an electrician would be the perfect job for me. Besides electrocution, what's the worst that could happen? My idea was to apprentice at the craft by having him come back several times after I try to fix things. If you watch enough YouTube videos, you feel like you can do anything.

     I was pretty much relegated to setting up the ladder. Let me pick his brain- I need to know more about the business structure. "So is there a corporate ladder or do you need to provide your own? What's the quickest way to get to the top?" "Well, I work for myself and I slept my way to the top. Could you set up the ladder vertically?" I was learning so much already.

     "Is that a jumper wire?" I asked. "Actually, yes it is." "I thought I saw it move." He says he needs to plug in his cordless drill, and this guy is supposedly the expert. "You have an outlet?" "I have an outlet, but I'm not sure we want to get into that here."

     He had his nose inside the circuit box, so I was basically his eyes and ears to the outside world. He said, "Can you find the ground?" I felt this was a test. I said, "Isn't it right down there?" But he was still looking inside the box. While I was thinking, outside the box, he said, "Yup, you're right. There it is. Good! Hand me those pliers?" He was twisting some wires. I thought this was a good time to bond. I said, "If you want to see the ground, come out drinking with me, and you'll see it at about 1:30, 2:00 on a good night, 12:15 on an even better night." "There's a pair of strippers over there." He was pointing somewhere. "Oh, so you know the place? I'm like a fixture there. That's an electrician joke."

     I think I had his attention. I said, "Listen, I've been writing some television scripts. One involves an electrician and an apprentice, and they are also private detectives. The apprentice is actually the smart one, and the electrician is always getting into trouble, and screwing things up, and the apprentice is always talking them out of a jam, but the electrician stumbles upon the answer to the crime without knowing it, and it's the apprentice who actually puts 2 and 2 together, because the police have already zeroed in on the ex-husband, but he didn't do it." "Mmm-hmmm. But if the apprentice was the smarter one why isn't he the electrician? Make 30 dollars more an hour." "I can set it in a post-apocalyptic world, if that makes you feel any better. Wait- you're paying me $40 dollars less than you?"

     I can explain the basics of electricity to you right now, if you'd like to become my apprentice's aide. It's an unpaid position, but people do a lot worse things for a lot more money. You can think of electricity as if it were water. Pretend a wire is the hose. Amperes, named for physicist André-Marie Ampère, represents the amount of water flowing. Voltage, named for Alessandro Volta, is the water pressure. Ohms, named after Georg Ohm, are like a sprinkler at the end of the hose, causing resistance to the water's flow. 

     The rickster, named after myself, is a unit that measures the amount of water you would need to stand in while working on an open circuit before becoming electrocuted. As you can see, everything is named after the guy who invented it. So to solidify my legacy in the field, I need to discover something. What I've discovered is that it seems like a lot of work to be an electrician.

     You need a license, which I already have, with only a few speeding tickets. And you have to be certified in your state. People have often said I am certifiable, so I'm just about ready to go. But I might just become a YouTube electrician instead, and make videos right here at home. I have the camera all set up and ready to go, but I can't get it to play back on the TV, so I'll probably have to call the electrician back.

LEFT OUT TO DRY

 ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY THE SOMERS RECORD (08-01-24)

     I was riding my motorcycle the other day, one hand on the throttle, the other hand on the brake (not at the same time), and it dawned on me that an estimated ten percent of all people in the world have to ride a motorcycle the other way around. I guess this means that left-handed motorcyclists stop when they should go, turn to when they should turn fro, go back when they should go forth. Are there motorcycles for left-handed people? Or are they cast adrift, like left-handed Jimi Hendrix playing the National Anthem upside down on a right-handed guitar, proudly hailing at the twilight's last gleaming from the other side of the fretboard?

     I don't want to imply anything about left-handed people that you don't already know, but the word in Latin for "left" is "sinistra," or sinister. Yes, I took two years of Latin in middle school, and if Latin hadn't already been a dead language I would have killed it right where it stood. But even back then, when people were saying things like, "ubi est agricola," they knew southpaws were different, maybe because they had paws.

     There are so many things a left-handed person has to learn to do backwards that the rest of us take for granted. At every meal at the restaurant, their knives and forks are on the opposite sides. So instead of eating what's right, they're stuck with what's left.

     Using a pair of scissors is a frustrating undertaking for left-handed people, and I can only imagine what it was like before they were sold in pairs. Taking a picture with a traditional camera must be a real pain in the aperture for lefties, who have to reach over the lens to push the button. It makes me shutter every time.

     I made the mistake of buying a jacket once in Europe, where the zipper is on the opposite side. This is also true of the buttons on women's blouses, and that's one of the things that makes cross-dressers so cross. I once read that the reason that women's clothing has the buttons on the left side was because it was easier for their dressers to dress them from the front. But what if their dresser was left-handed? You just can't win.

     A tape measure pulled to the left means whatever you're measuring will be calibrated in the metric scale. Objects may be smaller than they appear, apology accepted.

     These days you can thank goodness that Google was invented, so you can order left-handed versions of many things right-handers take for granted. And while you're thanking goodness, thank it for inventing a keyboard to replace an actual typewriter, where the carriage return is on the right.

     Having "two left feet" is considered an insult. It means you can't dance. But really, dancing is actually one of the few things where it doesn't matter if you're right-handed or left. My dog has two left feet, and she can  do the foxtrot if the music is right and there is romance in the air.

     The idea of two distinct hemispheres of the brain came to light in the 1960s, when Nobel winner Roger W. Sperry's research detailed evidence that the right side of the brain controlled artistic functions, while the left side managed the analytic operations. This led to a belief that there were "right-brained" and "left-brained" people. This theory has since been disproven, but if the scientists who published the study were right-brained, who knows how accurate it was.

      Last year I broke my right foot right after we had bought tickets to "Prairie Home Companion," but nothing was going to keep us from that show. Not even my wife injuring HER right foot. So there we were, driving through New York City traffic. My left foot is usually only used for depressing the clutch pedal in my car, but now on my wife's automatic it was called upon to depress the  accelerator AND the brake. Which was much more depressing. All the while my right foot was making smug and unhelpful comments like how "reckless" driving is a malapropism if you get into a wreck.

     How hard could it be to be left-handed in a right-handed world? I got hold of a left-handed guitar and played it right-handed, through a loud amplifier. And the sounds that came out were surprisingly similar to those made if I played it left-handed. Or if I ran over it with my car. While driving with my left foot. My wife said that if I really wanted the true Jimi Hendrix experience I should burn the guitar like he did at the Monterey Pop Festival. "Great idea!" I said. "Maybe after my next-" "I already burned it," she said. Well, I'm sure it was great. Anyway, here's to you, left-handed warriors of the world, you are modern-day heroes. Although that might be a bit of a left-handed compliment.