Recipe for Disaster

I enjoy cooking. Much of the time I'm reasonably good at it. There are few things more satisfying than calling the rest of the family to the dinner table after working hard to prepare the evening meal.

And there are few things more humiliating than realizing that I skipped an important part of the instructions in the recipe, which screwed things up pretty badly, such as I accomplished last night.

My deal with Mrs. Smoot is that I'm always happy to cook dinner so long as she tells me what she wants me to make, and I don't have to dream something up on my own. So last night I was instructed to make "Hearty Chicken & Noodle Casserole," a concoction dreamed up by the fine folks at the Campbell's Soup compound, and conveniently magnetized to our refrigerator door so I could find it.

I gathered all the ingredients, combined them into the specified kind of dish, and tossed 'er into the oven. I'm confident that I even got the oven temperature and timing set correctly: 25 minutes at 400 degrees. No sweat. It even looked quite good as I got it out of the oven and put it on the table.

Mrs. Smoot came to the table and immediately looked at it with suspicion. Granted, she does this even if I'm cooking something that can't possibly be screwed up, like Froot Loops. But she immediately took her fork and stabbed a load of it without even spooning any onto her plate. Then she gave me The Look, which indicated that the next words out of her mouth weren't going to be complimentary.

"Did you cook the noodles first...?" she asked after crunching away at a bite. "Uhhhhhhhh..." was my witty response.

They should really put directions like that in bold print in the recipe, for those of us who prefer to just skim the instructions for the important stuff. But no, it's written in tiny little letters, easily overlooked by people with my particular stage of dementia.

Well, Mrs. Smoot came to the rescue, adding some other ingredients to the mix, and tossing it into the microwave for a bit. Tomorrow night, I'm thinkin' Froot Loops.

Missing a Mega Opportunity

Once again, I have failed to think of an idea soon enough to cash in on it. I attended some of the G-20 protests (for amusement purposes) last week, and kicked myself when I realized what an opportunity I could have had.

Next time Pittsburgh hosts all of the world's major leaders, I am going to seize the opportunity to make a bundle of money. How, you ask, in an inquisitive fashion? By selling really crappy megaphones to protesters, that's how.

I'll set up a kiosk somewhere in a protest-prone area, and I promise I'll sell out of them no matter what price tag I put on them. It didn't take me too long to realize that protesters are very passionate people, and they really want their voices to be heard. Granted, if you try to pin them down and figure out what, precisely, they want people to do in response to their protest, they will probably have no idea. But they love to be heard!

So many of the protesters I encountered really obviously just loved to hear their own voices at a very loud volume, and many of them were attempting to do this without the help of Hank's Mega Megaphone Sale.

To give you an example of what I mean about these folks... I was heading back to my car after watching a rally in Oakland, and a woman shouted at me as I walked by (without the aid of a megaphone): "Capitalist Media!!" Keep in mind that I was merely a guy with a camera, walking down the street. I had no media credentials dangling from my neck, no news organization logo of any sort. But since I was walking down the street with a camera, I'm obviously part of some evil media empire.

For kicks, I asked the woman what kind of media she would prefer, as opposed to "Capitalist Media." That stumped her pretty well. She was pretty surprised that I responded to her, and after stumbling around for a while she answered, "Uhh... a working class one!" Touche, I guess.

Look Out! They Have Hula Hoops!

Like a moth to the flame, I couldn't restrain myself from heading into Pittsburgh late last week to see some of the G-20 hoopla.

The summit itself is an event where 20 of the world's leaders get together and pretend to fix all of the problems on the planet, like the economy, global warming, terrorism, world peace, blah blah blah. In reality, it appears that they mainly stand around and have photos taken of themselves shaking hands with one another while wearing dark suits. But perhaps that's just my perception.

More importantly, the G-20 gave throngs of very credible people the opportunity to express their opinions on a very wide variety of global issues. I have no idea what most of those issues might be, but the city was certainly full of protesters representing a wide variety of issues as well as vastly varying hygiene practices.

I can't help but wonder where these people come from. They certainly didn't come from anywhere that features showers, that's for certain. Some of the protesters, particularly the anarchist ones, were remarkably stinky people. It was hard to tell what they were protesting against, but the women took a strong stance against the issue of armpit shaving, for one.

Some of the things I saw:

- A whole lot of monks, honked off about Burma.
- A group of protesters who made their point via the fine art of hoola-hooping.
- People insisting that China get out of Tibet. And soon!
- A guy riding a bike while wearing a polar bear head.
- John Oliver of The Daily Show joining some protesters in a whacky dance (see picture).
- and of course, a man wearing a Batman outfit with a sign that said "Watch Family Guy"

In all of this I realized that I missed out on a great money-making opportunity. I'll share that tomorrow.

My Next Invention

In the past, I have come up with a few great inventions, only to have them stolen by Japanese entrepreneurs. Apparently I was being too vocal about my ideas before I had a chance to get anything patented or copyrighted or whatever the heck I was supposed to do before these great thoughts were put to good use by someone else.

This time, I am going to share my next invention by putting it somewhere I can be sure that virtually no one will ever see it: my blog.

So anyway, here's the idea.

Back at the beginning of 2009, Pennsylvania adopted a new law that prohibits smoking in most public places. As a non-smoker, I have been quite happy about this development, since "no smoking areas" in restaurants have always been rather ridiculous. We always had a knack for being seated in "no smoking areas" that were carefully situated right beside the smoking area. So basically this meant that we weren't personally allowed to smoke, but we were more than welcome to inhale the fumes from the next table.

So nowadays people can't smoke at work, or in most restaurants, etc. Since they can't smoke anywhere else, they now smoke in their cars. Constantly. Every single other car I see on the road features an arm sticking out the window, attached to a cigarette. I'm barely exaggerating. And being a non-smoker, it actually irks me to have to smell the fumes from the people in the cars in front of me.

I have come up with a great solution for this problem, which will be helpful to me personally, as well as for the smokers, particularly as we're heading into the midst of colder weather very soon. The answer is: Hank's Super Duper Car Chimney (see artist rendering, above).

My idea is to install a chimney on cars so the smoke can be funneled through it and safely up into the atmosphere. Smokers will like it because they won't need to have their arms hanging out the window on freezing winter days. And the chimney will be high enough that the smoke won't seep into the air of surrounding vehicles.

Granted, no one driving a chimney-enhanced car will be able to drive under a bridge or through a tunnel ever again due to the new height of the vehicle, but that's a minor detail.

80s Movie Nights

I can honestly say that I have thoroughly enjoyed being a dad through every stage of Little Smoot's development. Every year of her young life has been a new, exciting experience, each one to be treasured in its own way. Even back when she was just this little crying, pooping, eating machine, she was a bundle of fun.

Now that she has turned 11, she is entering a whole new stage that I can tell I am going to really enjoy: she's now old enough to enjoy and appreciate a lot of the goofy 80s movies I grew up with.

If I were a movie critic, I'd be able to rate a movie with ease. I wouldn't even necessarily need to see the movie -- just the credits. If I don't see the name Chevy Chase, Steve Martin, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray or Leslie Neilson in the credits, I can probably say with some degree of authority that the movie stinks.

Over the past couple months I have been enlightening Little Smoot with some of my all-time favorites. Right now, we're working on the Back to the Future trilogy. I had a great sense of parental satisfaction after we finished watching the first movie and she immediately said, "Let's watch the second one!"

We giggled our way through The Three Amigos last week. Mrs. Smoot hates that movie (and most of my other 80s favorites), so that made it even more satisfying to see that I'm instilling a sense of good taste in Little Smoot.

Little Smoot's favorite movie so far has been Ghostbusters, though. She absolutely loved the part where the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man terrorizes the streets of New York. I dare say that she laughed more at that scene than anything she has viewed on Sponge Bob Square Pants.

Sponsorships Gone Wild

I was watching the Steelers/Bears game last weekend (let's not speak of the outcome), and I have to say I'm always amused by the way they try to integrate new advertisers into the game in some form or another.

There are all sorts of "official" products of the NFL... like the official beer, the official soft drink, the official truck, blah blah blah. But I couldn't help but be amused by the new sponsorship of Febreze. They created something called the "Febreze Fresh Start," which is a series of video clips of players who had "fresh starts" during the previous week of play.

That seemed like a bit of a stretch to me, as far as desperately trying to incorporate a product into the football vernacular. And it made me wonder what we're going to see next. Imagine:

- The Charmin "Wiped Out" Play of the Week
- The Kleenex brand "Officiating Call That Really Blows"
- The Hoover "Player Who Really Sucked"

And, of course:

- The Viagra "Stiff Competition" Award

I'm sure there will be plenty more like this.

Dipstick on a RipStick

Little Smoot has been working hard again to make sure that I feel like a complete and total geezer.

All summer she has been bugging us to buy this thing called a RipStick. She got a taste of it at the home of an acquaintance earlier in the year, and she made it her mission to obtain one through whatever means necessary. We told her she could buy one if she saved her own money, a ploy that bought us several RipStick-free months of time since $70 is not something she can save up quickly.

Anyway, she finally bought one after her recent birthday windfall. A RipStick is much like a skateboard, except that it has only two wheels and you can jiggle your body back and forth in such a way to propel it.

Notice that I used the word "you" in the previous paragraph. "I" had much more trouble with this thing when Little Smoot gave me the opportunity to try it. We went to her school playground for a bit the other day, and she was getting the hang of it pretty well. I figured it couldn't be that hard, so I gave it a brief attempt.

I hopped onto this thing, and instantly decided that there were better things a 40-year-old person should be doing. And then it occurred to me that I'm now 41, not 40, so this thing should definitely be out of the question for a person of my chronological condition. When I got on it, all sense of balance went out the window, and I could tell that if I continued to attempt it, I'd better darned well know where my insurance card is.

Little Smoot is getting the hang of this thing fairly well, despite the fact that she did end up dripping with some degree of blood by the time we gave up. The worst thing is that I really, really hate it when young kids can do something -- anything -- that I can't do. So I know that while Little Smoot is in school, I'll undoubtedly be trying to figure this stupid thing out by practicing in the garage until I get the hang of it.

Hopefully there will be Internet access in the hospital so I can blog about it.

Institute for the Profoundly Gullible

My e-mail address has apparently landed in a database for really stupid people. I picture a building, somewhere in Nigeria, called the Institute for the Profoundly Gullible. Inside the building are a bunch of hard-working scam artists who concoct really stupid stories in an effort to swindle stupid people out of money.

My e-mail address seems to be at the top of their list. I'm guessing that someone tipped them off to the fact that I'm not amongst the most intellectual people in this particular hemisphere. Therefore I get tons and tons of these scam messages every single day.

Here's a summary of some of those messages from just the last 24 hours alone:

- MR. JOHN MIKE (they always capitalize their names for some reason, perhaps to indicate just how important they are) wants me to provide all of my personal information and DNA samples to him. Pffft. Snippet from his message: "You have to make sure you forward the above information to the Company to enable them commence arrangement towards delivering your box of money worth ($900.000 USD) immediately." Wooooo... a box of money! $900 is chump change compared to most of my offers, though.

-This one is more like it. $19 million... now we're talking! "I am Barrister Bin Dauwat, an attorney at law. A deceased client of mine who shares the same last name with you, died as result of a heart-related condition in March 12th 2008 leaving behind a deposit valued at $19 million dollars, his heart condition was due to the death of all the members of his family in the tsunami disaster on the 26th December 2004 in Sumatra Indonesia."

- This one is just $850,000. I mop my shoes with that kind of cash. "This is to inform you that Your winning Price of Eight hundred and fifty thuosand usd.($850,000.00USD)has been forwarded to Western Union for immediate transfer to you as soon as you meet up with the demands of the transfer charge of $175." Transfer this, moron. Just take the $175 out of my $850,000, and send me the rest.

- Anyone who wants to use a cancer diagnosis as the basis of their scam should have a very toasty portion of Hell reserved in their name, in my opinion: "My name is Mrs. Maria Bejes I am a dying woman who has decided to donate what I have to charities through you. I will be going in for an operation, and I pray that I survive the operation. I have decided to Will/Donate the sumof 10,300,000.00 (Ten Million three hundred thousand Dollars) to charities through you for the good work of the Lord, and to help the motherless, less privileged and also for the assistance of the widows. I,m in a hospital where I have been undergoing treatment for oesophageal cancer I have since lost my ability to talk."

- I must have made a strong impact on this guy: "I wish to notify you that late Engr. Jurgen Krugger made you a beneficiary to his WILL. He left the sum of Thirty Million, One Hundred Thousand Dollars (USD$30,100.000.00) to you in the Codicil and last testament to his WILL.This may sound strange and unbelievable to you, but it is real and true. Being a widely traveled man, he must have been in contact with you in the past or simply you were nominated to him by one of his numerous friends abroad who wished you good."

If you'll excuse me, I have to go make some room for all of this cash I'm going to be rolling in. Wheeeee!

Breaking News!

I fixed something.

Those of you who know me know that my abilities are severely limited when it comes to fixing stuff. If it can't be fixed by squirting WD-40 on it, well, I'm stumped.

Yesterday I actually fixed something without going through my regular routine. Normally, I'll squirt some WD-40 on the broken item, which obviously never fixes anything. Then I'll stomp around for a bit, until Mrs. Smoot either fixes whatever it is by herself, or she caves in and lets me purchase a new one.

This time, it was our barbecue grill that was acting up. A week or so ago, we noticed that when you turn two of the three burners on, flames would eventually start shooting out of the front of it. Using my amazing manly abilities, I determined that this was probably an undesirable feature of the grill, especially if we prefer not to have our shirts catching on fire while we're making burgers and such.

Before I took the drastic step of spraying it with WD-40, I conducted my other manly experiment where I ignored the problem for several days in hopes that it would resolve itself. Alas, it did not.

So today I did some manly work on it, requiring the use of an actual Phillips head screwdriver and everything. I yanked a bunch of parts out of the grill, and actually found the problem. Some idiot insect apparently decided to build a tiny condominium unit inside two of the thing-a-majiggers (sorry for the technical terminology) where the propane is supposed to flow. It was apparently blocking those passages, and causing the flames to shoot out of the front.

I took the thing-a-majiggers apart, as well as several doohickies, hoosemfoosits and whatchamacallems, and I cleaned them all up. Imagine my shock when I put everything back together (without any leftover, random parts, either!) and the grill actually worked.

I think I'll probably miss having those flames shooting out, though. They were kinda cool.

THI_ GAME _UCK_

If you would enjoy an exciting evening of television viewing culminating with the overwhelming urge to slit your wrists, I invite you to view Wheel of Fortune with Mrs. Smoot.

Yeah, I have complained about her word puzzle abilities before, but I figure it's an important issue, plenty worthy of continual whining. We had Wheel on while we were eating dinner the other night, and Mrs. Smoot was draining all of the fun out of it, as per normal.

The fun part of watching the show, of course, is playing along with the contestants to see who can guess the hidden phrases first. This is enjoyable, except that Pat Sajak isn't going to send me to Japan or give me money for guessing anything correctly. It doesn't matter anyway, because Mrs. Smoot would win everything anyway.

Pat had just revealed a new puzzle the other night, and someone guessed the letter "S," and there was just one of them on the board. Mrs. Smoot glanced over at the screen for about 1/1,000th of a second and said, "Chocolate-Covered Cherries." And of course that's what it was. I wouldn't have come up with that answer if the category had been "types of cherries, covered in chocolate."

So watching Wheel of Fortune is a pretty bland experience around here. A puzzle appears, Mrs. Smoot announces what the answer is, and we wait 5-10 minutes for the contestants to flounder around until one of them gets the right answer.

At least when we watch Jeopardy! there is the occasional answer she doesn't know. But now Mrs. Smoot has gone back to college and she's filling her brain with all of those answers. So night TV viewing is only going to get worse for me.

Trash Talk

Could I be the only one who sometimes gets a little nervous when the garbage man comes? I'm not afraid of the garbage man, per se, even though he could potentially throw me into the back of the scary truck that smooshes stuff, I suppose.

No, I sometimes worry about whether he's going to accept whatever weird thing I have left at the curb on any given week.

This week, I have a giant section of PVC pipe that I ripped out of the ground. It was one of my many failed attempts at being manly years ago. I had dug up the yard and stuck this pipe in the ground as some sort of demented drainage project, but naturally that didn't work as planned. So I finally ripped it out of the ground and nervously placed it at the curb yesterday.

I really have no idea if there's a limit to what they'll haul away. I know that neighborhoods near us have a different waste disposal company, and they're limited to two bags of garbage a week. Two bags wouldn't be nearly enough for us; I can use that much in belly button lint alone.

I know that some of our neighbors are edgy about a possible limit, too, because sometimes they'll spread their garbage to the fronts of other neighborhood houses in an effort to trick the garbage people into taking a huge mound of stuff. Yesterday, for example, a neighbor stuck an old ladder in with our stuff.

Over the years, I can only remember one instance when the garbage guys refused to take something I had left at the curb, and that was a waterbed mattress. It must have weighed 500 pounds, so it seemed. I left it at the curb, and I remember spying on the garbage man from behind a curtain to see what would happen when he came.

A couple men started to lift the mattress, and once they realized how heavy it was they said the heck with it and left it behind. So the next week I chopped it up and distributed it into about 10 garbage bags and left all of them at the curb, and sure enough, the garbage men took them all away.

I used the same strategy with a barbecue grill last year. It took me the better part of a day to dismantle that sucker into enough innocent-looking bags that it no longer looked like a grill.

We have a spare refrigerator that is probably on its last legs. I'm already eyeing it up to see how I can fit that baby into a series of bags...

The Topsy Turvey Verdict

As you can well imagine, I have been deluged by e-mails, phone calls, fax transmissions, telepathic messages, Western Union, and carrier pigeon queries, wondering how things have been going with my Topsy Turvey Tomato Plant Experiment '09. (Or "Tomatoe" for you Dan Quayle fans.)

And the official verdict is: It's ok.

The Topsy Turvey is this thing that gives you the magical ability to grow a tomato upside-down, much to the envy of all who see it. We had always had problems with deer eating our garden tomatoes, so I thought I'd give this a whirl. After all, I doubt very much that we have upside-down deer in this area... so I would think these devices should be safe.

The problem with this thing is that a bird decided that the top of the Topsy Turvey was a lovely place to build a home early in the summer. So every time I'd water the thing, this bird would flounder around inside and then escape, which gave me some degree of heart failure every single time.

My first instinct was to scare the bird away, and a friend had suggested utilizing a rubber snake to encourage it to go elsewhere. I tried that, and it seemed to work quite well. However, the bird had laid eggs inside the nest, and people made me feel guilty about chasing mommy away from her babies, breaking up a perfectly lovely family unit.

I was starting to think that maybe the bird had simply upped the ante by using rubber eggs to get back at me for the whole rubber snake thing, but at least a couple of the eggs did eventually hatch. The family eventually moved on, thankfully, so I was able to go back to tending to my plant.

So far I have had a handful of tomatoes from the plant, and they have officially been "ok." Nothing spectacular. I may have to try adding a few more plants to the collection next year with a couple other varieties involved.

Or maybe I'll just get some rubber tomato plants. I dunno.

The Sleep-over

Have you ever had 5 grade-school age girls sleep over at your house? I didn't think so... no sane person would ever consider such a thing. But we did just that over the weekend. Little Smoot had a few friends over for the night, and you can just imagine how much sleep everyone got.

We began the night innocently enough. We got them sugared up on M&Ms and other equally healthy foods, and they spent a couple hours playing on the Wii. Their favorite Wii game was called "Fart Wars," during which two competitors fly through the air, powered by their own farts, while attempting to avoid obstacles. And the winner gets flushed down a giant toilet (I'm not sure why this happens to the winner, and the loser merely gets thwapped up against a rock wall).

I suggested to the girls that if their parents asked what they did while they were here, I would strongly prefer that they would claim that we were all playing Bible-themed games while eating healthy vegetables, as opposed to eating vast quantities of chocolate while playing Fart Wars. I'm sure the parents would buy that story.

Later at night, while continuing to eat "vegetables" and such, they played some games that seemed to involve a lot of giggling and slamming of doors. I don't know the specifics of the game, but I did eventually find Little Smoot bound and gagged in a closet, and other girls were complaining because they hadn't had a turn and being tied up in the closet yet.

A little after midnight they played a very short-lived version (thank goodness) of Truth or Dare. I really don't want to know what truths OR dares were involved. There are some things that parents just aren't meant to know.

Around 1:00 a.m., they decided it was time to make a movie. I doubt that Spielberg will need to worry about the competition. I asked them to turn the lights out and get to sleep at about 1:30 a.m., and they fully cooperated that request at about 6:30 (I'm serious).

I'm planning to catch up on sleep sometime in the coming months. For now I think I'm getting hungry for some veggies.

How To Impress the Babes

I was visiting East Branch Dam in Elk County last weekend, and it reminded me of a story. Lots of things remind me of stories; that's why I have a blog.

Anyway... I enjoyed walking over the breast of the dam for a couple reasons. For one, it gave me a legitimate reason to use the word "breast" in a blog entry. And it gave me a chance to think back to the day when a friend and I decided that we should swim the width of the dam for some reason.

I guess the reason we decided to do this had something to do with the fact that we were attempting to impress the girls who were with us. I eventually married one of them, so apparently this stunt worked like a charm. After all, nothing makes a woman more filled with lust than seeing two out of shape guys wade into a seaweed infested lake where there was a good chance at least one of us could drown or be eaten by a school of angry perch.

The swim from one side to the other was about half a mile, and neither of us were exactly Olympians, but we went for it. The girls were counting on us.

Mike and I began our epic journey into the water, and as we were about half way to our goal, we were approached by a patrol boat, lights flashing and everything. They asked us what on Earth we were doing, and we told them that we simply decided to swim across the lake ("because it was there" I suppose).

Much to our surprise, the officer told us that it was actually perfectly legal to swim across the lake. Very stupid, but legal. (This was around 1991, so I'm not sure if it's legal to do this nowadays. It's probably still considered to be stupid, though.)

So the officer allowed us to continue our swim, but they followed us with the boat the rest of the way across the lake, figuring that at least one of us was bound to die in the process.

Both of us made it across just fine, thank you Mr. Boat Cop Dude. And you can only imagine how impressed the girls were.

Mower Tip #132

Here is today's official tip for lawn mowing: No matter how shiny and attractive it may be, do not attempt to mow over a large metal object.

Trust me on that one.

I was mowing our neighbor's yard a couple weeks ago, and I ignored this common tip, and managed to demolish a water pipe thing that stuck out of her yard. When I hit it, the mower came to a rather abrupt stop, and pieces of the water cap were quickly shooting skyward. Some of them are probably still orbiting the Earth as we speak.

Surprisingly, the mower did start up and I was able to continue mowing the yard. It was sputtering and rattling quite a bit, though. If the mower were able to talk (and thank goodness it can't) it would probably have said something like, "Nice work, genius."

I decided to do what I always do when I need manly help. I called our former neighbor, who is able to fix anything and everything. To keep his anonymity intact, for this blog entry I'll call him "Kevin," even though his name is actually Hubert.

"Kevin" was able to diagnose the problem just by hearing what I had done, and generously offered to pound some sense into the mower for me.

Over the years, Hubert -- er... "Kevin" -- has fixed probably dozens of items for me because I'm completely inept at this sort of thing. As if it isn't bad enough that I can't fix these things on my own, I have actually made him a fresh batch of cookies in the past as thanks for his work. Maybe I'll send him flowers this time.

Anyway, I would like to publicly thank him for once again coming to the rescue. The mower is working remarkably well, and I promise to make an effort to avoid the shiny obstacles in the future. The flowers are in the mail.

Two Birthdays

Well, two notable birthdays have just passed by, and I thought I should acknowledge them both.

Most importantly, Little Smoot has just turned 11. As you can see in the accompanying photo, she was very dignified as we celebrated with some of the Smoot clan.

Actually, her birthday has been a rather lengthy celebration these past couple weeks. At last count, she has had something like 27 different parties involving various combinations of family members. She didn't seem to mind the idea of getting presents on a daily basis, either.

Anyway, Happy Birthday Little Smoot! As always, we're tremendously proud of you, and we would like to remind you that you're pretty much done with getting presents this time around.

The other birthday that has recently passed is the anniversary of this very blog. My first post was back on September 3, 2008. And here we are today.

Just think... this blog began as a crappy little corner of cyberspace, bereft of any form of quality control, lacking in direction, and missing any opportunity to make a real impact on society. I'm very proud to say that little has changed since those days at the beginning of last fall. I doubt much will change in the year to come, either.

I Really Enjoyed Intercourse This Weekend!

Yes, indeed! I had a great Intercourse experience over the weekend. And it was my first time! Sadly, I experienced Intercourse alone, though.

By now I'm sure you recognize the hilarity of the name "Intercourse" as a rural community near Lancaster, PA. Intercourse is a small, very Amish town, and a bajillion people seemed to flock there over the Labor Day holiday to gawk at people in bonnets and purchase butter and such.

Personally, I'm growing more and more suspicious of the whole Amish thing. Seriously. Amish people allegedly live their lives as though it was still 1750, shunning new technology and wearing comically old-fashioned clothing, but what kind of sane person would do this?

Let's look at the evidence here. For one thing, the Amish don't use electricity, which would make computers pretty much out of the question. Yet nearly every one of these quaint Amish places miraculously had a web address on their signs. Who puts up these web pages... the cows?

Here's another odd thing I noticed. Later in the weekend I was driving through State College, home of Penn State University and Joe Paterno, and I literally couldn't carry on a conversation with an old college friend because we kept losing the cell phone signal. Yet in Intercourse, where bales of hay outnumber residents by a million to one, the cell signal was tremendously good no matter where I was in that area. Who the heck is using their cell phones out there... the cows?

And the Amish people never look very happy. I strongly suspect that they always look so grim because you only ever see them in the middle of the day while they're putting on their whole Amish "show," and frankly those clothes look awfully itchy. At night, I would bet you any money that they hide out in underground bunkers and have Wii bowling tournaments, just like regular folk.

I think the reason the Amish go through this routine every day is that, frankly, it moves the merchandise. If you were to tell your spouse, "Hey! Let's go buy some jam!" they'd probably roll their eyes at you and possibly threaten you with physical harm. But if you suggest buying jam from people in authentic clothing from days of old, they'd perk up and run out to start the car, wouldn't they?

The Amish know this, and I personally witnessed flocks of people buying butter, jam, pies, etc. And this was during a not-so-grand economic climate. People love this crap, and the Amish are reaping the profits to the extent that they have the entire library of Mario games in their bunkers.

So, needless to say, I am really getting suspicious of these so-called "Amish." And their cows, for that matter.

Punch Bugs and Slap Priuses

Like most normal American families, we have always participated in the popular "Punch Bug" tradition.

The rules have always been simple: When you see a Volkswagen Beetle (hereby referred to as a "Punch Bug," heretofore, per se) the person viewing said Punch Bug is entitled to punch whomever he or she pleases, and without any fear of retribution. While punching the other person, you must "claim" your Punch Bug by yelling out "Punch Bug!" and the color of the car you've spotted.

So we can be driving along for several quiet miles, and suddenly hear "PUNCH BUG BLUE!" from the back seat, and then get a brutal smack to the shoulder. This is the way God intended it. Heaven help us, though, when we pass by a VW dealership.

Anyway, as we have spent many hours traveling in the car, the Smoot family has decided to add twists and turns to those simple rules. We have always added that only one person can claim a single Punch Bug, so you don't have the whole family punching each other over the single sighting of one car. Fair enough.

But as we traveled on our New England trip this summer, things really started to go downhill, rule-wise. Little Smoot and Mrs. Smoot started deciding to claim various colors of Punch Bugs. Little Smoot and Mrs. Smoot claimed all of the typical colors for themselves, basically leaving me with chartreuse-ish mauve as the only color I was allowed to punch anyone for.

So, to help make things a little more fair, I tossed a few of my own rules in. For example, if I see a Prius (other than the one I was driving), I could slap anyone I wanted ("Slap Prius Green!"). And Hummers earned me a free Indian Burn.

You can imagine what we must look like after driving a few hours, slapping, punching and Indian Burning each other ad nauseum. As we stagger out of the car at rest areas, we probably looked a lot like we were emerging from Michael Vick's kennel.

Thankfully the family has not learned how to use the terrorism interrogation technique of waterboarding, because I'm sure that'll somehow find its way into our driving before we know it.

Swimming Toward Elderlyhood

Little Smoot and I spent a significant portion of our summer at our local pool, which we always enjoy. We have a good time together, diving off the board, getting nice tans, seeing friends, and keeping the concession stand in business by ingesting a disturbing number of Chips Ahoy ice cream cakes.

Things were going very nicely at the pool again this year, up until a tremendously disturbing incident last month involving a young boy. Was this kid picking on Little Smoot, or swearing, or otherwise creating a disturbance? No, he did something infinitely worse.

Little Smoot came rushing over to me after playing with this kid for a bit, and she took great glee in telling me that this boy asked her, "Is that your grandfather?" after seeing me playing with her.

I nearly dropped my dentures right out of my mouth when she said that one. "Your GRANDFATHER?" I asked. She said that she told the kid, "No, that's my dad," but he replied, "Well, he does have gray hair."

Just shoot me.

I thought about going over and beating the living tar out of the little whippersnapper with my cane, but I wasn't sure if Medicare would cover any injuries the kid would cause me.

Canadian Metric Time

Speaking of Canada (as I was in yesterday's post), we spent some time in Quebec a couple weeks ago. We had never been to that province before, so it was interesting to see just how foreign a country Canada could be.

We have been to Canada many, many times over the years, and it has certainly never seemed like a very foreign place. In Ontario, where we usually end up, everyone speaks English, they drive on the proper side of the road, and so forth.

Quebec is a whole different land. Every thing there is French. Their fries... the way they braid their hair... their toast... their maids... the way they kiss... etc. There were very, very few places that even had English captions for things.

On our first night, in Saint-Georges, I was assigned the task of locating and procuring a pizza to bring back to the hotel. Several hours later I returned with a llama and two bars of soap, and I was fresh out of pelt. It was that kind of night.

Anyway... it was interesting to introduce Little Smoot to this new culture. As soon as we crossed the border (which wasn't paved -- honest), we got to switch our car's speedometer over to metric. Little Smoot was amused to see that we were able to travel over 100 somethings-per-hour.

Seeing her interest in the metric system, I couldn't help but take the opportunity to convince her that there was such a thing as "Canadian Metric Time." I told her that Canada runs on a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour. She's not usually tremendously gullible, but she actually did believe that one and wanted me to switch the clock in the car to reflect it.

Mrs. Smoot wouldn't let me take this one too far, figuring that she'd end up bringing it up in school or some such thing, and she'd be scarred for life. I'd write more about this, but it's almost 17:72 o'clockometer already.

Ruffled

I have always suspected that there is something inherently wrong with living in the United States, and it actually has nothing at all to do with former President Bush OR Barney the Dinosaur.

Don't get me wrong... I love fruited plains as much as anyone (although I honestly cannot remember ever seeing purple mountains, despite traveling extensively throughout the country).

Anyway, I have always felt like there's just something we're missing, and when we were in Canada a couple weeks ago, I remembered what it was: Ruffles "All Dressed" potato chips.

You can only get this particular flavor (or "flavour" as they like to say in Canadian) of Ruffles chips in Canada. When we visit the Great White North, we always purchase a large quantity of these chips to bring back home.

As a result, we always get a little nervous as we're going through Customs at the U.S. border, worrying that there's some restriction on bringing these babies into our homeland and that we're going to be swarmed by honked off Canadian potato chip agents.

What's the big deal about these chips? They're just freakin' awesome, that's what. The flavor is some amazing combination of a bunch of flavors, and the result is a potato chip that tastes like there's a party in my mouth, and everyone is invited.

Mrs. Smoot has a particularly hard time keeping her hands off the All Dressed chips. I think one of the bags that we were attempting to smuggle back home barely made it to the border. If there were some sort of restriction on bringing these chips across the border, the Customs agents would probably be suspicious of Mrs. Smoot with all sorts of flavor powder affixed to her lips and chin as we were driving through.

Anyway... if you feel as strongly about this injustice as I do, I encourage you to fill out this petition to bring these things here. Thank you.