A Mischievous Responder

Some genius recently reported via NPR that teenagers skew important surveys by intentionally providing incorrect answers.

I know what you're thinking: "You listen to NPR?"

They call these lying teenagers "mischievous responders" and say they raise concerns over faulty data and misleading survey results. Apparently, the light bulb went off as early as 2011 when some rocket scientist with a clipboard decided to question not only the veracity of answers provided to a survey on the lives of lesbian and gay teenagers, but also whether or not the kids taking the survey were actually even homosexual.

To me, this is nothing more than one of those monumentally obvious "duh" moments.

• The McDonald's coffee was hot and burned you? -- Duh.
• The Outback's Bloomin' Onion appetizer is fattening? -- Duh.
• The Kardashians are soul-sucking parasites that are 47% responsible for all tabloid sales and 97% responsible for the decline of Western culture? -- Duh.

I turned 46 recently-- unless my parents are a couple of mischievous responders -- and I can honestly say that from the very first time I was ever surveyed to the most recent, I have never completed a survey without either gleefully adding an untruth or knowingly answering a question incorrectly simply because I knew no one would take it seriously. Call me a mischievous responder, or a wisenheimer, or a smart ass if you must, but it isn't my fault. If you're hell-bent on asking me stupid questions, I'm going to dedicate myself to being equally hell-bent on giving you stupid answers.

Plus, it's fun. If you're seriously going to ask my opinion on politics while I'm sucking down Dippin' Dots somewhere between Sbarro and Auntie Anne's Pretzels at the local mall, then you deserve to hear that I don't trust the Affordable Care Act because I think President Obama used to be a Somali pirate. In fact, that kind of canvassing might explain 90% of Fox News coverage.

In fact, I plan to make it my goal to respond more and more mischievously with each future survey I take. I'll go out of my way, time permitting, to seek out people with clipboards in malls and airports just to test my creative skills on the fly. I'll even try to enlist the aide of people around me. The next time you're watching the news, don't be surprised to find out a full thirty percent of Americans believe the Pope is secretly an Islamist extremist in league with Glen Beck to undermine the stock value of Apple.

Anyone interested in starting now? Go ahead. Ask me anything.



2014 Mark Feggeler

Flush With Manliness

I am not, by most modern definitions of the term, manly.

I am under six feet tall. My features are not chiseled. I don't follow sports. My last two dogs collectively weigh less than the average Christmas ham. I enjoy shopping. My abs are less six-pack and more lumpy down pillow. I bake a mean loaf of bread. My gambling skills are non-existent. And if I attempt to grow a beard, I end up looking like someone who might loiter near your child's elementary school with a bag of candy and a van parked around the the corner.

But where I have, in the past, proven my manliness are in those home maintenance and upgrade projects that occur from time to time.

Need a room painted? Two coats in one day with clean up. Done.

Assemble a new cabinet or dresser? Stand back. It might get messy for a bit, but you're gonna love it when it's all put together.

Enhancements to a mostly barren backyard? How about a 100-square-foot paved patio with retaining wall and a fire pit on one side of the yard, and an outdoor theater with an 8-foot screen and surround sound on the other side? Yeah, I did that.

Unfortunately, while I can still proudly grunt and strut from time to time, a chink in my manly armor has begun to show. It started small, almost unnoticeably, and has grown into an epidemic encompassing three of the most important rooms in the house. By now, it is nearly impossible to flush any one of our toilets with any sort of assurance it will (a) flush on the first attempt, (b) refill the tank within an acceptable amount of time, or (c) flush without generating a screaming, squealing sound like the souls of a thousand plumbers crying out in vain for you to call a professional for help.

Fixing a toilet used to be simple. Chances were pretty strong the root cause of your problem was a flapper that no longer kept a good seal. Easy enough change out and cheap, too. Five bucks and a little water sloshed over the edge of the tank later and you were done.  And if your toilet innards stopped working, you drove to the hardware store, plunked money down for new innards, drove home and installed them. That was it. Not any more.

In the past year or two, I've plunked down more money than I care to recall on toilet innards. Cheap ones, expensive ones, fancy ones, simple ones, complete replacements and partial repairs -- doesn't seem to make a difference.

This one didn't flush at all. That one is louder than a freight train. The flapper chain on this one can't be adjusted. That other one sprayed water ten feet into the air in a room with eight-foot ceilings. Even when you do get one that seems to work, you'd better hang on to that receipt because once you let your guard down it's going to find some way to mock and torment you.

At this point, I figure I have two options, and I'll let you decide which is the more manly of the two. I can either heed the screaming voices and call a professional, or I can remove the innards from the toilets in the house and hire one of our kids to remain on standby at all times with a bucket of water. What do you think?



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

My Aching Back

Regardless of what you might think of my physique, I do exercise regularly. Five days a week, in fact, down at the local fitness center I will have burned hundreds of calories and stretched various dormant muscles beyond their comfort level well before the Sun has even begun to think about cresting over the horizon.

The staple during the past several years has been my willing participation in RPM classes. I've never researched if RPM stands for "revolutions per minute," because I'm fairly certain it really stands for "rectal pain motivation." If you've ever sat on one of those rock-hard bicycle seats for more than five minutes you'll know exactly what I mean. You could slam me square between the legs with a sledgehammer after a 45-minute class and my numb prostate probably wouldn't even register the impact.

The trick to succeeding at RPM is to buy those goofy-looking shoes that clip onto the pedals and don't stop cycling until you black out. If you don't need a paramedic to revive you with crash cart paddles at the end of the class, then you aren't doing it right.

Lately, we've decided to try a program called Body Flow, a maniacal mix of yoga, Pilates and torture rack stretches. I don't know why the name of the class is Body Flow, since the last thing my body feels like it's doing when I leave the fitness center is flowing in graceful movements. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the class and know it increases my limited flexibility, but I'm the only person in there struggling to bend like a double-jointed circus freak and breaking out in flop sweat. And no matter what anyone says, down-dog is not a resting position.

SEATED is a resting position.

PRONE is a resting position.

Propped up like an idiot on your palms and toes with your ass hiked up high toward the rafters is not a resting position. It's an upper-arm-stressing, all-the-blood-to-the-top-of-my-head position that would get me cited for lewd behavior if I did it in the middle of a crowded shopping mall.

A new core-strengthening class we've been attending called CXWorx is slightly more kind to those of us not born with the natural ability to slip our ankles behind our ears. I'd like it even more if those rubber stretchy tubes we use didn't pluck every last hair out of my calves.

Somewhere in the past few weeks, one of these self-inflicted, self-improvement classes inspired me to pull something in my lower back. I've never had lower back trouble before and I can tell you from the heart that I am not enjoying it. In the last few days the pain has spread from my lower back, around my left butt cheek and through to my groin.

That said, I doubt My Lovely Wife should start planning her funeral home-sponsored singles cruise yet, because my doctor's concern when I called earlier today for an appointment registered at a Level 4.

That isn't as bad as it sounds. Level 4 simply means they can't see me for four days. It's when you reach Level 0 -- like I did last year when my throat was closing up for no apparent reason -- that you might have something to worry about. If I'm in good enough shape to wait four days, then I doubt I'll be kicking the bucket any time soon, which is good because the way my back feels right now I probably wouldn't be able to kick it very far.

In the meantime, I'll keep attending the exercise classes and scale back when it comes to anything involving the lower back. I'm sure to get a few stares from those self-righteous workout-a-holics who'll cast disparaging glances my way when I skip a move here or there, but I don't really care what they think of me. If I did, I'd change into fresh underwear before going to the gym.



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

16 Degrees Below Stupid

Four days.

That’s how long two inches of snow and a few consecutive nights below freezing will keep kids in central North Carolina out of school. Every night this week, promptly at seven o’clock, we’ve received the call that the next day of school is cancelled.

I hate to sound like one of those “knee-deep in three feet of snow, uphill, both ways” kinds of people, but to say I am flummoxed and flabbergasted is an understatement. When I was a kid, we needed six inches on the ground and the threat of more before our administrators would even consider cancelling school. And they would wait until the last possible second to let you know.

Matter of fact, they wouldn’t even let you know. There were no calling systems, text messages, tweets or Facebook posts back then. The only way you found out if you could ditch your books and break out your galoshes was to watch the scrolling bar along the bottom of one of the five available television networks (three national and two local) like a hawk. If you looked away for a second and missed your spot in the alphabetical string of school districts you were screwed and had to wait another fifteen minutes for the next rotation to begin.

It wouldn’t be so bad if our county’s single Tonka snowplow could get to every street. At least this time they managed to salt most of the roads before the snow fell, but snow isn’t our main problem. The entire 24 years I’ve lived in the Sandhills of North Carolina, snow has never really been the problem.

It’s the ice.

It’s the melting snow running across poorly pitched roads that refreezes during the night.

It’s the acres of black ice that cover rural roads lined by trees so high they never let in the sun.

It’s the jackass tailgating you for five miles until he can gun it past you who hits the patch of black ice you were anticipating you might eventually come across and loses control, fishtailing wildly until he kills himself, you and every fur-bearing mammal within a hundred yards of the scene of the crash.

And to top it all off, our school district does not have a single day built into the year that our kids can miss. No cushion at all for inclement weather in a territory prone to winter ice storms, tornadoes, and even the occasional hurricane, meaning each of the four days our kids have missed this week will need to be made up on a Saturday and during breaks.

I would hope, if nothing else, this latest protracted snow flurry teaches the students of our county the meaning of the word “contingency.”



© 2014 Mark Feggeler

The Noshing Neanderthal

According to an article in the latest Reader's Digest, egg yolks and lemon will be the new "big" things in eating this year. I'm not sure who, exactly, determines that egg yolks and lemon will be the new "big" things, but that's the prediction, nonetheless.

It's sad, really, because even though I'm an ardent food admirer, I'm not a particularly "big" fan of either egg yolks or lemon-flavored anything. Egg yolks are fine as a baking ingredient, or for omelets and scrambled eggs, but that's about it. And lemon's only purpose, in my humble opinion, is to make you feel better about the low-grade chemical furniture lacquer you spray all over your house when you're dusting. Neither item is going to win a popularity contest if I'm the judge.

But the article states there are other hot food stuffs to be watching out for this year, so perhaps I am despairing too soon.

Gluten-free pastas will hit the ground running, which is good for them because I'm likely to have a sizable head start when they arrive en force. See, I'm willing to scale back in certain areas for the sake of trying to save myself from gaining a few unneeded ounces, but I can't fathom the purpose of a gluten-free pasta. I'm not diabetic, or even pre-diabetic, or even predisposed to the potentiality of the possibility of becoming diabetic, so I'm not sure why I'm suddenly supposed to be excited about a variety of non-flour, carb-free, gluten-free, tough-as-hemp pastas that probably don't taste anything like real pasta.

It's also the year of dairy-free dairy products. Almond milk, soy milk, coconut milk, and any other artificially thickened watery extracts of non-cow origin are supposed to be all the rage, making real milk passé. Funny, but I like my milk to taste like milk, and fresh milk at that, not something that's left over when you accidentally leave a jug of milk sitting in the back of the fridge two weeks beyond the recommended expiration date. Again, I've managed to scale back from whole milk to skim milk, but I refuse to drink anything calling itself milk that didn't come from a mammal.

Unattractive poached chicken.

Then there's cooking methods. Seems steaming and poaching will make a comeback as people across the developed world embrace these healthier ways to prepare foods without depleting their nutritional values.

Yummy grilled chicken.

But have you ever poached anything? I haven't, so I looked it up. Poaching involves cooking in liquids at low temperatures. It requires patience and time, neither of which I have in any great abundance. Poaching a chicken breast can take up to thirty minutes. I can grill that sucker in less than ten, or five if I slice it thin and turn the grill on high. Carcinogens from burning the meat? Part of the price we pay for life at the top of the food chain. Besides, how many times has the Cooking Channel told me "color equals flavor?"

Maybe I'm the problem here.

Maybe my unwillingness to let go of the conventions with which I'm familiar in favor of the fun fads of the food industry makes me a culinary stick in the mud -- a noshing neanderthal. But no matter how many times I read about the power of kale to cleanse my intestinal tract and pack my bloodstream with four-thousand times the daily recommended allowance of every vitamin known to man, nothing is going to make me want to eat it. It's a bland, tough leaf and I'm not a rabbit.

At least kale is on the way out, or so I've heard lately. And that's the best news about fad foods -- their fifteen minutes of fame come and go fairly quickly. Wait long enough and perhaps a food you actually like will be the next "big" thing.

Of course, a food like chocolate doesn't need the PR. After all, it is chocolate.



© 2014 Mark Feggeler