Great Column Ideas

First published June 24, 2005

People often ask me, “Where do you get the ideas for your columns?” Then they go on to say things like, “Why, you must be some kind of genius to come up with such great material week after week!” Or, “You’re so clever, you should run for Emperor of the World!”

Ok, so nobody’s ever said any of that other stuff.

But to answer the question, my ideas come from lots of places. First, unusual things are always happening to me. This is probably because I get myself into a lot of unusual situations. I mean, anyone who knows full well that he is a charter member of the, “…never let this guy play with machinery or pointy objects…” club, and yet naively attempts to sharpen the lawn mower, can pretty much count on an adventure in his near future.

Reading the news can also be a rich source of material, so I try to stay alert for interesting things going on in the world. For instance, I recently read that the government on Prince Edward Island has decided to cut back the operating hours of their suicide hotline. This means that anyone calling after 5:00 PM will get a message telling them to call back during normal business hours. Or they can, presumably, leave a note…

And there was the recent World Toilet Expo, which had all of Shanghai, China flushed with excitement.

Sorry about that.

But the real key to turning a mishap involving a barbecue grill, a saucepan of gravy, and a small natural gas explosion into the sort of fine literature you see here, is keeping copious notes. I try to write everything down, hopefully even before the gravy re-enters the atmosphere.

Everywhere I go I have scratch pads, 3x5 cards, post-its, old envelopes and napkins covered with my brainstorms. I just can’t risk losing the inspiration that someday I really should do a piece on dog poo.

My most entertaining notebook is the one I keep next to the bed, in which I document all the brilliant insights that wake me from a sound sleep at three in the morning. These pages have yielded several columns, a chapter in a novel, and a short story that may become a novel.

Unfortunately my penmanship, not all that good under the best of conditions, is even worse performed in a dark room when I’ve apparently forgotten which hand I normally write with. This has produced some fairly puzzling entries like;

Write a barimmen about how every florbet has vleb sneeves. Especially when you consider the florbet’s seven little plevers. It Will Be Hilarious!

This epiphany is followed on the page by a diagram of some sort of animal in a top hat standing on what looks like a large casserole dish.

I have to admit, though, that sometimes my notes are not much clearer when I can read them. Here’s a recent entry – verbatim;

Walking home from a party, falling through the ice near the edge of a shallow pond by the high school / college while wife is trying to distract and annoy the tuba player practicing inside.

Now that I think of it, and at the risk of annoying tuba players everywhere, that just may be the subject of next week’s column…

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

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Girl Cars

First published June 17, 2005

Last week on this page we talked about guys and their obsession with the automobile. In the course of that discussion I happened to mention “girl cars.” As you might have guessed, this sparked a bit of controversy;

Dear Mr. Funny Guy,

You got a lot of nerve! Why I ought to rip your arm off and beat you with the bloody stump, you no good commie…

Yours truly,

Sister Mary Catherine

Well Sister, I sure didn’t mean to offend you or any of the other chicks who read my column.

Mea culpa! Ha, ha, ha.

It’s just that men and women truly do have different attitudes toward cars. Women use them to get where they want to go. Men build shrines around them.

Not that women aren’t picky about what they drive. When they go car shopping they consider “important factors” like styling, color, comfort, and utility – how adorable is that! Women will almost never base their decision on really critical issues like the bench horsepower of the model their pal Toby just bought.

“But what about Danica Patrick?” you ask. Ok, maybe you didn’t ask, but play along with me here.

Danica Patrick almost won the Indianapolis 500, finished fourth and was named 2005 Rookie Of The Year. She’s become a major force in the Indy Racing League and appears to be headed for a career as maybe one of the best open-wheel race drivers of all time. So what kind of car does she drive?

A Honda.

Now we all know that Hondas are good on gas and practical for getting around the track, all things considered. Danica just drives her Honda really, really fast.

Ok, I’ll admit it – I’m a major Danica Patrick fan. She’s talented, intelligent, articulate, attractive, and I can tell just by looking at her that she’s nice enough to push the seat back when she gets out of that race car so the next guy that comes along doesn’t bash his knees to hamburger trying to get in.

Ladies please take note of this last point. If you want us guys to put the toilet seat down, you might want to reciprocate by leaving the car seat pushed back, so that anyone taller than a Keebler Elf can get behind the wheel.

Here’s an interesting thing I noticed – Danica Patrick doesn’t seem to wear much in the way of makeup. This might be partly because she doesn’t really need much, but I think it might also reflect the relative difficulty of putting on eye liner at 225 miles per hour. That, and there’s no center rear-view “makeup mirror” in an Indy car.

Anyway, I’ve decided that the main thing that identifies a true “girl car” is not so much what kind of car it is, but how it gets used – usually as a sort of rolling long-term storage facility. A man doesn’t even want to keep a car as long as a woman will haul around a stack of old magazines or a tote bag full of used tennis balls.

And this brings us to the question of the day – do you think Danica keeps a box of chipped flower pots in the trunk of that Indy car?

Send your story about girl cars to mike@learnedsofar.com.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

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Big Boys and Toys

First published June 3, 2005

While we’re on the subject of men versus women (We are? Yes, we are. If you had paid attention to last week’s column, you would know that!) we might as well talk about men and our love affair with toys.

I’ll be the first to admit it – most men never really mature a whole lot beyond the Roy Rogers pajamas stage, and I am a prime example. I can still remember lying awake at night, wishing I could be outside playing with my new bike – the one with the streamers hanging from the ends of the handlebars and the playing cards flapping in the spokes.

Of course, over the years the objects of my toy lust have evolved. For one thing, I still have a bike I dream of riding, but I no longer have playing cards in the spokes. No comment on the streamers.

This evolution means that many of the things I now covet as toys tend to be at least allegedly useful. You can attribute this to the fact that my toy fetish is centered in the “Cool Tool Gene” that I mentioned on this page a few weeks ago. In other words, men are genetically programmed to say things like, “I need that reciprocating saw, honey. The one I have doesn’t even begin to reciprocate, and you of all people know how frustrating that can be!”

Women are different. Lacking the Cool Tool Gene, a woman will never buy a tool unless she actually has some kind of use for it. For example, let’s say a woman has a nail that she wants to drive into a wall. If she can’t pound that nail in with her cell phone or with the side of the TV remote, she may break down and buy a hammer.

A guy, on the other hand, will go out and spend $150 on a power drill, then spend weeks searching for something that looks like it could use some holes.

Of course, a woman can get all tingly over a dress, a pair of shoes and matching purse – how silly is that? That’s right, incredible as it may seem, my wife feels pretty much the same way about the crap in her closet as I do about my new weed whacker!

And this brings us to the heart of the difference. You see, a woman can focus her whole existence on a quest to find a little black skirt that’s just a smidgen shorter/longer/blacker than any of the little black dresses she already has. A guy is far more likely to find true fulfillment with something that has at least 150 watts per channel and a subwoofer.

If a man gets a new riding mower, he’ll issue a press release. You’ll never hear that same man call his friend and say, “Phil, you have got to see the new work boots I found! They match my tool belt perfectly – and they were on sale!”

Of course, there is a scientific explanation for all this. You see, researchers have determined that instead of the Cool Tool Gene, women have a thing called the Craving Clothing Chromosome.

But we’ll talk more about that in a future column.

Send your story about big boys and their toys to mike@learnedsofar.com.

Copyright © 2005 Michael Ball

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