Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

Last week was a huge week for guys exposing themselves. The nation's most politically prominent exhibitionist and candidate for mayor of NYC, Anthony Weiner, once again was busted for capturing his essence in pixels and then Tweeting it to a romantic cyber-partner.

"This guy is just an incredible p*ckerhead," America thought to itself. "He's already lost his job as a Congressman for putting pictures of Little Anthony on the Internet. People were ready to let him be Mayor anyway, but now he's done it again. I mean, we all know guys that can't keep it in their pants, but at least they know better than to take a picture of it every time it pops out."

Legitimate criticism, sure, but consider this—Weiner just can't help himself. He is merely following the Social Law of Penis Size, which states that the timing and frequency of a man's revealing his penis size is in inverse proportion to his physical attractiveness, assuming the size of the penis is noteworthy. To illustrate:

Handsome, indifferent-looking and unattractive men with unexceptional penises—the penis is seldom mentioned.

Handsome guy with a big one—you'll hear about it on the first date.

Indifferent-looking guy with a big one—you'll hear about it in the first five minutes of the first date.

Butt-ugly guy with a boa constrictor in his BVD's--it's printed on his business card.

Or Tweeted to the world. That's Weiner's problem. Or consider this: Since the invention of the camera phone and the possession of one by everybody over the age of six, every teenager in the US has sent a picture of his or her genitals to some other teenager, which technically makes every single one of them simultaneously a producer, a distributor and a victim of child pornography. Weiner's just courting the youth vote.

Weiner's man-lumber did not stand alone last week, however. A Subway employee gained some viral notoriety by posting a picture of himself rubbing his guy gear on a freshly-baked Subway roll. This column has complained previously that Subway rolls don't taste like anything, but that is not the solution the writer had in mind. This Subway person could have plunged his male essence into the mayo for its fifteen minutes. He could have wrapped his bro bone in little Subway cheese triangles. But no; he chose to massage the taste of his package into the one item that has to be on a Subway sandwich—the roll.

Subway fired him, rather than change their corporate slogan from "Eat Fresh" to "Eat Me."

Still another man-unit in the news belonged to Lucien Greaves, who placed the essence of his dudeness on the tombstone of the deceased mother of the head of the Westboro Baptist Church, which tombstone is located in Lauderdale, Mississippi, as part of a "pink mass" which Greaves and his fellow Satanists, who all hail from New York, claim will turn that woman gay in the afterlife. This could be regarded as a favor, if it is in fact ontologically possible; eternity is a long time and switching up sexualities is bound to pass some of it.

The local cops in Lauderdale aren't thinking theologically, however; they've issued an arrest warrant for Lucien for indecent exposure. He's escaped back to New York ahead of the law and the extradition of him and the leading citizen of his trousers back to Mississippi is considered unlikely. The authorities in Mississippi are said to merely wish to discourage copycat crimes, apparently afraid that every hipster in Brooklyn would otherwise now want to make a pilgrimage south to desecrate a Dixie grave-marker by waving his man-wand over it.

Speaking of Brooklyn, that is where our final briefly famous dipstick hails from. They had a "Brooklyn's Smallest Penis" contest, and somebody actually came. And won. Nick Gilronan took home the bragging rights, such as they are, selfishly ignoring, in the glow of his sudden celebrity, the likelihood that the guy who really has the most microscopic man-worm in that borough probably never even heard of the contest. That guy spends every night at home, snorting fat lines of raw Enzyte off his glass-topped coffee table while scouring the Internet for some pneumatic device that will magnify him to the size of Nick Gilronan.

And he's not voting for Weiner. 

Here in San Diego our mayor is under attack for what is apparently a long history of groping women. The mayor, who is seventy and divorced, has been indulging in his hobby since he was a Congressman, a job he held for ten terms. He specializes in fanny-patting, doorway-blocking and what several of his victims called "the headlock," a maneuver during which the mayor grabs a woman by the neck and drools all over her face.

These and various other smooth moves have been employed in a serial fashion by His Honor on a navy rear admiral, a dean at San Diego State University and his own communications director, along with others. Despite being urged to resign, the Mayor has instead sentenced himself to two weeks of intensive therapy.

Yep, it's ass-grab rehab for Bob Filner.  It's going to take two weeks of intensive therapy for him to figure out that you should only fondle a woman's buttocks if she makes it clear she would enjoy that sort of attention. Just palming random hiney does not make you more popular with the girls. Quite the opposite. Frankly, you should have figured this out by the time you were seventy, Mr. Mayor. Right now, you're just another unnecessary proof that you can't be too stupid to have a successful political career here in America.

I can save you two weeks here, Bob, if you'll just pay attention. A woman who wants you to touch her gives off certain signs. She smiles. She lowers her eyelids. She stands closer to you than she has to. Her whole body becomes a signal that she wants to be moved in on. Most guys have figured this out before they reach the age of fifty or sixty. You, sir, were apparently riding the short school bus while the rest of us learned how to initiate a physical relationship legally. It is definitely time for you to stop relying on your instincts. They're faulty, and it's too late for you to learn the more subtle cues. At this point in your life and career, you should just remember and obey just one rule when it comes to gripping booty:

If she grabs your ass first, then it's ok to grab hers.

Simple, right? Okay, on to the doorway-blocking thing. There's a certain age at which a male should stop using this particular flirtation method, and that age is 15. That's one followed by a five. I'm serious, Bob. If you're old enough to have a driver's license, you're old enough to let the girls go through any doorway they want, anytime they want to go. If you don't, it's creepy. Might even be downright rapey.

The "headlock" move? Nobody enjoys that, Bob. If God or Darwin wanted people to have their necks suddenly seized and their faces licked, dogs would have arms.

Are we clear here? Then let's go, Mr. Mayor. Go out there to the political wars and fight! Fight for what's right for San Diego. Keep you head focused for battle and your hands to yourself and you'll be fine. Go get 'em, Bob!

If I was actually on your team, I'd slap you on the butt.

I was wandering through the vegetable aisles of my local supermarket the other day when I suddenly noticed I was sniffling back tears. I was alarmed. Was I being pepper-sprayed, I thought, or abruptly undergoing male menopause? Then I realized that the supermarket was playing Adele on its shopping soundtrack.

Adele, for those of you who never leave the house, is a white British pop singer who sounds exactly like a black American soul singer when she belts out one of her many hit tunes, all of which have to do with her sorrow at being left by a man. Adele always takes the high road when her heart is squished by yet another ungrateful troll. She moves on nobly, building a memorial to the love that might have been with lyrics like:

"Never mind, I'll find someone like you
I wish nothing but the best for you too
Don't forget me, I beg you"

And:

"The scars of your love, they leave me breathless
I can't help feeling
We could have had it all"

Never lyrics like this:

 "Hit the road, Jack,
And don't you come back no more."

Or like this:

"I'll be waiting under the steps for you when you come home,
With a .45 in one hand and a machete smeared with excrement in the other,
You lying, ungrateful, faithless, diseased, unemployed , emotionally  crippled
Man-whore who deserves to die."

That's why I feel safe in making this offer, Adele. I will break up with you. You have to realize that this run of good luck can't continue. Sooner or later you will find a man that wants to stay by your side until the end of time. From your pictures I can tell you're a pretty billionairess, young, a trifle zaftig maybe, but there are plenty of guys who like that. Maybe you do have peculiarities that turn some men off, like insisting on wearing oven mitts when you are forced to touch any other person's skin or sleeping in a raincoat. Don't despair. You're a superstar. You'll find someone anyway.

And then your career will be over. That's why you need to have me break up with you. No matter how much you shower me with gifts—cars, clothes, jewelry—whatever you can afford after you pay those confiscatory British taxes—I will leave you. I promise. I'll make it your fault, too. If you quit touring to be alone with me, I'll say you're suffocating me. If you circle the globe putting on shows so you can afford to buy me castles, I'll say you're neglecting me. If we have sex at a torrid rate, I'll say you're too demanding. If you slack off in satisfying me, I'll accuse you of being frigid. I'll do it all in a wry, sensitive, witty, intelligent way, too, so that you'll realize that I am the only man you could possibly ever love, but that for some ineffable reason, I find you sadly loathsome. Or that I have another girlfriend. Which I do. And I'll promise to leave her for you. Then I won't.

Already you're thinking I'm the perfect man for you, right? My arms are wide open, Adele. Take that future full of more Grammy Awards out of them now, before I fold them and walk away coldly. You made me cry, girl.

It's only fair I should return the favor.

Ken Cuccinelli, currently running as the Republican  candidate for Governor of Virginia has made reinstating Virginia's Crimes Against Nature law, which forbids all Virginia citizens from having oral sex with one another, part of his campaign platform.

As when Florida finally succeeded in banning sex with goats, this progressive legislation is long overdue. It's been common knowledge for years that Virginians are lousy at oral sex. No one would actually want to get oral sex from a resident of the state. This statute just formalizes what the rest of the nation already knows: if you're in Virginia and craving oral sex, or "noggin," as it is informally known, you had better get in your wheels and start counting down those mileage markers on the interstate. Maryland, Kentucky and North Carolina all offer succor to the pilgrim after oral bliss, and also better firecrackers.

What accounts for the lack of oral talent in Virginia? Legend has it that Grant told Lee at Appomattox that in addition to giving up the Confederacy, the South was going to be required to refrain from oral sex as part of the surrender, and then passed out drunk before he could tell the Confederate commander he was just kidding. Lee gave the news to Jefferson Davis, who said, like the rest of the defeated rebels, "Intercourse that! Those damn Yankees aren't going to keep the South off its knees! What, are they going to have some kind of sex police?" and oral sexing continued in the rest of Dixie, but in Virginia, the idea of sex police apparently appealed to many of the citizens and most of all to Ken Cuccinelli. As Attorney General he fought against the overturning of the Crimes Against Nature law by some daft judge who thought Virginians who wanted to have oral sex should be allowed to. The judge, a Virginia resident as well, wrote "They need the practice," in his ruling.

Cuccinelli himself insists that if he gets his way as far as keeping the bj a nay-nay in VA, he will not enforce the law, out of respect for the personal privacy that he does not really believe you should have. This is the like strapping someone in an electric chair and telling him to trust you not to turn on the juice. People convicted under the law would become registered sex offenders, with all the problems that entails—being on a public list, having to triangulate a place to live that is at least a thousand yards from any church, school or liquor store and telling all their neighbors that they were convicted of committing an oral sex act.

Of course, in Virginia, that actually might make them more popular.

In Boston, if you are an atheist, you can now attend Sunday services that do not feature worship of a Deity. The hour long service features homilies, songs and inevitably, a collection plate. The ceremonies are presided over by a "humanist chaplain." Atheist hymns, a category of music of which I was completely unaware up to this point, are sung, the choruses of which are presumably mumbled unmusically along to by non-worshippers who are singing-challenged, just as in a regular church full of white people.

Here is a sample lyric, according to CNN:

“I don't believe in a great power to say thank you to, but that won’t take away from my gratitude.”

I realize it's a long life nowadays, if you're lucky enough to be gifted with good health and not accident-prone, and all of us engage in our share of utterly pointless activities to pass the time, but this sentiment takes the atheist church bake sale cake. Gratitude to whom? I hope not the person who tried to teach this individual to write song lyrics that made sense. Are we talking about gratitude to a random universe whose conditions are merely accidentally and temporarily favorable to our existence? I guess you can say "thank you" for that, but don't expect to hear "You're welcome" in return.

As the author of one of the few atheist parables ever written and thus possibly a future contributor to atheist liturgy, I should be more sanguine about atheist church, but I don't hold out much hope for it. Promoters of atheist services (this particular one is held, in slavish imitation of conventional Christian church, on a Sunday) fail to realize that that most of us who have converted to non-belief were originally motivated to do so by our distaste for attending church. At least the Catholic ones were, and I am one of them. I had Catholic school inflicted upon me as well as the Catholic religion. One of the features of Catholic school was that we were usually dragged off to a special Mass by our kid selves at least once a week. This was the old school, jumping-jack Catholic Mass that required an intimate knowledge of when to sit, stand and kneel, enforced by nuns with rulers ready to wap the bottoms of the non-compliant. It was worse than sitting in school, a foretaste of the Hell in which most of us were regularly promised future incarceration.

Sunday Mass with your parents was different but hardly more pleasant. It was longer, for one, since it involved a nearly endless, incomprehensible-to-child ears homily by the priest. The nuns were there, too, and while they didn't whack us in front of our parents, if we slipped up by squirming in our pews or failing to perform the required Catholic aerobics smoothly, they shot us daggers from their steely nun eyes, laser-like stares that said Hold still, you little sin-ball.

The gist of Catholic theology at the time was that while only Catholics were eligible to go to Heaven, precious few of them actually did, owing to the fact that following nearly any natural impulse was a mortal sin. I decided that the odds weren't worth playing, and I quit. Maybe I would have hung in longer had I not been subjected to a hundred services a year when I was a child. There's the real danger in atheist church. You force your kid to go to it every week, I guarantee he or she is going to rebel against it, and shame you by growing up to be a raging Presbyterian.

Atheists should have barbecues, not services, well-fueled by alcohol and provided with plenty of roasted meat in honor of the cave-ancestors from which we all evolved. Dirty jokes and possibly wives should be swapped and the entertainment should consist of mindless music concerning sex and lecherous swaying that passes for dancing.

Of course, Catholic barbecues often consist of exactly the same things. God bless 'em.

Pizza vs. quesadilla, burger vs. burrito--these are the weapons in the international flab struggle. Can America regain the top spot?

In another blow to American prestige, this country has now been relegated to second place on the list of the world's fattest countries. In a shocking development, Mexican citizens have now stealthily chowed their way past their fellow North American overeaters to claim the ring of being the planet's foremost lardasses.

The good news? It's not by much. At least according to the United Nations, which gathers the data on planetary gluttony, Mexico is only ahead by a couple of meaty sandwiches dripping with mayo and a plate or two of fried wings. There's no need for an expensive crash program to bulk America back up by putting candy bar machines back in middle schools or rehabilitating Paula Deen. We could easily be back in first after a normal Thanksgiving weekend. Just remember when you're gobbling that extra slice of pie or having a milkshake instead of a diet soda with your burger, you're doing it for your country.

Still, you've got to compare it to other moments when the USA suffered an unexpected international humiliation, like when we lost the America's Cup after a couple hundred years of owning it, or got Sputnik shot up over our heads in the last century. Doubt has been cast upon American exceptionalism, and the US must rally itself. A line has been drawn, not in the sand, but across the face of every chocolate cheesecake and cheese-stuffed pizza crust in the land. We must face this quesadilla and chile relleno fueled challenge in our own native way, by putting bacon in every sandwich and whipped cream in every coffee drink, until once again we rule the scales of Earth.

Or we could just ignore it, like we did the America's Cup thing. After all, who's collecting these statistics? The United Nations, that's who. Apparently not content with failing to stop any wars worth having and producing treaties that no one wants to sign, the UN is now trash-talking international body mass indexes. Other countries on the top ten list are ones no one would have suspected of harboring large numbers of fat citizens—Syria, Iraq and Libya, to name three. You thought those people all wore man-dresses and burqas for religious reasons but apparently it's to conceal their flabby tummies and dimpled thighs. Also they demonstrate helpfully that being shot at doesn't depress your appetite.

The good thing about the list of fattest countries is that Americans who are suspicious of the UN can now relax when they see black helicopters in their skies and blue-helmeted soldiers in their driveways. They're not here to confiscate our guns, or to implement Agenda 21--they're just here for our weigh-in.

In other developments, retailer Target has been the subject of scorn for putting out a memo stating, among other things, that Mexicans do not always wear sombreros and do not always eat tacos. This memo was directed at Target's middle managers, whom Target apparently doubts are capable of figuring out which side of a taco to hold upright. I would like to see other memos offering guidance to Target managers. I feel certain they would include such titles as Some Guidelines for Distinguishing Your Ass from a Hole in the Ground or Finding Your Butt with Both Hands-A Step-by-Step Procedural.

I travel to Mexico frequently and I can assure you that there are more sombreros worn at drunken, offensively-themed frat parties than in the entire country of Mexico. Mexicans hardly ever wear sombreros, unless they are in a mariachi band and are actually playing at Disneyland.

They do eat tacos, though. But so do we. Bring us a platter of them, and let the competition begin.

The political season is never over for my Republican friend, veteran political operator Joe Redstate. While the rest of us enjoy this all-too-brief interregnum between electoral frenzies, Joe is constantly plotting paths to glory for his beloved GOP. He was so excited about his latest plan to best the Democrats that he had to share it with me over the weekend.

"We call it the Denial Majority Project. Forget appealing to various scary, hard-to-understand minority groups and chicks. All we have to do is forge a coalition of deniers amounting to 50.01% of the vote and we rule. Again. And everybody's in denial about something."

I'm not going to argue with you there, Joe, but I'm not seeing how you can make denial a uniquely Republican attribute.

"Are you kidding, dude? We're nearly halfway there. We OWN the global warming deniers. And because the Republican Party is the party of the big tent, we accommodate the beliefs of all factions of  global warming denying—the ones that think global warming is real, but deny it's caused by burning fossil fuels so they can continue to drive mammoth SUV's without feeling guilty about it, and the ones who think it doesn't exist because it keeps snowing sometimes, and, most importantly, the feisty free-thinkers who believe that just because modern scientists invented every convenience we enjoy and every device that makes our easeful modern lives possible doesn't mean they're entitled to tell us something we don't want to hear."

Those people are an electoral force to be reckoned with, Joe, but I'm not sure they're a majority.

"That's why we keep adding on other deniers. Take the rape pregnancy deniers. Whether they believe that there's some biological process by which raped women don't get pregnant, or they simply have faith that God grabs every rapist's sperm by the tail and yanks it out of the rape victim's egg personally, they are welcome in the Republican Party."

I'm not sure there are enough of those guys to make a legitimate electoral difference.

"Could be enough to make a difference in a crucial swing state, though. But we have more. To the Gay is Innate deniers, we say welcome to the Republican club. To we Republicans, gay will always be a choice, or at least something we can blame on screwed-up, Democratic style parenting or "recruiting" by insidious gay forces. It's certainly not something biological."

What, so people "choose" a sexual orientation that can result in vicious persecution or even execution at the worst, and at best guaranteed bullying and social ostracization? Why would they do that?

"I don't know. Why do Mexicans choose to be Mexican, to cite a similar example? It would be much easier on them if they had chosen to be Americans, because then we wouldn't be agitating to kick them out of the country. We Republicans aren't saying we have all the answers. We don't want all the answers. We just want enough of them to win elections."

Joe, I thought the Republicans were going to quit being the Party of Stupid. This sounds like you're re-embracing boundless idiocy.

"Well, I absolutely deny that."

Mahalo to Donny "The Other Dude" Ferris, who doesn't think I skewer Republicans nearly enough, for this post idea.

It was a long and cheerful 4th of July weekend for most of us this year, with this implacably dated holiday falling, to America's immense gratitude, on a Thursday, making the Fifth of July a holiday, too, as well as a beverage suggestion. Ninety-nine percent of Americans enjoyed five nights and four days of rollicking, vaguely patriotic partying.

The remainder write for Slate Magazine.  This venerable publication, perhaps in an effort to see if anyone was actually reading it over the holiday, published separate articles attacking barbecues, flip-flops, fireworks and pie. I don't know how many Americans actually dialed up Slate on their iPads while attending a barbecue, setting off fireworks in their flip-flops and eating pie to discover they were being scorned by Slate. I just hope I wasn't the only one.

To be honest, the barbecue article wasn't so much anti-barbecue as blithely uninformed. Will Oremus tells us that the practice of cooking outdoors "spread in the first half of the nineteenth century." I am practically certain that it was earlier than that. The practice of cooking meat over an open fire goes back to the invention of fire, if not quite as far back as the invention of meat. So the article contained some factual errors, but wasn't actually dismissive of barbecuing.

Not so Dana Stevens regarding flip-flops."Your Flip-Flops Are Grossing Me Out" is the aggressive headline on her diatribe. Ms. Stevens does not wish to see us slipping around town in this most convenient of summer footwear, going as far as to describe the flop, and by extension the wearer, as "lazy and lacking in character."

This gratuitous insult is calculated to offend any flip-flop aficionado, but is especially wounding to any Hawaiian, of which I am a former one, since the flip-flop is the Hawaii state shoe. We call them "slippers" instead of flip-flops. We don't need to distinguish them from little booties worn to protect the feet when first placing them on the cold floor in the morning, since we don't have cold floors in Hawaii. I remember the words of the wise Hawaiian who first counseled me to obtain a pair of flip-flops. I had decided going to the beach barefoot was a good idea and was hopping painfully across the superheated black macadam of Kalakaua Avenue en route. He looked at me and said earnestly "You need buy da kine rubbah slippah, brah."

And so I did, and wore them proudly, on all occasions, as Hawaiians tend to do. I advise Dana Stevens to stay away from the place. And Nathan Heller can stay away from my picnic table, after describing pie as "gloppy, soggy and un-American." Here's a piece of celery, Nathan. Stick it in your pie-hole and go sit somewhere else, and to hell with your health-minded nanny-state suggestions of tortes and tarts instead.

But David Weigel takes the cake, pie, tortes and tarts by headlining hisanti-fireworks screed "A Waste of Gunpowder and Sky." Wrong. Fireworks are what you have to take your children to see on the 4th, and your reward is the look of shiny wonder on their little faces that is only replicated on Christmas Day, and you have to spend more on toys than David Weigel spent on his vasectomy to see it then. On the Fourth it's free. That's a deal.

The Fourth is the most patriotic of our holidays and I enjoy every minute of it in spite of suspecting that I am less patriotic than many people. I lightly resent being forced to participate in public displays of nation-worship and personally think that baseball would be the same game with or without the Star Spangled Banner being played in front of it. Whenever somebody says "America is the greatest country on earth" to me, particularly if it's some yick-a-doo who's never been further than twenty miles from the backwoods hollow in which he was born, I always answer "How would you know? Have you been to all the other ones?" And everybody's level of patriotism varies from day to day; nobody stands by the mailbox and sings "God Bless America" when they get a notice from the IRS.

But when those fireworks are blazing in the Fourth sky, I can't help thinking of the rockets' red glare and the men who fought desperately beneath it to found this outsize country. And I really think fireworks should be just that, just fireworks, full of sparkle and boom, but nowadays fireworks technology permits the pyrotechnician to shoot hearts, smiley faces and geometric shapes into the air. I was watching this year's fireworks with my son, as family tradition still orders, even though he's legally old enough to drink now, when another strangely-shaped form burst into the night sky.

"What's that one?" my son asked.

"I think it's supposed to be a 44-ounce soda," I replied. And I knew I was in America.

In honor of our nation's founding I, like many other Americans, will drink and burn meat. Only I will do it on the worst barbecue grill in America, depicted here. I brought it to my Significant Other's back yard about three years ago, right after she gave away the burnished aluminum, six burner beauty that was sitting there to her brother, forcing me to swipe this thing from the discard pile at my condo complex. It wasn't new then, but it looked a hell of a lot better than it does now.

It has sat uncovered through two rainy winters. My special lady won't let me cover it with a three-dollar blue tarp because she doesn't  want to have to look at a blue tarp in her yard. She said she wanted to buy a regular, kind of olivey-colored grill cover for it for aesthetic reasons. She said this, but she didn't follow through on it.

Consequently, the grill has been losing its battle with rain and the atmosphere. It is now just a heap of rust out of which a raw flame can be coaxed. When I need to grill, here's the process I follow:

I turn on the gas and light the grill. This is the most fraught part of the operation, because the Little Clicky Thing That Lights the Grill has been useless for longer than Paris Hilton. I currently have an extended lighter, which makes the ignition process safer than other methods I have used in the past to avoid the unpleasant smell of burnt knuckle hair, like lighting some newspaper and thrusting it towards the burner, or merely throwing matches at it. This last method works sometimes because the burner, which once consisted of a solid, shiny metal pipe with little homes punched in it at disciplined intervals, out of which flames would obediently pop, has long since turned to a corroded half-pipe from which irregular tongues of fire twist and leap.

Next, the grill has to be heated, so that it can be cleaned and sterilized. The cleaning consists of a few desultory scrapes with the wire brush pictured above, a tool which is racing the grill to achieve a state of utter decomposition. This knocks the few remaining fragments of the piece of meat I barbecued last off the grill onto the patio, making the dog's day. Then I just let the thing heat up to kill all remaining microbial life. Really, it's safe. I figure anything that can survive 600 degrees and still kill me would have crawled upstairs while I was sleeping and done so long ago.

Often, while the closed grill is heating up, a dramatic jet of flame shoots out one or more of the holes in the side, making it look from a distance like an astronomical wonder being photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. These ancillary flames threaten to ignite my neighbor's wooden fence at times, but so far she has ignored my suggestion that she move her fence.

Now I'm ready to cook. The eternal question for any griller is whether to sear the meat quickly on the grills themselves or to cook it slowly on the hanging rack? I have solved this dilemma for myself by letting the grills oxidize more or less completely. I have thrown away one, on the principle that if you have two things that are useless and disgusting, the prudent thing is just to discard one of them. Otherwise I wouldn't have any hot filthy metal on which to burn my hand if a food item were to fall off the rack and I felt the need to quickly pluck it from the flames.

I am not one of those grillers who need to stare at his food while it cooks, spatula in hand, ready to flip and shove innocent meat items brutally around in the flames. I close the lid and enjoy an adult beverage while I cook. The state of the grilling can easily be ascertained by the color of the smoke arising form the grill. If it's light and fragrant, the color of we've-elected-a-Pope smoke, all is well. If it turns a more somber hue, you'd better lift the lid and let it cool a tad. If all of a sudden you glance over and see, while you were involved watching your baseball team score six runs in one long and enjoyable inning, the smoke has turned black and fulminating, don't even bother opening the lid.

Turn off the gas, apologize to your neighbor and order Chinese.

God appeared to me the other day, again. He's an easy Being to recognize. I had just come back in from dumping the empty shells of a twelve pack in the recycle bin when I saw He had taken up a place on my couch.

"My Lord!" I exclaimed.

"You got that right," He said. He looked around. "You really haven't done much with this place."

"If you would let me win the lottery, as I often beseech you," I began, by way of excuse, but He cut me off. "Don't start in on Me with the lottery. Only erections get prayed for more than lottery wins."

"I'd like to point out, I really don't bother You about the erection thing."

"Give it a couple more years," He advised me. "I came to give you the Word on gay marriage."

"I don't mean to be disrespectful, my Deity, but couldn't you reveal Your Will to somebody people actually pay attention to, instead of me? Like Mike Huckabee. He's already told everybody that "Jesus wept" when the Supreme Court let gay marriage be legal."

"Jesus wept, all right, but that's because He gave Me Miami and the points for Game Seven of the NBA championship. Sometimes He forgets that I KNOW EVERYTHING when We start talking about who's gonna cover the spread. It had nothing to do with gay marriage."

"So you are going to forgive America for legalizing gay marriage?"

"It's a little more complicated than that. First of all, I don't forgive whole nations anymore. I know that's how I operated back in the day, letting those damn Israelites off the hook time and again, but My judgments are all individual now. My surveillance methods are more sophisticated these days. It's like that NSA thing you Americans have, only divinely more powerful. Not only can I intercept individual phone calls and emails, but every single human thought and deed is subject to My inspection."

"That's a lot of stuff to monitor."

"Oh, I don't listen to all of it. Certain algorithms—actually, Up There, We call them Sin-gorithms—alert Us to suspicious traffic. Then We can pull up the file and see if there was actual sinful activity. The filters are very sophisticated. We can't be bothered having the alarms go off every time some guy starts staring at a picture of Kate Upton's boobs."

"Oh, wow, so that's not a sin?"

"Well it is, technically, but I don't make a big deal out of it. Lucky for you, I might point out."

"Getting back to the gay marriage thing..."

"Oh, yeah. First off, a lot of Americans still hate gay marriage anyway, so they don't need to be forgiven. Secondly, I'm not sure I'm really against it. I invented gay in the first place..."

"You did? Well, that settles a lot of arguments, but why?"

"A couple of the archangels talked me into it. You should have seen humanity before I did. Zero fashion sense. And nobody could carve a decent statue. People were praying to these ugly lumps of clay and rocks, thinking they looked like Me. Gay fixed all that."

"But in the Bible, you come out strongly against gay."

"Yeah, I know that's in there."

"And the Bible is your divinely inspired Word."

"Well, you know they'll anything put on a book jacket to help it sell. I was actually more of an executive producer on that project. Sure, I put in the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, but I let the junior writers do a lot of the filler stuff. Didn't realize they could be so creative. That's where the gay thing started. I wasn't consulted. I was a little browned off about it, and also the part where you can't eat lobster or bacon, but the Book had already gone to press."

"You could put out a revised edition."

"Like I haven't tried? Every time I appear to somebody and pass along some notes for a rewrite, they end up getting stoned to death or burned at the stake. Speaking of notes, you taking any?"

"My Lord, you don't want me?? Honestly, I'm not even sure my life insurance is paid up."

"Relax, man. I'm just yanking your chain. You're right. Nobody pays attention to you. I'm just killing time until Mike Huckabee wakes up from his nap. Then I'll appear to him."

"So tomorrow he'll start preaching acceptance?"

"I doubt it. Whenever I appear to him, Mike always seems to think I'm a hallucination brought on by eating too much dessert. Chances are good he'll just swear off pecan pie with pistachio ice cream again instead of changing his tune."