Shooting the Hooch… and here’s hoping the clerk behind the counter is named The Hooch

While it sounds like it could be a lot of fun, if anyone ever suggests Shooting the Hooch, you shouldn't think twice before absolutely refusing to go under any circumstances. If you make the unfortunate decision to do it "because we've never done it before and it sounds like so much fun," you should know that there are many ways to spend a day that would result in more fun. Among them: using your feet to judge a contest to see who can drop an anvil the hardest, eating a bushel of bananas right before paying a naked visit to a hungry mosquito farm (which incidentally seems to be my back yard), or having open heart surgery.

The Hooch refers to the Chattahoochee River, a 430-mile river that flows through Georgia, Alabama and Florida. Shooting refers to yet another preferable activity you should consider, as long as you’re doing it to yourself.

Nonetheless, we chose to make a go of it. Our second mistake, and one that I as a Jew should have known to avoid, was departing from Helen, Georgia, a Bavarian-themed town that you’d swear was right out of a Krofft brothers television show. As we were getting ready to pay the three dollar fee at Helen Tubing, the clerk recommended that we purchase a stick, which was, for all intents and purposes, a stick. She told us that we’d “probably find it useful to push off if you get stuck on any rocks.” I reluctantly forked over another five bucks for the stick and we were on our way.

We boarded a school bus and began to make our way to ‘the start,’ or as we Yankees call it, ‘the dry riverbed.’ Ten minutes later we got off the bus (mistake number three), we each took a heavy duty water tube – hot pink – and we set off for a three hour tour that didn’t result in the kind of comedy we’ve all come to expect from such a tour.

Judging solely by the river’s average depth during our tubing trip, the Hooch contains, in total, approximately six gallons of water. It also contains about the same number of rocks as the moon, the Kuiper Belt and Snooki’s head combined. The five dollar stick did come in handy, but only as a weapon I used to beat out my aggression on the river, the rocks, the pink tube with which I was saddled, and anything else I could find that didn’t start its day alive. On at least one occasion, I also thought about how I could have used it to beat the clerk who had the temerity to use the word “if” when explaining the likelihood of our getting stuck on rocks.

In any case, I feel it’s my civic duty to provide all my readers with the mother of all public service announcements. Here’s a brief, but complete, synopsis of what you can expect when taking part in this barbaric activity:

Step 1) Float for 20 feet, get stuck on rocks,
Step 2) Climb out of tube,
Step 3) Pull tube for 300 yards, slip and fall often, jabbing yourself in the ribs with the end of the five dollar stick, all the while scraping major bodily joints on sharpest possible rocks,
Step 4) Climb back on tube, flip over backward, repeat step three twice, then skip to step five,
Step 5) Carefully climb back on tube, float for 20 feet, get stuck on rocks, hopelessly try to push off rocks with five dollar stick,
Step 6) Curse whosever stupid idea this was, climb out of tube, spend no less than 60 seconds beating tube with five dollar stick,
Step 7) Pull tube for 300 yards, slip and fall often, jabbing yourself in the ribs with the end of the five dollar stick while issuing expletive-filled diatribe to all within earshot,
Step 8) Climb back on tube, flip over backward again, ask rhetorical question about who would ever think this was a good idea,
Step 9) Climb back on tube, float for 20 feet…

Repeat steps 1-9 for approximately three hours.

In spite of a few dozen scrapes and sprained joints we did manage to make it to the end of the run. In retrospect, spending three hours splashing ourselves in the face with ice cold water and systematically dropping to our knees and elbows on sharp gravel would have achieved the same result in a cheaper and more pleasurable way.

After gladly surrendering our tubes, I thought about the lessons I learned. First and foremost, never participate in any activity whose name suggests something so exquisitely awesome and fun that you just have to do it no matter what (cruising the Inside Passage also makes this list). Second, if you do choose to ever Shoot the Hooch, make sure to bring a psychiatrist, a stick and 50 million gallons of water. And third, if you happen to see me there, beat me with the stick before I pay my three dollars.

Headline Hogs: Atlanta Edition

Every city has something special it’s known for: Seattle has the Space Needle, Starbucks and grunge rock; Chicago has deep dish pizza and Al Capone; New York has celebrities like Regis and the Naked Cowboy; and Atlanta gets stuck with all the social misfit headline hogs.

You name the crazy headline, I guarantee someone from Atlanta is involved – most likely Ted Turner. Ted is one crazy old coot – and Atlanta’s most successful businessman. He is both wealthy beyond imagination and certifiably insane. He has a habit of saying downright ludicrous things such as “Jimmy Carter was a great President”; he launched a campaign to get rid of some harmless fish in a Montana lake just because he wanted different fish in it; and he casually donated $1 billion to the United Nations because “They do good stuff.” But perhaps the most telling insane character trait he possesses is the fact that, according to Wikipedia, he has always had a special place in his heart for professional wrestling.

But Teddy isn’t the only headline hog in Atlanta. Just this week, 44-year-old Atlanta resident Richard Jewell made headlines for his untimely death. Jewell, for those of you who don’t remember, was wrongly accused of planting a bomb in Atlanta’s Olympic park in 1996. Unfortunately for Jewell, Ted Turner’s CNN led the media charge in eviscerating him.

Fortunately, when he was cleared, Turner extended an olive branch to Jewell in the form of two obstructed-view, upper reserved level tickets for any Atlanta Braves weekend day game, played on a Wednesday night, where the starting pitcher is knuckleballer Phil Neikro, who won a team record 23 games in 1967.

Another of our headline hogs stole the spotlight from Julia Roberts to become the first one Americans think of when they hear the term ‘runaway bride.’ Proud Georgian Jennifer Wilbanks is the perennially surprised-looking woman who faked her own disappearance in 2005 just so she wouldn’t have to marry her fiancé, John Mason. Wilbanks said she was “scared to marry John Mason because she is afraid of an imperfect world” - which she would see really, really vividly. Incidentally, Wilbanks was also cast as an understudy in the Gwinnett County Players’ production of ‘The King and I.’ (Zing!)

While no Richard Gere, Mason’s less-than-ravishing Southern looks and questionable sensibilities make you wonder whether her eyes are bigger than his brain. He vowed that he would remain with Wilbanks even after she made national headlines for running from him. Even the Dalai Lama would take a spot in line to beat some sense into this idiot.

Last year, Wilbanks and Mason officially broke up, after which she promptly sued him for $500,000, which includes a share of royalties from a book deal he never would have gotten without her story. If she wins, I just hope she uses the money wisely and hires a plastic surgeon to take her ‘surprised’ facial expression down a few notches to something like ‘really interested.’ As a side note, Ted Turner sued her for “not staying on the lam long enough” and for “robbing CNN of valuable redundant news reports.”

If there’s anything we’ve learned from TV programming over the years, it’s that a good medical thriller sells. Andrew Speaker, a.k.a. the TB guy, is another headline hog that calls Atlanta home. He’s also the target of a smear campaign by Ted Turner for drawing more attention to TB in Atlanta than he ever did with Turner Broadcasting. Speaker, as you may recall, is the newlywed who honeymooned in Europe Jason Bourne-style. He then flew back under the radar and crossed the U.S. border - all the while being infected with tuberculosis (which is widely known to be fairly harmless if you’re already dead).

When he found out about the severity of his illness, Speaker did what any rational person would do: he boarded a pressurized airplane full of people and pretended to be healthy for six hours. He did this because, as he claimed later, he had been fearful of dying if he didn’t return to America. Apparently, Speaker thought that ‘the Al Qaida method’ was infinitely better: Take out a whole airplane full of people instead of just dealing with your insanity by yourself.

After all this drama, it was later discovered that the tuberculosis strain Speaker actually had was just MDR, not XDR, which begs the question: Which satellite radio provider really is the best? I mean, one has Howard Stern, but the other has all the baseball programming. Decisions, decisions….

Now that I have first-hand experience with living and working in Atlanta and dealing with the locals on a regular basis, I’m beginning to understand why this town is such a hotbed of controversial headline hogs. Things are usually so slow and polite here that people, sooner or later, are bound to lose their minds - in the spirit of Michael Douglas in the movie ‘Falling Down.’ Case in point: it took precisely 7 hours and 43 minutes of living here before this transplanted New Yorker dropped his first F-bomb at a four-way stop sign where every polite participant insisted someone else go first. It’s no wonder why Atlanta needs some headline hogs to shake things up a bit.

Clearly, Atlanta is rife with insanity of all sorts. There are plenty of people doing plenty of stupid things here, and there’s no telling who the next big headline hog will be, or when their story will break. But a word of advice to those looking for the notoriety: No matter what you do, be prepared for Ted Turner to be crazier.

My Terrifying 30-Minute 3:00 a.m. Standoff

I'm the type of person who likes to do everything late at night. I pay the price when it's time to get up in the morning, but I'm a night owl who (who, who, who) loves to stay up late and really concentrate on what I'm doing with no other distractions. It's fantastic when there truly ARE no other distractions.

One recent night, I finally decided to hit the hay at about 2:45 a.m., but decided I'd be smart by taking my shower before bed – thereby maximizing sleep time when the later morning rolls around. I made my way upstairs into the bedroom and quietly moved, in the complete darkness, to the bathroom. Thus began what was to be the most terrifying night of my life to date.

As you know, we recently moved to the South. The cost of living is cheaper, the weather is better, and you really get maximum value for your money in terms of gross insect poundage. When I turned on the light in the bathroom, what I saw frightened me beyond compare. A palmetto bug the size of a traditional seedless hamburger bun skittered across the counter and parked itself right into the crevice between the sink faucet and the wall.

If you are unfamiliar with what a palmetto bug is, consider yourself lucky. Think: big, disgusting cockroach. Then think: hold big and shiny magnifying glass over said cockroach. Now, put the two images together and imagine that huge disturbing result sitting on your counter. In fact, it's such a large insect that you have to worry about how to best dispose of its guts when it's finally smashed. That, my friends, is the palmetto bug -- the most horrific, nasty-looking, vulgar insect that I've seen to date in Georgia.

Given his clearly pre-planned tactical position, and my complete and utter terror at seeing an insect this huge in my own living space, the clock began to tick on what became a late-night, thirty-minute standoff between bug and man.

In case you haven't yet realized, I am not a 'bug person'. I wince at the mere thought of them. If I encounter a standard-issue spider inside the house, for example, I will immediately find ANYTHING else to do – and exaggerate the importance of getting said thing done, rather than deal with the creepy crawler myself. (e.g., Me to wife: "Sorry, honey, can you get that spider? I'm, uh, working on solving the mystery of the den's light switch. I know it's been 15 years since anyone has seen it operate anything, but I think tonight - right now, in fact - seems high time for me to finally figure it out. Insect spray, by the way, is in the kitchen cabinet. Thanks honey.").

So, back to the horror of my recent run-in with the bug. This gargantuan, pre-historic, six-legged demon is taunting me from the counter, making my entire body convulse in fear. Add to that the realization that, not 10 feet away, lies my sleeping wife - oblivious to my being the main character in the horror movie being acted out on the other side of the wall. I could try to wake her up, I reason, and ask for her help. But my wife is not one to be happy when awakened in the middle of the night. My stomach tenses up more as I realize I have to actually take care of this myself. I recognize that if I try to kill this thing and fail, I will scream. But, if I try to kill it and am successful, I will probably scream anyway. And if said screams awaken my wife, she will surely unleash the Power of Grayskull on me.

As time passes, I literally stand frozen, part of me fearing for my life, another part of me wondering how I could possibly muster up the nerve to use the latest issue of Games magazine, found on top of the toilet tank, to smash this creature back to the hell from whence it came.

In an ideal world, I would have had a heavy clear container of some kind handy so I could just place it over the bug in question, and perhaps by some stroke of luck, God's most disturbing creature would asphyxiate by morning. The trick with this method is, you'd have to place a brick, a file cabinet or the living room couch on top of the container so that the bigger bugs can't simply walk across the room, dragging the container with them (picture the scene from the fine cultural phenomenon known as the television show "Cops" - where a hoodlum runs through yards until he finds a plastic kiddy pool to hide beneath. Then said hoodlum skitters across the yard to safety -- still under cover, pool and all). My palmetto bug seemed pretty capable of re-creating that scene based on the size of his pecs alone.

So, a few minutes have passed at this point, and I still find myself petrified and motionless, staring at my six-legged nemesis. It's at times like this when you tend to feel every little change in atmospheric pressure around your body. Every nerve ending in your body tickles with the fearful thought of something touching you, landing on you or crawling on you. This is what psychologists refer to as "a HUGE deal." I stand fearing for my life with that creepy feeling that something is on me.

As an aside, it is at this point when I relish the idea of someday going back to NY just so I can deal with insects of the right scale. Given their size here in Georgia, they should come with a warning, or be required to have a State-certified, onboard lighting safety system.

Back to the horror I'm living….

I'm so jumpy at this point, flinching and swatting at every part of my body which feels that ghastly tickle sensation. Then, there it is! On the back of my calf (side note: if you ever want to know what a palmetto bug probably feels like on the back of your calf, just take the corner of a paper towel and rub it gently on the area.)

So I just KNOW there's something touching my calf very lightly and I immediately freak out, swatting at this imagined thing as hard as I can – accidentally catapulting the decorative trash can clear across the bathroom in the process. RANG-TANG-TANG!!!!

So much for keeping quiet. The fancy metal trash can with the red flowers on the side sails across the floor and hits the side of the tub with a piercingly loud CLANG. Mental check on wife: still oblivious and sound asleep. Whew!

Taking account of the situation about 20 minutes in: I still have a stubborn mutant insect on my counter. There are now countless empty paper cups, wrappers, and other bathroom trash items strewn across the floor. I still have not managed to use the toilet or take a shower. And I have to be up for work in less than four hours. An increasingly impossible checklist to complete.

I finally get to a point where I need to release some of the 24 oz. of water I drank earlier in the evening. While the bug was comfortable under the cover of his secluded faucet, I knew I couldn't find a way to crush his spirit and his exoskeleton. I just couldn't find the guts to expose HIS – especially since I didn't have a clear shot. I finally had to make my move (away from the bug, but a move nonetheless). I relieve myself for what seems like just 15 seconds. When I came back over to check on my enemy's position, I find to my horror that the sonofabitch is GONE!

All that time - a half hour of complete insanity, and he disappears the second I turn my back! How did he know I was gone? I mean, I understand any animal in fear will take the easiest escape, but this is a palmetto bug. Last I heard, they don't have reasoning skills.

Now I start picking up things from the counter with my fingertips, peeking under them, and then flinging them across the room in fear that he could be hiding beneath or behind virtually anything. Now I'm completely freaked out because he's disappeared. I'm looking everywhere: ceiling, floor, walls. Nothing. Nowhere. He is gone. GONE!

In the meantime, the bathroom is completely ransacked. It's quite literally a reflection of my complete and utter failure to dispose of this demon bug in an efficient and tidy manner. The bathroom's about as much a mess as the dilemma in which I now find myself.

Now I have to try to figure out if I'm just giving up (which I kind of already did upon first seeing this disgusting insect), or if I should continue to look for him. I have several things against me:

• I clearly can't stand the sight of a bug,
• I have a huge mess to clean up now,
• I still need to take a shower,
• It's approaching 3:30 in the morning, and
• While I'd like to resolve the situation, I know that I firmly do not WANT to find this thing again.

Finally I decided the best course of action would be to take my shower in the kids' bathroom and to close the bathroom doors in the master bedroom. The logic of knowing that this pest came from outside the house to use my bathroom without the courtesy of asking does not enter my mind as I secure the bathroom door, knowing full well that he cannot possibly penetrate the one-inch gap between the floor and the bottom of the door.

My uneventful shower in the kids' bathroom was relaxing enough to get me into bed thinking hard about not thinking about the bug.

To add a bit of color to this story, I am not a small man. I have what some consider an imposing-tough-guy-native-New-Yorker look, and I came down to Georgia with no fear. The irony is that I was brought to my knees by a native Georgian less than half my size. It's got a similar storyline as the movie Deliverance, only this was scarier. The native in my story deserved a death sentence - if only because anyone with more than two legs who enters my house without an invite is entitled to die. Hey, I make the rules. I just can't believe what a liberal I am when it comes to actually enforcing them.

Because I lost this standoff, I will keep my eyes peeled, wondering what story that cockroach kin is telling HIS wife as he works his glutes on the elliptical machine. Bug: "I saw another one, Gladys. This time it was male, nearly naked, and swatting around the room like a woman."

The next time around I won't be so kind (yes I will), scared (um, not even fooling myself here), or willing to spend the time to wait for him to make the first move (right, like I'll be the one that takes the offensive). The next time around, I'll be able to finally live up to the macho version of the story that I told MY wife this time:

"Oh, it was no big deal, just a palmetto bug. I smashed it, flushed it and went back to bed."

The Bible Belt Loops North

I've officially been a Bible Belt resident for approximately two months. As long as I don't mind driving for 40 days and 40 nights to find a synagogue (and I don't), it's fine. What I left behind in New York was the melting pot of religion, culture, dining, acceptance, stress, costly parking, foul-smelling public transportation and skyscrapers that throw bricks off their faces at pedestrians like kids throw water balloons out a second-story window in the 'burbs. Boy do I miss it.

Anyway, last week confirmed my belief that it was a good idea that we moved when we did. While we (the new Southern 'we') have ownership of the Bible-thumping loonies, in a place where everyone and his brother is an ordained minister of some sort, New York is somehow paying the price for being so open.

Being really far from Kansas, Long Island isn't exactly the first place you think of when you hear the word tornado. However, this past week, Dorothy and the gang decided to pay Islip Terrace a visit. Truthfully, if Long Island did have a flat, plainsy, Kansas-like area, Islip Terrace is it. Islip Terrace – and the entire South Shore of Long Island, for that matter – is a barren wasteland of flatness, strip malls and slightly-too-expensive housing. We North Shore types only do two things on the South Shore: 1) go to concerts at Jones Beach, and 2) use it as a cut-through to get to the Belt Parkway.

Back to the point: Islip Terrace apparently did something to piss off Mother Nature. As the region experienced the most violent rainstorm of the past century, a handful of Islip Terrace residents got the rare opportunity to see Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt speed past to try to get their crystals into the vortex of the tornado that opened a hefty can of whoop-ass on the town. Trees three feet wide snapped as easily as Daniel-son's leg in the final scene of The Karate Kid; a shed became dislodged from its foundation and wound up fully in a neighbor's yard (imagine the scene: "See, Mike? I told you I'd get my sawzall back from you one way or another."); and cars experienced damage that I'm sure will be a bitch to explain to the insurance company ("Well, Mr. Adjustor… I can't REALLY explain why the interior of the Taurus is sprouting saplings.)

At least nobody was hurt, and more importantly, Mrs. Cheever's beloved, hand-made wooden tulips escaped unscathed, even as they sat in the window box outside her living room, next to the mammoth tree that took out the power lines that once delivered electricity to the entire town of Islip.

And then there was the rain. THE RAIN! Seeing the pictures of the flooding reminded me of the time I spent in China. China, it should be noted, is a third-world country. They have virtually no infrastructure, including proper drainage, to deal with many of the daily problems they are faced with. When it rained there, everything flooded big-time, and bicycle-ridden men were hard up to deliver food orders to the local Jewish population. (Cultural note: Chinese food in China isn't the same as in the U.S. They use normal containers – not those ridiculous square boxes with the rickety wire handles.) Ironically, after looking at the Long Island pictures, I found myself hungry about an hour later.

What's not so surprising about Long Islanders is that, as evidenced by the photos, they don't seem to care that other cars are literally floating away in several feet of water. There's always some jackass in a four-wheel-drive (usually some wussy-type truck like a Honda CR-V) who just knows his vehicle was made for this exact situation and guns it into the temporary river delta - only to be the next putz calling for help from his brother-in-law that lives nearby and has a boat. These are the same people who fail to realize that it doesn't matter how many wheels you have driving when you're on ice.

As I understand it, the Island has dried out somewhat, and everything is back to normal. Everything, that is, except the sandbox in the Lembeck's backyard, which is now full of wet sand because SOMEONE forgot to put the lid on it before it rained.

To add insult to injury, New York City decided that same day that it needed some attention and immediately exploded. Well, it exploded in midtown. Apparently, people walking through Manhattan aren't jittery enough about potential terrorism. No, the street decided to add to their daily anxiety by spontaneously exploding in the heart of rush hour. A non-terrorist explosion, it caused a powerful steam geyser to spray up into the air. Keep in mind, steam flows freely in the underbelly of the City. The Indians obviously never realized the potential in steam and decided to sell the entire island, Empire State Building and all, to the white man for a West Virginia state quarter, a few nylon fibers and a George Forman Grill.

As New York heals, many devout locals there are seeking help from the Bible to make sense of it all. If they are able to find peace and understanding through it all, more power to them. In the meantime, I have to go warm up my car. Rosh Hashana is coming in a short 52 days and I can't be late for services.

Waffle House

If you've driven through the South, you may have noticed that there is a Waffle House on virtually every corner. In suburban Atlanta alone, statistics show that there are more Waffle Houses than street lights.

I've never actually BEEN to a Waffle House, but I've seen more of them in the past two weeks than I saw snowflakes in the New York blizzard of '96. Now, I don't have anything against waffles; I rather enjoy a good waffle every now and then. I do, however, have something against gritty-looking, dingy, roadside roach motels that serve what some stereotypically classify as "food," and whose wait staff (I'm arbitrarily going out on a limb here) generally have more nipples than they have teeth.

Though I've tried my hardest to sway them, my kids are dying to go to a Waffle House. We have other options here, including IHOP, Denny's and Cracker Barrell (another place I've never been, but only heard good things about. Future blog entry, I'm sure), so why would we choose the grittiness of such an apparent roadside hazard whose food, and I'm guessing at this point, would probably cause me to experience the equivalent of labor pains? I'm just not sure I want to dine anywhere that requires me to kick off the gastronomic experience with a Maalox aperitif.

What's worse is that there are so many of these restaurants (term used loosely) here that the kids have actually started counting how many they see. This is not a good thing. I now have to listen to someone scream "WAFFLE HOUSE!!!!" every time we need to run to the market.

While I'm on the subject, I have a bone to pick... Was every Waffle House built in 1972? You look inside and it's like a scene out of Kubrick's 'A Clockwork Orange.' Big paper globe lights of every size, grease stains on the walls, polyester-clad wait staff. How did a chain of low-end eateries become so ubiquitous with that kind of decor? And, hey... has anyone ever heard the term 'corporate logo'???? I mean, it's one thing to have a single store and a low budget, but when you have 35,000 locations within a 10-square-mile area, I think you can afford to throw a few bucks at a design student for something more than non-descript letters on individual square backgrounds that Vanna White herself would be proud to turn. I've even heard that some Waffle Houses have Wi-Fi access!

I realize I'm new to the area, and that some of the local establishments in my old neck of the woods may have seemed questionable (The Shack, anyone?), but I'm pretty sure I won't be hitting a Waffle House anytime soon. Unless I can get the kids to agree to count something else. I know where there are a few Hooters around here.