Recently, my doctor told me that I have the glucose level of overripe sugar beet. Apparently, if I put one toe over the Vermont State line, I can legally be tapped and processed by the Log Cabin folks.

There is some irony in this diagnosis given that my ancestors grew sugar cane in Barbados.  And from the looks of those ancient photos filled with rotund bodies, they consumed mass quantities of it as well.

I knew something was wrong when black bears started tossing away their honeycombs and began stalking me. Wild pack animals were looking at me like I was a walking Snickers Bar.  And for swarms of mosquitoes, I was target practice and the body de jour.

Now I’m trolling the food aisles looking for anything that says “diabetic friendly.” This was my first mistake. I actually ate some sugar-free fudge and was immediately spot welded to the toilet for six hours.  Most of the approved foods (I am using that term loosely) taste like a mix between an old chalkboard eraser and styrofoam packing peanuts.

My food pyramid has been upended. Carbohydrates (we call them carbs in the biz) are monitored like Bernie Madoff walking the yard.  There are good carbs and bad carbs.  I happen to like the bad-boy carbs. Things like strudel, stuffing, pizza and pasta, candy corn, and anything Nabisco can stuff into a Newton – the very items that will put me into a coma.

No more Captain Crunch.  No more Dominos.  No more Oktoberfest binges with busty beer maids.  No more knocking the heck out of the Pillsbury Dough Boy while opening the buttermilk Grands. It’s basically a diet of protein and fat.  In other words, I am eating like a Neaderthal or John Madden.

Like B.B. King, I am stabbing my finger with lancets to get a reading.  It’s like performing a mini Hari kari on your digits.  Suddenly, I feel a kinship with Wilfred Brimley. I have grown an enormous mustache and have affected a surly, blunt demeanor.  If he's been off sugar and
carbs this long, no wonder he's surly.  

I don’t intend to walk lockstep into taste oblivion – I already have found something called indigestible carbs. It’s a loofah. Not so surprisingly, there's a secret brethren trying to turn cotton candy and pie crust into healthy proteins. Wish us luck. We're like Masons with candy bars.

It’s no longer “home sweet home.”  It’s “home low-glycemic home.” 

Hey, works for me.

The only remnants of that experience is a vintage Holiday Inn letter “M” which was also "W" and if tape was applied could stand in as a "Z" and  my collection of curious hotel postcards.  Now a  lesser rag than BakerMuse would probably pick on mom and pop motel postcards with a wagon wheel or bagpipe motif, but our stalwart staff is willing to take on the 5-star bigwigs.

Like the this famous Swiss hotel.  Apparently the Schweizerhof is still in business.  I don’t know why. This bell hop looks like he wants to make sure my papers are in order.  You can almost feel his heels clicking together as I am escorted to an interrogation room. 

Notice the lack of eye contact.  The well-oiled brim. This guy looks like he’s on the payroll of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the James Bond super villain and official lap for white Persian cats.

What is even more frightening is that this postcard is over 60 years old but they still proudly use the image on the hotel web site.  

Here’s one for the Repulse Bay Hotel in Hong Kong. It’s not exactly a badge of distinction to tell people, “I’m staying at the Repulsive.” It may be the only hotel where nobody steals the towels. In fact, the guests pilfer towels from other hotels to bring back to the Repulse so they won't be mocked at while drying off at pool side.

I am pleased they added China after Hong Hong. Otherwide we would have mixed it up with Hong Kong in New Jersey.

According to hotel lure, Major C.G.R. Ringer didn’t want to give up one of his initials, so instead he gave Nairobi a grand hotel in 1904 as a Christmas present.

Sadly, what Nairobi really wanted for the holidays was a central government, clean running water and a "Slanket" or two.

The postcard has an angry lion, a rogue elephant and a surly, fez-wearing bartender. What's missing from the graphic is a large machete. Hey, what’s not to love.

My one problem. If I am going to get my shots and travel all the way to Nairobi, I don't want to stay at a hotel that has the same name as my previous residence in Virginia.  

Now, if you have a bad hotel postcard that you want to share, shoot a jpeg to inotivity@gmail.com.  If it's bad enough, you'll get credit and a chance to win a trip to that very hotel.  Not a big chance, actually.

Bon Voyage.

So as an homage to the good old days,(Okay two years ago) I bring you Monty Python’s “The Four Yorkshiremen.” It’s a sketch first saw on the Secret Policeman’s Ball. It is in my top five funniest bits of all time.

It begins with four dapper men dressed in white tuxedos comparing stories on  how poor they used to be. 

JONES: 

Very passable indeed, eh?

ALL: 

Aye.

ATKINSON: 

You can’t beat a good glass of Chateau de Chasselas, eh Josiah?

JONES:

You’re right there, Obediah.

CLEESE:

Who’d have thought that 40 years ago, we be sitting here drinking Chateau de Chasselas?

ALL:

Aye.

JONES:

In them days, we’d be glad to have the price of a cup of tea.

ATKINSON:

Aye, a cup of cold tea.

ALL:

Aye.

CLEESE:

Without milk-

PALIN:

Or sugar-

ATKINSON:

Or tea.

PALIN:

Aye, in a cracked cup and all.

CLEESE:

We never had a cup. We used to drink out of a rolled up newspaper.

ATKINSON:

Best we could do is suck on piece of damp cloth.

JONES:

But, you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.

PALIN:

Because we were poor.  My old dad used to say to me, “money doesn’t buy you happiness, son.”

CLEESE:

And he was right.

JONES:

Right, he was.

CLEESE:

I was happier then.  We had nothing.  We used to live in a tiny old tumbledown house with great holes in the roof.

ATKINSON:

A house? You were lucky to have a house. We used to live in one room, 26 of us, no furniture and half the floor was missing. Huddled in one corner for fear of falling.

JONES:

Well, you were lucky to have a room.  We used to have to live in a corridor.

PALIN:

Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor. It would’ve have been a palace to us.  We used to live in old water tank at a rubbish tip.  Got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us. House? Hah.

CLEESE:

Well, when I say house, it was only a hole in the ground covered by couple of feet of torn canvas, but it was a house to us.

ATKINSON:

We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go live in a lake.

JONES:

You were lucky to have a lake.  There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of motorway.

PALIN:

Cardboard box?

JONES:

Aye.

PALIN:

You were lucky. We lived for three months in rolled up newspaper in a septic tank.  We used to have to get up at six every morning, clean the newspaper, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill, 14 hours a day, week in, week out for sixpence a month, and when we got home, our dad would thrash us to sleep with a belt.

ATKINSON:

Luxury.  We used to have to get our of the lake at 3 am, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, work 20 hours a day at the mill for tuppence a month, come home, and dad would beat us about the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky.

JONES:

Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night and lick the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of cold gravel, worked 24 hours at day at the mill for four pence every six years and when we got home our dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.

CLEESE:

Right. I used to get up in the morning at half past ten at night half an hour before I went to bed…eat a lump of freezing cold, work 28 hours a day at the mill and pay mill owner to let us work there and when I got home, our dad used to murder us in cold blood each night and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah-

PALIN:

Now you try and tell young people of that today and they won’t believe you.

ALL:

No, they won’t believe you.

Here it 'tis in concert.

Or Home Improvement's Wilson Wilson, Jr. dispensing avuncular advice behind the fence leaving me, and yes, the entire world better for the experience.

Or at the very least, Dudley Moore's neighbor in the movie 10. A shameless hedonist who always threw lavish parties with beautiful women cavorting sans clothing.

Well, these days my neighbors don't cavort.  In fact, my neighbors don't score very high on the uber friendliness scale.  They are a usually a cross between Ted and Al Bundy. Seriously. What follows is sadly 100% true.  When my wife and I moved into a condo in Richmond, Virginia, there was a gentle knock at the door. A kindly older woman, wearing a flowered apron, brought us a casserole as welcome gift.

It didn't matter that I hadn't eaten a casserole since the early '70s, I finally found the faux Aunt Bee I was searching for my entire life. Well, we put the casserole aside and I went out to my car to get utensils, the neighbor on the other side us said, "Welcome to the neighborhood.  And by the way, if "Jane" your other neighbor gives you any food, don't eat it.  She poisoned her husband with a casserole."

We'd get her casseroles from time to time and she'd ask, "did you like them?" My standard reply was, "Oh, yes, apparently angels can cook. Thank you -- you're such a dear. "A year later, they carted her off to an asylum.  

I actually never saw my neighbor in Los Angeles.  We had a large fence and massive tree to protect us. But word on the street was that he was ex-military and a surly brute of a man.  I made sure to keep my Richard Simmond's workout tapes on mute.  Well, fast forward to jury duty.  A friend and I were both called to help dispense the justice department mete out freedom or punishment.

Later, when our mutual cases were over, he told me that his case involved a man who shot a dog for barking too loud. "Kind of weird ex-military guy, lives on *****.  Of course, it was my neighbor, the gun-toting felon. He was hauled off to the local pokey.

The strangest of all neighbors lived across the hall from me in an apartment in New Jersey. He seemed like a regular guy who aparently survived without doing any manual labor of any kind.  One evening, he knocked on my door and I opened it to find that his teeth weren't his own -- he had a kind of Moms Mabley kind of vibe.

He wasn't just three sheets to the wind, he was an entire bedding set to the wind -- including the matching dust ruffle. He says, "I like to sleep New York style."  I wanted to say "do you mean Albany or Manhattan? But I had the feeling that he was thinking Fire Island.  Fortunately, I had a deadbolt the size of the Empire State Building. 

Recently, I lived in Texas and had a wonderful neighbor.  The problem was her dachshund "Duke." He was the Eddie Haskel of dogs.  When he was with my neighbor he was your best buddy.  But when her back was turned, he became what is known in the trade as  SOS, "Son of Satan."  He had the remarkable ability to thrust his entire top row of teeth out a few feet from his body.  It was like a hot dog with badly-fitting false teeth. Needless to say, I left Texas immediately.  

Well, now I live in a Victorian mansion so large,  I am too busy finding my way around to ever consort with the neighbors.  Ah, life is good.

In the facial DNA lottery, I won by a nose.  

Sure, my sniffer doesn’t have the sheer girth of the Jimmy Durante, or the dual bulbusness of the late Karl Malden, or the sweeping longitude of the Adrien Brody, but in the immortal words of the bard, my nose “ ‘tis not so deep as a well nor so wide as a church door but ‘tis enough, ‘twill serve.”

Somehow my parent’s chromosomes combined to create a septum of nearly biblical proportions. So, I have what is called in some nostril circles, the Lee Van Cleef. While other kids in my elementary school wanted to be fire fighters or doctors, I wanted to root out truffles.

My self-imposed moniker was Nostril-damus, because I could foretell the future of my nose. It would outgrow my body in my teens and I would have to wait until my 20s for the rest of the body to catch up. But according to the experts, the nose never stops growing. At BakerMuse, we call that the Dick Van Dyke Syndrome.

This is vintage Rob Petrie vs. the wizened Dr. Mark Sloan of Diagnosis Murder. Perhaps, I could see the irony in DiagNOSIS.

When I was in college, I made plans to move to France. After all, despite his unorthodox honker, Gérard Depardieu became a movie star and a sex symbol. But, I didn't go.  I didn’t want to usurp his territory or add on his excess poundage and I didn't have a passport.

Yes, we all have body parts that are the equivalent to the Ford Pintol -- ones that we’re like to toss into a recyling bin or give to competitor in the romance arena.

How important is the nose? Well, look how Nicole Kidman nabbed her Oscar in 2003.

Is it any coincidence that Adrien Brody with his Preakness-like aquiline nose won in 2002?

Survey says, no.

 Well, I have finally made peace with my nose, thanks to Steve Martin. Here is his wonderful rant from the movie Roxanne.

• 1. Obvious: Excuse me. Is that your nose or did a bus park on your face.
• 2. Meteorological: Everybody take cover. She's going to blow.
• 3. Fashionable: You know, you could de-emphasize your nose if you wore something larger. Like ... Wyoming.
• 4. Personal: Well, here we are. Just the three of us.
• 5. Punctual: Alright gentlemen. Your nose was on time but you were fifteen minutes late.
• 6. Envious: Oooo, I wish I were you. Gosh. To be able to smell your own ear.
• 7. Naughty: Pardon me, Sir. Some of the ladies have asked if you wouldn't mind putting that thing away.
• 8. Philosophical: You know. It's not the size of a nose that's important. It's what's in it that matters.
• 9. Humorous: Laugh and the world laughs with you. Sneeze and it's goodbye Seattle.
• 10. Commercial: Hi, I'm Earl Scheib and I can paint that nose for $39.95.
• 11. Polite: Ah. Would you mind not bobbing your head. The orchestra keeps changing tempo. 12. Melodic: Everybody! "He's got the whole world in his nose."
• 13. Sympathetic: Oh, What happened? Did your parents lose a bet with God?
• 14. Complimentary: You must love the little birdies to give them this to perch on.
• 15. Scientific: Say, does that thing there influence the tides.
• 16. Obscure: Oh, I'd hate to see the grindstone.
• 17. Inquiry: When you stop to smell the flowers, are they afraid?
• 18. French: Say, the pigs have refused to find any more truffles until you leave.
• 19. Pornographic: Finally, a man who can satisfy two women at once.
• 20. Religious: The Lord giveth and He just kept on giving, didn't He.
• 21. Disgusting: Say, who mows your nose hair.
• 22. Paranoid: Keep that guy away from my cocaine!
• 23. Aromatic: It must be wonderful to wake up in the morning and smell the coffee ... in Brazil.

I quote: "And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground--everything that has the breath of life in it--I give every green plant for food." And it was so."

Aside from that pesky Apple incident, Adam probably spent most of his time plucking away at weeds and finding flocks of willing sheep to nibble down the Eden estate.

Mowing the lawn is a grand lesson in civics. If your yard begins to look like it's been managed by the ladies of Grey Gardens, then you are a neighborhood pariah.  You can commit major felonies in private, but a lawn, like Clark Griswald's holiday lights, is community property.  It's like Freud's big green couch. 

Back when I was a respectable citizen, I owned a house in California. Fortunately, my lawn was the size of a golf divot. All I needed was a pair of pinking sheers and free minute and my mowing duties were done.  But I spent the last 15 years in Condos where a phalanx of mower-people were dispatched to my house when the lawn grew a millimenter. 

Now I'm renting a Victorian Home that has a yard of epic proportions.  It's like Ireland with weeds.  Worse, its on "Main Street" which means it's continually on display.  Now, I actually like mowing. It's me against a rising tide of angry chlorophyll. I joyfully decapitate weeds and grass of all stripes.  My problem is the bag attached to the mower.  Here's the scenario. I mow 25 feet.  Shut off the engine.  Empty bag of Soylent Green.  Restart engine. Repeat, until insanely aggravated.

To toss some major weedage into the wound, the two dogs next door watch my ordeal. Color me paranoid, by I think they are like the infamous Muttley. (See movie below.) Well, I survived all this and dragged two trash cans of trimmings to the curb and into the capable hands of a waste management team.

They don't take clippings.  

They will take vats of nuclear waste water, coffee cans filled with bacon grease, small mouth bass entrails, and Richard Simmons Sweating to the Oldies VHS tapes, but not the green fruit of dear Mother Earth.  I hatched a plan to stuff the trimmings into legal boxes or into empty cartons of Sugar Smacks but that would require the help of relatives and friends.

I tried to remove the plastic guard that would allow the mower to spit out the mutilated grass on its brethren, but it was welded tight. I had a choice. Major hernia or a better scheme to hide the clippings somewhere on the outskirts of town.

My conscience wouldn't allow me to orphan my clippings, so I dragged them to the municipal dump.

They don't take clippings either.  King Richard III famously barked: "My Kingdom for a Horse." I just say, "my surburban home for grass removal."

So, if on your morning constitutional, you see two laughing dogs and a car filled with Soylant green don't be alarmed.  It's me, the  Flying Dutchman of lawns.

Thanks Adam.  Next time, leave that darn apple alone.

When I was younger, I was a bubbling vat of testosterone. You could see my XYY chromosomes without the aid of an electron microscope. I was the kind of manly man who would feel comfortable wearing nothing but burlap underwear, steel-toed chukka boots, and a chain-mail T-shirt.

Well, now I've evolved  from that bubbling vat into the lukewarm water of a sterno-heating chafing dish. So, in this new edition of BakerMuse, I will reveal the results of our study on the effects of testosterone on males ages 6-18.  Actually, we only studied one man. The author. 

 Betty and Veronica. When I was a young lad,  I was enthralled by Superman, Bat Man and Green Arrow. But then, I spotted Betty and Veronica in the comic book rack. Holy hormones, Batman. For a 9-year-old, this was the equivilent of getting an invite to Hef's Grotto.

Much like the age old question, "who do you like better "Ginger or Mary Ann?" I opted for the girl-next- door type, the blonde bombshell Betty. As a youth, I had one burning question about life and its mysteries. Why were they interested in that dweeb Archie? 

Julie Lucarino and the Plaid Skirt In eighth-grade, the girl who sat next to me in class had an outfit she wore twice a week. It was a plaid skirt with an oversized saftey pin attached to the front. 

I wasn't an overtly religious boy, but I prayed nightly that Julie would purchase a week's worth of these delightful tartans. Frankly, Julie could have played the bagpipe and eaten mounds of Haggis and it still would have fascinated me. The photo at right is a rough approximation of what I remember seeing across the aisle.  

The Green Women of Star Trek.

Why would I lust over a woman the color of raw Brussel sprouts? Well, they were the original bad girls of the universe.  Apparently, chlorophyll is an aphrodisiac They danced provocatively. They flirted.  

And they even found Lt. Sulu attractive and he had his sights set on Captain Pike. After this episode I decided to give up my fear of heights and become an astronaut.  

 Princess Leia and the Bikini

In the first Star Wars, I appreciated Princess Leia, but no major hormonal bells were ringing. Frankly, I found the Wookie more appealing. But once the Sumu-Belkin-esk Jabba the Hut captured the princess and wedged her into a rivet-popping metal bikini, I soon lost interest in the green girls of Orion. Who knew the women from the planet Alderann, were so fetching?  

Whipped Cream Delights.  Well, this is was the one that started it all.  The mother load. This was the first time I would rather have dived into the whipped cream than eat it. I put this album cover on my night stand. My parents thought I was showing an growing interest in brass ensembles.  Even now, when I buy a can of Redi Whip, I have a smile on my face.  Thank you, Herb Albert and the delightful Tijuana Brass.

I am now living in a small Inuit village a snowball’s toss from the arctic circle.

Actually, I have moved temporarily someplace even colder and more foreboding -- a massive Victorian home in New England. Think of it as the dark side of Neptune with furnishings.

I am currently swathed in five layers of industrial-strength Gortex to the point that my mailman refers to me as Commander Perry. In fact, I have booked my next vacation with the Donner Party.

It was so cold this morning, I actually saw the breath come out the mouths of portraits on the wall.  And for a brief moment, I considered inserting myself directly into the fireplace to remove the permafrost from my body.

I echo Mark Twain's sentiments when he said it was so cold that "if the  thermometer were an inch longer at the bottom end, we'd all be dead."

“Frigid House” was built by a shipping tycoon in 1916. I’m convinced he became rich by not investing heavily in such exotic and frivolous things like furnaces, steam or anything that resembles heat or the illusion of warmth.

Sure, there are remnants of abandoned heating systems --fireplaces, steam pipes and a bizarre cast iron stove ominously called The Raven attached to the chimney, but none of them are working.

I braved the cold to enter the basement of the house, which frankly, has a Lizzy Borden kind of vibe. It’s where I found a cord of wood so old, Leif Erikson had carved his initials on it. Or perhaps it was Leif Garrett -- it's too cold to care.

Next to this petrified forest was a coal bin with massive black chunks and the desiccated remains of a miner still in it. Prometheus gave us the gift of fire, but I don't think he would have approved the fireplace.

Why we would we take one of nature's most lethal weapons and put it in our homes? Let's cuddle up to the fires of hell.  Hey, why not just put a Shark in the bathtub?

Well, the entire fireplace looked like the wreck of the Edmond Fitzgerald. The inner workings of the chimney were composed of rust. But since death was only a few degrees away, I stuffed a wad of the Sunday paper under the logs and prayed that the flue was rusted open.

Next week: How to open a flue while wearing Rhinestone oven mitts.

Staying at a discount hotel is like the home buying experience in miniature. It begins with a ceremonial handing over of the keys and the inevitable buyer's remorse as you open the door. You know you've gotten a solid deal from your virtual travel agent when your first inclination after seeing your room is to call for backup.

The let down began when I was immediately greeted by a shag carpet that smelled like the green room at an Amy Winehouse concert.

After the first wave of odiferous horror, I realized that the room felt, well, Chernobyl-like. The thermostat was set at a sweltering 87 degrees. Obviously, the previous occupant was a fugitive from a nursing home or was attempting to grow rare Panamanian orchids.

The bathroom is always a measure of the hotel's willingness to sooth the savagery of the road warrior's day. I once stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in St. Louis where a television was built into the bathroom mirror. My hotel, didn't have a mirror-- just brushed aluminum -- apparently, a fixture picked up from a prison rummage sale.

Then, I perused the toilet area. Where there should have been one of those crisp white strips stating that bowl was "Sanitized for your Protection," mine just had a skull and bones bio-hazard warning and the phone number for the Centers for Disease Control. And instead of the Four Season neat little toast points at end of the velvet- soft toilet paper, there was only a ragged edge of what I would describe as part loofah, part wood chips. It's the kind of bathroom tissue that makes one pray for a serious bout of constipation.

The bathtub looked like someone had sprinkled roofing tar and sandstone along the bottom. In a successful attempt to dissuade people from taking baths, the drain hole was expanded. You had to have a New York City man hole cover and welding equipment to plug up that conspicuous cavity.

While some upscale hotels brag about their sheets with Egyptian tread counts in the millions, my sheets were virtually invisible. I'm convinced the sheets were barely held together by the odor of the aforementioned stinky rug. Even the Gideon's bible had some pages ripped out -- the parable about the Good Samaritan.

Then, I noticed the small sign on the back of the hotel door. This is the place were the hotel owners inflate the price of the hotel room so that you think you're getting quite the bargain. Mine indicated $299 a night. Perhaps the decimal point was left out.

The hotel did offer a lavish "Continental Breakfast." Yeah, the Continental army. A ration of water and hard biscuit. And was obvious from the cobwebs that the coffee pot was just for show.  

Thank you Captain Kirk. "Live long, prosper......and stay home!"

5.    

This may be my all time favorite. It is an aficionado's guide to the flu.  If you get any strains I describe, don't fight it, enjoy the misery.

http://tinyurl.com/3kwkpl

4.

In my younger years, I was thin as a Whippet. You could actually see my ribs. I had the body fat of a Romanian gymnast.  Here is the story of my exercise routine in the age of the expanding middle.  Procrasticise.

http://tinyurl.com/3v8r8c

3.

I have the legs of a dachshund and the arms of T-Rex.  Try finding a suit that fits.  This is a called Pardon Me, While I Slip Into Something Less Comfortable.

http://tinyurl.com/3pfbbo

2.

This is an intervention of those spokesmascots like Charlie the Tuna who sacrifice their lives shilling for their products.

http://tinyurl.com/3wldos

1.

Frankly, this isn't my favorite, but it's the most visited blog entry of my canon.  It is my personal kryptonite -- the all-american hot dog.

http://tinyurl.com/3mw98f

Cheers