Author: Walter Jowers

Well, it’s not a war exactly. It’s more like one one-billionth of a war. But it’s escalating, right here in my own quiet, tree-lined all-American neighborhood in Nashville, Tennessee. People are fighting over political yard signs.

For weeks now, signs have been getting yanked down, torn up, defaced, and relocated. Best I can tell, it has been good old cold-war-style mutually assured destruction. For every dead Kerry sign, a Bush sign has to pay the ultimate price, and vice versa. That’s okay with me, since all the signs are bound for the landfill in a week anyway. Ironically, though, in the last few days, people have started acting like their signs are critically important. They’re defending their signs with weapons.

Last week, The Tennessean reported that a woman had booby-trapped her two Kerry signs by gluing thumbtacks on them, pointy-ends out. Seems she’s willing to give a dose of tetanus to the next sumbitch who touches one of her precious signs.

“Those thumbtacks are just going to fall off and end up in her family’s feet,” said my wife Brenda’s co-worker, Mrs. Schwartz.

“Yep,” I said, “or they’ll get sucked up into the lawn mower and shot out at mamas pushing baby strollers down the sidewalk or innocent dogs and cats. Maybe I missed something, but I thought the Democrats were all compassionate and peaceful. I didn’t think they’d be the ones willing to rip somebody’s flesh over a yard sign.”

Meanwhile, in my own neighborhood, a man who’s become known as Moped Guy (MG for short) has been prowling the streets on a little blue motor scooter, putting homemade anti-Kerry signs on telephone poles and starting up shouting matches with Kerry supporters. Apparently, he’s been really busy at it, because virtually every Democrat neighbor claims to have had a confrontation with the Moped Guy.

My teenage buddy, Hannah, told me that she and MG were stopped at a neighborhood intersection, and he started yelling at her about her Kerry bumper sticker. “So I yelled back, ‘Bush sucks!'” she said. “Then he gave me the finger, and I responded with the two words that mean exactly the same thing as the finger.”

“How old a man are we talking about?” I asked.

“Looked 60-ish to me,” Hannah replied.

“And he’s giving the finger to teenage Democrat girls?” I pondered.

“All I know is he gave one to me,” she responded.

Up until today, Moped Guy has mostly gotten notice by screaming at neighbors and deploying homemade anti-Kerry signs on utility poles. The signs feature a caricature of Kerry, wearing a business suit and a pair of flip-flops. They’re labeled “Mr. Flip Flop.”

Today, a neighbor who chooses to remain nameless is telling people that Moped Guy rigged at least one of his signs with explosives. She says that as she did her patriotic duty and snatched a Mr. Flip Flop sign off its pole, a little explosion went off behind the sign. She said it was like a firecracker.

Well, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on an exploding sign, so I spent all afternoon cruising the neighborhood and snatching down every Mr. Flip Flop I could find. I got excited when I found one with a bump behind it, but it turned out to be a half-walnut, probably dropped by a squirrel.

I’ve never been much of a yard-sign or bumper-sticker kind of guy. I don’t want to mow around a yard sign, and I don’t want to hassle with folding it up and putting it in the trash can after the election. As far as bumper stickers go, the only one on a Jowers car says “Everyone Poops” and has pictures of several creatures — men and beasts — answering the call of nature.

Best I can tell, political yard signs serve two purposes, neither of which appeal to me. First, they’re pure statements of vanity. Like Hummers and Manolo Blahniks, they make their owners feel special. Second, they’re a passive way of giving the finger to folks on the other side. It’s a perfect one-two punch: I’m special, you suck.

These signs, like duct tape, are useless for their intended purpose. Surely nobody’s thinking, “People are going to drive by my house, see my fine yard sign, and vote for my guy.” If I ever find out yard signs have that kind of power, I’m going to throw up a bunch of signs that say “Leave a duffle bag full of crisp hundreds on Jowers’ porch.”

Right now, though, let me gently suggest that you folks with yard signs just pull the things up and throw them in the trash. You’re cluttering up the landscape, and you’re not changing any minds. You’re wasting perfectly good paper and ink. Worst of all, you’re getting the psychos all worked up. Nobody’s yard sign is worth an injury. A thumbtack could cut somebody’s finger to the bone, and even a little party-popper firecracker could throw some debris into somebody’s cornea.

Put down the signs. Put down the little weapons. Just go vote. •

A while back, undercover narcotics officers in Burleson, Texas, arrested Joanne Webb, mother of three and a member of the local chamber of commerce. Was she selling dope? Nope. She was selling dildos. Vibrating dildos. They charged me with promoting an obscene device, said Webb.

For the last several months, Webb has been hosting passion parties for women 18 and older. At these parties, women get some sex education, then choose from Webb s wares. Passion-partying women can buy sexy books, lingerie, vibrators, and even some light S&M gear, including fake-leopard-fur handcuffs and a little rubber flogger, which tickles and caresses but never hurts. Heck, for $145, a woman can go home with her very own love swing.

Webb said her top seller is a fruit-flavored enhancement gel, which is supposed to make tingly parts even tinglier and feels good when you blow on it.

Webb said her passion-party business was doing fine until the young narcotics-officer couple walked into her husband s business, where she works as office manager. Once inside, the cops made sure that she was the Joanne Webb who was in the adult-toy business, then asked to see some of her brochures. I ve got them divided into mild and wild, she said. Of course, they went straight to wild.

What in the world did you sell those people? I asked.

I recommended the Nubby G, Webb replied. They bought that and then went for the weirdest-looking thing in the catalog, which is the Double Hot. That s what they arrested me for.

I know, I know. You re wondering, What s a Double Hot? Well, if you must know, it s a two-headed red jelly vibe, which would be useful for women only, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. It has a slightly miniaturized representation of the male organ on the top and a stack of graduated beads on the bottom. (Think six-ball snowman on that bottom part.) It costs 33 bucks, which is probably a great deal if you ve been craving something like a Double Hot.

While I m on the subject, I might as well explain that a Nubby G is a battery-powered G-spot stimulator. If you don t know what a G-spot is, you probably ought to book a passion party. The Nubby G costs 20 bucks. (If you want to see the contraband units for yourself, go to PartiesByJoanne.com, click on Shop Online, then Online Catalog, then Vibrators.)

As soon as I heard about this vibrator hubbub, I wanted to know how a woman could get hauled to the jailhouse for selling another woman a vibrating dildo, which she asked for and paid for with government money. So I called Nashville attorney Jean Harrison and asked for her insight.

It could only happen in Texas, she groaned. I ve told you before, Walter, I m in favor of swapping Texas for Israel. Take every Texan, every Texas creature, every grain of Texas sand, and move it all to what is now Israel. Then bring Israel over here. That would put an end to these frivolous vibrator prosecutions, and it might bring peace to the Mideast.

What about Austin? I asked.

Keep Austin, Harrison replied. But everything else in Texas goes, except maybe San Antonio and the Spurs. Nothing against Texas or Texans, you understand. This would benefit all of mankind.

Seriously, what good is this anti-vibrator law and what would it take to get this woman off? I asked.

I knew you were going to ask that, Harrison sighed. The simple answer is, I don t know. I don t do criminal law. Anybody who hired me to beat a criminal charge would definitely get the chair.

Lacking scholarly legal guidance, I just asked myself, What s the worst thing that could happen if every grown woman in Texas got a Double Hot in the mail tomorrow, the way we men get trial razors? The way I see it, the only use for a double-dipping vibrating dildo is to produce orgasms in women. As far as I know, there s not a woman alive who doesn t enjoy a good orgasm or, better yet, a whole bunch of orgasms close together. I ve never met a woman who got mad about having an orgasm. Never once have I heard anything like, You gave me an orgasm, you sumbitch! Don t you ever do that again!

Even so, the Burleson authorities have their reasons for protecting their citizens from sex toys. Besides being obscene devices, Webb said, [the local prosecutors] say they can spread disease.

I say that s lame. Doorknobs spread disease, but nobody s getting arrested for selling doorknobs, even in Texas. Besides, Webb sells Passion Parties Toy Cleaner right there on her Web site. One 8.9-ounce bottle makes 60 quarts of cleanser. That ought to be enough to clean up anybody s toy collection. Then there s this: People who share sex toys are like people who run over their own feet with lawn mowers sooner or later, something bad is going to happen to them no matter what.

Webb said if the case goes to trial, she s going to ask for DNA samples from the Double Hot and the Nubby G, just to see who, if anybody, might have put them to use while they were in police custody.

A couple months back, I was squatting behind our backyard home plate, and daughter Jess was firing drop balls at me. As she paused between pitches, she asked, Dad, do you have your eyes closed?

Daughter, I said, you re throwing drop balls, the most evil pitch known to a catching daddy without a cup. I have to catch them all, or pay a heavy price. So, don t you know, my eyes are open.

Okay, just asking, she said, as she fired another one that started at my chest, then arced down to where my cup ought to be. But you still look like your eyes are closed. You re not flinching back there, are you?

I knew that my eyelids had gotten a little droopy over the past few years. It happened gradually, so I didn t pay it much attention. But when Jess thought I was sleeping through drop-ball practice, I knew it was time to go see the eyelid doc.

I went to see Dr. Louise Mawn, an oculoplastic surgeon over at Vanderbilt. She agreed with Jess: My lids were too low. Then, she and a busload of other docs ran endless tests to prove that my lids were too low. One was the visual-fields test, where I had to stare into a big white bowl and click a Jeopardy-style buzzer when I saw a dot of light moving down from the top of the bowl. After a round of testing with my low lids, a kind and gentle woman taped my eyelids up, so I looked like Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange. Then I did the whole see-light/click-buzzer routine again. By the end of the day, all the docs, machines, and measurements were in agreement: I would see a whole lot better, especially at night, if I got my eyelids raised. As a no-extra-charge bonus, I d also look better. Not that I wouldn t still be ugly as pan-fried dirt.

So we set a date: October 3rd. That morning, I reported to Vanderbilt, went to my room, gowned myself up, and waited for somebody to come get me. I sat in the recliner chair and tried to relax. Then it hit me: I have walked into this hospital voluntarily and I have actually asked somebody to take a knife to my eyelids.

Then I started pondering: There s not much to an eyelid. It s not even half as thick as a saltine cracker. What if the knife slips, and they cut one of my eyelids off? They ll never get that sumbitch sewed back on right. I ll have to get a prosthetic eyelid with a motor that they ll mount to my temple, with big bolts, like a mag wheel. I ll have to raise and lower my plastic eyelid with a Jeopardy buzzer. It ll have to retract up into a slit in my skull. The fake eyelid will clank and whirr when it goes up and down. For the rest of my life, I ll be Eyelid Man. Children will mock and fear me. Here he comes, Mama. Eyelid man. Listen to him clank and whirr. Should I laugh or run or what?

So, when the anesthesiologists came in, I begged them: If y all cut off one of my eyelids, just kill me. Turn up the gas, put a kink in my air hose, give me a horse-dose of morphine. I don t care how you do it. Just do not send me home eyelidless.

Well, I learned right then that you don t joke with the anesthesiologists about killing you during surgery. That s not funny to them. As soon as the words horse-dose of morphine left my lips, they stepped outside my door and started whispering. I heard every word. Long story short, I almost smartassed my way into a psych consult.

Lucky for me, the next doc in the room had a sense of humor. I talked to her about her work, and she shared this: Y know, a lot of cataract patients think we pop their eyeballs out, fix them, and then put them back in. I think to myself, Who doesn t know that there are no body parts that pop in and out? But I don t say anything to the patients. I just let them keep that image of popped-out eyeballs in their heads.

A few minutes later, some people I don t remember wheeled me into the operating room, where those anesthesia people knocked me out calmly and professionally. Well, I assume they were calm and professional. Truth is, I don t remember anything until I woke up and heard Dr. Mawn telling me to open and close my eyes. She pulled on little threads, which pulled my lids up like windowshades, until she got the lids just right. When she was satisfied with the job, she sewed me up and sent me back to my room.

Now, almost a month later, I can go outside at night and see things I haven t seen for years. The only downside to the eyelid surgery is that I had to wear ice bags on my eyes for two days. Despite the ice, I had a fair bit of swelling and bruising for about two weeks. When people asked, What happened to your eyes? I just told em: Every morning, my wife gets out of bed and beats the hell out of me. I think a few people believed it.

If you haven t done it already, call your heat-and-air guy and tell him you want your heating system cleaned and serviced. If you wait until there s a cold snap, you ll end up on your heat-and-air guy s waiting list, behind the people who turned on their furnaces and found out about all the things that died in their sleep over the summer.

I tell everybody who ll listen: Get your heat-and-air equipment serviced twice a year, once before the weather turns hot and once before the weather turns cold. Heat-and-air service calls aren t cheap, but they re way cheaper than running a dirty, inefficient, and maybe even dangerous system. Service calls are surely cheaper than buying a new system years too early, which is what happens to people who don t want to pay for maintenance on their equipment.

I m proud to say that my downstairs heat-and-air system is finishing up its 19th summer of keeping the Jowers house at 70 degrees day and night. Believe me when I tell you, that s remarkable. Heat-and-air equipment usually lasts about as long as a dog. Mine has lasted much longer. That s because I get it serviced.

Before your heat-and-air guy shows up, I suggest you do the following:

1) If your furnace or heat pump is outside, make sure there s enough room around it. A lot of people are furnace-hiders. They either plant bushes around the outside heat-and-air equipment or they build a little corral around it. Your service man needs at least two feet of walking, squatting, and working room. If you ve got bushes in his way, trim them back or dig them up. If you ve got a corral, tear it down.

2) If your furnace is inside and you ve got junk piled up around it, move the junk. Just about every day, I look in attics and basements and find furnaces covered with Christmas decorations, baby toys, books, and luggage. Just like outside equipment, inside equipment needs at least two feet of workspace around it.

3) Take a look inside the equipment. Gas furnaces have easily-removable panels. Take them off and look inside your furnace. Make a mental note or even take pictures of water stains, rust, and debris inside the furnace cabinet. When your service man is done, check again.

I know some of you are thinking, Why should I do that? Well, in our little home-inspection business, we look at hundreds of gas furnaces every year. We ll find dozens of them filled with rust, burnt matches, and cicada carcasses from 1998. When we point these things out, a lot of home owners claim that they just had somebody clean the furnace. Sometimes, they even have receipts. Clearly, some of you people are getting ripped off. One way to cure that is to do your own before-and-after check. Another is to sneak up on the heat-and-air guy while he s working and offer him some refreshments. If he s doing something that you re sure is work, good. If he s sitting down smoking a cigarette and talking on his mobile phone, you might just need that before-and-after evidence.

If you have a mid-efficiency gas furnace, here s something else to check: There should be at least an inch of open space between the metal furnace vent (the exhaust pipe) and anything that will burn. The specification for this one-inch clearance is written right on the vent pipe. Even so, a lot of heat-and-air installers ignore the specification.

It s easy to check for proper clearance. Just eyeball the vent pipe. Here are the usual offenders:

1) The vent is too close to insulation. Often, the vent is touching or very close to insulation on the ductwork. Insulation has a paper facing. Even foil-faced insulation has a paper backing. That paper will burn.

2) The vent is too close to a wall or ceiling. Wallboard (which is the same stuff used for ceilings) is covered with paper. It ll burn.

3) The vent is too close to wood. In basements, vents often are butted up to wood framing or subfloor. In attics, vents are often butted up to wood framing or roof decking.

Now, a recommendation for those of you who are about to find out your existing gas furnace is dead: Buy a high-efficiency furnace that can be vented through PVC pipe. That way, you get a unit that will be cheaper to run, and you won t have to deal with the costs, dangers, and installation headaches that come with metal vent pipe.

You heat-pump owners should buy the most efficient system you can afford. High-efficiency systems are generally better built, last longer, and work better than the mid-efficiency systems.

If you buy the good equipment and treat it right, it might live as long as a good horse.

About 15 years ago, wife Brenda sat up in bed at 4 a.m. and announced, I m quitting the management job and I want to have a baby. It was a good plan all around. Brenda never was management material. In management, you have to tell the same people the same things every day until you go full-out crazy. That s not Brenda s style. She s more the listen-up-because-I m-only-going-to-say-this-once type. As far as the notion of having a baby, I was all for it. Then, as now, Brenda was excellent mother material. So, don t you know, I held up my end of the baby deal with enthusiasm. Daughter Jess joined the family 10 months later.

About nine months after that, Jess said her first word, which, of course, was Daddy. A week or two later, she called Brenda Mom-mom. Soon after Jess named us, she got busy on creating her very own language. For instance, as a toddler, she invented the verb hoju. That came from Brenda and me holding out our arms and asking Jess, You want me to hold you? To Jess, hoju was the act of getting picked up, hugged, and carried around on my chest or Brenda s hip. Every day, Jess would toddle up to one of us, reach up, and say, Hoju, hoju, until she got picked up.

When we fed Jess, we d ask, Do you want some? Soon after, all foods and drinks were some to Jess. Whenever she was hungry, she d lock eyes with one of us and say, Some? Some?

When I was outside, I liked to ride Jess around on my shoulders. I d put her up there, fix her legs so they straddled my neck, and grab ahold of her ankles. She d grab two handfuls of my hair and off we d go. We didn t do this inside, though, because I m taller than the standard 6 8 door frame when I ve got a baby on my neck. I learned that the hard way, and I m lucky the government didn t send somebody to take my bruise-headed baby. Anyhow, Jess enjoyed all but one shoulder ride. She came up with a better name for shoulders, though. For the first three years of her life, Jess asked many times to ride on Daddy s holders.

As her vocabulary expanded, Jess decided that P was the finest of the consonants and deserved more exposure. There was a long stretch where she liked to play with palloons, eat pananas, and play a little puitar.

Now, before I go any further, let me tell you new parents something: Videotape your kid while the kid is an infant and toddler. When you watch the videos years later, you ll learn that all those early coos and random vocalizations were proto-words which actually meant something. You ll understand what your kid was saying when she was 9 months old. It s great fun.

Oh, before I leave the subject of videotaping: Do all your taping at your own house. Don t bring the video camera to every dance recital, play, party, and sporting event. That s unforgivably vain. Worse yet, you get all in the way when you stand up in the aisle or park yourself behind home plate. Believe me when I tell you: You obsessive videotapers kill a whole lot of fun for people who want to watch their kids and not the danged parent paparazzi. I m amazed that I have to explain this.

When Jess was about 5, she started arguing with me about words. For instance, she told me that my pickup truck was really a holder truck. It duzzint pick up anything, Dad, she said in her over-enunciated kindergarten accent. It just holds things. Jess still has the kindergarten accent, which, oddly, has no uh sound. Jess, and most other kids at her school, say they didint, wouldint, and couldint do something. Their shirts have buttins. That big grey animal at the zoo is an elephint. And when they sing the national anthem, they sing of the perilis fight.

When Jess was 6, she turned quotable. She adapted the box of chocolates line from Forrest Gump. Life is like a box of nerds, she said. Sometimes you get some red ones on the green side and some green ones on the red side. In fifth grade, she turned a little cynical. I had a perfectly good life, she sighed, before I ever heard of latitude and longitude. Soon after, she went logical. At a mall, Jess spotted a sign that read: Dippin Dots Ice Cream of the Future. How stupid is that, she said. It s not the ice cream of the future. It s here now!

These days, she s quotable, cynical, and logical. Last week, she heard somebody use the term head over heels. She rolled her eyes and said, Isn t your head always over your heels? If somebody went around with his heels over his head, that would be news.

Last week, I had a day off. It’s been a long time since I had one, and I didn’t know what to do with myself. The grass didn’t need cutting, the dog didn’t need washing, and the pigeons that nest in my gables didn’t need shooting.

The only thing left on my to-do list was cleaning up my office. I get all swimmy-headed when I look at the foot-high pile of paper on my desk, so don’t you know I was delighted when daughter Jess walked into the office and said, “Mom and I are going shopping. Want to come with us?”

“Where are y’all going?” I asked.

“A mall or two, Target, maybe even a Wal-Mart,” Jess answered.

“Think we might be able to work a Sharper Image store in there?” I asked. “I enjoy looking at expensive and ironic gizmos, like those ozone machines. People buy ’em to rid their precious houses of indoor pollutants, but instead, they get a machine that actually makes pollution.”

“Works for me,” Jess said. “You can wander in the gizmo store while Mom and I look in Bath and Body Works.”

A few minutes later, I was standing in a mall. It wasn’t quite what I expected. Last time I looked, a mall was just a warehouse full of the same stores that are in every other mall — kind of like a money-sucking theme park. Now, the stores are like night clubs — disco music blasting, a whole bunch of colored lights blinking, and patrons dressed in clothes that advertise their willingness to have sex in the bathroom.

The Jowers girls’ first objective was to find some blue jeans for daughter Jess. I knew things had changed since I last shopped for jeans. I was pretty sure Levis didn’t cost $4 anymore, and I figured jeans, like sneakers, would be designed to make kids covet each others’ stuff, thus keeping prices artificially high. What I didn’t know was that you can’t buy a pair of new blue jeans anymore — they come already worn out, and even the low-status ones start at about 50 bucks.

“Sweet Baby Jesus,” I yelped. “The kids who worked Saturdays killing rats in the cotton mill wouldn’t have worn jeans this worn out. Their mamas would’ve died of shame.”

Daughter Jess rolled her eyes. “Dad, you sound so old and square.”

“Sorry, baby,” I said. “Back when I wore jeans, we couldn’t afford to buy them worn out. We had to buy ’em undamaged, so we could get some wear out of ’em.”

I kept on: “We ought to try giving brand-new, stiff jeans to underprivileged children. They could wear them for three or four years then sell ’em to the spoiled-rotten overprivileged kids at a huge profit. It’s a win-win deal — clothe the needy, soak the rich. I can’t be the first person to think of this.”

Jess and Brenda hustled me out of the jeans store before I started drawing too much attention. I followed them to some other stores as they went shirt-shopping. “Jowers girls,” I said, “one of y’all explain this low-pants-short-shirt thing to me. I can understand a trim girl with a belly like the bottom of a turtle shell showing off a little belly skin. But all I see are jelly-bellied girls with three-inch-deep navels running around showing what too many Cheetos can do to a person. That kind of intractable fat shouldn’t show up until a person’s at least 40.”

And with that, the Jowers girls took me to Chick Fil-A. They figured I couldn’t get too contrary about a chicken sandwich.

After lunch, I followed Jess and Brenda as they went shopping for makeup. I’ve got to tell you, it was a surprise to me that either Jowers girl fools with makeup. In all the years I’ve know Brenda, she hasn’t used 10 dollars’ worth of makeup. Jess just plain doesn’t need it. Even so, they like to shop for it.

I thought women bought makeup like men buy beer — just walk up to the counter, say what you want, somebody hands it to you, then you pay for it. But no. I learned that everything in the makeup department is subject to tryout. Women open up perfectly good lipsticks and paint their hands with them. That way, they can compare colors. Their hands end up looking like Señor Wences’ hand puppet, Johnny. They do the same thing with nail polish — open up the bottles and start painting nails right there in the store.

“Y’all quit,” I said. “That’s stealing.”

“No, it’s not,” daughter Jess replied. “Everybody does it. See all the polish on these price tags? That’s from people trying out different colors.”

I don’t know about anybody else, but I wouldn’t paint my nails with polish that other people have been dipping in. I’d wear rental shoes at a bowling alley first. That way, at least I’ve got socks between me and other peoples’ funk.

Clearly, I’m not fit for modern shopping. Next time the Jowers girls head for the mall, I think I’ll just stay home and clean off my desk.

Every now and then, co-inspector Rick and I get hired to check out a condo. Most of the condos we see were built in the ’70s and ’80s. When we inspect one of these ’70s-’80s condos, we head straight for the little room that holds the gas-fired furnace and water heater. In that room, we’ll find a cornucopia of defects and hazards so grossly wicked and reprehensible that just looking at them could strike a man blind.

For example, let’s start at the return-air duct. The inlet — the hole where air is sucked into the furnace — is supposed to be at least 10 feet away from the furnace. Two reasons: 1) You don’t want air rushing into the inlet disturbing the gas flame and creating a “dirty burn.” A dirty burn can generate carbon monoxide, which can kill you. 2) If you get a dirty burn and carbon monoxide spills out of the furnace, you don’t want that carbon monoxide to get sucked into the return inlet. If carbon monoxide gets in the return duct, it’ll be distributed through the whole condo.

Often as not, we find the return-air inlet just outside the door to the evil little furnace/water-heater room, about two to three feet away from the furnace. That’s downright dangerous.

Inside the evil little room, space is tight. That gives installers fits when it’s time to run the vent pipes (think exhaust pipes) out of the condo building. Usually, they run the water-heater vent to the furnace vent, then run the furnace vent up through the ceiling. In a multistory condo, the vents are usually stacked vertically; that is, the vent from the bottom floor becomes the vent for the second floor, and so on. To do the job right, the installers would have to get all this pipe lined up perfectly, with no leaks, and keep it at least an inch away from anything that will burn.

That never happens. Inevitably, the pipe joints get misaligned, and the vents end up touching paper-faced walls, ceilings, and insulation. The result is leaky vents that spew carbon monoxide and might catch something on fire besides.

Often, the vent pipes aren’t sloped properly. That slows down the gases in the vents and increases the chance of carbon monoxide spilling out into the condo, getting sucked into the return-air inlet, and killing you.

Now, as if the fire and asphyxiation threats aren’t enough, there’s the mold threat. If you don’t already know — and I hope you don’t — some people have had water leaks turn their houses into giant mold farms. If you get enough mold in your house, it might just make you sick — so sick that a judge or jury might just award you tens of millions of dollars for your trouble. Within the last year or two, trial lawyers specializing in mold cases and bootleg mold-testing companies have sprung up and grown like Georgia kudzu.

What’s that got to do with the evil little room in the condo? Well, most of the time, installers don’t put any catch pans or drains under condo furnaces or water heaters. I know, I know — a regular old gas furnace doesn’t leak water. But in the summer, water drips off the air conditioner’s coil, which is usually located on top of the furnace. And, as everybody knows, water-heater tanks blow out when you’re out of town for a long weekend.

In most condos we see, condensate leaks and water-heater leaks just spill out onto the floor and into the condo(s) below. Big leaks can cause ceilings to collapse, ruin carpets and furniture, and even grow a whopping-big crop of toxic mold.

In the worst of the evil little rooms, especially those in 1970s condos, we’ll find an obsolete, dangerous electrical panel, such as the infamous Federal Pacific Electric “Stab-Lok” panel. Some of these boogers are even wired with skinny aluminum cable, which is a known fire hazard. It’s a double whammy, all in one box.

I know, some of you are thinking, Omigosh! I live in a condo. I’ve got all these problems. I’d better fix them. Well, here’s the problem: You probably can’t fix them without tearing up somebody else’s condo. If you’re in a multistory unit, your ceiling is somebody else’s floor, or your floor is somebody else’s ceiling, or both.

Even if you could fix just your condo, you’ve probably only reduced your asphyxiation risk. As long as somebody in a condo near you has fire hazards, you’ve got fire hazards. If somebody else gets a leak and grows big mold, you might just end up breathing it.

That’s why I call this collection of messes the Condo Curse. Unless you get the whole condo complex fixed, all you can do is load up your personal condo with smoke detectors and carbon-monoxide detectors, be on the lookout for leaks and mold, and hope for the best.

Here’s the closest thing I have to good news: The Condo Curse is pretty much limited to condos 20 years old or older. Some of the newer ones don’t have all these problems. Some of the brand-new ones don’t have any of these problems.

One thing you should know about termites: You can poison them, you can light them on fire, you can stomp them, or even drop a neutron bomb on them. Whatever you do, you can never be sure that your house is immune to a termite attack. The termites were here before we got here. They’ll be here when we’re long gone and there’s nothing left but Styrofoam, sharks, and Cher.

Usually, the first indication of termites eating your house is a termite swarm. In our part of the world, termite swarms happen right about now. When the bugs swarm, they come fast. One minute you’re sitting on the sofa reading the Sunday paper, the next minute there are bugs in your hair, bugs on the walls and floors, bugs on the dogs and cats. If it happens at your house, don’t freak out. Termites don’t bite or sting. They can’t hurt you. Just suck ’em up with the vacuum.

Sometimes, a plague of flying bugs turns out to be an ant swarm. An ant swarm isn’t good, but it’s better than a termite swarm. Here’s how to tell ants from termites: Termite swarmers are black. They look like ants, except that they’re about the same size all the way from head to butt, without the pinched-in waists that ants have. Termite swarmers have straight antennae. Ants have crooked ones. If you get termite swarmers in your house, it’s a safe bet that termite workers have been eating your house for a while. I know that sounds worrisome, and it is. But it’s usually not a crisis. Often as not, replacing or reinforcing termite-damaged wood is a medium-sized job at worst, and it’s nothing a decent carpenter can’t handle.

Swarmers outside the house don’t necessarily mean termites are eating your house. It’s perfectly all right for termites to come flying out of a rotten stump 100 feet from your house. That’s what termites do. But if the bugs are coming out of the ground immediately adjacent to your house, that could mean your house is under attack. Call the bug man. If you’re lucky, you won’t be home when a swarm hits, and the bugs will let themselves out before you get home. You’ll find some live and dead bugs here and there, but you’ll mostly find wings on the windowsills. That’s because wings fall off the swarmers as they fly out of their dark underground colonies and toward the light.

House-eating termites (workers, not swarmers) are white and they don’t have wings. They live in the ground and build mud tunnels up to your house. You probably won’t see the workers unless you go into your crawl space or basement and break up their mud tunnels (about as big around as a pencil) or probe into a piece of infested wood. An Orkin factoid: There are about 12 to 13 termite colonies in a typical American acre, each with about a million bugs. Using those figures, I’d say that my yard alone has more termites than Tennessee has Tennesseans.

People ask me all the time: How can they be sure that there are no termites eating their house? Well, you can never be sure. You’ve got millions of termites in your yard, and they get up every morning with nothing to do but find wood and eat it. There’s no fool-proof termite-detection system, and there’s no truly effective termite-killing system. My smarty-pants sources tell me that the bait systems are best but far from perfect. When we’re doing our home-inspection work, we go into a crawl space packing a 500,000-candlepower flashlight. We look for termite tubes, termite-chewed wood, and termite poop. But the flashlight beam is only about a foot across. We can’t promise that there isn’t some termite damage somewhere. The guys who come from the bug companies are specialists, but their termite inspection still involves one guy with one flashlight. Truth is, nobody can inspect a house and know if it has termites or not. Some exterminators have trained beagles to sniff out termites. I’ve been told that the beagles are good. But shoot, with 12 million bugs to the acre, I could put my own nose to the ground and say I smelled termites, and nobody could prove me wrong.

Homeowners, listen to me: Just give up the notion that any company, person, or beagle can find all the termites. Any Tennessee house could have termites at any time. If you want protection against termite damage, hire a good pest-control company, which can treat the house, put out termite-killing bait traps, and inspect the house frequently. If you’re lucky, you might find a company that’ll sell you a no-loophole repair bond, which means if bugs eat your house, they’ll pay to fix the damage.

If you haven’t done it already this winter, you might want to check your chimney. You never know what you’re going to find in there. Just going through the daily rituals of our little home-inspection business, we’ve found active football-sized wasp nests, heaping piles of chimney swift babies (some alive, some dead), and a gone-to-heaven cat or two. Those are just the critters. There’s more. We’ve found wood formwork and framing, just waiting to catch fire and burn the house down. We’ve found foamboard, newspaper, rugs, rags, towels, and plastic wrap — all meant to stop drafts, and all ready to fill the house with smoke, burn the house down, or both.

Sooner or later, I figure we’ll find a person. That’s because some poor crazy sumbitches do end up in chimneys. Just a couple of months ago, Fort Worth resident Mark Vaughn got locked out of his house and decided that the chimney was the best way in. Don’t you know, he ended up stuck. Firemen had to come knock a hole through the chimney to get him out. Vaughn would probably still be in the chimney today if some observant neighbor — whose identity is still unknown — hadn’t called for help.

Earlier this year, a grocery-store owner in Evansville, Indiana, opened up his store and heard somebody hollering in his chimney. Once again, firemen came to the rescue. Although police suspected that the chimney man was just a would-be robber with a bad plan, they bought his story that he had been chasing his escaped pet parrot across the grocery-store roof and followed the bird when it flew down the chimney.

Two years ago, masons renovating an old building in downtown Natchez, Mississippi, found the remains of Calvin Wilson, who had disappeared in 1985. Wilson’s family was upset by this development, because they thought his body had been recovered from the banks of the Mississippi River way back in 1986. As it turned out, Wilson didn’t meet his fate in the river. Instead, he went to his reward when he tried to break into the Riverboat Gift Shop by taking a headfirst dive down the chimney.

Back in 2000, Southern Californian Shaun McCarthy, seized by a powerful urge to spend some time with his estranged girlfriend (never mind the restraining order), jumped down the chimney of her duplex. The flue was 12 inches by 15 inches, which is just a little bit bigger than a laptop computer. So, don’t you know, McCarthy didn’t make it to the bottom. He found himself stuck in a squat, his arms up over his head. Los Angeles firemen tried to haul him out with a rope, but he couldn’t get it around his body. The firemen finally jackhammered a hole in the chimney, with McCarthy screaming like a circus monkey the whole time. Once McCarthy was out, he got stuck again, this time in the La Mesa jail.

Weirder than all of ’em, though, was the poor soul who tried to break into Nashville’s Pancake Pantry back in 1992. He didn’t exactly go in through the chimney. He went in through the whopping-big exhaust vent over the restaurant’s grill. And he went in buck-naked. All the better to slide through the grease, I reckon. He went feet-first, and his feet almost made it to the grill. He might’ve gotten in all the way if he hadn’t caught his neck on his arm and suffocated himself.

The incident got one last crazy twist that evening, when the news showed video of the recovery effort. We all got to watch as the heat from the fireman’s cutting torch activated the Pancake Pantry’s fire extinguishers. Next thing you know, the whole scene was enveloped in a rapidly-expanding cloud of fire suppressant, which knocked most of the oxygen out of the room and sent rescuers and reporters alike running through the fog, fighting for air. By golly, that was fine television.

There’s a lesson here, and it’s obvious: If you’re a dumb-ass looking to break into a building, the chimney is not the way to go. Try the doors or windows instead. Or, if you want to do something fancy, go get yourself a decent battery-powered reciprocating saw. That’ll get you through a roof or a wood- or vinyl-sided wall. Heck, you can get through a vinyl-sided wall with a utility knife.

I know some of you are thinking, Hush, Jowers. Don’t tell the criminals how to cut holes in houses. Well, don’t you worry. I’ve checked the demographics. Burglars who are looking to upgrade from their usual chimney-diving break-ins don’t read this column. But even if one does, if he tries to cut his way into a house, he’ll mostly likely end up incapacitated or at least leave a really easy-to-follow blood trail back to his place.

If I come home one day and hear somebody hollering in my chimney, I’ll yell back and make sure it’s not my old drummer. I say this because, even though he’s crazy and hard-up enough to rob me, I still love him. If I had the drummer in my chimney, I’d call the fire department. If anybody else gets stuck up there, I guess I’ll just fire up the gas logs.

It’s time to clean your gutters. It’s a headache, I know, but if you don’t get it done in the next little while, there can be astonishing repercussions.

For instance, a few years back, I had a spell when I was fed up with thinking about houses all day. So I made up for it by not thinking about my own house. I let thousands of hackberry, oak, and catalpa leaves just stack up a foot high in my gutters. Seeds sprouted and gave rise to a miniature arboretum right there at the edge of my roof. Of course, the downspouts got clogged with leaves, berries, and twigs, and that made the gutters useless. When it rained, water just poured right over the sides of the gutters.

Right at the height of my negligence — which was one chilly November evening — came a three-inch-an-hour rainstorm. I walked into my house at the end of my working day and heard water running. I followed the sound and found a man-size waterfall in the Jowers mudroom/pantry/cat-feeding room. When I ran upstairs to find the source, I looked through a window and saw wife Brenda standing on the roof, fighting the fog and the driving rain, snatching leaves out of a gutter hand over fist. Within seconds, she had the gutter cleared, and the waterfall was controlled.

That was fine work on Brenda’s part, but she wasn’t too happy about having to fight a flood from our rooftop. Don’t you know, that episode created a little bit of marital discord and left me with some wall-and-ceiling patchwork to boot.

Since then, I have reformed. Every November, no matter how sick and tired I am of thinking about houses, I call handyman Julius, a fine American and a man who can build, fix, or destroy and haul away just about anything. Julius cleans my gutters and he cleans them right.

Now, I know some of you are thinking, I’m going to call Jowers and find out how to reach this Julius. Well, don’t waste your time. Too many people know about Julius already. I’m keeping his number and his true identity secret, same as I do with that plumber who has a shed full of contraband 3.5-gallon-flush Canadian commodes. Some people are so valuable I just can’t afford to share ’em.

Anyhow, back to gutter cleaning: It’s important. I’ve seen hundreds of houses with foundation problems caused by leaky and overflowing gutters and downspouts. Over time, if water that should have run out the gutters and downspouts ends up running under your foundation walls, you’re going to have some structural trouble.

Generally, gutter cleaning is hard and dangerous work. Unless you live in a low-slung rancher, with eaves just eight feet or so above the ground, I don’t think gutter cleaning is a good do-it-yourself job. As a general rule, I think homeowners should stay on the ground and leave the ladder work to people who do it every day. Not many homeowners have heavy-duty ladders, ladder levelers, standoffs, and all the other specialty gadgets that take some of the danger out of ladder work. Of course, most contractors don’t have this stuff either. But at least they know the risks involved.

The slickest gutter-cleaning trick I’ve seen is to put an extension tube on a leaf blower and use the blower to blast the leaves out of the gutters. On a low ranch house, you can do this from the ground.

I’m highly skeptical of all the whiz-bang “systems” that are supposed to keep leaves out of gutters. For instance, I sincerely dislike gutter screens. Just about every day, I see gutters with screens that have gotten bent, come loose, or fallen off. As far as I can tell, they don’t keep crud out of gutters. At best, leaves just sit on top of the screens until they rot, then they fall into the gutters in the form of mulch. The gutters still get clogged. Worst of all, when you try to move or fix the screens, they cut up your hands, and you can never get them back into place.

I’m even more skeptical of the cap systems some contractors put on gutters. The idea is to put a little “roof” over the top of the gutter, so water will run out toward the edge of the gutter then fall into the gutter via a crack too small to allow in leaves, twigs, and such. Well, leaves are thin. They’ll get through any crack. Given enough time, capped gutters will fill up with crud, and there won’t be any good way to clean ’em out. Another problem with cap systems: If it rains really hard, water will just fly off the edge, creating the waterfall situation that had poor Brenda on the roof.

The cap systems are truly expensive, around $10 to $12 per linear foot. For that kind of money, you could hire somebody to clean your gutters for years.

So, that’s what I say you ought to do: Forget useless and expensive hardware and spend your gutter-cleaning money on a hard-working contractor who has decent equipment and insurance. Make a standing appointment for the middle of November, and you ought to be able to keep your gutters clean.