You asked for it, and so ye shall receive.

Actually, if I had to be completely honest (which is a new thing for me these days), I would tell you that no one necessarily asked for another edition of WFME’s You Decide. But since my experience is often that people don’t tell you what they want anyway (and you have to try to figure out exactly what it is they want), sometimes I’ve gotta take a chance and try to assume what the audience is looking for.

Today I’ve decided that all you readers must decide between being a midget with a receding hairline or a left-leg missing cruise shuffleboard coach.

Life throws many many tough obstacles at us as we careen through the years. We’re challenged with making moral choices, making emotional and financial decisions that could shape our futures and we’re often faced with two distinct pathways and forced to choose one. In my opinion, all pale in comparison to a much bigger, much more substantial decision:

Receding hairline midget or left-leg missing cruise shuffleboard coach.

It’s a tough decision to make and a very personal one, but it’s always smart to identify the pluses and minuses before jumping head first into a pool of sharks. See, being a midget (not a dwarf) is hard enough in this world. Everything is made for bigger folks (not “normal folks” as some might accidentally say) and thus, the smaller peeps of our world are already faced with a disadvantage. Add to this fact that the daily lookie-loos gawking at the little people of the world and you’re suddenly faced with a tough situation. Short, gawked-at, and the subject of ridicule and jokes in the mainstream media.

This isn’t to say that being a midget is a bad thing. It’s just one of those things that just is. But add to the fact that you’re short, periodically gawked at…and then you’ve got a receding hairline? Well, needless to say, it could very well be the straw that breaks the camel’s back…if you know what I mean. Because now, not only are you looking at me because I’m a midget, but then you’re thinking to yourself things like, “oh how sad he’s a balding midget” and I know you’re thinking that, and then I have to start wearing hats everywhere I go and then people start referring to me as “The Midget Ron Howard.”

Not fun.

But when you compare being the receding hairline midget to being a cruise-ship shuffleboard coach who happens to be missing their left leg… Well… It’s a toughie. First and foremost — who really ever wants to work on a cruiseship? People who work on cruise ships are musical theater-majoring college students who couldn’t get a job on Broadway (and want to sing and dance somewhere), chefs who couldn’t get a job on restaurant row (and want to cook somewhere) and people who had to choose between joining the Army or getting a job on a cruise ship or end up being homeless. Yes, some generalizations there, but 90% true.

So already, you’re working in a place where half the people are running away from land.

Add to this the fact that everyone you come in contact with on each voyage happens to be there to eat and drink themselves to the point of ripping their inner-stomach lining and that everyone’s feeling entitled because they paid “one flat rate” for a ship-full of experiences… And let’s just say you’re not going to be happy. And you’re missing your left leg. And you’ve got to teach old folks how to play shuffleboard.

Eh.

But one might say to themselves, “hey, at least there’s good prosthetics out there on the market, and I’ll always get to travel around the world and I can still reach the sink in my bathroom…” Yes, maybe being a left-leg missing shuffleboard cruise ship coach is the better decision out of the two.

In my personal opinion, despite some of the huge downfalls that come with being the left-leg missing cruise ship shuffleboard coach, I’m going to choose that one over being a receding hairline midget. I just would rather be made fun of for limping and playing shuffleboard in a dead-end job than not being able to reach the mochi in the freezer.

That’s my decision. Officially.

But what’s yours?

This week, You Decide pulls back the film on the underbelly of what some people like to call El Socieded de Tacos (or, in English, The World In Which Tacos Reign Supreme) — which is not to be confused with a Supreme Burrito or Nacho Bell Grande Supreme. We’re talkin’ tacos today, people, so roll up those sleeves and get ready to decide.

2 Tacos for $.99? Or 99 Tacos for $.02?

Let’s get one major human nature thang out of the way. People are afraid of getting something for nothing. This is not a hypothesis, but in fact — a hard and true fact of society. Offer someone up some free anything, and they start to wonder just what the catch is. Offer someone something but ask them to pay for it, and they may very well feel better about the decision they’ve got to make. Why else do people think that the most expensive product is the best?

It’s all marketing.

And yet here we sit, today, faced with a conundrum of decision making processes. Would you rather buy two tacos for just under a dollar (which to me, seems like reasonable deal you can find in fast food places the world over) or would you rather buy 99 tacos for barely any money whatsoever (i.e. two cents)?

I go with the 99 tacos all the way.

Most people would say to themselves — “no way am I buying 99 tacos for two cents because first of all who sells that many tacos for that little — there’s gotta be something wrong with those tacos!” And it’s a thought process that makes sense. Because anyone who’s selling 99 tacos for two cents is either (a) taking part in some kind of experiment to see how many people are gonna buy said tacos, (b) losing money and using sub-par taco meat, or (c) insane. And nobody wants to be a part of an experiment, eat sub-par taco meat or have to actually sit somewhere and be thinking about what might be in those tacos while eating 99 tacos — which would literally take at least an hour anyway.

But I’d still go with the 99 tacos.

If you think about the guy making the 99 tacos — making 99 tacos takes a lot of time, no matter if you’re poisoning them or using horse meat in them. It still takes a ton of time and effort to make 99 tacos and make them look presentable. And then to go out and take all that time and effort to find someone to spend two cents on them. It’s like, why go to all that trouble, if you aren’t going to put your heart and soul into the 99 tacos.

But you could easily screw up two tacos on purpose and not worry about the waste of time, in the event that your two taco poisoning experiment didn’t “take.”

If you can put yourself in the shoes of the 99 taco maker for one second, you’ll immediately let out a sigh of fatigue just thinking about having to make 99 tacos. It’s a huge job and the only reason anyone would make 99 tacos would be that they have a passion for making tacos, and someone with a passion for making tacos would never try to screw up making those tacos in the first place.

So you know those 99 tacos would be good.

The two tacos for a buck? That’s where I totally question the quality of them. I would totally wonder about the person making them. Cause really, who makes only two tacos and sells them for a buck? Someone who is insane. That’s who.

So I go 99 tacos.

That’s where my final decision lies.

Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Welcome to yet another democratic decision making moment of WFME’s You Decide, where you (the reader)…read. And us (the writer) write. And somewhere in between there’s a mutual understanding that results in positive communicational exposition, cooperative role-playing and over-the-top jockeying, in order to come to a conclusion that will, eventually, bring waring tribes of vocabulary goodness into one like-minded hive of thought.

Aw, screw it. Let’s talk about fish.

As you’ve seen before, WFME’s original and trademarked feature “You Decide” gives you two choices. Neither is necessarily correct, and both have their positive and negative spins. Personally, here at WFME, we like to choose one and then watch the wolves rip apart each other.

Today we’d like to address a famous saying that’s been around at least as long as the Back to the Future trilogy. It’s an ancient Chinese proverb that goes a little something like this: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him how to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

Which would you rather do?

Personally, if given the choice between giving a man a fish or teaching a man to fish, I’d always end up giving a man a fish instead of teaching a man to fish. This, of course, stems from the fact that I honestly don’t have the time to try and teach a man to fish, not to mention the fact that I’m not a huge fan of live fish bait and lures. Now, I haven’t taught people to fish in the past, so I must come clean about that — but I have tried to teach my mother how to upload pictures to Shutterfly and then print them out on her printer, and it came dangerously close to ruining our relationship forever. I also have tried to teach the “older set” how to go to my blog website — but it seems that no one outside of our generation can figure out how to type a URL into the address bar of a browser. Everyone’s Google this and Google that and it doesn’t help when you’re trying to teach someone how to just go to one single website.

The frustration has overwhelmed on more than twelve occasions, and so based on my experience here, I’d probably have to opt out of teaching a man to fish. Teaching someone to surf the web is, in my opinion, one of the easiest skills to teach — and yet it’s not. Imagine trying to teach a man to fish? Too many variables, too much time, and you’d probably have to get up at like 5 in the morning just to get the jump on the fish. And the water. And the rental boats. And the lures. And so on and so on.

What a nightmare, teaching a man to fish.

Not to mention, if you ended up getting paired with one of those “just let me try to do it myself before you teach me how to do it” kind of guys, you’re in for the looooong haul if you know what I mean. Please — if you ask me to teach you how to fish, let me teach you how to fish. Don’t ask me to teach you how to do something, then let me come out there with the intent on teaching you how to do it, and then you stand there and suggest you may already have an inkling of how to do it in the first place. That’s just wrong, a waste of my time, and I’m not having it.

But giving a man a fish?

I go to the supermarket on a pretty regular basis. When I go there, I pick up everything from water to cereal to milk to eggs to fruit and vegetables…and I often walk past the produce section on my way to the sparkling water aisle. It would be so easy for me to just pause, ask for a fish, and then bring it home in preparation of giving it to said man.

The only complication, of course, would be just when I’d be meeting said man to give previously aforementioned man the previously aforementioned fish. Fish goes bad fast, my friends. In fact, you usually only have about three or four days in which to cook or freeze those mothers. The hope, of course, is that I could previously schedule the fish hand-off with the man before going to the store, then I’d be able to succesfully prepare for the exchange. But if for some reason the man had to reschedule after I’d already bought the fish I was going to hand off to him… Well…

I’d end up with a smelly fridge, filled with one smelly fish.

But when I weigh the pros and cons of both situations, the giving the man a fish choice always seems to come out on top. In a nutshell, I look generous (cause I gave a man a fish), I look patient (because I waited a little while until the man’s schedule allowed for me to give him the fish), and I appear to be a lover of protein and healthy fish oils (since I chose to give a man a fish instead of a box of Double-Stuff Oreos). The cons, of course, only pretty much have to do with the fact that I might end up stuck with a smelly fish or that people might not want to hang out with me on the day in question (the fish hand-off), since most people steer clear of fish delivery folks. But that’s it.

However, when doing the pro/con list for teaching a man to fish — the cons pretty much outweigh the pros. I mean, there are no pros. So I get to teach some guy to fish. I don’t even get to wear those A River Runs Through It water pants/overall things. I get to drag my ass up early, meet some guy at a dock, rent a boat (which I’m assuming I have to pay for since I’m the guy teaching the man to fish), sit in a boat for hours with raw bait, and potentially have a frustrating day on my hands. What’s the positive? What are the pros? So I taught a guy to fish? So he can feed himself forever? All sea life is supposed to be extinct in the next fifty years anyway, so it’s really a moot point.

I’d give the guy a fish.

That’s the way to go.

You’ve made many decisions in the past.

You chose between getting hit in the head with an anvil or a dead kangaroo. A bird in the hand or a bird in the bush. Coughing up a lung or a small ferrett. A painless nail in the head or a weekly pedicure and walking around with a ziploc bag filled with water or a severed left arm. They were tough choices that, surprisingly, pale in comparison to your next enigmatic choice. A choice so tough, it will shake you to the core.

Yes…today, your decision is all about Taco Bell.

Here’s the deal. The choice on the table this glorious Sunday is a tough one. One that will require you to reach deep inside in an attempt to discover the truth about yourself and Taco Bell in one full swoop. You must decide between two choices. The first? Having to eat dinner at Taco Bell every single night for the rest of your life… OR Having to pick up the phone during dinner every night and have a 15 minute conversation with the strange opposite-sex cashier from the Taco Bell down the street.

Personally, I would go with tacos over talks.

I mean really, what’s the big deal in having to eat Taco Bell for dinner every single night for the rest of your life? I could mix things up, making Tuesdays my all-night taco extravaganza and making Fridays into the day I eat only fried taquitos at “the Bell.” I would write constant letters to the corporate offices in the hopes that they’d continue to invent crazy new food items like the chalupa and the mexican pizza and the beef meximelt all the while finding new and unique ways to make each night at Taco Bell the equivalent of an exciting experience for all to see. I could pile up on the hot sauce one night, the fire sauce another night and even go no-sauce on particularly bad acid reflux nights. I could invite my friends to Taco Bell (because everyone loves Taco Bell at least once a week) and it would make the torture of having to eat there every single night for the rest of my life somewhat less painful.

Of course, having to talk to the opposite-sex Taco Bell cashier for fifteen minutes every single night (during my dinner hour) would be far more painful than just having to eat there.

There are people who I am friends with who I would never want to talk to every night during dinner for the rest of my life. There are family members who I choose to only call once a week. What would my life become if I was forced to make friendly conversation with “Heather” for fifteen minutes each and every night. Besides the fact that it would be rude for me to blather on with my TBF (Taco Bell Friend) right in the middle of a nice evening dinner, would be the fact that Heather’s choices for conversation fodder would probably be relegated to some of the following, not-so mind-blowing topics:

• No More Hot Sauce, We’re Ordering More For Tomorrow
• The Funny Story From Today, When A Customer Dropped Their Burrito On The Floor And Jimmy Had To Clean It Up
• How “Gordita” Could Have Possibly Been Named After “Gordon Sumner” (a.k.a. Sting)
• The Correct Sterile Temperature For Mop Water
• How Working On The Taco Bell Assembly Line Will Train Her For Future Challenges
• Her Recent Hair-Pulling Argument With Mary, The Sour Cream Dispensing Team Member
• That She Can’t Shake This Beef Smell, No Matter How Many Showers She Takes
• Aaron Sorkin’s New TV Drama Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip and the Underlying Political Themes He’s Infused Into The Weeekly Drama’s Storylines and Character Arcs

See what I mean?

Having to talk to my local opposite-sex Taco Bell cashier on a nightly basis would quickly wear down my will to live and slowly make me fear the 7 ‘o clock hour simply based on the fact that I would know the phone would soon ring, rip me away from my quaint, quiet dinner at home, and force me to make conversation with a woman whom I would never be friends with in the real world and whose idea of conversation would drive me mad before too long.

But eating at Taco Bell every night for the rest of my life?

Sure, I would potentially put on the pounds and it would require me to go to the gym more often… Sure, I might find myself with a nasty case of heartburn and beef rickets (a painful chest ailment caused by eating pounds of seasoned ground beef on a daily basis)… Sure, I might end up hating cheese and beef and beans and sour cream — which had been my favorite food items up until the strange experiment had begun…

But I wouldn’t have to talk to you know who, and to me — that’s the far better, saner decision if you ask me.

Hypothetically, of course.

In doing so, maybe you’ve flexed your muscles with previous incarnations of WFME’s You Decide — where your democratic tendencies are allowed to breathe, stretch, contemplate and ruminate. Maybe you’ve found that when given two distinct choices, you feel your soul scream out from inside of you and you feel more alive than ever before. Or not.

Either way, it’s time for you to decide if you’d rather walk around with a ziploc bag filled with water or a severed left arm.

It’s not often you see someone walking around with a ziploc bag filled with water. Sure, people walk around with ziploc bags filled with carrots, celery, cookies, crackers, candy, slices of fruit, cold cuts, halves of sandwiches and so on. But a bag filled to the brim with clear, innocent spring water?

What would people think?

Personally, if I saw someone walking around with a ziploc bag filled with water, I’d want to know why they were carrying around a ziploc bag filled with water. I might even stop them and ask, “Hey my friend — why is it that you’re carrying around a ziploc bag filled with water?” Surprisingly, if it was me carrying the ziploc bag filled with water and you were the guy asking me that question about the ziploc bag filled with water, I’d probably respond back to you something like, “Well, water bottles are so bulky and they don’t fit in your pocket. But ziploc bags filled with water? So much easier.”

And you’d walk away thinking I was a loon.

But what about if I was walking around with a severed left hand? You know, the whole hand, cut off at the forearm. Now, it wouldn’t be bleeding or anything (I would have cauterized it prior to taking it out on the town) but I would carry it around everywhere I went. And you would probably want to know why I was carrying a severed left arm around with me so much so that you’d probably ask something like, “Hey my friend — why is it that you’re carrying around a severed left arm?” And if it was me being asked such a question, you’d probably get an answer like: “Um, it was my brother’s and, um, that’s all I have to say on the subject.”

And you’d walk away thinking that my brother was probably in some accident and I must love him a ton because I’m carrying around his severed left arm with me everywhere I went — you might even think to yourself something like, “Man, that Pauly is one emotional and family-loving sonuvabitch.”

And you’d be right.

And that’s why if I had the choice between carrying around a ziploc bag filled with water or a severed left arm — I would pick the severed left arm ten times out of ten times. Because some guy carrying around a ziploc bag filled with water is about five seconds from being thrown into an insane asylum because it makes zero sense to be walking around with a ziploc bag filled with water. But carrying a severed left arm? There’s some sanity to that, believe it or not, and you could probably even get onto an airplane these days with a severed left arm way before you could get on a plane with a ziploc bag filled with water.

It’s the difference between an overly-emotional guy fascinated with medical science and research and some crazy guy carrying around a ziploc bag filled with water.

Severed left arm. All the way.

Today’s decision is almost a non-issue.

And when I say that today’s decision is almost a non-issue, it means that there’s really no question whatsoever as to which choice most of the male WFME readers will choose. Faced with having a nail painlessly lodged into our heads (and a really cool story to tell) or having to face the humiliation of getting a pedicure on a weekly basis…well…

We men know which one to choose.

I will come straight out and tell you that I had a horrific pedicure experience recently. I was blindly forced into this “right of passage” by being convinced that it would be the most amazing experience I would have ever had. There would be massages given to me by women, who would be fawning all over me, rubbing oils and creams over my body parts. Shoulder massages, neck rubs and attention the likes of which I had never had before.

Yes, I’d rather have a nail lodged in my head.

The experience of having a pedicure is more like a scene out of an Amnesty International warning pamphlet. You are made to sit in an uncomfortable position for minutes on end, with your native language nowhere to be heard. Then, like a spy with sensitive and classified information, sharp metallic objects are jammed into sensitive parts of your body, followed by acidic oils, creams that feel like they have shards of glass peppered throughout… And that’s way before the manhandling even begins.

A nail in the head is a swift, quick shot — and then it’s over.

Women will disagree almost immediately. They will rave about the orgasmic-like pedicure as if it is their own personal Nirvana. Many are addicted to the stuff and swear up and down that without such an experience they would be lost in this world. And some of the elite few will never cease to convince you (like a cult, per se) that if you just “try it once” your eyes will be opened immediately to the majesty that is, um, someone jamming sharp objects under your toenails.

But worse than the sharp metallic scrapers and the cuticle-pushing rods and the sandpaper like creams and the acidic, skin-burning liquids is the fact that while I am being subjected to an experience that would consistute a nightmare if I suddenly woke up from a dream that resembled a similar situation — is that everyone around me is talking about me in a different language.

Trust me when I tell you that I know when people are talking about me.

And as I look around that stripmalled, dry-walled cookie-cutter foot-punishing mind-freak, I can tell you that the idea of having someone with a nail gun rush up to my side and quickly shoot a nail into the left quadrant of my head seems way more humane than anything a weekly pedicure would entail.

But that’s just me.

That’s why WFME likes to periodically give you the choice of the decade, except that since I’ve given you this choice five other times before today over the course of two years means that WFME is technically giving you “five choices each decade” to make an important decision that will never affect your future yet prepare you for obscure events that may, potentially happen to you. Then again, since this is the sixth time, you’re gettin “six choices each decade” which is more choice then the government actually gives you over the course of four years.

Aw heck. Either way, today you’d better be ready to make the ultimate choice of your entire life.

Let’s face it. At one point or another in your life you’ve had a cold. Had some kind of illness or allergic reaction that caused you to cough. Cough cough cough cough cough to the point of Nyquilling yourself up or taking medication to quell the cough inside of you. Sometimes, when it got really bad, it felt as if you were going to cough up a lung.

In reality, this can actually happen.

Even if it couldn’t, for the sake of today’s question — let’s assume for one moment that you had a really bad cold. You were lying in bed, sick of TV even though you had 800 channels via satellite and you were passing the time by sneezing, sniffling, aching, stuffy-headening, fevering, not resting and having a coughing fit like you’d never had before. Perhaps, your coughing fit got so bad that you started to cough up stuff. Use your imagination on whatever that might be.

But then suddenly, things got way worse.

It would be at that moment, at the height of your coughing fit, that you would actually COUGH UP A LUNG. Right there, on the bed. Right in front of you. You can imagine how scary something like that would be, and perhaps it would even be tough to call for help. Given, in this scenario you could probably still breathe and function and what not — but the experience of coughing up a lung would be traumatic I’m sure. Yes, you’d go to the hospital they’d fix you up and what not, but you would always have that memory ingrained in your head — the moment you were watching Dr. Phil when you coughed up a lung on your bed sheets.

But what if you were able to switch out that memory for something that (in my humble opinion) would be the far better solution of the two?

What if you coughed up a small ferret instead? A weasel-like, usually albino mammal (Mustela putorius furo) “related to the polecat and often trained to hunt rats or rabbits”? What if at the height of your coughing fit, you coughed up a small ferret instead of your left lung? Wouldn’t that, my friends, be the far better solution?

Personally, if I had a choice, I’d rather cough up a small ferret than a lung. Why? Because if I had been the guy who coughed up a small ferret, I could totally use that story for some time in the limelight. I mean, can’t you just imagine that conversation I’d have with Jay Leno the night I went on The Tonight Show to talk about my most recent and startling experience?

Jay Leno: “So, let’s get to the real story. What everyone’s been talking about lately…”

Me: “Oh, Jay…”

[The Audience laughs and cheers.]

Me: “Oh YOU people! You really want me to talk about it!?”

[More cheering!]

Jay Leno: “I think they truly want to hear the story, Paul.”

[Even louder cheering!]

Me: “Anyone here from San Francisco!?”

[Even more cheering!]

Me: “Okay. So here’s the story…”

Jay Leno: “Yesssss-?”

Me: “The other day… I was having a coughing fit… And, well-”

Jay Leno: “Go on… This is going to be priceless…”

Me: “I coughed up… a small ferett!”

[The audience goes WILD.]

Jay Leno: “As in the small mammal referred to as ‘mustela putorius furo?’”

Me: “Oh, Jay. YES. That exact one!”

[The audience loves me.]

And over on The Late Show with David Letterman I could probably parlay the experience into some kind of stupid-human story/trick. I mean, the media opportunities would be endless, and then I could even tie it into my new book and a bunch of other self-important moments where I would shine.

After all, I’d be the guy who coughed up a small ferret.

But switch that to me being the guy who coughed up a lung, and what kind of excitement surrounds that? People cough up lungs all the time – maybe not literally, but they do. That’s a medical condition. But coughing up a small ferret is a talent of sorts. It’s magic! It’s like being a combination of Dr. Doolittle and David Copperfield. And that, my friends, is ultra cool. In fact, on the scale of coolness (which goes from 1 to 187), that would rank about a 178.

Then again, there are people out there (and I know they’re out there because they commented on the previous You Decide post about getting hit in the head with an anvil or a dead kangaroo) who will undoubtedly choose the coughing up a lung over the coughing up a small ferett because they will say that it would be much more traumatic to cough up a living ferret (yes people, it’s still alive when it comes up) because they will start to wonder what kind of riggling-around in their intestines/damage the ferret might have done while inside. They will sit around all day wondering what happened inside of them. I mean, a live ferret in your stomach isn’t the most comforting visual to have stick with you for your entire life.

But when you really weigh the positives and negatives, I think you’ll agree with me:

Positives For Coughing Up A Lung

• Simulates real sickness, which gets sympathy.
• May get you some hot soup, for free.
• Could become spokesperson for NyQuil.
• Visit to hospital could reunite you with that hot nurse you always admired from afar.

Negatives For Coughing Up A Lung

• Pain.
• Trouble breathing.
• Not too glamorous.
• Hard to talk with lung hanging out of your mouth.
• Unattractive.
• Little to no appeal to major media outlets.
• Potentially can ruin your professional sporting goals.
• No more smoking.
• Inclusion on Discovery Channel’s newest show, “People Who Have Coughed Up A Lung And Survived To Tell The Tale” as hosted by TV’s Alan Thicke.

Positives For Coughing Up A Small Ferret

• Fame & Fortune
• TV Appearances
• Still able to smoke.
• Able to eat more, a lighter feel in your stomach.
• Finally, you’ll have a great story to tell the grandkids (since you never fought in a war).
• Ferrets are famous: they were figured prominently in the movie Kindergarten Cop.
• The word ‘ferret’ contains the letters “F R E E” which is how you’ll be feeling once you’ve coughed up a small ferret from your stomach.
• Suddenly, without spending any cash, you’ll have a quirky adorable little pet.
• Ferrets will hunt rats & rabbits, thus solving your rodent problem around the house or the farm.
• You will be a GOD to the regurgitators of the world.
• Ferret just sounds like “fun” if you think about it.

Negatives For Coughing Up A Small Ferret

• N/A

As you can see, I’ve put a lot of thought into this. I’ve drawn up the postive/negative lists. I’ve thought about the pain that accompanies the coughing up of any object. I’ve considered the psychological stress and emotional trauma that could be associated with both choices. And when all is said and done, I think my decision is more than obvious:

I would rather cough up a small ferret.

But that’s just me. What about you?

What have you decided?

Being faced with getting hit in the head with an anvil or a dead kangaroo’s carcass is one thing. Trying to decide between the name “Jon” versus “John” is another. But all famous sayings aside, when you really sit down and think about it, wouldn’t you totally rather have a bird in the bush than a bird in the hand?

Literally speaking, I can agree with that mentality wholeheartedly.

First and foremost, there’s a lot of talk lately about this bird flu thing. They say don’t touch birds, don’t caress birds and definitely don’t share needles with birds. The government suggests that you stay away from birds as often as possible and if you happen to come across one in a wide open field…run as fast as you can.

But for a moment, let us forget about the horrid avian flu.

Assuming for a quick moment that none of the bird population has a deadly disease that could end your life within days, then we can revisit today’s “You Decide” question. Assuming birds are cuddly and cute and will not bite your nose or eat your entire winter’s supply of pine nuts — would you rather have a bird (physically) in your hand or a bird (physically) in a bush nearby?

Like I said, it’s a no-brainer for me.

Personally, I don’t want a bird in my hand for a variety of reasons, which include some of the following reasons:

• Not a fan of the scent of a bird.
• Bird feet scratch my skin and make me feel uncomfortable.
• No bird would hold me in its hand, nor could it, so why should I do it any favors?
• Bird rhymes with turd, which is most likely the last thing it’s going to leave on my hand before it flies away but after it’s scratched my skin and made me feel uncomfortable.
• People will think I’m trying to be literarily clever, by recreating one of life’s most famous sayings by holding a bird in my hand.
• Bird also rhymes with curd, which makes me think of cottage cheese which sort of grosses me out (that is, if it’s not mixed with pineapple in a factory somewhere far far away).
• Any bird who trusts a human with strong hands (ME) to hold it, ain’t that smart in the first place.

The list of reasons could go on and on, but instead of convincing you that way, why not look at the simplest argument of them all? In the most basic, honest way I can muster the words: birds belong in the bush.

A bush is a small tree. A tree is where birds live, feed, learn to fly from, hang out, et al. A bush is a living breathing green part of this planet whose true reason for being involves providing a home for birds. As an example, if there had been a famous saying that was something like “Me in your hand is like me in your house” you would easily see the reasoning here. I don’t belong in your hand. It’s not natural. But a house? Hoo-boy, I sure do belong in a house because that’s where I belong. And isn’t it all about belonging, anyway?

And listen, just like I wouldn’t force a penguin into my freezer or force a tiger to hang out in my basement inside the tanning bed — I wouldn’t force a bird to hang out in my hand. Strictly in a real world sense, it just makes zero sense to force a bird to be in any non-nature filled environment, and my hand is defintely not one of those places.

So, in summary: bird in hand, bad. Bird in bush, good.

Thank you.

Decisions, decisions.

Previously, WFME has asked you if you preferred Jon or John, affection or inflection, Pepto or Necco and “Bless You” or “Cough-it-easy”. In doing so, the WFME readers came together collectively to decide and came to a conclusion that both helped each person on an individual level and together as a group. Honestly, it was a heart-warming tradition that people were desperate to see again.

But today, things are going to get much more complicated.

How do you really decide between the lesser of two evils? Death by drowning or death by fire? A BLT or a Club sandwich? A friend who believes he’s the coolest person on the face of the earth, or a friend who believes you’re the coolest person on the face of the Earth?

Simple questions and simple answers.

But when faced with having to decide if you’d rather get hit in the head with a heavy metal anvil or a dead kangaroo, there’s a lot of important details that you’ve got to detemine. For example, what are you wearing? Are you wearing a typical casual ensemble, potentially made of cotton or a soft cloth of some kind? Or are you wearing a football jersey and protective gear, just having come from the final game of a winning season? Are you walking underneath an awning (unable to see the sky and the clouds) or is there nothing between you and the “air up there”? Do you like anvils more than kangaroos? Do dead kangaroos remind you of that horrible movie with Elliot Gould where he finds a boxing kangaroo and then turns the creature into a boxing sensation?

There’s a lot of noise up there in that paragraph and that’s the result of living in a society where people ask too many questions and refuse to just strip the details away so they can concentrate on the issue at hand. Which is simply: would you rather get hit in the head with an anvil or a dead kangaroo?

I say anvil.

Sure, the pain would be unbearable. Sure, I’d probably have to go to the hospital, get stitches and MRI’s and x-rays and go through a long rehabilitation period where I’d be back to reading Dick & Jane books and watching the Teletubbies and what not — but I would work hard and get myself back to the place I was before “the anvil incident” as I would so appropriately call it in the years to follow when I went on the road and gave motivational speeches about being sure to “always look up” when walking past construction sites. But I would have grown as a person, gone through a horrible set of circumstances, and emerged stronger on the other side. Some national magazine would probably even do a story on me with a glossy picture of me holding an anvil and smiling wide.

But getting hit in the head by a dead kangaroo?

I may not have to go through all those years of rehabilitation — because let’s face it, dead kangaroos are more squishy and pliable masses than steel anvils… But I think the psychological result would not be too good. I mean, the questions would run rampant. Where did the dead kangaroo come from? Who would throw a dead kangaroo from the sky down at my head? Where is this dead kangaroo’s family? Was it really the appropriate time for this kangaroo to die and then to be hurled at a human’s soft skull? Who hates me so much that they’d want to throw a dead kangaroo at me? Was I even the intended dead kangaroo recipient or was I just at the wrong place at the wrong time?

See? Total internal mental chaos.

That being said, I think my mind is made up here today. More pain and rising out of the ashes like a Phoenix far beats a psychological scar that would forever keep me guessing and wondering and fearing another incident like the dead kangaroo throwing thing. Pain is temporary, but having to explain to your kids why someone threw a dead kangaroo at your head… Well…

I’m not having any of it.

Mind you, it has nothing to do with my recent run-ins with Jon Cryer nor does it have anything to do with the fact that when I was a child my grandfather once told me that “people with three letters for a first name, where the first and last letters are consonants and the middle letter is the vowel “o” and the first consonant has the same sound as the letters “ch” or “sh” — they’re criminals or malcontents.”

My grandfather heard voices, too, but who am I to criticize. I mean, the guy was in WW II and spent hours in planes going on missions while shrapnel flew all around him. If he wanted to hate certain three-letter names, that was OK by me.

The name John has got to be the most normal, American, typical name on the face of the Earth but that’s not the reason for my total support of the name and my total disdain for the name Jon. I think when it really comes down to it, I find that the name Jon represents more than just the missing “h” — but represents society’s desire for shortcuts.

Having a kid and want to use the name John but feeling like it’s too typical or takes too long to write? Want to name your kid Jonathan but again, it’s just starting to become a hassle? Well why not go ahead and just drop a letter and make it Jon.

I want to know the mentality behind such a short-cut.

If I was standing in the middle of a desert and I was desperate for water and I was going to die in the very near future and a spirit or God came down from the Heavens and said to me a big ‘ol booming voice, “You must change your name to Jon and then you will be saved!” I would probably first ask what they meant by “saved” — cause if saved means they’re going to magically beam me to my house where my fridge is filled with good deli stuff from Whole Foods, sure. But if saved means they’re just going to send down a few bottles of Fiji water and then I still have to walk all the way home, I have to really think about the decision. But yeah, if the Whole Foods thing was going to happen, I may possibly change my name to Jon. But probably not.

Because, I don’t know — there’s something off with the name.

So, too is the case with the following names, where parents have simply seen fit to remove ONE LETTER in order to truncate a typical name and create something far more frightening: Margret, Pal, Jeny, Frak, Heny, Briget, Lia, Suzi, Hether, Shanon, Fredd, Paty, Rebeca, Genifer, Am…

So in trying to decide between Jon and John — there’s an inherent problem. Do you go for the more obscure, fewer letter name or do you go with the more-mainstream, more traditional spelling of the name? Do you go with pickled eggs or pickles? Do you go with Chinese Chicken Salad or Chinese Food? Do you go with a hand missing a finger or a hand that has all its digits? Do you go with Ghost in the Machine or Ghost?

It’s a tough decision.

It really is.

—

In other news, tomorrow brings another exciting, ground-breakingly stunning edition of “Words For Your Enjoyment” — where you supply the idea, we steal it, and you gain so much notoriety from the entire process that it makes you a huge big star and you turn into a total a-hole and never talk to any of your friends ever again, and then one day you’re out riding your bicycle on a mountain road and you ride into a tunnel and don’t see a huge truck coming and it hits you and you die and go up to Heaven where you’re given a chance to go back to Earth but only in the body of a rich a-hole-ish billionaire but you figure, hey why not, if Warren Beatty could do it and Chris Rock could do it — then so can I.