BAD HABITS

A 100% Fact-Free Book

By

Dave Barry

An Owl Book

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

New York

Introduction, "It's in the Genes," "Beer is the Solution" and "Suet Won't Do

It" copyright (C) 1985 by Dave Barry. All other essays copyright (C) 1982 and

(C) 1983 by Feature Associates.

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions

thereof in any form.

Published by Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

115 West 18th Street

New York, New York 10011.

Published in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited

195 Aristate Parkway

Markham, Ontario L3R 4T8.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barry, Dave.

Bad habits.

"An Owl book"

Reprint. Originally published: Garden City, N.Y.:

Doubleday, 1985.

1. American wit and humor.

ISBN 0-8050-0254-5 (pbk.)

Published in arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

First published in hardcover by Doubleday & Company, Inc. in 1985.

First Owl Book Edition-1987

Henry Holt books are available at special discounts for bulk purchases for

sales promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special

editions or book excerpts can also be created to specification. For details

contact:

Special Sales Director

Henry Holt and Company, Inc.

115 West 18th Street

New York, New York 10011

Printed in the United States of America

Also by Dave Barry

Babies and Other Hazards of Sex

Claw Your Way to the Top

Stay Fit and Healthy Until You're Dead

The Taming of the Screw

Dedication

To Mom and Dad, who never forced me to go see Santa Claus.

Contents

HOUSEHOLD PERILS

It's in the Genes............................................................3

Barbecuing Is the Pits.......................................................5

A Solution to Housework......................................................7

Three-Pronged Attack........................................................10

They've Got Our Number......................................................12

Okay, Now Try the Engine....................................................14

The Problem with Pets.......................................................16

GOVERNMENTAL FOLLIES

Fungus on the Economy.......................................................21

Give Wall Street Credit.....................................................23

Outbungling the Commies.....................................................25

It's Drafty in Here.........................................................27

MX Is the Way to Go. Bye....................................................29

MX Service Warranty.........................................................31

Birthday Celebration........................................................33

Why Not a Postal Service?...................................................35

The Leak Detectors..........................................................37

States for Sale, Cheap......................................................39

There Auto Be a Law.........................................................41

You'll Look Radiant.........................................................43

Caution: Government at Work.................................................46

TAXATION WITHOUT RESERVATION

A Taxing Proposal...........................................................51

Our Patriotic Booty.........................................................53

Taxpayer's Blues............................................................55

THE MEDIA IS THE MESS-UP

Perking Up the News.........................................................61

Junkyard Journalism.........................................................63

Bring Back Captain Video....................................................65

In Depth, but Shallowly.....................................................68

Radio's Air Heads...........................................................71

What to Ban on Video........................................................73

Subtract Those Ads..........................................................74

LOW FINANCE

A Matter of Life and Debt...................................................81

Full-Service Bankruptcy.....................................................83

The Net May Be Gross........................................................85

Anti-Insurance Policy.......................................................87

Build Your Own Mess.........................................................89

God Needs the Money.........................................................91

HEALTH HABITS

Exercising Your Rights......................................................97

Programs for the Unfit......................................................98

Jogging for President......................................................100

A Cold Cure? Who Nose?.....................................................102

Male Delivery Room.........................................................104

Tale of the Tapeworm.......................................................106

Injurious to Your Wealth...................................................108

Psychiatrist for Rent......................................................110

Oaf of Hippocrates.........................................................112

"Great Baby! Delicious!"...................................................114

B - - - sts and Baby Care..................................................117

Suet Won't Do It...........................................................118

Dentistry Self-Drilled.....................................................122

CULTURE STAGGERS ON

Art Cuts Really Sphinx.....................................................127

Some Art, Some Art Not.....................................................129

Music to Get Rich By.......................................................131

Prurient Interest Rate.....................................................134

Compressed Classics........................................................137

A LITTLE LEARNING ...

Basic Frog Glop............................................................143

Schools Not So Smart.......................................................145

Why We Don't Read..........................................................146

What Is and Ain't Grammatical..............................................149

It Takes a Lot of Gaul.....................................................151

How to Trap a Zoid.........................................................153

College Admissions.........................................................156

SCIENTIFIC STUFF

Barry's Key to Life........................................................161

Basic as Atom and Eve......................................................163

Boredom on the Wing........................................................165

What's Alien You?..........................................................167

The Computer: Is It Terminal?..............................................169

Bring Back Carl's Plaque...................................................171

Socket to Them.............................................................173

Cloudy with a Chance of ...................................................175

EAT, DRINK, AND BE WARY

The Art of Wine Snobbery...................................................179

Beer Is the Solution.......................................................180

Hold the Bean Sprouts......................................................182

Rooting for Rutabagas......................................................185

TRAVELING LIGHT

Vacation Reservations......................................................191

Trip to Balmy California...................................................193

The Plane Truth............................................................195

Destination: Maybe.........................................................198

THE SPORTING LIFE

Unsportsmanlike Conduct....................................................203

Football Deflated..........................................................205

Gunning for Safety.........................................................207

Something Fishy Here.......................................................209

TIPS FROM THE BOTTOM

Serf Wanted................................................................215

Wedding Etiquette..........................................................217

"Look! I Got You a Gift!"..................................................219

About Lawn Order...........................................................221

The Law vs. Justice........................................................223

Into the Round File........................................................225

INTRODUCTION

When people come to my home for the first time, they often ask me, "Dave,

where's the bathroom?" To which I always answer, "Down the hall there, on the

left." And from that point on we are usually close friends.

I bring this up because people often wonder what I'm really like.

"Dave," they often ask, when they get out of the bathroom, "are you really as

witty, insightful, articulate, and handsome as your writing suggests?" I

would have to say that yes, I am, although I am not as tall as you might

think. I'm maybe five nine. But then a lot of truly great writers were of

average height or less. William Shakespeare was only fifteen inches tall!

Which leads us to accuracy. When Doubleday & Company decided, after days

of heavy drinking, to publish this book, they hired a panel of extremely

brilliant nuclear physicists, who combed through these essays and marked, with

a red pencil, every sentence that might conceivably be accurate, and these

sentences were all removed with pruning shears. So I freely admit, right up

front, that there are no facts left in this book, and I don't want you Little

League coaches out there to send me a lot of cretin letters informing me that

a ten-year-old can't really throw a baseball six hundred miles an hour. Okay?

So there you have it, except for my philosophy of life. My mother used

to say to me: "Son, it's better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick." I

think that still makes a heck of a lot of sense, even in these troubled times.

Household Perils

IT'S IN THE GENES

My wife and I were both born without whatever brain part it is that

enables people to decorate their homes. If we had lived in the Neanderthal

era, ours would be the only cave without little drawings of elk on the walls.

When we moved into our house eight years ago, there was this lighting

fixture in the dining room that obviously had been installed by vandals.

Simply removing this fixture would be too good for it; this is the kind of

fixture that needs to be taken out in the backyard and shot. When people came

over to visit, back when we first moved in, we'd gesture toward the fixture

derisively and say "Of course that's got to go."

Of course we still have it. We have no way of deciding what to replace

it with. What we have done is get an electrician to come in and move the

fixture to another part of the dining room, because, after years of thinking

about it with our defective brains, we thought this might be a good decorative

idea. To move the fixture, the electrician had to punch holes, some of them

big enough to put your fist through, in the wall and ceiling. I have taped

plastic sandwich bags over these holes, to keep the air from rushing in and

out.

So now, after eight years, we have the original vandal fixture, plus we

have holes with plastic bags over them. We eat in the kitchen. We will

always eat in the kitchen, and our dining room will always look like the South

Bronx. We have learned that anything we try to do to improve it will just

make it worse, because of these missing brain parts.

We do a lot of work with plastic bags. We made curtains for several

rooms by taping up dark plastic garbage bags. My wife feels guilty about

this, because she believes women are supposed to have this Betty Crocker gland

somewhere that secretes a hormone that enables them to sew curtains. God

knows she has tried. She reads articles, she takes measurements, she even

goes to the fabric store, but because of what she perceives to be a deficiency

of her Betty Crocker gland, she never actually produces any curtains. Which

is fine, because I have a deficiency of my Mr. Goodwrench gland and would

never put them up.

So we use plastic garbage bags. They work fine, but I have noticed that

most of our friends, now that we're all grown-ups, have switched over to

actual cloth curtains. Also they have tasteful Danish furniture. They just

went out and got it somehow, as if it were no big deal, and now everything

matches, like those photographs in snotty interior design magazines featuring

homes owned by wealthy people who eat out and keep their children in

Switzerland. We have this green armchair we got at an auction for twenty-five

cents. This is not one of those chairs that are sold for a song but turn out

to be tasteful antiques worth thousands of dollars. This chair, at

twenty-five cents, was clearly overpriced. It looks, from a distance, like a

wad of mucus, and it could not possibly match any other furniture because any

furniture that looked like it would have been burned years ago.

Accompanying this chair is a sofa that some people we know tried to throw

away six years ago, which we have covered with a blanket to prevent guests

from looking directly at it and being blinded or driven insane. Such is the

tastelessness of this sofa. And these are two of our better pieces. The only

really nice furniture we own is manufactured by the Fisher-Price toy company

for my son's little Fisher-Price people, although I certainly don't begrudge

them that, inasmuch as they have no arms or legs.

I imagine you're going to suggest that we go out and buy a nice piece of

furniture, and then, when we can afford it, another one, and so on until we

have a regular grown-up neat and tasteful home. This would never work. If we

were to put a nice piece of furniture in our living room, all the other

furniture would wait until we'd gone to bed, then ridicule and deride the new

furniture, and emit all kinds of shabbiness germs into the living room

atmosphere, and by morning the new furniture would be old and stained and

hideous. I also firmly believe that if we were to leave our chair in one of

our friends' tasteful living rooms for several days, it would become sleek and

Danish.

This interior decorating problem extends to cars. None of my friends,

for example, have plaster models of their teeth in their cars. I have two in

my car. My dentist gives them to me from time to time, sort of like a treat,

and I'm afraid to throw them away for fear he'll get angry and make me come in

for an appointment. I keep them in my car because God knows the house is

already bad enough, but I know they are not tasteful. I can't put them under

the seat, because my car, like all the cars we've ever owned, has developed

Car Leprosy, which causes all the nonessential parts such as window cranks to

gradually fall off and collect under the seat and merge with French fries from

the drive-thru window at the Burger King. I'm not about to put my teeth down

there. So they sit in plain view, grinning at me as I drive and snickering at

my lack of taste.

My wife and I are learning to accept all this. We realize that if the

present trends continue, we will not be able to admit people into our house

without blindfolds. I can live with that. What I worry about is that we will

get in trouble with the bank or the government or something. One day there

will be a violent pounding on the door, and we will be subjected to a surprise

inspection by the Committee of Normal Grown-ups, headed by my wife's home

economics teacher and my shop teacher. They'll take one look at our curtains,

and they'll take away our house and cars and put us in a special institution

where the inmates are roused at 4:30 A.M., chained together, and forced to

install wallpaper all day. Nancy Reagan would be the warden.

BARBECUING IS THE PITS

What could be more fun than an outdoor barbecue? I can think of several

things offhand, such as watching the secretary of state fall into a vat of

untreated sewage. But that would probably cause us to go to war in Nicaragua

or somewhere, so I guess we'll have to settle for a barbecue.

The barbecue was invented more than eighty million years ago by

Cro-Magnon Man, who was the son of Stephanie Cro and Eric Magnon, a primitive

but liberated couple. Cro-Magnon Man used to eat dinosaur meat raw, and it

tasted awful, worse than yogurt. One day, while Cro-Magnon Man was eating,

lightning set a nearby log on fire. Cro-Magnon Man was so surprised that he

dropped his dinosaur meat onto the fire, where it ignited and gave off a

disgusting odor that drove off all the insects, which in those days were the

size of mature eggplants and extremely vicious. "This is terrific," said

Cro-Magnon Man, only nobody understood him because English hadn't been

invented yet.

Burning dinosaurs quickly became a major form of insect control. At

large Cro-Magnon lawn parties, the hosts would put whole brontosauruses on the

fire, and they would sizzle into the night, keeping the insects away and

giving off a stench that lingers to this very day at the northern end of the

New Jersey Turnpike.

Eventually, of course, they used up all the dinosaurs, which led to the

discovery that if you put cows and pigs on your fire, you could not only drive

away insects but in a pinch you could also eat the cows and pigs. This led to

the invention of hamburgers and hot dogs, which are cows and pigs that have

been ground up in Chicago and formed into little portable units that can be

easily thrown on a fire. Today people rarely put entire cows on fires except

in Texas, where lifting animals is a major cultural activity, second only to

wearing big hats.

To hold your outdoor barbecue, you'll need several dozen units of cow or

pig and a portable grill, or hibachi. ("Hibachi" is a Japanese word meaning

extremely flimsy grills that break at the slightest touch but Americans buy

them anyway.") You'll also need fuel. At one time, people used wood, but

then the Consumer Product Safety Commission discovered that wood is flammable

and banned it. So today you are required to use charcoal, a mineral that

forms in torn paper bags in supermarkets. The problem, of course, is that

charcoal, being a mineral, does not burn. Neither does charcoal lighter

fluid. Firemen routinely use charcoal lighter fluid to extinguish major

refinery fires. So what actually heats your barbecue food is matches,

hundreds and hundreds of matches that you heap onto your charcoal until they

form a blaze.

While you're waiting for your matches to get going, you should prepare a

tangy barbecue sauce.

TANGY BARBECUE SAUCE RECIPE

1 cup broached onions

2 liters vanilla abstract

1/2 pound neat's-foot oil

2 table-spoons butter or oregano

1 fresh poltroon, diced

To Prepare

With floured hands, on a floured surface, standing on a floured floor,

and just generally surrounded by mounds and mounds of flour, combine the

ingredients in a greased 5518' by 16318' pan, then pour the mixture carefully

into an ungreased 4318' by 18718' pan and heat it until a 1318' blister forms

when you stick your hand into it.

Now place your meat units on the grill. They should burst into flames

immediately. Let them burn until they're cooked the way you like them:

RARE (5-10 minutes): The outside is burnt and welded to the grill; the inside

is pink and swirling with cow and pig disease germs.

MEDIUM (5-10 minutes): The outside and part of the inside are burnt; many of

the disease germs, particularly the elderly and pregnant ones, are dying

slow, painful deaths.

WELL DONE (5-10 minutes): Both the outside and the inside are completely

burnt; almost all the disease germs are dead, and the few remaining ones

are making elaborate plans for revenge.

When your meat is done, extinguish it with the barbecue sauce or charcoal

lighter, detach it from the grill with a spatula or sharp chisel, and serve it

with something that people can eat, such as Fritos or turkey sandwiches. You

should eat quickly, because the insects will monitor you from a safe distance

and attack the instant the smoke clears.

A SOLUTION TO HOUSEWORK

Almost all housework is hard and dangerous, involving the insides of

ovens and toilets and the cracks between bathroom tiles, where plague germs

fester. The only housework that is easy and satisfying is the kind where you

spray chemicals on wooden furniture and smear them around until the wood looks

shiny. This is the kind of housework they show on television commercials: A

professional actress, posing as the Cheerful Housewife (IQ 43), dances around

her house, smearing and shining, smearing and shining, until before she knows

it her housework is done and she is free to spend the rest of the afternoon

reading the bust-development ads in Cosmopolitan magazine. She never cleans

her toilets. When they get dirty, she just gets another house. Lord knows

they pay her enough.

Most of us would rather smear and shine than actually clean anything.

For example, our house has a semifinished basement, which means it looks too

much like a finished room to store old tires in, but too much like a basement

to actually live in. Our semifinished basement has a semibathroom, and one

time, several years ago, a small woodland creature crept into the house in the

middle of the night and died in the shower stall. This is common behavior in

the animal world: many animals, when in danger, are driven by instinct to seek

refuge in shower stalls.

Since we hardly ever go down to our semifinished basement, we didn't

discover the dead woodland creature until several weeks after it crept in, at

which time it was getting fairly ripe. Now obviously, the correct thing to do

was clean it up, but this is the hard kind of housework. So instead we stayed

upstairs and went into an absolute frenzy of smearing and shining, until you

could not walk into our living room without wearing sunglasses, for fear of

being blinded by the glare off the woodwork. Eventually, we managed to block

the woodland creature out of our minds.

Several months later, our friend Rob, who is a doctor, came to visit. He

stayed in our semifinished basement, but we noticed that he came upstairs to

take showers. One of the first things they teach you in medical school is

never to take a shower with a dead woodland creature. We were so embarrassed

that we went down and cleaned up the shower stall, with a shovel and acid.

But I doubt we'd have done it if Rob hadn't been there.

Our behavior is not unique. People have been avoiding housework for

millions of years. Primitive man would stay in one cave until the floor was

littered with stegosaurus bones and the walls were covered with primitive

drawings, which were drawn by primitive children when their parents went out

to dinner, and then the family would move to a new cave, to avoid cleaning the

old one. That's how primitive man eventually got to North America.

In North America, primitive man started running out of clean caves, and

he realized that somebody was going to have to start doing housework. He

thought about it long and hard, and finally settled on primitive woman. But

he needed an excuse to get himself out of doing the housework, so he invented

civilization. Primitive woman would say: "How about staying in the cave and

helping with the housework today?" And primitive man would say: "I can't,

dear: I have to invent fire." Or: "I'd love to, dear, but I think it's more

important that I devise some form of written language." And off he'd go,

leaving the woman with the real work.

Over the years, men came up with thousands of excuses for not doing

housework--wars, religion, pyramids, the United States Senate--until finally

they hit on the ultimate excuse: business. They built thousands of offices

and factories, and every day, all over the country, they'd get up, eat

breakfast, and announce: "Well, I'm off to my office or factory now." Then

they'd just leave, and they wouldn't return until the house was all cleaned up

and dinner was ready.

But then men made a stupid mistake. They started to believe that

"business" really was hard work, and they started talking about it when they

came home. They'd come in the door looking exhausted, and they'd say things

like "Boy, I sure had a tough meeting today."

You can imagine how a woman who had spent the day doing housework would

react to this kind of statement. She'd say to herself. "Meeting? He had a

tough meeting? I've been on my hands and knees all day cleaning toilets and

scraping congealed spider eggs off the underside of the refrigerator, and he

tells me he had a tough meeting?"

That was the beginning of the end. Women began to look into "business,"

and they discovered that all you do is go to an office and answer the phone

and do various things with pieces of paper and have meetings. So women began

going to work, and now nobody does housework, other than smearing and shining,

and before long there's going to be so much crud and bacteria under the

nation's refrigerators that we're all going to get diseases and die.

The obvious and fair solution to this problem is to let men do the

housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The

trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the

importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn

housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire

secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda,

but they'd never clean anything. So men are out.

But there is a solution; there is a way to get people to willingly do

housework. I discovered this by watching household-cleanser commercials on

television. What I discovered is that many people who seem otherwise normal

will do virtually any idiot thing if they think they will be featured in a

commercial. They figure if they get on a commercial, they'll make a lot of

money, like the Cheerful Housewife, and they'll be able to buy cleaner houses.

So they'll do anything.

For example, if I walked up to you in the middle of a supermarket and

asked you to get down and scrub the floor with two different cleansers, just

so I could see which one worked better, you would punch me in the mouth. But

if I had guys with cameras and microphones with me, and I asked you to do the

same thing, you'd probably do it. Not only that, but you'd make lots of

serious, earnest comments about the cleansers. You'd say: "I frankly believe

that New Miracle Swipe, with its combination of grease fighters and wax

shiners, is a more effective cleanser, I honestly do. Really. I mean it."

You'd say this in the same solemn tone of voice you might use to discuss the

question of whether the United States should deploy Cruise missiles in Western

Europe. You'd have no shame at all.

So here's my plan: I'm going to get some old cameras and microphones and

position them around my house. I figure that before long I'll have dozens of

people just dying to do housework in front of my cameras. Sure,most of them

will eventually figure out that they're not going to be in a commercial, but

new ones will come along to replace them. Meanwhile, I'll be at work.

THREE-PRONGED ATTACK

I have two major complaints about electricity.

First, I cannot understand my electricity bills. I never even read them

anymore: I just pay whatever random amount the electric company puts after

"PAY THIS AMOUNT."

Frankly, I suspect the electric company doesn't have the vaguest notion

how much electricity I use. I have an electric meter, but it is on the side

of the house where a large contingent of killer wasps has lived since 1977,

and nobody, not even my dog, ever goes there. I suspect that whoever is

supposed to read my meter is lying out in the bushes somewhere, covered with

stings.

So I think the electric company is just making my bill up out of thin

air. Oh, they're very clever about it: They make the bill so elaborate that I

won't suspect anything. It looks like this:

Adjusted basic flat usage charge rate: $34.70

Charge for usage of ajusted basic flat: $22.67

Flatly basic adjustable usage rate: $17.31

Maladjustment of usable, chargeable flat rate: $4.12

Ferrous Mineral Tax: $5.12

Tax to Pa $0

The Spanish-American War Debt: $2.89

Gratuity: $1.68

As I said, I always pay these bills. I'm afraid that if I don't pay, the

electric company will send huge jolts of electricity through the wire: one

minute I'd be carving poultry with the electric carving knife, and the next

minute I'd be a shriveled lump of carbon lying on the kitchen floor. So I

pay, but I don't like it.

My other major electrical complaint concerns appliance plugs. You may

have noticed that something very sinister has happened to appliance plugs

since you were a child. I grew up during the Eisenhower administration in a

normal, God-fearing home with a normal, God-fearing electrical system. All

the outlets had two holes, and all the appliance plugs had two prongs, and

everything worked just fine. Also the inflation rate was very low.

Now, suddenly, the appliance manufacturers are putting three prongs on

their plugs, and you can't plug them in. What is going on? Has there been

some huge mistake in the shipping department, so we're all getting appliances

that were supposed to go to Yugoslavia? Has the government decided that

appliances are so dangerous that consumers shouldn't be allowed to plug them

in? Maybe it has something to do with the metric system. Whatever it is,

it's a problem.

The simplest solution is to get a hacksaw and saw off the third prong.

Unfortunately, this is a violation of federal law. It's like removing those

little pillow tags that say "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW." If you are

convicted, agents of the Consumer Product Safety Commission will come to your

house and lock you in a room filled with government safety publications and

not let you out until you can pass an eight-hour written safety test.

So most people use those little plug adapters. This seems to work fine,

but if you read the appliance instructions carefully, you'll note that plug

adapters are Not Recommended:

WARNING: IF YOU USE ONE OF THOSE LITTLE PLUG ADAPTERS TO

PLUG THIS APPLIANCE IN, ALL THE WARRANTIES AND GUARANTEES

AND PROMISES THE SALESMAN MADE ARE NULL AND VOID AND YOU

MAY BE UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.

The most radical solution to the three-pronged plug problem is to build a

new house with three-hole outlets, or rewire your old house (which costs about

the same). But this is really no solution at all, because as soon as

everybody has three-hole outlets, the appliance manufacturers will come out

with four-pronged plugs, and it will just keep escalating until your average

plug contains so much metal that you will need the help of three or four

strong men just to lift it.

So there is no good way you can solve the three-pronged plug problem. I

think you should write your congressman and tell him to get off his butt and

do something about it. Tell him you want the Defense Department to have a few

large army tanks cruise up to the appliance manufacturers' factories and

suggest that they start producing two-pronged plugs again pronto. And while

you're at it, tell your congressman to straighten out the electric-bill mess,

and maybe do something about my wasps.

THEY'VE GOT OUR NUMBER

What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with

people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the

middle of the night. These people have been abducted by large publishing

companies and placed in barbed-wire enclosures surrounded by armed men with

attack dogs, and unless they sell 350 magazine subscriptions per day, they

will not be fed. These people are desperate. They will say anything to get

you to subscribe, and you cannot stop them merely by being rude:

CALLER: Hello, Mr. Barry?

ME: No, this is Adolf Hitler.

CALLER: Of course. My mistake. The reason I'm calling you at eleven-thirty

at night, Mr. Hitler, is that I'm conducting a marketing survey, and ...

ME: Are you selling magazine subscriptions?

CALLER: Magazine subscriptions? Me? Selling them? Ha ha. No. Certainly

not. Not at all. No, this is just a plain old marketing survey. (Sound

of dogs barking in the background.) If you'll just answer a few

questions, we'll send you a million dollars.

ME: Well, what do you want to know?

CALLER: Well, I just want to ask you some questions about your household, such

as how many people live there, and what their ages are, and what their

incomes are, and whether any of them might be interested in subscribing

to Redbook?

ME: I don't want to subscribe to anything, you lying piece of slime.

CALLER: How about Time? Sports Illustrated? American Beet Farmer?

ME: I'm going to hang up.

CALLER: No! (The dogs get louder.) Please! You can have my daughter!

ME: (Click.)

The first telephone was invented in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell

attached a battery to a crude electrical device and spoke into it. Everybody

thought he was an idiot. He would have died in poverty if Thomas Edison

hadn't invented the second telephone several years later.

The first telephone systems were primitive "party lines," where everybody

could hear what everybody else was talking about. This was very confusing:

BERTHA: Emma? I'm calling to tell you I seen your boy Norbert shootin' his

musket at our goat again, and if you don't-

CLEM: This ain't Emma. This is Clem Johnson, and I got to reach Doc

Henderson, because my wife Nell is all rigid and foaming at the mouth,

and if she don't snap out of it soon the roast is going to burn.

EMMA: Norbert don't even own a musket. All he got is a bow and arrow, and he

couldn't hit a steam locomotive from six feet, what with his bad hand,

which he got when your boy Percy bit it, and which is festerin' pretty

bad.

DOC HENDERSON: You better let me take a look at it.

BERTHA: The goat? Oh, he ain't hurt that bad, Doc. He's mostly just skittery

on account of the musket fire.

CLEM: Now she's startin' to roll her eyes around. Looks like two hard-boiled

eggs.

EMMA: What kind of roast is it?

DOC HENDERSON: If it'S just skittery, you should stroke it a bit and keep it

in a dark place.

EMMA: Well, I ain't no doctor, but I ain't never heard of stroking a roast.

CLEM: Only dark place we got is the barn, and I'd be afraid to put Nell in

there on account of she'd scare the chickens.

BERTHA: Chickens ain't a roast, Clem; chickens is poultry. Take 'em out of

the oven when you can wiggle the drumstick.

EMMA: I told you already, Norbert don't even own a musket.

CALLER: Hi. I'm conducting a marketing survey. Is Mr. Hitler at home?

CLEM: No, but I'll take a year's worth of American Beet Farmer if you got it.

The party-line system led to a lot of unnecessary confusion and death, so

the phone company devised a system whereby you can talk to only one person at

a time, although not necessarily the person you want. In fact, if you call

any large company, you will never get to talk to the person you're calling.

Large companies employ people who are paid, on a commission basis, solely to

put calls on hold. The only exception is department stores, where all calls

are immediately routed to whichever clerk has the most people waiting in line

for service.

But we should never complain about our telephone system. It is the most

sophisticated system in the world, yet it is the easiest to use. For example,

my twenty-month-old son, who cannot perform a simple act like eating a banana

without getting much of it in his hair, is perfectly capable of direct-dialing

Okinawa, and probably already has. In another year, he'll be able to order

his own magazine subscriptions.

OKAY, NOW TRY THE ENGINE

You should do your own car repairs. It's an easy way to save money and

possibly maim yourself for life.

You're probably afraid to repair your car because you think cars are

complicated. This is nonsense. Many teenage boys understand cars, and on any

scale of intellectual achievement teenage boys rank right down there with

newts. At least they did when I was one of them.

When I was in high school, we boys would stand out on the corner at

lunchtime and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and spit frequently and guys would

pull up in genuinely hideous-looking cars with the front ends jacked way up.

They'd open the hoods and we'd stare inside and have conversations like this:

LOOKERS: Three eighty-nine?

DRIVER: Four twenty-seven.

LOOKERS: Fuel injected?

DRIVER: Headers.

LOOKERS: Dual?

DRIVER: Quad.

LOOKERS: Boss.

Then we'd all spit approvingly. Sometimes the conversation would turn

ugly, particularly if some participants favored Fords and some favored

Chevrolets. The Ford-Chevrolet conflict was a major issue, considerably more

important to us than, say, the fate of the Free World. Those who favored

Fords would yell "Fo Mo Co," which is short for "Ford Motor Company." Those

who favored Chevrolets would yell "Fo No Go," which is short for "Ford No Go."

This was considered a very witty insult. Sometimes fights would break out.

What I'm getting at is that we had the intellectual depth of lima beans,

and we still managed to understand cars. So you can, too.

The trouble with most do-it-yourself car articles is they tell you how to

do things you don't really need to do, like change the oil. Most Such

articles rave on for pages about changing the oil, as if it were some kind of

sacred ritual, never once telling you how degrading and pointless it is. I

have been driving for eighteen years, and I have never once had a car problem

I could have solved by changing the oil. If the Good Lord had wanted us to

change the oil, He would have put different oil in the car in the first place.

But if you believe the do-it-yourself articles, you traipse along,

changing your oil regularly, and one day your car ceases to run, and you try

changing the oil a couple more times, and it still doesn't run, and you end up

taking it to an auto mechanic, and you have this conversation:

You: What's wrong?

MECHANIC: It seems to be either the transmission or the engine. (Translation:

I'm not sure, so I plan to replace every part in the car.)

You: How long will it take to fix?

MECHANIC: We should have a pretty good idea by Friday. ("One hundred and

sixty-two years.")

You: How much will it cost?

MECHANIC: Well, I have to Check on some of the parts and labor, but figure

about $130. ("Eight billion skillion dollars.")

So what you need to know is how to do major car repairs, the kind most

do-it-yourself articles don't talk about. There are two major kinds of car

problems, which we in the automotive community refer to as The Two Major Kinds

of Car Problems:

Problems that cause your car to make loud noises.

What you do here is turn up the radio. If your car doesn't have a radio,

you can sing loudly as you drive. Some people try to deal with noise problems

by messing around with the muffler, but I advise against this. Mufflers are

filthy, disgusting objects covered with parts of every dead animal you have

ever run over. I would no more touch a muffler than I would change my oil.

Problems that cause your car to stop.

Generally these problems involve the engine, which is a large object

you'll find under your hood, unless you live in a high-crime area. Open the

hood and poke around among the wires with a screwdriver, or, if you have no

screwdriver, the tip of an umbrella. Have somebody sit in the car. As you

poke, yell "Try it now" or "Okay, try it now." This is how most professional

mechanics solve engine problems. Before long you'll be fixing cars as well as

they do, by which I mean about 30 percent of the time.

THE PROBLEM WITH PETS

Everybody should have a pet. Pets give you all the love and devotion of

close relatives, but you can lock them in the basement for hours at a time if

they get loud or boring. The pets, I mean.

Have you ever wondered why people have pets? Neither have I. I suspect

it's because pets are easy to talk to. I spend hours talking to my dog,

explaining my views on world affairs. She always listens very attentively,

although I'm not sure she understands me. If I could hear what she's

thinking, it would probably go like this:

ME: The situation in the Middle East certainly looks serious.

MY DOG: I wonder if he's going to give me some food.

ME: It is unfortunate that an area so vital to the economic well-being of the

world is so politically unstable.

MY DOG: Maybe he'll give me some food now.

ME: The Russians certainly are making it difficult for our government to

achieve a lasting Mideast peace.

MY DOG: Any minute now he might go into the kitchen and get me some food.

My first pet was a group of ants in one of those educational ant farms

with clear plastic sides. My mother gave it to me for Christmas when I was

about ten. She had to send away to Chicago to buy the ants. The ironic thing

is that our house was already overrun with local ants, which came out during

the summer in hordes. I mean, it was like one of those science fiction movies

in which insects take over the Earth. Every summer we had huge, brazen ants

striding around the kitchen demanding food and running up long distance

telephone charges. My mother spent much of her time whapping at them with

brooms and spraying them with deadly chemicals. Nothing worked. The ants

used to lie on their backs, laughing at the brooms and the chemicals and

calling for more.

What I'm getting at is that my mother hated ants, but she sent good money

all the way to Chicago so I could have ants for Christmas. Christmas does

horrible things to people's values.

Anyway, I got the ants and put them into their ant farm and fed them

sugar and water. The idea was that they would build a lot of ant tunnels and

stuff and I would learn about Nature. Instead, they died. My mother was

astounded. I mean, here she spends whole summers trying to kill local ants

that she got for free, and these Chicago ants, ants that she paid money for,

ants that had their own little farm and their own little food, just die. If

we had been smart, we would have put our local ants into the ant farm and fed

them sugar and water; that probably would have polished them off.

The lesson to be learned here is that insects make lousy pets. Even the

best-trained, most intelligent, and most loyal insect pets tend to look and

behave very much like ordinary common-criminal insects. Also you can't

explain your views on world affairs to an insect, unless you drink a lot.

Fish and Green Cheese

Tropical fish are not much better. My wife and I went through a fish

period, during which we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tanks and

pumps and filters and chemicals and special plants and special rocks and

special food. We had enough tropical-fish technology to land a tropical fish

on the moon. What we could not do was keep any given tropical fish alive for

longer than a week. Just as soon as we'd pop one in the tank, it would

develop Fin Rot. Medical science has developed no cure for Fin Rot, so our

fish would languish around among the fish technology, rotting. We were

constantly buying replacement fish. Whenever one of us would leave the house,

the other would say: "Don't forget to pick up several tropical fish." I have

no actual proof, but I strongly suspect that these fish were manufactured in

Chicago.

The most popular pets are dogs and cats. Now when I say "dogs," I'm

talking about dogs, which are large, bounding, salivating animals, usually

with bad breath. I am not talking about those little squeaky things you can

hold on your lap and carry around. Zoologically speaking, these are not dogs

at all; they are members of the pillow family.

Anyway, dogs make good pets because they are very loyal (NOTE: When I say

"loyal," I mean "stupid.") I once wrote a column in which I said dogs are

stupid, and I got a lot of nasty mail from people who insisted, often with

misspelled words, that dogs are intelligent. Perhaps from their point of view

dogs are intelligent, but I don't want to get into that here. I'll just stick

with "loyal.")

Yes indeed, dogs are loyal. Here is an example of how loyal dogs are:

When two dogs meet, they will spend the better part of a day sniffing each

other's private parts and going to the bathroom on any object more than one

inch high. Talk about loyalty.

Cats are less loyal than dogs, but more independent. (This is code. It

means: "Cats are smarter than dogs, but they hate people.") Many people love

cats. From time to time, newspapers print stories about some elderly widow

who died and left her entire estate, valued at $320,000, to her cat,

Fluffikins. Cats read these stories, too, and are always plotting to get

named as beneficiaries in their owners' wills. Did you ever wonder where your

cat goes when it wanders off for several hours? It meets with other cats in

estate-planning seminars. I just thought you should know.

Governmental Follies

FUNGUS ON THE ECONOMY

I don't know about you, but I was ever so grateful when President Reagan

and several other top leaders got together recently and straightened out the

world economy. I had been meaning to do something about it myself, but I

never found the time on account of we've had a lot of rain lately, which has

caused these fungal growths to sprout all over the lawn.

I am not talking here about toadstools. I am talking about organisms

reminiscent of the one that nearly ate the diner in the Ingmar Bergman film

The Blob before Steve McQueen subdued it with a fire extinguisher. Of course

Steve had to deal with just the one lone, isolated growth, whereas I have

several dozen, and I couldn't possibly extinguish them all if they attacked in

unison. Eventually they're going to figure this out. I mean, they may be

fungal growths, but they're not stupid.

Anyway, with all this on my mind I've had very little time to spend on

the world economy, which is why I was so glad to hear that the leaders of the

economic bloc known to economists as the Big Rich Western Nations with Indoor

Plumbing and Places That Sell Cheeseburgers met in Williamsburg to straighten

things out. Williamsburg is an authentic colonial restored place in Virginia

where people in authentic uncomfortable clothing demonstrate how horrible it

was to live in historical colonial times. Back then, if you wanted one crummy

bar of soap, you had to spend the better part of a week melting beeswax and

rending pigs and all the other degrading things people did before the

invention of the supermarket. This is how people still live in a lot of

wretched little Third World nations with names like Koala Paroondi, whose

leaders were not invited to Williamsburg because the Western leaders were

afraid they'd eat all the food.

The economic summit cost something like eight million dollars, which

sounds like a lot of money until you realize it lasted almost four days. The

reason it took the leaders so long to straighten out the world economy is that

they had to wrestle with some very complex issues. For example, I read in

Newsweek that French President Mitterand does not like white sauces, and West

German Chancellor Kohl does not like seafood, and so on. These high-level

food differences often resulted in Frank Exchanges of Views during the summit

meals:

FRENCH PRESIDENT MITTERAND: Please pass the tiny lobsters dish.

BRITISH PRIME MINISTER THATCHER: Those are not "tiny lobsters." Those are

crayfish.

MITTERAND: Fish? Do not make me laugh. I represent the greatest food snots

in the world, and I know what is the fish and what is not the fish, and

this is not the fish. Regard: it has the claws. Does this fish of the

cray have the claws?

THATCHER: Yes, you twit. It's a crustacean.

MITTERAND: Perhaps I am a twit, but at least I am not wearing the tweedy

British clothings of such monumental dowdiness that a dog would be

reluctant to relieve itself upon them.

Another problem was interest rates. Interest rates are very high, and

the leaders spent a lot of time during their high-level meals trying to come

up with a solution. Finally--and this just goes to show you why these people

are world leaders and you are a mere taxpayer--they decided that interest

rates ought to come down. It's a radical plan, but it just might work.

From the United States' point of view, the big issue at Williamsburg was

unfair foreign competition, which means any competition that involves

foreigners. At one time, the foreigners competed fairly: they made chocolates

and little carved-wood figurines, and we made everything else. Then, without

warning, foreigners began making reasonably priced, well-made, technologically

advanced cars, television sets, shoes, mushrooms, etc., and they forced

Americans to buy these things at gunpoint. President Reagan discussed this

problem at Williamsburg with Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, and they

hammered out an agreement under which the Japanese will continue to send us

cars, but they'll start putting defects in them. We're going to give them

technical assistance: we're going to send people over there to train Japanese

factory workers to be hostile and alienated and put the transmission in wrong

and stuff like that.

At the end of the summit, the leaders issued a major economic-policy

statement that nobody read except the editors of the New York Times, and

everybody went home. The world economy began to improve almost immediately.

Even as you read these words, the yen is rising vs. the franc. Or else it's

failing. You may rest assured that the yen is doing whatever it does vs. the

franc when things are improving. Also the other day my son ran his tricycle

over one of the growths, and the growth let him off with only a sharp

reprimand. So things are really looking up.

GIVE WALL STREET CREDIT

I think I'll just quickly bring us all up to date on President Reagan's

plan to save the economy, so we can get back to whatever we were doing.

The big problem is Wall Street, which is a street in New York City where

people go every day to work themselves into a lather. To understand how Wall

Street works, all you have to do is recall those television commercials for a

major Wall Street brokerage firm, the ones that feature cattle. It is not

mere chance that the firm chose cattle as its symbol. If you spend much time

with cattle, you know they spend their time making cattle mess and panicking.

The scene is pretty much the same on Wall Street, except the herd members

carry briefcases. They are very skittery, and for good reason: They are in

the world's silliest business. Here's how it works:

Say a company wants some money. It prints up a batch of pieces of paper

("stocks"), goes down to Wall Street, and looks around for some herd members

to sell the paper to. "Hey there," the company says to the herd members.

"How would you like to own a piece of paper? Look at these features: It has

an attractive border, three different colors of ink, and many financial words

such as 'accrual' and 'debenture' printed right on it." The herd members

snuffle around for a while, then one of them bolts up and buys a piece of

paper. Then, suddenly, they're trampling all over each other to buy pieces of

paper.

The company now has a large sum of money, and it departs hurriedly,

chuckling, to buy factories or executive washrooms or whatever. Gradually,

the herd members realize that all they have is paper, which is utterly

worthless unless they can get other herd members to buy it. So they all end

up simply trading paper back and forth, day after day, year after year. Deep

in their souls, they realize they are participating in an enormous hoax that

could collapse at any moment, so any event, no matter how trivial, causes them

to panic. You can pick up the newspaper financial section any day and read

stories like this:

NEW YORK--Stock prices plunged sharply today as investors

reacted to the discovery that Saturn actually has six

moons, rather than five as was believed previously.

So the stock market is always skittering up and down. When Ronald Reagan

was elected, it skittered up for a while, because Ron promised he would reduce

government spending. Wall Street fears the government because the government

is Wall Street's major competitor in the worthless pieces-of-paper business.

But it turned out that what Ron really meant was he was going to reduce

one kind of government spending, so he could spend more money on the MX

Missile, the B-1 Bomber, the Cruise Missile, the Atomic Dirigible, the Secret

Decoder Ring, and the Deadly Outer Space Death Ray. So he ended up with a

budget that actually increases government spending, for the 206th year in a

row.

Once Wall Street realized what Ron had done, it worked itself into an

even bigger panic than usual. Ron has been trying to calm it down, but the

herd members are too busy barging around, wild-eyed, waving their pieces of

paper. Ron may have to go to Wall Street personally and deliver a soothing

speech. "There, there," he would tell the herd. "There, there."

Ron's other big problem is the Federal Reserve Board. Nobody knows much

about the Federal Reserve Board: it is a secret society whose members

periodically emerge from their mountain hideout, raise the interest rates,

then scurry off into the darkness. This forces the banks to raise the prime

rate, which is the rate they charge customers who do not want or need money.

One result of all this interest-rate-raising is that financial

institutions have cooked up all kinds of bizarre schemes to get you to give

them money. You can't pick up a newspaper or turn on the television these

days without seeing advertisements for these schemes:

"Attention savers: If you invest in our new All Savers Money Market Fund

Treasury Bond Certificates of Deposit, you can earn 23.6 percent interest,

which, compounded hourly and during neap tides, will yield an actualized

semiannual net deductible pretax liquid return of 41.7 percent, although of

course your mileage may vary. If you are found guilty of premature

withdrawal, the federal government requires us to send people around to break

your legs, so be sure to thumb through the prospectus."

I have a lot of trouble understanding these schemes, so for the time

being I am investing my money in groceries and consumer objects that I can

charge on my Sears credit card.

OUTBUNGLING THE COMMIES

Let's all write our congresspersons and demand that the United States

become involved in a no-win military quagmire in Central America.

The reason? Global strategy. To understand the strategic significance

of Central America, let's take a close look at the map, especially in the

critical region where the Oswego River flows into Lake Ontario. No, wait.

Wrong map.

Ah. Here we are. Look closely at Central America, and try to imagine

what would happen if this vital region were to fall into Communist hands.

What would happen is a lot of Communists would be stung repeatedly by vicious

tropical insects the size of mature hamsters.

We cannot afford to have this happen. We cannot afford to have a horde

of Communists down there becoming so cranky and welt-covered that eventually,

just for an excuse to get out of the jungle, they foment a revolution in

Mexico, which means you'd have Communist guerrilla troops right next to Texas.

I doubt they could take Texas by force. Texas has the largest fleet of armed

pickup trucks of any major power, and any invading guerrilla army would be

shot and run over repeatedly before it got half a mile, especially if it

invaded on a Saturday night.

So the Communists would have to use a psychological approach. They'd win

the Texans over by such ploys as holding barbecues, wearing big hats and

promising to extend the football Season. Once Texas went Communist, Oklahoma

would follow quickly, followed by Nebraska, followed by whatever state is next

to Nebraska, and so on until the entire nation had turned Communist except

Massachusetts, which is already very left-wing and consequently would turn

Republican.

It is to prevent this kind of tragedy that we're sending bales of your

tax money to buy guns for the corrupt, murderous slime buckets who run El

Salvador. And for those of you weak-willed, sob-sister, namby-pamby probable

homosexuals who think this is wrong, let me point out that if we don't prop up

our slime buckets, the Communists will install their corrupt slime buckets,

and you can bet your bottom tax dollar that the peasants down there are much

happier being oppressed by ours. "Anything to keep Texas safe" is the

traditional El Salvadoran peasant motto.

Besides, the El Salvadoran rulers have started showing a real interest in

human rights since we put them on this clever incentive plan under which we

threaten to stop sending them guns if they keep using them to shoot their own

citizens. This plan is working very well: Reagan administration observers

have been bringing back rave reviews. "They're not killing nearly as many

innocent women and children," the observers report, beaming with pride.

"Let's send them some more guns."

But guns alone are not enough, which is why Texas does not control the

world. You also need troops, and the Communists are sending Cuban troops to

Central America. Truth to tell, you can't wave your arms in a world trouble

spot without striking Cuban troops. They'll go anywhere, because if they stay

home they have to listen to extremely long speeches.

I say that if the Communists are sending troops, they must have a damned

good reason, and we should send troops, too. Only I don't think we should

send our armed forces, because I have serious reservations about how they'd do

in an actual war. I suspect most of them enlisted because of those really

slick, upbeat TV commercials suggesting that all you do in the armed forces is

grin and jog and learn meaningful career skills such as tank repair. If we

sent these kids to Central America, they'd go jogging into the jungle,

grinning and clutching their tank-repair tools, and the only question would be

whether the Communists would get them before the insects did.

So I say we send the people who really understand the Communist threat in

Central America, the very people who alerted us to it in the first place. I'm

talking about the Reagan administration's foreign policy strategists. I say

we arm them to the teeth, smear them with insect repellent, fly them over the

jungle and drop them at night. We could even give them parachutes.

IT'S DRAFTY IN HERE

If you can possibly manage it, you should avoid being a young person or a

wheat farmer when the president starts feeling international tension. Nine

times out of ten, when a president gets mad at the Russians, he does something

nasty to young people or wheat farmers, and sometimes both.

For example, when the Russians invaded Afghanistan, President Jimmy

Carter was so angry that he ordered teenage American males to register for the

draft; told the U.S. Olympic team it couldn't go to the Olympics; and told

farmers they couldn't sell wheat to Russia. If you didn't know any better,

you'd have thought Afghanistan had been invaded by teenage American wheat

farmers, led by the U.S. Olympic team. I imagine that if Jimmy had been

really angry at the Russians, he would have had the Olympic team lined up and

shot.

But eventually everybody got bored with Afghanistan. The Russians

remained there; the farmers went back to selling them wheat; and the Olympic

athletes found occupations that are less directly connected with international

tension than, say, the parallel bars. Jimmy went on to other pursuits, such

as losing the election. But draft registration continued.

When Ronald Reagan was campaigning for president, he said he was dead set

against peacetime registration, on the grounds that in a free country the

government shouldn't go around forcing people to do things. It turns out he

was just kidding. He recently decided to continue registration, using the

same logic that Jimmy did: Although at the moment we are not technically in a

war with the Russians, we could get into one any day, and if we do, we could

have our Army up to snuff six weeks faster if we have the teenagers already

registered. I see only one minor flaw in this reasoning, which is that if we

ever do get into a war with the Russians, we will probably be melted,

teenagers and all, in the first half hour or so, which would tend to disrupt

the training process.

Aside from that flaw, I think registration is a terrific idea. When the

national security is at stake, I think everybody should be obligated to

register, regardless of age, sex, religion, or occupation. The only

exceptions should be children, women, and anybody else who is not a teenage

male.

Perhaps you're wondering why we single out teenage males. Some people

believe it's because teenagers are the most physically fit, but that is

stupid. If physical fitness were the main reason, we would register

professional athletes first. The truth is that we register teenage males

because:

We always have.

Many teenage males are sullen and snotty and could use a little discipline.

There are fewer of them than there are of us.

If we tried to register older people, they would write letters to their

congressmen and hire sharp lawyers, and we'd never be able to get anybody into

the Army.

So when we draft people, we always start with teenage males. This means

that the President, his advisers, and the members of Congress usually don't

get a chance to serve, but that is one of the burdens of public office.

Many Army officials would like to start drafting teenagers right away,

but unfortunately they don't have any actual war going on at the moment, so

they're stuck with trying to get people to volunteer. This is very difficult,

because the Army is not generally perceived as being a fun organization. Most

people think that the Army is a place where you get up early in the morning to

be yelled at by people with short haircuts and tiny brains.

The Army has been trying very hard to change its image. It has produced

a bunch of television commercials suggesting that it is really just a large

technical school, where everybody is happy and nobody ever gets sent to

wretched foreign countries to get shot at. I think these commercials are on

the right track but don't go far enough. I think they should make the Army

look more as it does on "M*A*S*H," where the characters have so much fun that

most of them have remained in the Army for ten years:

HAWKEYE: Boy, war sure is awful, isn't it? Ha ha.

BJ: Ha ha, it sure is. Say, I have an idea: Let's go drink a bunch of

martinis and flirt with attractive nurses and play practical jokes on

various stuffed shirts, as we have every night since this series began.

HAWKEYE: Ha ha. Good idea, BJ. But first let's fix these wounded soldiers,

who are a constant reminder that war is an enormous waste of human life,

although fortunately the major characters never get killed.

BJ: Ha ha.

If the Army commercials were more like "M*A*S*H," I think lots of

teenagers would want to enlist. In fact, I think just about everybody would

want to enlist, for a chance to pal around with Alan Alda. The Army would

have all the people it would need, and everything would be swell--unless, of

course, we got into an actual war. Then we'd have to turn things over to the

teenage males.

MX IS THE WAY TO GO. BYE

I realize it's none of my business, but I have a few questions about the

MX missile system. Here, as I understand it, is how the MX is supposed to

work: We would put a bunch of missiles where the Russians can't hit them with

their missiles. That way, if the Russians shoot at us, we'll be able to shoot

back, and everybody will wind up dead. This is considered to be much more

desirable than what would happen without the MX, namely that the Russians

would still be alive and we would be dead. Obviously, the best solution would

be for us to be alive and the Russians to be dead, but for this to happen we

would have to shoot first, and we wouldn't do that because the whole reason we

built all these nuclear devices in the first place is to preserve world peace.

So we are going for the peace-loving solution, which is to guarantee that if

anybody attacks anybody, everybody winds up dead.

So far so good. I mean, any fool can see the MX is the way to go. But

what troubles me is the particular kind of MX President Reagan decided to

build. Basically, the people who worry about our national defense for us came

up with two options:

OPTION ONE: Dig several thousand holes in Nevada and Utah, but put actual

missiles in only a few of them, so the Russians won't know which holes to

shoot at.

Cost: A trillion or so dollars.

Advantages: The bulldozer industry would prosper beyond its wildest dreams.

Disadvantages: It won't work. One flaw, of course, is that the Russians,

using their spy satellites, could figure out which holes we put the

missiles in. We could probably come up with some crafty scheme to

overcome this flaw: Maybe we'd attach leaves and fruit to the missiles,

so the Russians would think we were merely planting enormous trees in

Nevada and Utah; or maybe we'd put huge signs on each missile with the

words "THIS IS NOT A MISSILE" printed in Russian. So hiding the missiles

is not the problem. The problem is that the Russians, if they have any

sense at all, would simply build more missiles and shoot at all the

holes, and we'd all wind up dead with no way to make the Russians dead.

So the national-defense people came up with Option Two.

OPTION TWO: Put the MX missiles in holes we already have.

Cost: A few hundred billion dollars.

Advantages: None, except it costs less, which is not really an advantage

because the government will spend the leftover money on some other

gigantic scheme anyway.

Disadvantages: It won't work, since the Russians already know where the

existing holes are. Heck, I even know where they are. They're in

Kansas. All the Russians would have to do is locate a map revealing the

location of Kansas, which they could probably do, what with their

extensive spy network.

So basically, President Reagan was faced with two options, both of which

involved holes and neither of which would work. He pondered this problem for

a while, on his horse, and finally decided to go with Option Two. Why, he

reasoned, should we pay a trillion dollars for a system that wouldn't work,

when we can get the same thing for a few hundred billion? He's going on the

time-honored axiom that if something is not worth doing, it is not worth doing

right.

Ideally, President Reagan would have delayed his decision in the hope

that, given time, his defense planners could have come up with a third option,

such as covering Nebraska with ice and launching the missiles from dogsleds.

But he had to act fast, because of the Window of Vulnerability. The Window of

Vulnerability, which was discovered only recently, is the period of time

between now and whenever we finish the MX system, during which we are

vulnerable to Russian attack. Reagan's defense advisers are very big on the

Window of Vulnerability: for months now, they have been running around the

country proclaiming how vulnerable we are. This puzzles me. I mean, if we're

so vulnerable, why are we telling everybody? And if the Russians are so hot

to attack us, why don't they do it now? Why on earth would they wait until

after we finish our MX system? And if they don't attack us when we're

vulnerable, why do we need the MX at all? These questions deserve a lot of

hard thought, which I intend to give them just as soon as I've had another

drink.

MX SERVICE WARRANTY

I'm a little worried about the MX missile system. Don't get me wrong: I

certainly think we need another missile system. Better safe than sorry,

that's my motto.

What I'm worried about is that we won't be able to get anybody to repair

the MX. You can't get anything repaired these days. Take, for example,

Voyager 2, a United States space rocket that recently flew to Saturn to take

pictures. It worked okay for a while, but then the camera got pointed in the

wrong direction and started sending back pictures of outer space. This was

bad public relations: taxpayers don't want to pay nine zillion dollars for

pictures that look like the inside of somebody's closet with the light off.

The NASA scientists claim Voyager 2 is a success anyway, but they have to

claim this, because otherwise they can't ask for more money. They would have

claimed Voyager 2 was a success even if it had crashed into Phoenix, Arizona.

The truth is, Voyager 2 broke and they couldn't get it repaired.

This is a problem not only with rockets but with other major appliances

as well. If you have ever called the service department of a major department

store to get an appliance repaired, you know what I am talking about:

You: Hello, my washer ...

TAPE RECORDING: Thank you for calling the Service Department. All of our

service representatives are smoking cigarettes and chatting; your call

will be taken just as soon as somebody feels like taking your call.

Thank you.

(For the next thirty-five minutes, you listen to a medley of songs by Barry

Manilow, who has written a great many songs. Perhaps too many. Then an

actual service representative comes on the line.)

SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: Thank you for calling the Service Department. How may

we serve you?

You: It's our washer. One of the drive belts snared my wife by the arm and

she can't get loose and we can't turn it off and we're worried about what

will happen when it gets to the spin cycle.

SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: When did you purchase the washer?

You: A year ago, I guess. Could you hurry please? It's almost done with the

rinse cycle.

SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: Then I'm afraid you are not covered under the

ninety-day warranty. But don't feel bad: nobody is ever covered under

the ninety-day warranty. That's why we offer it. Did you buy a

maintenance agreement?

You: I don't know, for God's sake. (Your wife screams in the background.)

Please, just get someone out here.

SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: We will have a serviceperson in your area in 1986.

Will someone be at home?

You: I imagine my wife will. What's left of her.

SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE: Fine. We will have someone call you during the latter

half of 1986 to let you know exactly what month the serviceperson will be

there. Thank you for calling the Service Department.

A few years ago, we had a serviceperson come to our house regularly to

try to repair our television set. He had this ritual: He would arrive with

six hundred pounds of tools, select a screwdriver, take the back off the

television, and stare at the insides as if he had been raised by a primitive

Brazilian jungle tribe and had never seen a television before. Then he would

put the cover back on, load his six hundred pounds of tools back onto the

truck, and leave. Once, to prove he was sincerely interested in the problem,

he took the television with him and kept it for several months. Finally, my

wife and I took the cover off ourselves and blew on the insides of the

television; it worked fine after that, and the serviceperson didn't come

around anymore, which was sort of a shame, because he was getting to be like

one of the family.

Another time, the motor on our forty-five-dollar vacuum cleaner broke, so

I took the vacuum to a serviceperson, who took it apart but couldn't fix the

motor. So I sent it to the factory, which fixed the motor for twenty-five

dollars but didn't put the vacuum cleaner together again. So finally I took

the parts to the Service Center, which is where people go when they are really

desperate. You go in and take a number, then you sit with the other appliance

owners, who are clutching their toasters and radios and hoping the counter

person will call their numbers before their food and water runs out.

Finally the counter person called my number, and I explained to him that

my vacuum cleaner was not broken, that I merely wanted him to Put it together

again. I had trouble getting this message across, because the counter person

had obviously spent several years in an IQ-reduction program. He'd say:

"Well, what's wrong with it?" And I'd say: "Nothing's wrong with it. I just

want you to put it together." And he'd say: "Well, what's wrong with it?" And

so on.

Eventually, he got the picture, and he took my vacuum cleaner parts to

the fellows back in the Shop, and together they came up with an estimate of

eighty-seven dollars to put them together again. This means that we would

have paid a total of $112 to repair a forty-five-dollar cleaner, so instead we

bought a new vacuum cleaner, which is, of course, what they wanted us to do in

the first place.

Well, I'm afraid the government will have the same sort of problem.

They'll buy a snappy new MX missile system, and everything will be fine until

the Russians attack us, at which point we'll have bombs raining down on Ohio

while the guys down the Pentagon are sitting in the War Room, listening to

Barry Manilow on the telephone. Think about it.

BIRTHDAY CELEBRATION

The name "February" comes from the Latin word "Februarius," which means

"fairly boring stretch of time during which one expects the

professional-ice-hockey season to come to an end but it does not." During

February we observe four special days, none of which is an excuse for serious

drinking:

Groundhog Day, February 2

This is an old American tradition started years ago by profoundly

retarded old Americans. According to the tradition, on this day Mr. Groundhog

comes out of his hole and looks around for media representatives, who make a

major fuss about it. It is one of those things that only media people care

about. Another one is the government of Canada.

Lincoln's Birthday, February 12

Abraham Lincoln grew up in the Tennessee wilderness and killed a bear

when he was only three years old. No, wait: That was Davy Crockett. Abraham

Lincoln grew up in a log cabin and read by candlelight and learned to spell by

writing on the back of a coal shovel. Later on he wrote the Gettysburg

Address on the back of an envelope. He had a pathological fear of normal

paper. As a youth, Lincoln was famous for splitting rails. People were

afraid to leave their rails lying around because Lincoln would sneak up and

split them.

Lincoln became nationally known when he won the famous Lincoln-Douglas

debates, sponsored by the League of Women Voters. Here is a complete

transcript:

DOUGLAS: I think the territories should decide the slavery question for

themselves, and I'm five feet seven inches tall.

LINCOLN: I disagree, and I'm six four.

After the debates, Lincoln became president and grew a beard because some

little girl wrote him a letter and suggested it. He was crazy that way. We

should all be grateful she didn't suggest he wear rouge.

St. Valentine's Day, February 14

The Encyclopedia Britannica says, "St. Valentine's Day as a lovers'

festival and the modern tradition of sending valentine cards have no relation

to the saints, but, rather, seem to be connected either with the Roman

fertility festival of the Lupercalia or with the mating season of birds."

This means that, at this very moment, your kids may be in school cutting

out little construction-paper hearts to celebrate the sexual activity of

Romans or birds. No wonder people don't go to church anymore.

Washington's Birthday, February 16

Actually, George Washington was born on February 22. The government has

decided that we should celebrate his birthday on the third Monday, because

that way the nation gets a long weekend, and, what the hell, Washington is

dead anyway. (When I say "the nation," of course, I mean "government

employees and maybe six or seven other people.") I think that if the

government can mess around with the calendar for its own convenience, the rest

of us should be able to do the same thing. For example, most people find

April 15 to be a terribly inconvenient day to file income tax returns, coming

as it does right at the beginning of baseball season. I think this year on

April 15 we should all send the government little notices explaining that we

observe Income Tax Day on December 11.

But back to Washington. As a youth, he threw a cherry tree across the

Delaware. Later he got wooden teeth and was chosen to represent Virginia at

the Continental Congress, a group of colonists who wanted to revolt against

the King because he made them wear wigs and tights. They chose Washington to

lead their army because he was strong and brave and not in the room at the

time. Everybody thought he would lose, but he outfoxed the British by

establishing headquarters all over the place. Here on the East Coast you

can't swing your arms without hitting one of Washington's headquarters.

Finally the British, who were Germans anyway, gave up and went home to fight

the French, who were more conveniently located, and Washington became the

Father of Our Country. That is why each year on a Monday somewhere around his

birthday we have major-appliance sales oriented toward government employees.

WHY NOT A POSTAL SERVICE?

EDITOR'S NOTE: This column appears at first to be about the Postal

Service but may actually be about the neutron bomb. It's hard to tell.

I am all for the nine-digit Zip Code and the eighteen-cent stamp. In

fact, I think the Postal Service ought to go even further: Let's have a

fifteen-digit Zip Code and a $4.50 stamp. Let's make it virtually impossible

to send mail. I hate getting mail anyway. Apparently, my name is on a

computerized mailing list entitled "People with Extremely Small Brains," and

as a result I get mainly two kinds of mail:

Announcements Announcing Contests Somebody Else Will Win: "Mr. Barry, we

are pleased to announce that you have been chosen as a semifinalist in the

Publishers' Publishing House Sweepstakes, and may have already won 11,000 head

of cattle and a Korean servant family."

Investment Opportunities for Morons: "This rare opportunity to purchase a

finely crafted, individually registered investment collection of Early

American Colonial Jellied Candies is being made available only to residents of

North and South America, and will not be repeated unless people actually take

us up on it."

I have learned to recognize this kind of mail from the envelopes, which

always have gimmicky statements designed to arouse my curiosity ("If you do

not open this envelope immediately, you will never see your children again").

So I usually throw the envelopes away without opening them. But this doesn't

work: the junk mail companies have armies of workers who comb through

everybody's garbage at night, retrieve their announcements, and put them right

back in the mail.

We could solve this problem if we all bought portable blowtorches. We

could stroll up to our mailboxes, open the doors, and incinerate everything

inside. Or, for a more efficient approach, the Postal Service could buy

larger blowtorches and incinerate everybody's mail right at the post offices.

Ideally, the Postal Service would buy enormous blowtorches and incinerate the

junk mail companies directly, but this is probably illegal.

The only problem with the incineration plan is that it would also destroy

the occasional piece of actual mail. I got a piece of actual mail the other

day, from the White House. It was signed by a machine that had learned how to

reproduce the signature of Anne Higgins, Director of Presidential

Correspondence, and it said: "On behalf of President Reagan, I would like to

thank you for your message and to let you know that he appreciates the time

you have taken to send in your views. They have been fully noted."

This letter troubles me greatly, because I never sent any views to the

White House. This means the White House now possesses somebody else's views

masquerading as mine, and, what is worse, has fully noted them, whatever that

means. I guess they have a machine in the White House basement that fully

notes views at a high rate of speed, then tells the Anne Higgins signature

machine to shoot out a thank-you letter.

Now here's my problem: I recently acquired a view that I would like to

send to the White House, only I'm afraid that now it won't be fully noted,

because they probably have some rule about how many views will be noted per

citizen per year. So I want the person who used my name to send in his view

to now use his name to send in my view, and we'll be even.

My view concerns the neutron bomb, which, at the Pentagon's urging,

President Reagan recently decided to build, and which would eventually be

deployed in Western Europe. The neutron bomb is a nuclear device that kills

people without destroying buildings. Many people feel this is inhumane; they

much prefer the old-fashioned humane-type nuclear devices that kill people and

destroy buildings.

Western Europe's reaction to the neutron bomb has been mixed: most

buildings are for it, and most people are against it, on the grounds that it

might kill them. They're always wallowing in sentiment, those Western

Europeans.

Anyway, here's my view: I think we should develop the neutron bomb, but

instead of using it to defend a bunch of ungrateful people with unAmerican

views, we should keep it for ourselves. All we have to do is modify the

design so that instead of leaving buildings alone and destroying people, it

leaves buildings and people alone but destroys third-class mail. This would

save the country billions of dollars in blowtorch fuel alone.

THE LEAK DETECTORS

I think President Reagan has come up with a swell idea in his plan to

give lie-detector tests to government employees suspected of leaking.

"Leaking" is when a government employee tells the public what the government

is doing. This is very bad, particularly in the area of foreign policy,

because our foreign policy is supposed to be a secret. This principle was

perfected by Richard Nixon, who used to keep the foreign policy hidden in a

little jar buried in the White House lawn. Nobody ever had the vaguest notion

what he was going to do next. For example, he went around for years

announcing that our foreign policy was to hate the Chinese, then one day he

showed up in China laughing and chatting with Chairman Mao and spilling

ceremonial wine on himself. This kind of erratic behavior kept the other

nations on their toes, because they could never really be sure that Dick

wasn't going to suddenly turn around and, say, order the Air Force to

defoliate Wales.

Today, our foreign policy is so secret that not even the President really

knows what it is, which is why he is concerned about leaks. He doesn't want

to be embarrassed at a press conference when some smart-mouth reporter asks

him a question about why we're secretly sending arms to one of those humid

little countries in Central America that the forces of international communism

are always trying to spread into, and he doesn't know the answer. So the

President came up with this plan whereby if the public ever gets hold of any

classified government documents, which basically means all government

documents except the Zip Code directory and those cretin newsletters your

congressman sends you at your expense, the government employees who could have

leaked the information will have to take lie-detector tests, and if it turns

out they are guilty they will be fired or shot or something.

Needless to say, the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization of

left-wing communists, claimed Reagan's plan is unconstitutional, but this is

typical. The ACLU is always yakking about the Constitution, and most of us

are getting mighty tired of it. I mean, if the Constitution is so great, how

come it was amended so many times? Huh?

Personally, I think the President's idea is excellent. My only concern

is who's going to administer the lie-detector tests. We don't want government

employees doing it, because they'd mess it up somehow. It would wind up like

one of those Army Corps of Engineers projects where they're trying to irrigate

four beet farms in Texas but they end up causing most of Iowa to be washed

into the Gulf of Mexico.

So I think we should turn the lie-detecting operation over to the Private

Sector, by which I mean F. Lee Bailey, the famous criminal trial lawyer who is

widely considered to be extremely brilliant despite the fact that he always

gives me the impression he's coated with a thin layer of slime. Bailey has

this television show called "Lie Detector," wherein famous people such as

Ronald Reagan's barber take lie-detector tests, then, in the highly dramatic

climax, Bailey oozes up and reveals the results. I think this would be an

appropriate forum for investigating suspected leakers:

BAILEY: Mr. Carbuncle, you're Assistant Secretary of State for Really Pathetic

Little Countries, is that correct?

CARBUNCLE: Yes.

BAILEY: Okay, here's an innocent question to put you at ease. How are you?

CARBUNCLE: Fine, thank you.

BAILEY: Are you the person who told the New York Times about the secret CIA

plan to drop 250,000 poison attack frogs on left-wing guerrillas in the

Republic of Belize?

CARBUNCLE: No.

BAILEY: Mr. Carbuncle, our polygraph machine, which has been monitoring your

pulse rate and blood pressure, indicates that you are telling the truth.

Either that or you have just suffered a massive heart attack. Here's an

autographed picture of the President grooming his horse, and thanks a

million for being our guest on "Lie Detector." Folks, be sure to stay

tuned, because next we're going to see if we can figure out who leaked

the plan to sell nuclear bazookas to rival street gangs in the South

Bronx.

STATES FOR SALE, CHEAP

For more than a year now, President Reagan and the Congress have been

working very hard on reducing government spending, so it should come as no

surprise to anybody that they have managed to increase it. This is because

the atmosphere in Washington, D.C., tends to lower people's intelligence.

You've probably noticed this. You elect all these sharp people, full of

brilliant ideas, and you send them to Washington, and after a few months of

breathing the atmosphere they start behaving like brain-damaged turnips. As

soon as they leave Washington, their IQs start to rise again.

This is why congressmen go on so many trips. Each congressman has a herd

of aides who watch him constantly, and as soon as he starts to drool, or

forget how to put on his pants, the aides send him off to Switzerland or

someplace on a so-called fact-finding mission, which is really just a

desperate attempt to get him away from Washington long enough to boost his IQ

back to the level of, say, a cocker spaniel's. The President has the same

problem, which is why he almost always gets packed off to Camp David during

times of international tension. His aides are afraid that if they leave him

in Washington, he'll start babbling into the hot line and set off World War

III.

The problem is that the only place where the President and the Congress

can work on economic problems is Washington, because the economy is stored

there, in a large Treasury Building vault. This means that the longer they

work on the budget, the worse it gets. So the solution to our budget problems

will have to come from someone who spends very little time in Washington,

someone whose brain has not been affected by the atmosphere. Me, for example.

I have been thinking about the budget for several minutes now, and I

believe I have come up with an excellent way to reduce it and maybe raise some

money to boot. Here's my plan: We can sell excess states.

The way I see it, we have far too many states, many of them serving no

useful purpose whatsoever. I first noticed this some years ago when my wife

and I drove from Pennsylvania to Colorado. It took us practically forever to

get there, mainly because there were all these flat, boring states in the way.

Take Kansas. Kansas just sits there, taking up an enormous amount of space

that you are required to drive across if you want to get to Colorado.

Fortunately, the Stuckey's Corporation has been thoughtful enough to locate a

restaurant roughly every eighty miles along Interstate 70, so we were able to

stop and buy cute little gift boxes containing a dozen miniature pecan pies,

which is just enough pecan pies to keep two people occupied until the next

Stuckey's so they don't go insane with boredom and drive off the interstate at

speeds approaching a hundred miles per hour, threatening both human and animal

life. Not that there was all that much visible life in Kansas.

Now don't get me wrong. I have nothing against Kansas persons. I'm sure

that, wherever they are, they're a fun bunch. I'm just saying we can save a

lot of money, and make it much easier for people to get from Pennsylvania to

Colorado, if we sell Kansas and move the Kansas persons to, say, Iowa, which

looks a lot like Kansas (only narrower) and seems to have plenty of extra

space.

Another thing. I see no reason why we need both a North and a South

Dakota. One Dakota ought to be sufficient. My personal opinion is that we

should sell South Dakota, because the capital is called "Pierre," but I'm

willing to leave the final decision up to the Congress. I'm just saying one

of them should go. We should also try to sell California and New York, of

course, but I doubt anybody would be stupid enough to buy them.

Another thing. If we sold some states, we'd have fewer state

legislatures. I have never really understood why we have state legislatures

in the first place. If they're not raising their salaries, they're arguing

over some lunatic law nobody ever asked for. For example, in my state,

Pennsylvania, the legislature is obsessed with Official State Things. Our

legislators have named an Official State Animal; an Official State Bird; an

Official State Dog (it's the Great Dane, and God alone knows why); an Official

State Fish; an Official State Flower; and an Official State Tree. They have

even named an Official State Insect. I'm not kidding. It's the firefly.

What does all this mean? Does it mean that if you squash a firefly in

Pennsylvania, official state agents will track you down, using Great Danes,

and arrest you?

I don't know the answers to these questions. All I know is that the

state insect, as well as the state legislature, would become someone else's

problem if we sold Pennsylvania. So I'm all for it. I'd be perfectly happy

to move to Iowa, along with the Kansas persons. My only concern is that my

plan might be a bit tough on the folks at Stuckey's, who make a terrific pecan

pie.

THERE AUTO BE A LAW

I think we Americans ought to go right out and buy some American cars.

Nobody has bought an American car since 1977, and this has had profoundly

negative effects on the nation, the main one being a lot of whiny television

commercials:

"Hi, I'm Telly Savalas, here to tell you that under Ford's desperate new

program, you don't have to pay for maintenance and repairs. In fact, you

don't even have to pay for the car, or drive it, or anything. All you have to

do is sign a piece of paper stating that if you were going to buy a car, it

might conceivably be a Ford."

Unless we want to see more of this kind of thing, we're going to have to

buy some American cars pronto. Most of us could use new cars anyway. My wife

and I have been driving the same cars for more than five years, and they're

starting to get a little rank, especially the one the dog threw up in on the

way to the veterinarian's office. The other one, which we use to cart our

nineteen-month-old son around in, smells a little better, but it has ninety

billion cracker crumbs permanently bonded to the backseat by hardened saliva.

Also, we have a lot of junk in the glove compartment, mostly in the form

of a series of recall letters from the manufacturer:

July 3, 1977

"Dear Mr. Barry:

Under the terms of United States Department of Transportation Regulation

23947-54B, we are required to notify you that there exists the possibility of

a potential radiation condition with respect to the wireless receiver

installed in certain of our automobiles at the time of manufacture, and owners

of said vehicles are therefore requested to contact their authorized sales

representative with respect to an adjustment of the aforementioned potential

possible condition described heretofore."

February 4, 1978

"Dear Mr. Barry:

A review of our records indicates that you have not responded to our

earlier recall notice with respect to the potential radiation danger from the

radio in your car. Your prompt attention to this matter would be

appreciated."

October 8, 1978

"Dear Mr. Barry:

Please bring your car to the dealer right away and don't turn on the

radio because you will get very sick and all your hair will fall off."

June 17, 1979

"Dear Mr. Barry:

If you are still alive, do not bring your car or yourself anywhere near

the dealer. Instead, leave the car in a lightly populated area and flee on

foot. We'll try to detonate it with helicopter-mounted bazookas."

So far, we haven't responded to the recall campaign because we've been

fairly busy, and besides we like the convenience of being able to locate our

car in darkened parking lots by the glow. But I think we're going to get a

new car, because we want to get Telly off the air and receive a large sum of

money in the form of a rebate. In fact, we may buy several cars and retire.

If you want to buy a car, you should know that under federal law you are

now required to get one with front-wheel drive. The advantage of front-wheel

drive is that it's good in the snow, so when there's a really bad storm you'll

be able to get to work while your neighbors are stuck home drinking bourbon by

the fire. The disadvantage of front-wheel drive is that it was invented by

European communists, so nobody in the United States has the vaguest notion of

how it works. In fact, most mechanics have a great deal of difficulty even

finding it, because it's all mixed in with the engine, which in turn is very

difficult to find because it is covered with a thick layer of

emissions-control objects that are designed to prevent the engine from

starting, thereby drastically reducing the amount of emissions it can emit.

These controls were mandated by the federal government and Ralph Nader, who

drives a 1957 Pontiac with racing tires and an enormous engine.

Speaking of engines, you should also decide whether you want a regular

engine or a diesel engine (named for its inventor, Rudolf Engine). Lately, a

lot of people have been choosing diesel engines. I won't go into the reasons

here, because, frankly, I don't know what they are. I'm just assuming there

must be some really terrific reasons for paying extra money for an engine that

gives off a foul odor and is extremely slow.

If you get a diesel, you'll have to learn to keep your momentum up, the

way truck drivers do. If a truck driver starts accelerating when he leaves

New York, he does not hit fifty-five miles per hour until he gets to

Cleveland, so he will run over anything in his path--fallen trees, passenger

cars, small villages--to avoid losing his momentum.

The only other thing to consider when you buy a car is gas mileage. To

make it easy for you to compare, the government requires car manufacturers to

provide two mileage estimates and inform you that:

You should pay no attention to one of the estimates, and

You shouldn't pay much attention to the other estimate, either.

The manufacturer is also required to tell you that neither estimate

applies to California. When you get right down to it, almost nothing applies

to California.

YOU'LL LOOK RADIANT

Let's look at the positive side of nuclear war. One big plus is that the

Postal Service says it has a plan to deliver the mail after the war, which is

considerably more than it is doing now. I, for one, look forward to the day

after the missiles hit, when the postal person comes striding up and hands me

a Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes letter announcing that I may have

already won my Dream Vacation Home, which I will probably need because my

regular home will be glowing like a movie marquee.

The Postal Service isn't the only outfit that's all set for a nuclear

war. The whole federal government has elaborate plans to keep doing whatever

it does. As soon as word arrives that enemy missiles are on the way, all the

vital government officials will be whisked by helicopter to a secret mountain

hideout guarded by heavily armed men. The guards are there, of course, to

shoot nonvital citizens who attempt to get into the hideout, because they

would get in the way of the officials who are trying to protect them.

To determine which officials are vital enough to go to the hideout, the

government periodically sends out a questionnaire:

TO: All Top Government Officials

FROM: The Government

SUBJECT: Who Gets to Go to the Secret Nuclear Hideout

Please circle the statement below that best describes how vital you are. Be

as sincere as possible.

1. I am extremely vital and should be whisked away, in the first helicopter if

possible.

2. I am not all that vital and should be left to die a horrible death with the

ordinary citizens.

Using the results of this questionnaire, the government has determined

that all of its top officials are vital. This means, of course, that

conditions in the hideout will be fairly cramped. But that is one of the

prices you pay for being a public servant.

Once the officials are in the hideout, they will immediately swing into

emergency action. The President will announce his emergency plan for getting

the nation back on its feet, and within minutes the leader of the opposition

party will hold an emergency press conference to announce that the President's

plan is unfair to either middle-class taxpayers or the poor, depending on

which party is the opposition at the time. Meanwhile, Pentagon officials will

warn that the surviving Russians are probably stockpiling large rocks with the

intention of coming over here on crude rafts and throwing them at us. The

Pentagon will recommend that we, too, start stockpiling large rocks; this will

lead to an emergency tax increase.

So the government is well prepared to continue governing after a nuclear

attack. The only potential fly in the ointment is that the public will

probably be too sick or dead to pay taxes or receive mail. So to make sure

that the government still has somebody to govern, it is the patriotic duty of

all of us nonvital citizens to come up with our own personal nuclear-survival

plans.

I have some experience in this area, because in 1953, when I was a

first-grader at the Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., we used to

practice surviving a nuclear attack. Our technique was to go into the hall

and crouch against the walls for about ten minutes. This worked extremely

well, and I recommend that all of you develop emergency plans to get to Wampus

Elementary as soon as you get word that the missiles are coming.

The best way to get information during a nuclear war is to listen to the

Emergency Broadcast Radio Network, which is the organization that broadcasts

those tests all the time:

ANNOUNCER: This is a test. For the next thirty seconds, you will hear an

irritating, high-pitched squeal. We here at the Emergency Broadcast

Network are bored to death, waiting for a real nuclear war, so for the

past few years we've been varying the pitch of the squeal just a little

bit every time. Our theory is that if we find just the right pitch, it

will drive certain species of birds insane with sexual desire. We know

we're getting close, because during our last test a Cleveland man

carrying one of those enormous portable radios turned up real loud was

pecked to death by more than three hundred lusting pigeons.

Frankly, I have always wondered what the Emergency Broadcast Network

would broadcast if we actually had a war. I imagine they'd try to keep it

upbeat, so people wouldn't get too depressed:

ANNOUNCER: Hi there! You're listening to the Emergency Broadcast Network, so

don't touch that dial! It's probably melted anyway, ha ha! Weatherwise,

we're expecting afternoon highs of around 6,800 degrees, followed by a

cooling trend as a cloud consisting of California and Oregon blots out

the sun. In the headlines, the President and key members of Congress met

in an emergency breakfast this morning, and a flock of huge mutant

radioactive mosquitoes has emerged from the Everglades and is flying

toward New Orleans at speeds approaching four hundred miles an hour.

We'll have the details in a moment, but first here's consumer affairs

reporter Debbi Terri Suzi Dinkle with the first part of her eighteen-part

report entitled "Radiation and You."

DINKLE: Radiation. You can't see it. You can't smell it. You can't hear it.

Yet it's all over the place, and it can kill you or make your hair fall

out. In my next report, we'll explore the reasons why.

So we'll be in good shape after the war. And there are advantages I

haven't even talked about, such as that the Miss America Pageant will probably

be postponed for a couple of years at least.

CAUTION: GOVERNMENT AT WORK

I've been seeing these television commercials lately in which Tug McGraw,

the noted nutritionist and left-handed relief pitcher, points out in a very

cheerful manner that many major soft drinks contain caffeine. Tug is

concerned about this, because caffeine is one of the many substances that have

been shown to cause laboratory experiments involving rats.

Tug implies we'd all be better off if we drank 7-Up, which does not

contain caffeine. He neglects to point out that 7-Up contains sugar, which,

as you are no doubt aware, usually causes instant death. But I can't blame

Tug for forgetting to warn us about sugar: nobody can keep up with all the

things you're not supposed to eat and drink, because scientists come up with

new ones all the time.

You young readers should feel very fortunate to live in an era in which

we know how dangerous everything is. When I was a child, people thought

everything was safe except communism, smutty books, and tobacco, and a lot of

people weren't sure about tobacco. For example, the cigarette manufacturers

thought tobacco was fine, and as a public service they ran many advertisements

in which attractive persons offered thoughtful scientific arguments in favor

of smoking, such as: "Luckies separate the men from the boys ... but not from

the girls," and "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should."

But then the U.S. Surgeon General, who is the highest-ranking surgeon in

the Army, decided that cigarettes are bad for people, and recommended that the

manufacturers put little warnings on cigarette packs. Congressmen from

tobacco-growing states offered to help with the wording, so at first the

warning was a bit vague:

NOTE--The U.S. Surgeon General thinks that cigarettes

could possibly be somewhat less than ideal in terms of

your health, but of course he could be wrong.

But over the years the warning has gotten stronger, so now it says:

WARNING--Cigarettes will kill you, you stupid jerk.

These days the government won't even allow cigarette manufacturers to

advertise on television. All you see are those public health commercials in

which smug ten-year-old girls order you not to smoke, to the point where you

want to rush right out and inhale an entire pack of unfiltered Camels just for

spite.

Some of you may be wondering why the same government that goes around

warning people not to smoke also subsidizes farmers who grow tobacco. The

answer is that the government is afraid that if it stops paying the farmers to

grow tobacco, they'll start doing something even worse, such as growing opium

or beating crippled children with baseball bats. So the government figures

the wisest course is to pay them to grow tobacco, then warn people not to

smoke it.

The anti-smoking campaign was such a hit that the government decided to

investigate the chemicals that make diet soft drinks taste sweet. Researchers

wearing white laboratory coats filled a huge vat with Tab and dropped rats

into it from a sixty-foot-high catwalk, and they noticed that most of the rats

died, some before they even reached the vat. So the government banned the

chemicals, but the diet-soda manufacturers immediately developed new ones,

which also failed the vat test. At this point, the government realized that

the manufacturers could come up with chemicals as fast as it could ban them,

and that at the rate things were going the country would face a major rat

shortage. So the government decided to let the manufacturers keep their

chemicals, but it ordered them to put a little warning on diet-soft-drink

containers that says: "Do not put this product in a big vat and drop rats into

it from a catwalk."

Nowadays, Warning the Public is a major industry. Every schoolchild

knows the hazards associated with cigarettes, caffeine, diet soft drinks,

sugar, alcohol, dairy products, nondairy products, electronic games, air,

league bowling, and chemicals in general. Any day now, you'll pick up the

newspaper and read:

BOSTON--Laboratory scientists at a very major scientific

university announced today that everything is terribly,

terribly dangerous. Dr. Creston L Pesthole, who headed

the research project, said scientists got a bunch of rats

and just let them lead normal lives--eating, drinking,

sleeping, watching television, making appointments, etc.

"They all died within a matter of days," reported Dr.

Pesthole. "Most of them had cancer. Some of them also

had irregular bowel movements." Dr. Pesthole said the

scientists weren't sure what the study proves, but they

feel the government ought to do something about it.

Until we get that Final Warning, we'll all have to make do as best we

can. I, for one, plan to consume nothing but filtered rainwater. For

amusement, I may take a chance on some smutty books.

Taxation Without Reservation

A TAXING PROPOSAL

Here it is again, income tax time, and I imagine many of you readers,

especially the ones with smaller brains, are eagerly awaiting my annual tax

advice column. Those of you who were fortunate enough to read last year's

column no doubt recall that I advised you to cheat, on the grounds that by

reducing the amount of money you gave the government, you'd be supporting

President Reagan in his program to reduce government spending. I'm proud to

report that many of you went all out to support the President, and I'm sure

he'd thank you personally if the Secret Service allowed him to visit federal

prisons.

But this year we have an entirely new plan, taxwise. This year,

President Reagan needs all the money he can get, because he was going over the

figures recently with his aides, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and they noticed that

the government was going to be short by something like $200 billion. "Gosh,"

chuckled the President. "That's even bigger than those humongous deficits the

Democrats used to run up when I went around making fun of them on the radio!

Why, for all the difference I've made in the past two years, the nation might

just as well have had Ted Kennedy as president! Or a toaster!" Then they all

had a good laugh and decided to jack up taxes. The other option, of course,

was to cut government spending, but they rejected that because they have

already cut spending to the bone in the form of raising it by about $100

billion a year.

The Democrats are happy as clams about raising taxes. The Democrats

believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have

created the Internal Revenue Service. So finally, after two years of

bickering, the President and the Democrats are beginning to see eye-to-eye on

the importance of taking money away from the public. Recently, for example,

the Democrats supported the President's plan to have a new gasoline tax under

which the government will take $50 billion from motorists such as yourself!

This will create jobs. See, if you were allowed to keep the money, you

wouldn't create jobs with it. You'd just throw it into the bushes or

something. But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs. In this

case, the government will spend the $50 billion on a major road-repair

program, including several million dollars for highway-construction signs that

say:

CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER and the United States

Department of Transportation are pleased to announce that

for the next 86.8 miles there will be federal traffic

cones all over the place and hundreds of friends and

relatives of a contractor who contributed to the campaign

of CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER standing around with

red flags directing traffic so casually that they may

occasionally wave your car right into an oncoming

tractor-trailer filled with propane gas, sorry for the

inconvenience, but as CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER

pointed out when he flew in by federal helicopter to make

a speech taking credit for this $364.7 million

highway-repair project, we cannot allow our nation's

highways to deteriorate, especially the ones that provide

access to land owned by CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER.

Thank you.

But the $50 billion won't be nearly enough to allow Congress to create

jobs on the level it would like. And on top of that, President Reagan needs

money to buy additional exploding devices to defend you with. So what can

you, the ordinary taxpayer, do to help? Here's what: this year, when you

prepare your income tax return, I want you to lie in the government's favor.

I want you to declare more income than you actually received, and I want you

to deliberately fail to report large numbers of legitimate deductions.

Some of you will be caught, of course. Some of you may be called in to

face IRS audits. You may even be forced to accept a large refund, thus

depriving the government of money it could have used for your benefit. These

risks are unavoidable, but they can be minimized if a few of us continue to

cheat, so the IRS will be less likely to see any particular pattern. I'm

willing to volunteer to be one of the few. It's a dirty job, but somebody has

to do it.

OUR PATRIOTIC BOOTY

I say we all help President Reagan cut government waste. I say we cheat

on our income taxes this year.

I mean, let's face it: the reason the government wastes hundreds of

billions of dollars is that we give it hundreds of billions of dollars. Even

an intelligent organization would have trouble spending that much money

usefully; the government can't even come close. So it ends up spending money

on things like the Office for Micronesian Status Negotiations. I am serious.

According to the Congressional Directory, one of the things the government

spends your money on is an office devoted to negotiating the status of

Micronesia. I'm not saying its employees are goofing off. I'm sure they get

up early in the morning, negotiate the status of Micronesia all day, then come

home and collapse. I'm just saying that if they haven't been able to get

Micronesia straightened out after all these years, then the hell with

Micronesia.

Now I know President Reagan has promised to comb through the budget and

get rid of everything we don't need except nuclear weapons, but I seriously

doubt he'll ever even notice the Office for Micronesian Status Negotiations,

let alone the International Pacific Halibut Commission. You didn't know we

had a Halibut Commission, did you? Well, we do. It's in Seattle, Washington.

When the folks at the Halibut Commission answer the phone, they say: "Good

morning, Halibut Commission." They're just as bold as brass about it. No

shame whatsoever. They know Ron will never find out about them, and even if

he does, some congressman will claim the Halibut Commission is vital and

therefore needs the support of all taxpayers, including the ones who live in

Kentucky and don't even like halibut. And then some other congressman will

say: "Well, if you're going to keep the Halibut Commission, I'm going to keep

the Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission." Before long, the budget will be

bigger than it was when Ron started to cut it.

So let's help Ron out: let's keep the money out of the government's hands

altogether. Let's each claim an extra thirty or forty dependents on our tax

returns this year. We should view it as our patriotic duty, sort of like

buying war bonds.

Another patriotic thing we can do is send Ron lists of government

activities we do not want to pay for anymore. The top item on my list is

newsletters from congressmen. The way I see it, we taxpayers have an

agreement with our congressmen: we give them fifty or sixty thousand dollars a

year each and offices and staffs and traveling expenses and cheap haircuts and

subsidized dining rooms and other privileges, and in return they go away for

two years. If we valued them or their opinions, we never would have voted to

send them away in the first place. The last thing we want them to do is

clutter up our mailboxes with accounts of their activities:

Dear 647th Congressional District Resident:

I'm just taking a minute out from my hectic schedule down here in the

nation's capital to let you know that my schedule down here is very hectic.

As a member of the House Joint Plumbing Committee's Ad Hoc Subcommittee on

Spigots and Drains, I recently went on a two-week Special Fact-Finding Mission

to Rio de Janeiro. Here's the fact I found: In the Southern Hemisphere, water

goes down the drain in a clockwise direction, whereas in the Northern

Hemisphere, which includes the 647th Congressional District, water goes down

the drain in a counter-clockwise direction. Or else it's the other way

around. Next month, I plan to go to Argentina to determine which way water

goes down the drain there, and whether any of this is related to the spread of

International Communism.

All the best,

Congressman Bob Bugpit

Here are some other government activities I don't want to pay for

anymore:

National weeks and months, as in National Seedless Prune Week or National

Faucet Repair Month.

All programs that are administered by people whose titles contain more than

three words. Take, for example, the National Science Foundation's

Division of Engineering. The Division Director, Physics, could stay,

because his title contains just three words. But the Division Director,

Division of Polar Programs, would be given two weeks to clear out his or

her desk and find useful work. And the Executive Assistant, Planning and

Evaluation, Biological, Behavioral and Social Sciences, would be taken

out and shot.

TAXPAYER'S BLUES

I am beginning to suspect that many of your big-time Washington national

news reporters have coleslaw for brains. My evidence is that for the past few

months they have been telling us that the Reagan administration and the

Congress are busy reducing government spending. You can't pick up a newspaper

or turn on a television newscast without reading or hearing about all these

drastic budget cuts. If you were a very stupid person, you might get the

impression that the administration and the Congress really are reducing

government spending. This, of course, is utterly ridiculous.

The big-time Washington national news reporters evidently have fallen

into the obvious trap of believing that politicians actually intend to do what

they say they intend to do. Administration officials say they intend to

reduce government spending. Most senators say they intend to reduce

government spending. And most members of the House of Representatives say

they, too, intend to reduce government spending. Only a fool would conclude

that they intend to do anything but increase government spending.

And they will increase it. No matter what budget they end up adopting,

next year the government will spend more money, and collect more taxes, than

it does this year. If you don't believe me, look it up.

What happened is that just before he left office, Jimmy Carter (remember

Jimmy Carter?) proposed to increase the federal budget enormously. Then along

came Ronald Reagan, the Taxpayer's Friend, the Foe of Big Government. Ron

decided to replace Jimmy's enormous budget increase with one that was merely

huge. So for the last few months, the politicians have been arguing over

whether to increase the budget enormously or just hugely. The news media

refer to this process as "Cutting" the budget.

The best way to understand this whole issue is to look at what the

government does: it takes money away from some people, keeps a bunch of it,

and gives the rest to other people. This means there are two kinds of people

in the United States:

People who pay more to the government than they get from it (taxpayers);

People who get more from the government than they pay to it (senators, welfare

recipients, cabinet members, defense contractors, government employees,

etc.)

So if you are just a plain old ordinary taxpayer, the Great Budget Debate

doesn't really concern you. One way or another, the government is going to

spend more of your money; the only real issue is who is going to get it.

For the past forty years, the government preferred to use your money for

Social Programs. Most of these are aimed at Helping the Poor. Now the

problem poor people have is obvious: they don't have enough money. They can't

afford food, housing, or medical care. The simple, obvious, efficient way for

the government to help them is to give them money so they can buy these

things. So that is not how the government does it.

See, if the government merely gave money to poor people, no matter how

inefficiently it did it, it would need only one bureaucracy. This would force

a lot of people to leave government employment and find honest work. So

instead of simply giving money to poor people, the government Administers

Programs for them. You've got your food programs. You've got your housing

programs. You've got your medical care programs. And so on. This way you

get lots of administrators. You also guarantee that poor people remain poor,

since they're so busy being administered they don't have time to work. This

is fine with the poverty-program administrators; the worst possible thing that

could happen to them is for poor people to stop being poor. If that happened,

the administrators would have nothing to administer. But fortunately, poverty

has continued; in fact, it has been a major growth industry. A lot of people

have made very good livings Helping the Poor.

Then along came Ronald Reagan. Ron believes taxpayers are tired of

having their money taken away and used for massive, inefficient social

programs. He wants to take their money away and use it for massive,

inefficient defense programs. So the poverty-program administrators are

extremely unhappy, while the defense-program administration are tickled pink.

But they have the same problem the social-program administrators had: They

have to figure out how to spend the extra billions on defense without actually

making the country any safer, because if they really do make it safer, they

won't be able to demand more money.

This is tough, because the United States is obviously not directly

threatened except by Russian missiles, and we already have enough missiles to

blow up the whole world if the Russians ever attack us. So the defense

program administrators have come up with a very imaginative plan: they have

decided to defend virtually every country in the world other than Russia and

its allies. Since most of these countries are hopelessly unstable, we could

spend every dollar every taxpayer ever earns to defend them and never come

close to succeeding. But the defense-program administrators will certainly be

busy.

Right now, for example, they are busily administering the defense of El

Salvador, a wretched little country that has suddenly become Vital to Our

National Security. According to many people familiar with El Salvador,

including a former U.S. ambassador there, the El Salvadoran government spends

much of its time shooting El Salvadorans. But our government is sending them

arms anyway. I mean, it has to do something with the money. Anything but let

taxpayers keep it.

The Media Is the Mess-up

PERKING UP THE NEWS

One swell thing about the United States is that newspapers can print

whatever stories they want. Another one is that nobody has to read them.

In the United States, the press is protected by the First Amendment to

the Constitution, which states: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife."

No, wait, that's the Ten Commandments. Anyway, whatever the Constitution says

about the press, we Americans should be darned glad it says it. In the Soviet

Union, the press is controlled by the official news agency, Tass, which is

always giving out highly amusing versions of world events:

MOSCOW--Tass, the official Soviet news agency, announced

today that Soviet troops have entered Poland,

Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Iran, Albania, Mongolia, Egypt,

Norway, and Saskatchewan at the request of liberation

movements fighting the western capitalist colonialist

Zionist hegemony of running-dog pipe-carrying

widow-stabbing baby-eating lackeys of United States

imperialism. Tass said the Soviet forces will ride around

in nuclear-powered tanks until the various countries are

safe from the threat of further oppression.

I imagine the Russian people regard Tass as a major chuckle. I bet they

can't wait to see the paper each day, so they can read what isn't going on in

the rest of the world. In fact, this is the big advantage their system has

over ours: since the Russian government always lies, the people can safely

assume that the opposite of whatever Tass says is true. Over here, things are

more complicated. Our government lies a lot, too, but it can't force the

newspapers to print the lies accurately. From time to time the reporters try

to get at the truth, and once in a great while they succeed. So you can be

fairly sure you're reading lies, but, unlike the Russians, you can never

really count on it. The only reliable parts of American newspapers are

horoscopes, weather forecasts, and economic outlooks, which are all

consistently false.

Another problem with American newspapers is that they are positively

obsessed with boring issues. Take the Helsinki Accords. You don't care about

the Helsinki Accords, and neither does any other normal person. You can go

into every bar and shopping center in America, and you will never once hear

anyone say: "Hey, how about them Helsinki Accords?" But newspapers will drone

on and on about them at the slightest provocation.

Newspapers are also inordinately fond of writing about statements by

presidential press secretaries. No presidential press secretary in the

history of the United States has ever said anything newsworthy. I mean, his

whole job is to make sure nobody has the vaguest idea what the President is

thinking. Nevertheless, every morning dozens of Washington reporters troop

into the press secretary's office and write down everything he says:

PRESS SECRETARY: I wish to correct the accounts that appeared in some

newspapers yesterday quoting me as stating that the President's mood is

one of Restrained Optimism. I did not state that. I stated that the

President's mood is one of Guarded Optimism.

REPORTER: Does this represent a change in the President's mood?

PRESS SECRETARY: It does not represent a change from yesterday. The President

has been in a consistently Guardedly Optimistic mood for two days now.

Now at this point, your average citizen would be asleep. But the

Washington reporters think this stuff is dynamite. They're wetting their

pants over the President's mood. They all go roaring out to find some

presidential aide, who tells them, in strictest confidence, that despite what

the press secretary would have them believe, the President's mood is actually

one of Hopeful Caution.

The next day all the papers run page-one presidential-mood stories long

enough to choke Brahma bulls. The reporters read them. The President's aides

read them. Everybody else, including the President, turns directly to the

sports section.

I think British newspapers have a much better approach. They ignore the

official actions of the government, which hasn't done anything in forty years

anyway, and focus on something readers can respond to: sex. If you read the

headlines in British newspapers, you get the impression that everybody in the

government, with the possible exception of the Queen, is a pervert:

EIGHT MEMBERS OF PARLIAMENT ARRESTED IN BED WITH NEWTS,

CALLIOPE

This is the kind of story you can sink your teeth into, so to speak. I'd

like to see American newspapers try the same sort of thing on the Reagan

administration. Let's face it: the Reagan administration is full of really

boring-looking guys, guys who have investment portfolios and matching

pen-and-pencil sets. If the newspapers write about what these guys say, the

entire country will be asleep in a matter of weeks. People will be nodding

off at work, in their cars, at the controls of commercial airliners. The

country will collapse. The newspapers should see it as their duty to print

stories about high-level sex. They wouldn't even have to lie:

WASHINGTON--AN in-depth examination of the statements of

Vice President George Bush reveals he has never publicly

denied having spent two weeks in a motel with a lawn

tractor.

Imagine seeing that in, say, the New York Times. It would turn the

country around. People would start to care about public affairs again.

JUNKYARD JOURNALISM

I bet you don't read the National Enquirer or any of the other

publications sold at supermarket check-out counters. I bet you think these

publications are written for people with the intellectual depth of shrubs,

people who need detailed, written instructions to put their shoes on

correctly.

Well, you're missing a lot. I have taken to reading check-out-counter

publications, and I have picked up scads of useful information. For example,

a recent Enquirer issue contains a story headlined "Whatever Happened to the

Cast of 'The Flying Nun'?" Now here is a vital story most of the so-called

big-time newspapers didn't have the guts to print. I mean, while the New York

Times and the Washington Post were frittering away their space on stories

about Alexander Haig, millions of people all over America were tossing and

turning at night, wondering what happened to the cast of "The Flying Nun."

All over the country, you'd see little knots of people huddling together and

asking each other: "Remember Marge Redmond, who played Sister Jacqueline in

'The Flying Nun'? Whatever happened to her?"

Well, the Enquirer has the answer. Somehow, an Enquirer reporter got

Marge's agent to reveal that Marge has appeared in commercials for Tide,

Bravo, Betty Crocker, and Ajax. "But," adds the agent, "she is perhaps best

known as Sara Tucker of Sara Tucker's Inn on the Cool Whip commercials."

I, for one, was stunned by this revelation. Believe it or not, I had

never made the connection between Sister Jacqueline and Sara Tucker. Now, of

course, it seems obvious: only an actress skilled enough to perform in "The

Flying Nun" would be able to convincingly portray a woman who is so deranged

that she puts huge globs of Cool Whip on her desserts at what is supposed to

be a good restaurant. But without the Enquirer I would never have known.

And without the National Examiner, which is like the Enquirer except it

uses even smaller words, I would never have found out that

40 VAMPIRES ROAM NORTH AMERICA

This extremely scientific story reports on the research of Dr. Stephen

Kaplan, a parapsychologist who founded the Vampire Research Center. I got the

impression that Dr. Kaplan is the Vampire Research Center, but the story never

makes this clear. It also doesn't say where he got his degree in

parapsychology, but we can safely assume it was someplace like Harvard.

Anyway, Dr. Kaplan sent questionnaires to people who requested mail from

the center, and forty responded that, yes indeed, they are vampires. In a

way, this cheered me up. I mean, I always thought of vampires as evil,

uncooperative persons of Central European descent who never even file income

tax returns, and here we have forty of them who cheerfully fill out

questionnaires for the Vampire Research Center.

Dr. Kaplan, who (surprise!) plans to write a book about vampires,

believes there are lots more vampires around. "This probably represents the

tip of the vampire iceberg," he told the Examiner, which knows a good metaphor

when it hears one. If Dr. Kaplan is correct, I imagine that before long we'll

have a federal law requiring large companies to hire a certain percentage of

vampires. They have been discriminated against long enough.

Here are some more stories you missed: "Bingo Can Restore the Will to

Live On," "$50 Operation to Restore Virginity....," "A Machine Chewed Up My

Legs," "Cancer Ruins Sex," "Dead Man Thanks Killer" and "34 Years in a Haunted

House." The last one is about a Massachusetts man and woman whose house is

occupied by a ghost that does terrifying things, such as caressing the woman's

brow with ghostly fingers when she's reading. By way of proof, the article is

accompanied by an actual photograph of the woman reading.

Check-out-counter publications also perform valuable services for their

readers. The Examiner has a psychic named Maria who uses her incredible

psychic ability to answer baffling questions, such as "Dear Maria: A man I am

dating keeps asking me to spank him. What should I do?" To which Maria

replies: "Dump him. He's nuts." And some people have the nerve to claim that

psychics are frauds.

But the best part of check-out-counter publications is the

advertisements. They can make you rich. I, for one, never realized how much

money you can make stuffing envelopes, but according to the ads in the

Enquirer and the Examiner, the sky is the limit. I mean, people are willing

to pay you thousands of dollars a week to stuff envelopes. I figure there

must be a catch. For one thing, they never tell you what you have to stuff

the envelopes with. Maybe it's poison spiders. That would explain the high

pay.

Another ad I saw in the Examiner just intrigues me. The headline says:

JESUS IS HERE. Now I am going to quote very carefully from the ad, because

otherwise you won't believe me:

Tired of money-mad ministers and physicians? Free,

drugless urine cures all ills, increases energy and

intelligence and is prescribed in the Bible ... Due to

its Ammuno-genetic qualities, urine is the only antidote

for nuclear radiation ... If you are not fully convinced

that the course heralds the Second Coming of Christ,

return it in perfect condition for a full refund ...

The course costs seventy-five dollars; otherwise I would have sent for it

already. I am very curious about it, and even more curious about the person

who wrote it. I strongly suspect he's one of the people who responded to Dr.

Kaplan's vampire survey.

BRING BACK CAPTAIN VIDEO

If we're ever going to return the United States to its glory days (August

14 and 15, 1955) we're going to have to do something about television. This

country has been going downhill ever since they took the Ed Sullivan show off

the air, and I say we should bring it back. Some of you may argue that Ed

Sullivan is dead, but I don't see how that would affect his judgment or

delivery in the slightest. Ed knew talent when he saw it. He discovered such

acts as the little dogs that wore dresses and walked around on their hind legs

for twenty or thirty minutes while the audience, whose average IQ could not

have been higher than eighteen, roared with laughter. That was entertainment.

If we had Ed Sullivan back, we wouldn't spend Sunday evenings being depressed

by "60 Minutes":

"Good evening, I'm Mike Wallace. Tonight on '60 Minutes' we will explain

why the Earth will be covered with a sheet of ice eight miles thick within the

next fifteen years; we talk to a government researcher who has discovered

that, because of a manufacturing defect, 93 percent of the refrigerators in

the United States could explode at the slightest touch; and Andy Rooney will

take an amusing look at whisk brooms."

Another show we could do without is "Phil Donahue":

"Hi, and welcome to the Phil Donahue show. My guest today is Wesley

Snate, who was convicted in 1979 of charges that he bludgeoned roughly three

hundred Los Angeles-area French poodles to death. Mr. Snate has written a

very sensitive and moving book about his experience, entitled They Deserved

It, and I have invited him on the show so I can ask him many sensitive and

insightful questions so our viewing audience will gain a deeper understanding

of dog bludgeoners and perhaps buy his book."

The trouble with Phil's approach is that, with all his tiptoeing around,

he hardly ever gets around to the really depraved stuff everybody is tuned in

to hear. For sheer depravity, Phil's show can't hold a candle to the old

"Queen for a Day" show, in which deranged housewives competed to see who had

the most miserable life:

FIRST CONTESTANT: My husband had a stroke and he lost his job and our house

got repossessed so we had to live under a sheet of plywood in the

supermarket parking lot but when it got cold our kids got tuberculosis

except the youngest who got kidney disease so we built a fire under there

to keep warm but the plywood caught fire and burned up my insulin and all

our clothes so I had to wrap the kids in discarded plastic garbage bags

which is giving them a rash.

SECOND CONTESTANT: Well, I have cancer, of course, and my husband was hit by a

truck which gave him amnesia and he wandered off and I haven't seen him

since which would be okay except he had just withdrawn our life savings

so we could pay for an operation for little Theodora who has lost the use

of her fingers because of rat bites and can't tend little Buford's iron

lung when I'm out picking through the garbage for supper.

THIRD CONTESTANT: Well my problem is that ... arghhhhh. (The third contestant

keels over and dies.)

Then the audience would applaud each contestant, and the one who got the

most applause would win an Amana freezer. It was a terrific show.

We're also going to have to do something about children's television.

Today's children watch shows like "Sesame Street," which teaches them that the

world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that

form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, a pack of lies. When I was a

kid, in New York, my friends and I watched shows like "Captain Video," which

taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth,

which turns out to be absolutely correct.

"Captain Video" consisted of five episodes a week, no one of which cost

more than eleven dollars to produce. The episodes always took place in

Captain Video's spaceship. It was an extremely low budget spaceship. For ex

ample, Captain Video's radio was a regular telephone handset, except he held

it as if it were a microphone and talked into the listening end.

In a typical episode, Captain Video's spaceship would be under attack by

an evil alien warlord who had a robot named Tobor (get it?). The evil alien

would order Tobor, who was played by a stagehand wearing cardboard boxes

wrapped in aluminum foil, to attack. "Kill, Tobor, kill," he would say, and

the stagehand would go lumbering toward Captain Video. Just when he got

close, Captain Video would come up with this brilliant idea: he would say "Go

back, Tobor, go back." Then the stagehand would start lumbering toward the

evil alien. Then there would be some commercials. Then the alien would say

"Kill, Tobor, kill," again, and the stagehand would start toward Captain Video

again, and Captain Video would say "Go back, Tobor, go back" again, and there

would be more commercials, and before you knew it the half hour had just flown

by. Kids today don't get that kind of drama.

They also don't get Meaningful Social Lessons, the kind we got from shows

about cowboys and Indians. These shows taught us that not all Indians were

savage killers. For example, Tonto was a good Indian. As I recall, all the

others were savage killers.

IN DEPTH, BUT SHALLOWLY

If you want to take your mind off the troubles of the real world, you

should watch local TV news shows. I know of no better way to escape reality

except perhaps heavy drinking.

Local TV news programs have given a whole new definition to the word

news. To most people, news means information about events that affect a lot

of people. On local TV news shows, news means anything that you can take a

picture of, especially if a local TV News Personality can stead in front of

it. This is why they are so fond of car accidents, burning buildings, and

crowds: these are good for standing in front of. On the other hand, local TV

news shows tend to avoid stories about things that local TV News Personalities

cannot stand in front of, such as budgets and taxes and the economy. If you

want to get a local TV news show to do a story on the budget, your best bet is

to involve it in a car crash.

I travel around the country a lot, and as far as I can tell, virtually

all local TV news shows follow the same format. First you hear some exciting

music, the kind you hear in space movies, while the screen shows local TV News

Personalities standing in front of various News Events. Then you hear the

announcer:

ANNOUNCER: From the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studios, this is the

On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News, featuring Anchorman Wilson Westbrook,

Co-Anchorperson Stella Snape, Minority-Group Member James Edwards, Genial

Sports Personality Jim Johnson, Humorous Weatherperson Dr. Reed Stevens,

and Norm Perkins on drums. And now, here's Wilson Westbrook.

WESTBROOK: Good evening. Tonight from the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness news

studios we have actual color film of a burning building, actual color

film of two cars after they ran into each other, actual color film of the

front of a building in which one person shot another person, actual color

film of another burning building, and special reports on roller-skating

and child abuse. But for the big story tonight, we go to City Hall,

where On-the-Spot reporter Reese Kernel is standing live.

KERNEL: I am standing here live in front of City Hall being televised by the

On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News minicam with Mayor Bryce Hallbread.

MAYOR: That's "Hallwood."

KERNEL: What?

MAYOR: My name is "Hallwood." You said "Hallbread."

KERNEL: Look, Hallbread, do you want to be on the news or don't you?

MAYOR: Yes, of course, it's just that my name is ...

KERNEL: Listen, this is the top-rated news show in the three-county area, and

if you think I have time to memorize every stupid detail, you'd better

think again.

MAYOR: I'm sorry. "Hallbread" is fine, really.

KERNEL: Thank you, Mayor Hallbread. And now back to Wilson Westbrook in the

On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studios.

WESTBROOK: Thank you, Reese; keep us posted if anything further develops on

that important story. And now, as I promised earlier, we have actual

color film of various objects that either burned or crashed, which we

will project on the screen behind me while I talk about them. Here is a

building on fire. Here is another building on fire. Here is a car

crash. This film was shot years ago, but you can safely assume that

objects just like these crashed or burned in the three-county area today.

And now we go to my Co-Anchorperson, Stella Snape, for a Special Report

on her exhaustive three-week investigation into the problem of child

abuse in the three-county area. Well, Stella, what did you find?

SNAPE: Wilson, I found that Child abuse is very sad. What happens is that

people abuse children. It's just awful. Here you see some actual color

film of me standing in front of a house. Most of your child abuse occurs

in houses. Note that I am wearing subdued colors.

WESTBROOK (reading from a Script): Are any efforts under way here in the

three-county area to combat child abuse?

SNAPE: YeS.

WESTBROOK: Thank you, Stella, for that informative report. On the lighter

side, On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness Reporter Terri Tompkins has prepared

a three-part series on roller-skating in the three-county area.

TOMPKINS: Roller-skating has become a major craze in California and the

three-county area, as you can see by this actual color film of me on

roller skates outside the On-the-Spot Action Eyewitness News Studio.

This certainly is a fun craze. Tomorrow, in Part Two of this series,

we'll see actual color film of me falling down. On Wednesday we'll see

me getting up.

WESTBROOK: We'll look forward to those reports. Our next story is from

Minority-Group Reporter James Edwards, who, as he has for the last 324

consecutive broadcasts, spent the day in the minority-group sector of the

three-county area finding out what minorities think.

EDWARDS: Wilson, I'm standing in front of a crowd of minority-group members,

and as you can see, their mood is troubled. (The crowd smiles and waves

at the camera.)

WESTBROOK: Good report, James. Well, we certainly had a sunny day here in the

three-county area, didn't we, Humorous Weatherperson Dr. Reed Stevens?

STEVENS: Ha ha. We sure did, though I'm certainly troubled by that very

troubling report Stella did on child abuse. But we should see continued

warm weather through Wednesday. Here are a bunch of charts showing the

relative humidity and stuff like that. Ha ha.

WESTBROOK: Ha ha. Well, things weren't nearly as bright on the sports scene,

were they, Genial Sports Personality Jim Johnson?

JOHNSON: No, Wilson, they certainly weren't. The Three-County Community

College Cutlasses lost their fourth consecutive game today. Here you see

actual color footage of me watching the game from the sidelines. The

disgust is evident on my face. I intended to have actual color film of

me interviewing the coach after the game, but the team bus crashed and

everyone was killed.

WESTBROOK: Thank you, Jim. And now, here is Basil Holp, the General Manager

of KUSP-TV, to present an Editorial Viewpoint:

HOLP: The management of KUSP-TV firmly believes that something ought to be

done about earthquakes. From time to time we read in the papers that an

earthquake has hit some wretched little country and knocked houses down

and killed people. This should not be allowed to continue. Maybe we

should have a tax or something. What the heck, we can afford it. The

management of KUSP-TV is rolling in money.

ANNOUNCER: The preceding was the opinion of the management of KUSP-TV. People

with opposing points of view are probably in the vast majority.

WESTBROOK: Well, that wraps up tonight's version of the On-the-Spot Action

Eyewitness News. Tune in tonight to see essentially the same stories.

RADIO'S AIR HEADS

If you don't listen to radio talk shows, you really should, because it

gives you a chance to reassure yourself that a great many people out there are

much stupider than you are. Here's how these shows go:

HosT: Hi, this is "You Get to Talk on the Actual Radio," the show where You

Make a Difference. I'm your host, Hubert Spankle, going under the radio

name David Windsor Castle, which sounds better. Today I thought we'd

talk about President Reagan's economic plan. What do you think about it?

Let's go to the phones and find out. Hello, you're on the air.

CALLER: Hello, David?

HOST: This is David. Go ahead.

CALLER: Am I on the radio now?

HOST: Yes, you are. Go ahead.

CALLER: Go ahead and talk?

HOST: Yes. Go right ahead and talk.

CALLER: I'm so nervous.

HOST: Don't be nervous. Go right ahead and talk. Right now. Just talk.

CALLER: Well, I just wanted to tell you what happened to my husband. He was

riding the lawn mower, which we just got at Sears--can I say

Sears?--well, let's just say we just got it at a major department store,

and believe me it wasn't cheap, and he was driving it near the kitchen

window, and all of a sudden he crashed right through the septic tank, and

he disappeared right into the ground, and the firemen had to come and get

him out, and I spent three hours going over the lawn tractor with

Lysol--can I say Lysol?--and it still doesn't smell what you'd call

attractive, not to mention my husband, and I think they ought to make

those septic tanks stronger, because a lot of people have lawn tractors,

and ...

HOST: I certainly hear what you're saying. What do you think of President

Reagan's economic plan?

CALLER: President Reagan's what?

HOST: His economic plan.

CALLER: Well, I really haven't been too involved in it, because we live in the

suburbs, which is why we got the lawn tractor, but we had no idea that

our septic tank ...

HOsT: Thanks for your views. Let's see how some of our other listeners feel

about President Reagan's economic plan. Hello, you're on the air.

CALLER: Hello, Frank?

HOST: No, this is David Windsor Castle, and you're on "You Get to Talk on the

Actual Radio." What's on your mind?

CALLER: What's on my mind is I'm trying to get hold of Frank, because I just

found out that Denise ...

HOST: Excuse me, but this is a radio show, and there is no Frank here.

CALLER: Well, when he gets there you better tell him that Denise found

out about what's been going on at the Jolly Goat Motel. Somebody sent

her pictures of Frank, Louella, Preston, and the trained snakes, and the

last I heard Denise was buying a gun, so he'd better ...

HOST: Okay, let's see if any of our other listeners have anything to add about

President Reagan's economic plan. Hello, you're on the air.

CALLER: Yeah, I'm calling about that lady with the septic tank. It just so

happens I make septic tanks, and there's no way u can make one collapse

with just a lawn tractor unless the guy who's riding it weighs about six

hundred pounds. Why didn't you ask her how much her husband weighs? I

bet he's a real lard bucket. You see these guys out on their lawn

tractors, flab hanging down almost to the ground, and it makes you want

to puke.

HOST: Let's go to another caller. You're on the air.

CALLER: Hi. I'd like to talk about President Reagan's economic plan.

HOST: Thank God.

CALLER: It seems to me that people are being too quick to criticize the

President's plan, before it has had a chance to ... Oh no!

(In the background is the sound of a door lock being shot open with a .35 7

magnum.)

CALLER: Denise!

(More shots, screams)

HOST: Well, that concludes today's version of "You Get to Talk on the Actual

Radio." Tune in tomorrow, when we'll explore the situation in the Middle

East.

WHAT TO BAN ON VIDEO

I keep reading these stories about these towns that want to ban video

arcade games, as if these games were part of the International Communist

Conspiracy. You know:

POND SCUM, ARKANSAS--The town council in this small

pig-farming community voted tonight to ban video arcade

games on the grounds that they are a threat to the moral

fiber of the town's youth. "The youths in this town

barely got any moral fiber left to speak of, and I blame

these here video games," charged Council President Lionel

B. Sparge. "When I was a youth, Pond Scum didn't have no

video games, and we found plenty to do. For example, we'd

stand around and spit.

I agree with the people who want to ban video games. These games

definitely destroy your moral fiber. At least they destroy my moral fiber. I

have this video game that I play all the time on my personal home computer,

which I keep back in a back bedroom. I don't allow my two-year-old son to get

near it, because it might destroy his moral fiber, and also he tends to pull

the plug right when I'm in an important phase of my game, such as when the

aliens materialize out of hyperspace.

So what has happened is that my son has been going through all these

critical stages of growth and development out in the living room, and I've

missed most of it. Not that I mind all that much, really, since if you want

to participate in my son's growth and development you have to read him these

profoundly dull children's books with names like Let's Go to a Condiments

Factory and Tommy the Toad Vacuums the Carpet. So I've left his development

pretty much in the hands of my wife, with instructions that she should call me

if he reaches any new developmental stages so I can come out to the living

room and watch him for a few minutes.

And I'm not the only one whose moral fiber is being destroyed. It is a

proven scientific fact that video games are also corrupting American youth.

In a recent experiment, scientific researchers exposed a group of teenaged

boys to an arcade game, and found that all of them had unclean sexual

thoughts. Of course, the researchers got the same result when they exposed

the boys to coleslaw, an alpaca sweater, and "The MacNeil-Lehrer Report," but

that is beside the point. The point is that we should all write letters to

our elected officials and urge them to ban video games.

And while they're at it, they should also ban golf. Golf is similar to

video games in that it is a monumentally useless activity that people become

obsessed with and waste a lot of money on, but it has the added drawback of

encouraging people to wear really stupid clothing, such as pants that can be

seen with the naked eye from other galaxies. I strongly suspect that if our

nation's youth continue to play video games, many of them will eventually

graduate to golf, so I say let's kill two birds with one stone and ban them

both.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "How, in a free

country such as this, can we ban video games and golf, yet continue to permit

stamp-collecting?" You're absolutely right, and I'm only sorry I didn't think

of it myself. It would be hard to conceive of an activity more useless than

stamp-collecting, except maybe water-skiing or the Rose Bowl parade, so I

suppose these things will have to be banned too, along with fraternal

organizations, music, tropical fish, racquetball, and any activity whatsoever

involving Ed McMahon. Also, anybody attempting to operate a beauty pageant

should be shot without trial.

Of course, this is only a partial list of the useless, fiber-destroying

activities that should be banned, and I'm sure you'll think of plenty more

when you write to your elected officials. The important thing isn't so much

what you want to ban; it's the fact that you participate in the banning

process. That's what democracy is all about.

SUBTRACT THOSE ADS

I strongly suspect that the people who appear in television commercials

are imported from the planet Jupiter. I can think of no other way to explain

their behavior. Take, for example, the commercials for Coca-Cola in which an

extremely interracial group of people gathers on a hillside, holding candles,

and sings:

I'd like to teach the world to sing

In perfect har-mo-nee

I'd like to buy the world a Coke

And keep it com-pa-nee.

This is not the way native Earth people behave. Native Earth people do

not gather interracially on hillsides for any purpose other than to watch

motorcyclists leap over cars. And native Earth people, at least the ones I

know, see no connection whatsoever between Coca-Cola and world harmony. In

fact, I'm willing to bet statistics would show that Coca-Cola sales and world

tension have both been increasing steadily for the past thirty years or so.

Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying Coca-Cola causes world tension.

I happen to be very fond of Coca-Cola. It tastes fine, and it makes an

excellent industrial cleanser. I'm just saying the people in Coca-Cola's

commercials either are deranged or come from another planet.

And it's not just Coca-Cola commercials. You can watch commercials for

days and never see anything approaching normal human behavior. I think that,

in the interest of honesty, the government ought to pass a law requiring

companies to use regular Earth people in their commercials. Here's how they

would behave:

COMMERCIALS FOR MEN'S HAIR DARKENERS

(The commercial opens with a white-haired man and a dark-haired man standing

in an office.)

WHITE-HAIRED MAN: I'M worried that the boss won't give me that Big Promotion.

DARK-HAIRED MAN: That's because you look too old. Here, take this

hair-darkening stuff home and smear it in your hair every night.

WHITE-HAIRED MAN: Thanks a million. I'll try it.

(The scene shifts to the boss's office, several weeks later. The formerly

white-haired man now has extremely dark, glossy hair. He looks as though

he has a wet cat on his head.)

BOSS: I called you in here to tell you I've decided to give you ... My God,

what's that on your head?

FORMERLY WHITE-HAIRED MAN: My hair. I've been smearing stuff on it every

night.

BOSS: It looks like a wet cat.

FORMERLY WHITE-HAIRED MAN: What did you want to see me about?

Boss: Uh, nothing. On your way out, ask my secretary to send in somebody who

looks distinguished.

COMMERCIALS FOR HEADACHE REMEDIES

(A woman is sitting at a table on which are four bowls. She is facing many

bright lights. From behind the lights, a faceless man is talking to

her.)

FACELESS MAN: Mrs. Jones, do you have a headache?

WOMAN: Yes, and those lights aren't helping one bit.

FACELESS MAN: Which of these leading pain relievers do you think has the most

laboratory-proven pain-killing ingredient?

WOMAN: You mean aspirin, right? Why do you guys always dream up these

elaborate names for aspirin? Why don't you just call it aspirin? And

why are you hiding behind those lights?

FACELESS mAN: Look, this leading brand has only 450 milligrams of

laboratory-proven pain-killing ingredient. And this brand has only 450

milligrams. And this brand has only ...

WOMAN: Shut up! Just shut up! Isn't it bad enough that I have a headache?

Do I also have to sit here in front of a bunch of hot lights and listen

to some idiot blither about milligrams? I'm going to go home and take

some aspirin.

COMMERCIALS FOR SMOKER'S TOOTH POLISH

(Two people are standing at a cocktail party, smoking cigarettes.)

FIRST SMOKER: Say, I have an idea: Why don't you exhale some cigarette smoke

through this white handkerchief?

SECOND SMOKER: That sounds like a swell idea. (He blows some smoke through

the handkerchief.)

FIRST SMOKER: Look at that brown glop. Imagine what that's doing to your

teeth.

SECOND SMOKER: My teeth? What about my lungs, for God's sake? I've got to

quit.

(The first smoker coughs violently and spits something disgusting into the

handkerchief.)

COMMERCIALS FOR STOVE-TOP STUFFING

(A woman and her husband are shopping in a supermarket. A man with a

microphone approaches them.)

MAN WITH MICROPHONE: Mrs. Brown, which do you think your husband would rather

have for dinner: potatoes or Stove-Top Stuffing?

WOMAN: I don't see where that's any of your business.

MAN WITH MICROPHONE: Well, Mr. Brown?

HUSBAND: Geez, I don't know. Stove-Top Stuffing, I guess.

MAN WITH MICROPHONE: Well, Mrs. Brown, what do you think of that?

WOMAN: I think that if my husband is going to go around telling perfect

strangers that he doesn't like the food I cook, then he can cook his own

damn food.

COMMERCIALS FOR WISK

(Two men are talking at a party, as their wives listen.)

FIRST MAN: I'm feeling really wrung out lately.

SECOND MAN (jeeringly): That's because you've got ring around the collar. Ha

ha.

(The first man shakes his head sadly, then walks away.)

SECOND MAN: What's with him?

SECOND MAN'S WIFE: His mother just died, you idiot.

Low Finance

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEBT

First of all, let me assure you that we are not in a depression. The key

economic indicator of a depression is that you suddenly start seeing a lot of

primitive black-and-white newsreel films of people wearing old-fashioned hats

and overcoats and forming lines in the streets of major cities to obtain

bread. So far, all the lines of people have been videotaped in color, which

is the sign of a stable economy. Also, the people have not been lining up for

bread. They have been lining up for cheese, which the government has several

million tons of.

Some of you are no doubt wondering why the government has so much cheese.

It's because of the Strategic Dairy Products Act, which was passed in 1947 to

guarantee that the nation never becomes dependent on some unreliable foreign

power, such as France, for its cheese supply. So for years the government has

been paying huge sums of money to dairy farmers for cheese that winds up

sitting in government warehouses as a permanent reminder to the cheese-making

nations of the world that we are a strong, self-reliant people.

The problem is that after a few years the cheese hardens to the

consistency of formica, and the government has to get rid of it. The original

plan, developed by Alexander Haig, was to drop the cheese from Air Force

bombers onto rebel troops in El Salvador, but military analysts pointed out

that the rebels might be able to melt it down and eat it, so the government

decided instead to give it to poor people here in the United States. But this

should not be taken as a sign that we are in a depression.

What we are in is a recession. The key economic indicator of a recession

is that government economists go around announcing that the economy is

improving. The truth, of course, is that government economists don't have the

slightest notion what the economy is doing; if they did, they would have

decent jobs. But they keep trying. Every few days they come out with some

economic statistic and attempt to explain it, using charts and pointers, to

the news media:

WASHINGTON--The U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Calculations

announced today that the rate of increase of the Average

Price of Things that People Buy So They Can Make Them into

Other Things and Sell Them for More Money Than They Paid

for Them was slightly lower than might otherwise have been

expected. "It is a very, very hopeful sign," said

government economist Elwood Welt, once he located the room

where the press conference was held. "To be perfectly

frank, we had feared that the rate of increase would be

something like 6.67 percent, when in fact it was 6.53

percent, so we here at the Bureau of Calculations are

extremely pleased and hopeful and will probably take the

rest of the day off.

Government economists are always hopeful, for two reasons:

1. They have jobs.

2. If they aren't hopeful, the President will fire them.

So government economists go around with big smiles on their faces all the

time. For the past thirty years, presidents increased spending deficits like

clockwork, and the government economists smiled. Then Ronald Reagan said he

was against big spending and deficits, and the government economists smiled.

Now it turns out that spending and deficits are still going up, and the

government economists are still smiling. Phyllis George would be a good

government economist.

The big question, of course, is, What can we, as citizens, do for the

government during the recession? Well, for one thing, it would be a big help

if we would stop being unemployed in such large numbers. A lot of us have

managed to get ourselves unemployed lately, and some of us are guilty of

extremely high interest rates. As a result, we are making it very difficult

for government economists to remain hopeful. So far they have managed to pull

it off, but it's only a matter of time before they start to feel depressed:

WASHINGTON--The U.S. Treasury's Bureau of Calculations

announced today that the nation's economy is going to hell

in a hand basket and probably will never get better. "I'm

so sorry, but I just can't feel hopeful about anything

anymore," said government economist Elwood Welt, clutching

a fifty-pound block of government surplus cheese. "We've

tried everything. We've tried coming up with new

statistics, and more recently, we've started using more

color charts, but the truth is we are all very depressed

about the economy and will probably take the rest of the

day off."

FULL-SERVICE BANKRUPTCY

What makes international finance so fascinating is that, thanks to the

miracle of modern electronic banking, you are linked financially with billions

of people you don't even know, which means the actions of a deranged

scum-bucket politician in some country you never even heard of could cause you

to lose your home and your life's savings and wind up living in a cardboard

refrigerator carton and licking discarded candy wrappers for nourishment.

This has caused some people to be concerned about their banks. The banking

industry has responded with reassuring television commercials, wherein a man

wearing a reassuring suit says:

"We're the nation's banks, and we're not the least bit worried about

anything, which is why we're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to let

you know that nobody is worried about anything. Here, for example, is an

extremely solid bank. Just look at this momma." (Here he kicks the bank.)

"You're talking solid masonry construction. And on top of that, your deposits

are protected by the full faith and credit of the United States Government,

the same organization that gave so many of you shots for swine flu. This

means that if anything goes wrong with the banking system, your elected

representatives will fly back from Switzerland or France or wherever they are,

and they'll hold press conferences and call each other names, and eventually

they're bound to come up with a nifty plan to get your money back. So there's

nothing to worry about, nothing at all. Forget we even brought it up. Thank

you."

To illustrate how you are connected to international finance, let's look

at how the banking system works. First, people like yourself deposit money in

banks. The banks put the money in their safes, where the amounts gradually

increase thanks to the sound banking practice of never lending money tO people

like yourself. Eventually the bankers at the smaller banks get nervous about

having all that money around, so they transfer it to gigantic international

banks in New York, in return for which they receive very attractive desk

calendars. At this point, the gigantic international bankers are sitting

around, wondering what to do with the money, when officials of a country such

as Poland pull up in a taxi, race into the bank without paying the driver, and

apply for a loan:

BANKERS: And just how much money did you have in mind?

POLISH OFFICIALS: We were thinking in terms of one million trillion dollars in

small bills.

BANKERs: That's a great deal of money for us to lend to people who have

horribly mismanaged their country's economy for years and whose authority

depends on the armed oppression of the Soviet Union. What assurance do

we have that you can repay us?

POLISH OFFICIALS: We're willing to sign our names to several pieces of paper.

BANKERS: Would tens and twenties be okay?

The Polish officials flee back to Poland with the money, all of which

immediately disappears into the black market in exchange for Elton John

records. After maybe five years, the international bank sends Poland a

letter:

Dear Poland:

This is just a friendly note to remind you that, according to our

records, you now have a past due balance of $832,674,709,908,772.54. Although

we value you as a customer, continued tardiness in payment on your part could

force us to precipitate an international banking crisis.

Warmest regards,

Your Gigantic Full-service International Bank

So the Poland officials telephone the bank collect and, shouting to be

heard over the Elton John record playing in the background, claim the check is

in the mail.

Over the years, this process has been repeated with so many countries

that virtually all the money originally deposited in U.S. banks is now in the

hands of foreign street vendors, which is why your local bank is willing to

give you calculators and toasters if you'll deposit more money. This can't go

on, of course. Already, some banks have taken drastic corrective action in

the form of lending more money to foreign countries so they can make their

interest payments. But this may not be enough; we may soon see a day when the

United States Government, fed up with the incredible stupidity of the

international bankers, finally steps in and gives them enormous amounts of

money taken from taxpayers, which is only fair, because the taxpayers were the

ones who got the toasters.

THE NET MAY BE GROSS

The reason that you are not extremely wealthy, of course, is that you do

not carefully keep track of your finances. John D. Rockefeller carefully kept

track of his finances, and he ended up with so much money that he started

giving it away in bales, and many of his offspring became governors. For a

while there, we barely had enough states for Rockefellers to be governors of.

So if you want your offspring to be governors, you should drive down to your

local office-supplies store and get yourself a little accountant-style

notebook and immediately start writing down your expenses:

Accountant-style Notebook--$7.97

Gas Used to Get to Store for Accountant-style Notebook--$1.14

Depreciation on Car--$4.34

Parking--$0.25

Beef Jerky Purchased at Convenience Store on Way Home--$0.49

Damage to Fender Caused by Uninsured Motorist While Car Was in Convenience

Store Parking Lot--$385.62

Knife Wound Suffered in Argument--$1,830.88

Legal Fees--$12,757.21

See? You're on your way to riches. Not only do you know exactly where

your money is going, but all these items are tax-deductible, provided you were

talking to your lawyer when you ate the beef jerky.

When you get home, you should sit down and try to figure out what your

major assets are. There are two kinds of assets: "liquid" assets are the ones

you have already spent, and "solid" assets are the ones you still have. In

our household, our major asset is roughly $4,000 worth of pennies under the

furniture. These pennies are a fairly solid asset, because to get them we

would have to crawl around and stuff them into those little wrappers you get

at the bank, and the bank probably wouldn't accept them anyway, because of the

high floor-lint content. Our other major solid assets are:

$42.13 worth of U.S. postage stamps that we bought only recently but cannot

use because the Postal Commission raises the rate every two or three

days.

$3,024.56 worth of aquarium supplies, from when my wife and I went through our

Tropical Fish Phase, which culminated in our discovery that they are

called "tropical" fish because they can survive only in the tropics,

which we do not live in.

A pure-bred German shepherd dog for which we paid $300, or roughly $50 per

brain cell.

$80 worth of rolls of undeveloped photographic film, which we don't want to

have developed because we can't remember whether they contain any

memorable pictures, but which we don't want to throw away in case they

contain any memorable pictures. We've had these rolls for years now, and

we often take them off the shelf and settle down in front of a crackling

fire to look at them and reminisce. "Remember this roll of film?" we

say.

$200 worth of random keys.

Your only remaining financial responsibility is to balance your

checkbook. Every month, you send out a batch of checks to various people, and

every month the bank gets hold of these checks somehow, smears them with

bank-style graffiti, and sends them back to you. The obvious question, of

course, is, What are you supposed to do with them? My wife ignores them. She

merely tosses the bank envelope, unopened, into a drawer, and walks away,

laughing a carefree laugh. So far, she has gotten away with it, but I'm

fairly sure that someday the Bank Inspector will show up with guns and attack

dogs and make her stay in her room until she balances her checkbook. So I

always balance mine. Here's the system I use:

1. On a large, flat surface, such as a washing machine or floor, arrange all

the checks in a tasteful, numerical pattern.

2. With a sharp pencil, put little check marks next to all the numbers on the

bank statement and all the numbers in your checkbook.

That's all there is to it. You could avoid even this much work if you

could prevent the bank from getting hold of your checks and sending them back

to you. One way to do this would be to write, in large letters at the top of

each check, the words DO NOT LET THE BANK GET HOLD OF THIS CHECK. If

everybody did this, we would all save thousands of hours we now waste

balancing checkbooks, and we would probably have come up with a cure for the

common cold by now.

ANTI-INSURANCE POLICY

I have been under almost constant attack by life-insurance salesmen for

most of my adult life. I was first attacked when I was in college, by this

guy named Charlie. One day he was a normal college student, no different from

the rest of us, and the next day he was a life-insurance salesman. It was as

if the Moonies had got him. All of a sudden, he was wearing wing-tipped shoes

and acting very concerned about my Financial Security. At the time, my idea

of Financial Security was to have enough money to buy a pizza with extra

cheese, but Charlie thought I should have at least six hundred thousand

dollars' worth of life insurance, so that when I died my dependents would be

rich.

To be honest, I didn't care what happened to my dependents, because I

didn't have any. But Charlie was obsessed with my dependents: he'd sit in my

room, hour after hour, and fret about them, until finally, to ease his mind, I

bought some life insurance, and he went away. As soon as I was safely in

another state, I cashed in my insurance and used the money to go sailing in

the Virgin Islands with some friends who had not had the foresight to buy life

insurance for their dependents, and thus had a more difficult time coming up

with the money. So my life insurance turned out to be a good investment.

All life-insurance salesmen believe that no matter who you are, or what

your financial situation is, you need more insurance. So unless you wear

elaborate disguises and sleep in old refrigerator cartons, sooner or later a

life-insurance salesman will come to your home, calling you by your first name

a lot and subtly hinting that you're going to die. Suppose your name is John.

Here's how your insurance salesman will attack you:

INSURANCE SALESMAN: John, I just stopped by to chat about your Financial

Security. John, our records indicate that you're going to die someday

and leave your dependents penniless and they'll end up out on the street

eating garbage in the cold. I just thought we should chat about that,

John.

You: Well, I certainly appreciate it, but I already have eight million

dollars' worth of life insurance, and my only dependents are these

tropical fish.

INSURANCE SALESMAN: Frankly, John, in these inflationary times, eight million

dollars just isn't going to buy all that much tropical-fish food. And

I'm not even talking about the cost of fish-tank filters, John.

You: But they're just fish, for God's sake. I just can't see buying more

insurance for fish. But thanks anyway.

INSURANCE SALESMAN: John, not long ago I was sitting in a room just like this,

talking with a man, just like you, who thought he didn't need more

insurance. I left his house, and the next day he was struck by lightning

and run over by a bulldozer and his body was eaten by ants, and within a

matter of days his fish had all developed fin rot, all because he didn't

think he needed more insurance. So, John, if I were to leave your house

tonight and something like that were to happen to you, I'd never forgive

myself. So I'll just unroll my sleeping bag here and cook some

freeze-dried food, of which I have a three-week supply, while you think

about it, John. And another thing, John. John John John John John.

Finally, of course, you will buy insurance. As the salesman leaves, he

will put a secret mark on the door to alert other insurance salesmen that

yours is a good house to stop at, and soon they will be at your door in

droves. If you want them to go away, either you have to shoot them, which is

illegal in some states and which doesn't always work anyway, or you have to

buy more insurance.

So the only real solution to the problem is to convince the salesman that

you are a bad risk. Put a sign outside your house that says: CAUTION:

RADIOACTIVE RABID LEPROSY VICTIM WITH SMALLPOX. This won't stop a really

successful salesman from entering, but it will slow him down. When he knocks

on the door, hide in the bedroom and have a friend, wearing a surgical mask,

escort him into the living room. Then follow this script:

INSURANCE SALESMAN: Is John home?

YOUR FRIEND: Yes, but I think he's dead. Let me check. John? Are you dead?

You: Not yet. Who is it?

YOUR FRIEND: A visitor.

You: Oh, goody. Send him in. I haven't had a visitor since poor old Wesley

Bumpers came to see me last week. Speaking of whom, I wish you'd get him

out of here. He's beginning to spoil.

INSURANCE SALESMAN: Perhaps I've picked a bad time.

You: Not at all. Come on in. (Here you cough violently, and toss a bucket of

giblets into the living room.)

INSURANCE SALESMAN: I just realized I'm late for an important appointment in

Belgium. I'll stop by later. (Holding his breath, he barges out the

door.)

If this approach doesn't work, you should try vicious dogs.

BUILD YOUR OWN MESS

You young couples out there who dream of having your own houses someday

have probably read a lot of depressing articles about housing costs. You

know:

WASHINGTON--The American Institute of People who Keep

Track of These Things released a study today showing that

by 1990 the average single-family house will cost eleven

million dollars, not counting drapes, and that the only

people who will be able to afford houses will be members

of the Saudi Arabian royal family and major drug dealers.

Well, cheer up, young couples: You can have your own house. All you need

is a large sum of money. The best source of money is your parents. You can

get almost anything you want from your parents, provided you're not afraid to

whine. I remember when I was twelve and really needed a BB gun. My parents

didn't want me to have one, on the grounds I might shoot my brother. But I

put together a string of about thirty-five days during which I was without

question the most sniveling, obnoxious child in the entire world. It got to

the point where, to preserve their sanity, my parents had to either give me a

BB gun or hire someone to kidnap me. They eventually elected to buy me a BB

gun, mainly because it was cheaper. I was so grateful I didn't shoot my

brother for three or four days.

Anyway, your parents probably have a bunch of money rotting away in

things like savings accounts and investments and pensions and insurance and

retirement homes. So what you should do is follow your parents everywhere--to

the supermarket, to work, to parties--tugging at their sleeves and saying "I

wanna house." Sooner or later, because they love you, they'll give you some

money. Or flee to Brazil.

If you can't get money from your parents, you may be able to get some

from a bank. The trouble is that banks prefer to give money to people who

already have a lot of it. If you walk into a bank looking like a

poverty-stricken young couple whose own parents won't give them money, the

loan officer will drum his fingers impatiently and try to get you out of his

office so he can get back to increasing the prime rate. So you want to look

wealthy. Wear tuxedos and evening gowns, and act as though you could not care

less whether you get any money:

LOAN OFFICER: May I help you?

You: Yes. We'd like to grab a quick bite of pheasant while Jacques fuels the

Mercedes. Could we have a table please?

LOAN OFFICER: I'm sorry, but this is a bank.

You: A bank? How very quaint. Is it for sale? I should think it would be

gobs of fun to have a cozy little bank like this. Our others are so

huge.

LOAN OFFICER: Uh, no, I'm afraid it's not for sale. But I could give you a

loan. Would $300,000 do?

You: Thanks awfully, but we're all set for today.

LOAN OFFICER: How about $450,000? Please, take it. We can sign the papers

later.

If you can't get money from your parents or a bank, you can build your

own house. Anybody can build a house. My father is a Presbyterian minister

who knows only the basics of carpentry, and he built the house I grew up in.

The only problems are that the house took him about thirty-five years to

finish and in many ways looks like it was built by a Presbyterian minister who

knows only the basics of carpentry. Also some of the windows have BB-gun

holes.

Here is how to build a house:

1. Find some land. You can find empty land all over the place, particularly

along interstate highways. Pick out a nice batch of land and watch it

for a few days: If nobody seems to be doing anything with it, you can

assume it's okay for you to build a house there.

2. Dig a ditch in the shape of the house. If you run into a lot of rocks and

stuff, forget the ditch, You're going to put a house on top of it anyway,

so nobody will know the difference.

3. Get several thousand boards at a lumberyard and nail them together so they

form a house. (NOTE: Do not do this at the lumberyard.)

If you don't want to go to all this trouble, you can just put up a crude

hut made of animal skins or mud and twigs. No matter what you build, you'll

be able to sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars in a few years, when

you need the money to get your children to stop following you around saying "I

wanna house."

GOD NEEDS THE MONEY

Here are three types of people you should not trust:

People who tell you God told them to tell you to send them money. You

know the guys I mean. They get on television and say: "God told me He wants

you to send me some money, say $100, or even just $10, if that's all you can

afford, but in all honesty I must point out that God is less likely to give

you some horrible disease if your gift is in the $100 range."

The theory here seems to be that God talks only to the guys on

television. I always thought that if God needed money all that badly, He

would get in touch with us directly.

My wife gets a lot of letters from people who say God told them to tell

her to send them money. She got a great one recently from Brother Leroy

Jenkins, who is evidently one of the people God goes to when He needs a lot of

money. Leroy is very straightforward:

The Lord spoke to me to have you send a one-time large

gift. Will you send me $1,000, or $500, or $100, or even

$5,000 ... If you are not able to send all of the $1,000,

$500, $100 or $5,000 now, send as much as you can, and

make a vow to the Lord that you will send an offering of

$20 (or at least $10) each month.

Notice you make the vow to the Lord, but you send the money to Leroy.

Leroy doesn't specify what he plans to do with it, but he does tell you to

send it to him at the Walden Correctional Institution in South Carolina, where

he is serving a twelve-year term for criminal conspiracy. I imagine God

advised him to get a good lawyer.

People who say they want to do things for the Public. I have yet to

locate the Public: All I ever see is people. Nevertheless, some people are

certain there's a Public out there somewhere, sort of like the Lost Continent

of Atlantis, and they keep trying to do things for it. Generally, these

things consist of taking money away from people to help the Public, or passing

laws prohibiting people from doing things that most people see nothing wrong

with, but that are not in the Public Interest. For example:

The federal government helps the Public by taking ever larger amounts of money

away from most people. The theory is that if the government didn't step

in, people would spend the money on things they want, which would cause

inflation, which would be bad for the Public. So the government takes

the money and (surprise!) spends it.

Most states protect the Public by limiting people to only one telephone

company, electric company, and so on. This is Good for the Public. It

is not to be confused with monopolies, which are Bad for the Public.

Your really enlightened states protect the Public by prohibiting everybody but

the state from operating liquor or gambling businesses. These businesses

are considered Bad if people operate them, but Good if the state does,

even though the only real difference is that state liquor stores have

high prices, poor selection, and all the charm of unwashed junior-high

school locker rooms; and state gambling games offer sucker odds and idiot

advertisements that appeal most to people who can least afford to throw

money away.

I want to clarify one point: When I talk about "people," I am not talking

about "the People" with a capital "P," as in "Power to the People" and other

such slogans, which are bandied about by people who really mean "Power to Me

and a Few of My Friends Who Know What Is Good for the People." Generally,

these people merely want to get control over property that is already owned by

people, only not the right ones.

a People who say they are doing things in Your Interest. Don't trust

anybody who says he's doing something in Your Inter est, except maybe your

mother. Let's face it: most people do what they do because they enjoy it or

make money from it, and there's nothing wrong with that. But most people feel

obligated to pretend all they ever think about is helping the human race,

especially you. Life-insurance salesmen, for example, tend to carry on as

though the only reason they sell life insurance is that they feel it is more

beneficial than the priesthood. Advertisements work the same way. The

Chrysler Corporation wants me to buy a Chrysler not because it sells

Chryslers, but because it wants to Help America. Mobil isn't trying to sell

petroleum products: it's trying to Solve the Energy Crisis. And so on.

So there you have it: a list of people not to trust. You should be

grateful you have someone like me, working for the Public Good, with Your

Interest in mind. God wants you to send me some money.

Health Habits

EXERCISING YOUR RIGHTS

Let's talk about exercise and your body. First, the bad news. You

cannot have a really swell body, like the one belonging to Victoria Principal.

Victoria is the actress from the famous television show "Dallas" who appears

in newspaper and television advertisements wearing a stretch garment that, if

not occupied by Victoria Principal, would contract to the size of a gum

wrapper.

In the television commercial, Victoria walks around a health club

striking various bodily poses and saying something. You can't hear what she's

saying, because when you see this particular commercial your brain tends to

devote all available nervous-system resources to your eyes, but the gist of it

is that if you join a health club and exercise a lot you will look like

Victoria Principal or one of the major hunks of manhood behind her.

This is a lie, of course. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has

decided that only a select few people can look like Victoria Principal or the

hunks, and you are not one of them. These select people are destined to have

swell bodies even if the only exercise they get is eating Slim Jims and

drinking cheap whiskey. Certain other people can exercise constantly and eat

nothing but grapefruit rinds, but they will still have the bodies of water

buffalo.

This is probably for the best. Think how dull the world would be if we

did not have wide variations in our bodily formats. We'd be like ants. If

you've ever taken a good, close look at a batch of ants, you've probably

noticed that they're all equally attractive. You never see any fat ants, or

buxom ants, or lean, sinewy ants. They all have identical, perfect little ant

bodies, and consequently they find each other boring. Put yourself in their

position: how would you feel if you lived in a world where every member of the

opposite sex had a perfect body? You'd crave something different. You'd

start casting a speculative glance toward the larvae, or even the pupae. If

you were a male ant, you might even make a pass at, say, a queen termite,

despite the fact that she is about sixty times your size, lays thirty-five

thousand eggs a day, and tends to devour her sexual partners. Or is that

spiders? No matter. The mere fact that you would even consider making a pass

at a termite is proof of my point, which, if I recall it correctly, is that

Mother Nature wants us all to be different, which means that if you are

basically a squat person, you can exercise all you want, and you will still be

basically a squat person.

This does not mean you shouldn't exercise; it merely means that you

should understand the real reason you should exercise, which is to prepare

your body for the pain you'll inevitably have to endure when you become older.

Let's say you're in your mid-twenties to mid-thirties. Most of the time you

feel pretty good, right? The only time you feel really lousy is when you

attend a major party and ingest huge quantities of alcohol and wake up the

next day naked in an unfamiliar city. But as you grow older, you're going to

start feeling more aches and pains caused by the inevitable afflictions of

age, such as arthritis, the Social Security Administration, condescending

denture-adhesive commercials, children who call only when they want to borrow

money for down payments on houses much nicer than the one you live in, etc.

You need to prepare your body for this pain. This is why exercise is so

important.

Take joggers. You see them running along the street, clearly hating

every second of it, and you say, "What's the point?" Ha. Years from now,

you'll struggle to adjust to the aches and pains of growing older, whereas the

joggers, who have been in constant agony for fifteen or twenty years, will be

able to make the transition smoothly, unless they've committed suicide.

So don't delay. Start an exercise program today, the more painful the

better. If you don't like to jog, buy the exercise book that Jane Fonda, the

noted critic of capitalism, sells for $17.95, and do the exercises in it. Or

just hit yourself repeatedly in the head with it.

PROGRAMS FOR THE UNFIT

Okay! Today's the day you start on your physical-fitness program, the

program that's going to make you slender, healthy, and attractive, like the

people in cigarette advertisements.

Step one is to take your pulse, because a healthy heart is the key to

physical fitness. If your heart is healthy, you can continue to collect

Social Security long after your other major organs have become senile and are

wandering around aimlessly with no idea what bodily functions they are

supposed to perform. The best way to understand the relationship between your

heart and your health is to examine an actual heart. You cannot, of course,

examine your own heart, unless you have a high threshold of pain, so instead

you should trot down to the grocery store and ask the butcher for some surplus

hearts from an assortment of animals--a cow, a pig, a fish, an earthworm, etc.

Most butchers will be happy to give you the hearts for free, just to get you

to go away.

Now take your hearts home, spread them out on a clean, level surface,

such as a Ping-Pong table, and examine them closely. You'll notice that the

hearts differ in size, but they have one important thing in common: the

animals they were removed from are all dead. This tells us that hearts are

extremely important for physical fitness. Now place your hearts in Tupperware

containers and store them in your freezer in case your children ever need them

for science-fair projects or practical jokes.

Now you're ready to take your pulse. The traditional method is to locate

the major artery that goes through your wrist and press your thumb against it.

The only potential drawback to this method is that you might squash the artery

flat with your thumb, causing the blood to back up so that eventually your arm

explodes like a party balloon. A safer way is to drink gin and tonic until

you can actually hear your pulse pounding in your head, then walk or crawl to

a nearby store and tell the salesperson you want to buy a stopwatch so you can

count the number of pounds per minute:

YOU: I want a stopwatch.

SALESPERSON: We don't sell stopwatches. This is a grocery store.

You (picking up an eggplant): Oh yeah? Then what do you call this?

SALESPERSON: That's an eggplant. Say, you're the guy who was in here earlier

asking for fish hearts. Are you drunk or something?

YOU: Certainly not. As any idiot can plainly see, I'm taking my pulse.

SALESPERSON: With an eggplant? Why don't you just squash your thumb against

your artery like everybody else?

You (with great dignity): If I wanted a squash, I would have selected a

squash, wouldn't I? I'll take this eggplant, and make it snappy.

Next, using a stopwatch or an eggplant, count the number of times your

head pounds in a minute; if you're a healthy person, this should be a two- or

three-digit number. Now you're ready to start your exercise program. Turn on

your television and watch one of those programs in which people in skimpy

outfits leap around in time to recorded music under the direction of a

cheerful leader.

Notice I say you should watch the program: under no circumstances should

you actually do the exercises, because all that leaping around will reduce

your brain to tapioca pudding. You'll wind up like the people on the

television programs, smiling vacantly and doing whatever the cheerful leader

tells you to:

LEADER: Okay! Let's kick those legs up high! Great! Now let's bend way

over! Terrific! Now let's all say "I pledge allegiance to the Reverend

Sun Myung Moon."

EXERCISERS: I pledge allegiance to the Reverend Sun Myung Moon.

LEADER: Okay! Now let's all hop on one foot and put our fingers in our

noses'. Great! Now let's all take out our checkbooks and ...

After your exercise program, take your pulse again, then go into the

kitchen and prepare a large, nutritious breakfast. You may not feel hungry,

especially after all the pulse-taking, so to boost your appetite, think about

how important good nutrition is to your heart. Think about what will happen

to you if you don't take good care of your heart. Think, as you chew your

food, about what happened to the cow, the pig, the fish, and the earthworm

whose hearts are sitting in Tupperware containers only a few feet away from

your breakfast, sheathed in frozen slime. This should give you all the

incentive you need to eat a hearty breakfast, after which you'll be ready to

face the day or go back to bed.

JOGGING FOR PRESIDENT

Lately, I have noticed large numbers of people staggering along the sides

of major highways, trying to get in shape. I think they have the right idea:

most of us Americans are out of shape. I know for a fact that I am.

When I was in high school, my friends and I were in terrific shape. Our

bodies were fine-tuned machines. We would routinely drink quarts of warmish

beer, then perform feats of great physical prowess. For example, during the

Halloween Dance we carried a 1962 Volkswagen all the way up the front steps of

Pleasantville High School, right into the lobby. I bet we couldn't do that

today. I bet you couldn't, either.

Now I grant you that most of us no longer feel any great need to drink

warm beer and carry Volkswagens into high schools, but the point is that if

some emergency arose, if for some reason involving national security we had to

carry a Volkswagen into a high school, we couldn't do it. We'd go a few

steps, then we'd drop the Volkswagen and collapse on the ground, gasping and

heaving, and that would be the end of our national security. So I figure it's

time to get in shape.

But jogging is not the way to do it. For one thing, jogging kills your

brain cells. The Army has known this for years; it forces recruits to jog

every day, on the theory that some of them will lose so many brain cells that

they will eventually reenlist. Your really dedicated joggers know it, too; in

fact, it's one of the main reasons they jog. The idea is that if you're

troubled about your job or world affairs, you go out and jog until you've

killed whatever brain cells are responsible for those thoughts. The problem

is that you may also kill the brain cells that remember your name and address,

in which case you keep right on jogging, sometimes for days. This is what has

happened to the people you see jogging along major highways, the ones with

vacant expressions on their faces: they left home as nuclear physicists, heart

surgeons, corporation presidents, and so on, but after a few hours most of

them have library paste for brains.

Remember Jimmy Carter? Every day at the White House he used to wake up

at the crack of dawn, develop some brilliant plan to save the economy, then

head out for his morning jog. His aides would find him stumbling around hours

later, sweaty and confused, his economic plan gone forever. Jimmy might have

stood a chance in the 1980 elections if he had run against another jogger, but

instead he faced Ronald Reagan. Ron has his horses jog for him and thus is

able to preserve what brain cells he has, although I suspect his horses are

fairly stupid.

My other objection to jogging is that even if you manage to jog yourself

into shape, you still don't look all that great. I mean, look at marathon

runners: they appear gaunt and desperately hungry, like refugees wearing

numbers. They're always snatching scraps of food from spectators and stuffing

them (the scraps of food) into their mouths. If you were to toss, say, a side

of raw beef into their path, they'd all dive for it, teeth bared, and that

would be the end of the marathon.

So I have rejected jogging as a way to get in shape. In fact, I was

about to give up altogether when I discovered body-building magazines.

Body-building magazines are published for people, mostly male, whose idea of

being in shape is to have muscles the size of lawn tractors. You've probably

seen these magazines: they're full of pictures of people who have smeared

Vaseline all over their bodies and are wearing bathing suits no larger than a

child's watchband; they are trying to smile in a relaxed manner but end up

with more of an intense grin, because they have enormous muscles lunging out

from all over their bodies, and Lord only knows how many bizarre chemical

substances coursing through their veins.

These people obviously do not jog--I doubt they ever leave their

gymnasiums, for fear their muscles will lunge out and kill innocent

bystanders--but they are obviously in terrific shape. At least they look as

if they're in terrific shape, which is the important thing. If Jimmy Carter

had spent his time body-building instead of jogging, he would be president

today. His aides would have carried him into the presidential debates and

propped him up against his lectern, and when it was time for him to make his

opening statement, he would have just stood there, Vaseline shimmering on his

muscles, grinning intensely at the audience. Who would have dared to vote

against him?

So I've been reading body-building magazines, hoping to pick up some tips

on getting in shape. The idea seems to be to lift a lot of heavy objects

until you get dense. Density is much sought-after in the body-building world.

For example, Muscle Digest magazine, in its October issue, refers to one

promising body builder as "one of the most dense body-builders in senior level

competition." Evidently this is considered high praise.

So I plan to lift heavy objects, starting with my typewriter and working

up to a 1962 Volkswagen, until I get fairly dense, after which I intend to

smear Vaseline on my body and maybe run for president.

A COLD CURE? WHO NOSE?

I say we give the medical community two more weeks to cure the common

cold, and, if it doesn't, we turn the problem over to a more competent outfit,

like the Sony Corporation. Sometimes I wonder what the medical community is

thinking. We give it buddles of money to buy office furniture and white coats

and other medical devices, and all it seems to want to do is invent obscure

new operations nobody you know or I know ever needs:

CHICAGO--A team of surgeons at the Warpfinger Medical

Institute here has successfully implanted a tiny

electronic device into the right tonsil of a

fifteen-year-old boy. "We don't really know why we did

it," said a spokesman. "We just had this tiny electronic

device and this fifteen-year-old boy, so we figured, whY

not? Next week we're going to install the battery.

Meanwhile, millions of people are out here getting common colds and

generally making the world a tackier place to live in. You have two kinds of

cold victims: your nose blowers and your snorters. For overall ability to

make you want to walk out of restaurants, I'd have to give the edge to the

nose blowers. And they are everywhere. Americans think nothing of public

nose-blowing. They encourage it in their young. My fourth-grade teacher once

spent two hours instructing us on nose-blowing. She never married.

As far as I can tell, the only groups trying to do anything useful about

the common cold are the cold-remedy companies that advertise on TV:

(The scene opens in a pleasant suburban home. The husband walks in through

the front door and speaks to his wife, who is wearing a bathrobe and

lying on the floor.)

HUSBAND: Are you ready to go visit my father at the Home for Sickly Old

People?

WIFE: I don't think I can, dear. It's this darn cold. I have a fever of 112

degrees and I can no longer move anything on the left side of my body.

HUSBAND: Here, try some Phlegm-B-Gone.

WIFE: Phlegm-B-Gone?

HUSBAND: Phlegm-B-Gone.

(The scene shifts to an impressive office with a big desk. On a shelf behind

the desk is a huge collection of books. It is actually the complete

Hardy Boys series, but the camera doesn't get close enough for you to

realize this. A medical-looking actor, wearing a white coat, is standing

in front of the desk, holding a clipboard.)

MEDICAL-LOOKING ACTOR: Medical tests show that Phlegm-B-Gone, a collection of

medical ingredients, is extremely medical when used in a conscientiously

applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care. Get back

on your feet with Phlegm-B-Gone.

(The scene shifts to the Home for Sickly Old People.)

WIFE: Gosh, that Phlegm-B-Gone, with a collection of medical ingredients, is

great! I'm back on my feet again with only a slight limp!

HUSBAND: I'm beginning to feel a little feverish. How about you, Dad? ...

Dad? ... Dad?

Some people think the way to avoid colds is to eat a lot of vitamin C,

something on the order of nine billion pentagrams a day. My wife believes in

this approach. She's always choking down vitamin C pills, which are the size

of toaster-ovens. She gets colds anyway. My approach is to drink large

quantities of beer. It seems to work. Since I started drinking large

quantities of beer, I have not had one cold that I remember clearly.

MALE DELIVERY ROOM

NOTE: If you are a little kid, and your parents have not yet told you

about sex and where babies come from, do NOT read this column, because it

contains a lot of stuff you would kill to find out.

Things go in and out of fashion. Take water. For years, water was

unfashionable, something to wash bird droppings off the car with. Today,

water is fashionable, something to be advertised on national television by

great men such as Orson Wells. (I use "great" not in the sense of "superior"

but in the sense of "Considerably larger than Zanesville, Ohio.") So today

you'll see people paying $2.50 and more for fancy-looking six-packs of water.

Five years ago, these people would have been considered stupid. Today, they

are considered fashionable. Stupid, but fashionable.

Another example is babies. They were out of fashion during the

seventies. Young couples were too busy. They'd say: "Should we have a baby?

Should we embark on this great human adventure, which brings with it great

responsibility, but also great joy and fulfillment? Nah, let's play tennis."

But babies are back in fashion. In the past year or two, many a couple

has decided to sacrifice material things for the chance to create a new life,

a life capable of love and hate, a life capable of dreams and desires, a life

capable of excreting things in large volumes from three or four orifices at

the same time.

But before you decide to have a baby, let me warn you, particularly you

males: They have changed the rules.

When your parents had you, the responsibilities of childbirth were

clearly defined:

THE WOMAN went to the doctor regularly, read a lot about pregnancy, made sure

she ate the right foods, kept track of the baby's growth inside her,

bought baby clothes and furniture, told the doctor when contractions

began, timed them, made sure she got to the hospital on time, went to the

delivery room, went through labor, and had the baby.

THE MAN smoked Cigarettes.

This system is obviously fair, and it worked well for years. But

somewhere along the line, some sinister granola-oriented group got to the

medical community and the women's magazines and convinced them that the man

should become more involved. That's right, men: they want you right there in

the delivery room when it happens. Not only that, they want you to go to

classes at which people openly discuss pregnancy.

I found all this out the hard way.

Let me assure you that I want to play a responsible role in my wife'S

pregnancy. I am willing to pace for hours in the waiting room with the other

fathers-to-be and old copies of National Geographic. I am willing to go to

classes on how to pace in the waiting room. But at our classes we don't talk

about pacing: we talk about what goes on inside a pregnant person's body. I

don't want to know what goes on inside a pregnant person's body. I don't want

to know what goes on inside my own body. I think if the Good Lord had wanted

us to know what goes on inside our bodies, He would have given us little

windows.

Another thing we do at our classes is practice breathing. That's right:

breathing. The idea is the man helps the woman breathe steadily and imagine

she's on a beach; this takes her mind off her labor and helps her relax. They

haven't told us men how we're supposed to relax. I can see it now: my wife

will be breathing steadily, imagining she's on a beach; I will be breathing

shallowly, imagining I am lying on the delivery-room floor, because I am lying

on the delivery-room floor.

I could go on: I could tell you about how the women in the class talk

about really personal things in hearty, cheerful tones while we males stare

intently at various ceiling tiles. But you'll find out anyway, if you haven't

already.

At our last class, the leader said we're going to see a film soon. I

just know my wife will have to drive us home afterward.

TALE OF THE TAPEWORM

The human body is an amazing machine. Mine is, anyway. For example, I

regularly feed my body truly absurd foods, such as Cheez Doodles, and somehow

it turns them into useful bodily parts, such as glands. At least I assume it

turns them into useful bodily parts; otherwise, there must be a huge wad of

Cheez Doodles hidden away in my body somewhere, and eventually it will have to

be removed in a major and fairly disgusting operation.

I learned about the human body in high school biology class, which

covered everything except sex. Sex was covered in health class, which mainly

involved how many different kinds of venereal disease there are (fourteen

million); how high school students get venereal disease (merely by holding

hands firmly); and whether it is a good idea for high school students to get

venereal disease (no). These days, of course, high school students learn

about the more positive aspects of sex, which is why so many of them have

vacant smiles.

In biology, we learned about all the different systems of the body,

mainly so we could find out how many things could go wrong with them. My

biology teacher would describe, in loving detail, the many diseases we could

get, and we students would imagine we were getting them. I went home with a

new disease every night.

I was particularly susceptible to parasitic worms. The teacher was

always telling us about these little worms that were trying to get into our

bodies, often disguised as pieces of pork, so they could be parasites. We

spent several classes on tapeworms, which get into your intestines. When I

was writing this column, I decided to brush up on tapeworms (we should all

brush up on tapeworms from time to time), so I looked them up in the

Encyclopedia Britannica, which says:

"Tapeworms ... occur worldwide and range in size from about one

millimeter (0.04 inch) to more than 15 meters (50 feet) ..."

Think of that. Assuming you are a person of average height, at this very

moment you could contain a worm nearly ten times as long as you are. If you

suspect that you do contain a fifty-foot tapeworm, I advise you to feed it raw

pork or whatever else it wants. Do not try to get it out, or anger it in any

way; we have enough trouble in the world without huge, angry parasitic worms

thrashing about.

If anything besides tapeworms goes wrong with your body, you should get a

large quantity of money and go to a doctor. Everybody is always picking on

doctors just because they charge high fees and rarely cure anything, but this

is unfair. I mean, look at it from the doctors' point of view: they are

healthy, intelligent people who spend years in medical schools, dealing with

lots of other healthy, intelligent people; then they have to go out and deal

with members of the public, most of whom are sick and have no medical

training. As far as doctors are concerned, the worst part about practicing

medicine is having to deal with sick, untrained people all the time. Some

doctors solve this problem by becoming surgeons, who wear masks and deal only

with patients who are unconscious and strapped down. Others become

specialists, who issue opinions from motor yachts and never see patients at

all.

But most doctors are stuck in offices, and eventually they have to see

actual conscious patients. What is worse, these patients generally insist on

trying to explain their medical problems. Doctors hate this. I mean, they

didn't spend all those hours learning such things as where the pyloric valve

is located just so they could listen to some idiot patient talk about

medicine. So most doctors follow this rule: The patient is always wrong.

This is why most doctor-patient conversations go like this:

PATIENT: I broke my leg.

DOCTOR: What makes you say that?

PATIENT: A tree fell on me, and my leg went "snap." Look, a jagged piece of

bone is sticking out of my thigh.

DOCTOR: The symptom you describe could well be caused by a dysfunction of the

endocrinological system.

PATIENT: But my leg ...

DOCTOR: I'm going to schedule you for a series of tests at the Mayo Clinic

next month, and in the meanwhile, I'll consult with several specialists

by marine radio. I suggest you avoid fatty foods.

So if you know what's wrong with you, your best bet is to tell your

doctor you think something else is wrong with you. That way you stand some

chance of actually getting treated.

INJURIOUS TO YOUR WEALTH

I understand "M*A*S*H" is going off the air, which means I will have to

get a new doctor. For the past few years, I have been telling my

life-insurance agent that my doctor is Alan Alda. My agent needs to know who

my doctor is so he can increase my life-insurance coverage, which he does

roughly every couple of months. He'll call me up and say, "Dave, I've been

reviewing your files, and I really think we need to increase your coverage,

now that you have a child." And I'll say, "But, Jeff, we had the child two

years ago, and we have used that excuse to increase my coverage four times

since then." And he'll say, "Oh yeah, right. But I still think we ought to

increase your coverage, because, ummmm, the cost of living has been going up."

And I'll say, "It sure has, Jeff, especially the cost of my life-insurance

premiums." And he'll say, "That's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking

about, Dave. Think how difficult it would be for your wife to pay your

life-insurance premiums if God forbid you were dead."

This goes on for a half hour or so, until finally I agree to increase my

coverage because otherwise I won't be able to get off the phone and earn

enough money to pay my premiums. Then Jeff says, "All I need, Dave, is the

name of your doctor." I don't know why life-insurance companies always want

the name of your doctor. Maybe they use it to check your credit rating. Or

maybe they have a master list of really incompetent doctors, doctors whose

patients come in with minor ear infections and wind up getting open-heart

surgery, and if you have one of these doctors your premiums are adjusted

upward. All I know is that Jeff won't get off the phone until I name a

doctor.

I used to give him the name of the doctor who gave me my physical

examinations for my life-insurance application. He was a terrific doctor,

because he specialized in insurance examinations, which means he was not the

least bit interested in the internal workings of my body. All he was

interested in was filling out the insurance application, which is a long list

of questions, sort of like the college-entrance examinations, except that the

correct answer is always no. If you answer yes, you run the risk that you

won't be allowed to pay the premiums, so the doctor reads the questions very

quickly and checks "no" before you get a chance to answer:

DOCTOR: Have you or any member of your family or anybody you played with as a

child ever had any funny tingling sensations?

You: Well, 1 ...

DOCTOR (checking "no"): Have you ever sat bolt upright in bed in the middle of

the night with a sharp pain in your abdomen and thought it might be

appendicitis but couldn't remember whether your appendix is on the right

or the left side so you woke up your spouse and he or she was somewhat

irritable?

You: Well, once ...

DOCTOR (checking "no"): What about endotoxic infections? Salmonella typhosa?

Acne? Clostridium botulinum? Semicolons? Ricketts? Tired blood? What

is the capital of Idaho?

You: Would you mind repeating ...

DOCTOR (checking "no"): Okay. Now cough.

I liked this approach, because I never had to spend more than ten minutes

with the insurance doctor, and he never tried to inject any foreign substances

into my body. So I always said he was my doctor, until he retired, which is

when I switched to Alan Alda.

I picked Alan Alda because he is a peck of fun. This is because he is in

the Korean War, which, as you know if you watch "M*A*S*H," is a zany, wacky,

fun war, so much fun that it has been going for ten years now. I always

figured that if I got sick, I could be flown directly to Korea, where Alan

Alda would heal me within a half hour and introduce me to one of the several

dozen attractive nurses who work in the M*A*S*H unit, and we could all go off

and drink martinis and talk about how awful war is and then make lots of

hilarious remarks, except for the nurses, who never say anything because their

job is to mop Alan Alda's brow.

But "M*A*S*H" is going off the air, so I need a new doctor. I'm

seriously considering Robert Young, who stunned the medical world a few years

back when he discovered that virtually all major psychological disorders can

be cured through the regular use of caffeine-free coffee.

PSYCHIATRIST FOR RENT

Psychiatry has gotten a lot of attention lately because of the recent

court case in which John W. Hinckley, Jr., was charged with being sane. Those

of you who do not understand our legal system probably thought Hinckley had

been charged with shooting the President and several other people, because

that is what he did. But everybody knew he had done it, so the trial would

have been fairly short:

DEFENSE ATORNEY: My Client, John W. Hinckley, Jr. ...

juRy: Guilty.

So to put some meat on the trial, the judge decided that the prosecution

would have to prove that Hinckley was sane. Apparently, being sane is now a

federal offense. As a result, the lawyers pretty much ignored the actual

shootings, which everybody had seen on television anyway, and instead spent

the bulk of the trial showing the movie Taxi Driver and getting testimony from

rented psychiatrists, who explained that Hinckley clearly was or was not

insane, depending on which psychiatrist happened to be on the witness stand:

PROSECUTING ATORNEY: So, Dr. Warble, would you say that the defendant is sane?

PSYCHIATRIST: Oh yes indeed, very sane. Extremely sane.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I object, your honor. The defense rented this psychiatrist,

and he is supposed to say that the defendant is insane.

PSYCHIATRIST: Oh yeah, that's right. What I mean is the defendant is insane.

Sorry.

The defense psychiatrists proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Hinckley

shot the President because he (Hinckley) was in love with Jodie Foster and had

watched Taxi Driver many times, so he was acquitted. This makes sense to me.

I think we can all agree that anyone who fell in love with Jodie Foster and

watched Taxi Driver many times would have no option but to shoot the

President. I think Hinckley should be set free, and Congress should pass a

law requiring Miss Foster to date him.

The only flaw in the Hinckley trial is that it left a lot of people with

the impression that psychiatrists are just a bunch of bearded voodoo doctors

who espouse confusing and wildly contradictory theories that have nothing to

do with common sense. This is totally unfair. Many psychiatrists are

clean-shaven.

To understand why psychiatrists behave as they do, you have to understand

the history of their profession. In primitive times, people believed that

psychiatric disorders were caused by demons who possessed people, and

primitive psychiatrists cured them by gouging holes in their skulls so the

demons could get out (I am not making this up). Now, of course, we know that

this is silly. The modern approach for getting rid of a demon is to have a

priest dive out a fourth-floor window, as you know if you saw the fine

documentary movie The Exorcist, which I imagine John Hinckley saw thirty-five

times.

The other big cause of psychiatric disorders, besides demons, is your

father. The man who discovered that fathers cause virtually all psychiatric

problems was Sigmund Freud, who is known as the Father of Modern Psychiatry.

Freud also discovered that if a trained analyst probed a patient's past for

several hours a week, week after week, year after year, the analyst could make

an enormous amount of money. Of course, the analyst must be very skilled,

because otherwise the patient might go off on all kinds of irrelevant tangents

unrelated to the father:

PSYCHIATRisT: And what seems to be the trouble?

PATIENT: I've been having these horrible, splitting headaches.

PSYCHIATRIST: And when did these headaches begin? Around the time you

realized your father was a horrible man?

PATIENT: No, my father was a wonderful man. My headaches began last week,

when I was working under my car and the jack broke and the car fell on my

head. I've also been bleeding from my ears.

PSYCHIATRIST: I see. And was your father's name Jack?

And so it goes, for a decade or so, until the patient realizes that his

head aches because forty-seven years earlier his father wouldn't buy him an

ice cream cone.

Freud's approach is based on the fact that the human personality is

actually made up of a number of parts: the Ego, the Libretto, the Sense of

Humor, and the Tendency to Be Irritable in the Morning. The Libretto is

trapped in the subconscious with nothing to read and consequently thinks about

sex all the time. This embarrasses the other parts, so they clean up the

thoughts before you actually get to think them. For example, let's say the

Libretto thinks about a sexual organ. By the time you get it, the other

personality parts have turned it into an aquarium, so that's what you think

you're thinking about, you nave fool. What this means is that everybody is

actually thinking about sex all the time, although this becomes obvious only

under intensive psychoanalysis or at office parties.

Freud's brilliant pioneering paved the way for new discoveries by future

generations of psychiatrists, all of whom disagree with him and each other.

We can only regret that Freud did not live to see his theories come to

fruition, and maybe watch Taxi Driver a few times.

OAF OF HIPPOCRATES

NOTE: Before you read this article about medical care, let me warn you

that I am not a doctor. I did, however, study First Aid when I was in the Boy

Scouts. We scouts used to meet in the Methodist Church basement and apply

tourniquets to each other, and we got really good at it. We once applied a

tourniquet to Randy Lape that was so elaborate he couldn't move any part of

his body, and he probably would have lain there until he starved to death if

the choir hadn't shown up for rehearsal.

I have forgotten my First Aid training, except for one rule: When you

encounter an injured person, you're not supposed to move him. At least I

think that's the rule. Maybe the rule is that you're not even supposed to

touch him. Maybe you're supposed to run away. Frankly, it's all a blur in my

mind, along with the Morse Code, which is the other thing I learned in Boy

Scouts, God only knows why.

Anyway, I just thought you should be aware of this before you read this

article, assuming you still want to.

You should get a thorough physical examination at least twice a year,

unless you have to pay for it personally, in which case you should get one

every eight years or whenever you think something is really wrong with you,

whichever comes first.

You can usually tell when something is really wrong with you, because you

feel really lousy even when you haven't been drinking. Sometimes you can cure

yourself merely by calling your employer and saying, in a sincere, sick voice,

that you won't be coming into work. If you have faked illnesses in the past,

you should subtly let your employer know that you really are sick this time.

Retch frequently, and say something like "I'm really sick this time. Really.

(Pause here for a retch.) Honestly."

If you still feel lousy, you should identify your symptoms and try to

figure out exactly what's causing them. Here are the most popular symptoms:

Sharp, stabbing pains in the chest or stomach--These are usually caused by

being stabbed in the chest or stomach with a sharp object, but it could

be something worse.

Dull, aching pains in the head--These are usually caused by a headache.

Often, you can cure yourself merely by being irritable; if that doesn't

work, you may need aspirin or brain surgery.

Vomiting--This is usually caused by eating clams.

If your symptoms don't go away, you should call your doctor's office.

Notice I say "doctor's office," not "doctor." Under American Medical

Association rules, doctors are not allowed to talk to patients over the

telephone, because this would be unethical.

So when you call the doctor's office, you will talk to a medical

personnel wearing a white outfit, whose job is to make an appointment for you

to come in roughly six weeks later. If you are really sick, and you are a

regular patient, the medical personnel may agree to talk to the doctor on your

behalf, and your doctor may agree to phone the drugstore and order you a

little bottle of pills that costs $34.38. But if you are really really sick,

too sick to go to the drugstore, too sick to walk, too sick to even move, the

doctor may want you to come to his office right away and sit in the waiting

room.

Assuming you can get to the doctor's office without dying, your first job

is to find a good seat, ideally one that is close to the tropical-fish tank

and as far as possible from patients with visible fungus. Then you should

read an old copy of National Geographic. Doctors like to have National

Geographic in their waiting rooms, because it reminds patients that in many

primitive countries people are not fortunate enough to have the kind of

medical care we have here in the U.S.A. Many patients feel so much better

after reading it for a couple of hours that they don't even need to see the

doctor. They just pay their bills and leave.

But if you still feel sick, the medical personnel will order you to

undress and put on a garment that gives your secret bodily parts a high degree

of visibility. Then they'll take some blood out of your arm and make you go

into a bathroom and urinate into a glass container. While you're in there,

the medical personnel will hide, giggling, in a closet, so that when you

emerge you have to parade around, bodily parts flashing in every direction,

looking for somebody to give the container to. None of this has anything to

do with curing you. Why on earth would they want your blood and urine?

They'll just throw it away. The point of all this is to determine whether you

are really, sincerely sick, sick enough to actually see the doctor.

If you pass this test, you get to go into a little room and sit on a

table covered with cold waxed paper for about forty-five minutes--this is the

final test--while the doctor watches you through a secret peephole. If he is

satisfied that you qualify, he'll bustle into the room and prod you with

various implements, muttering all the while. The doctor is not allowed to

tell you directly what is wrong--again, this would be a breach of ethics--you

have to listen closely to his muttering, and interpret it. Here are the

standard doctor mutters, translated to laymen's terms:

"Uh huh": This means "Oh my God."

"Ummm": This means "Good Lord."

"Ah hah": This means "I vaguely remember seeing a case like this in medical

school, but it hadn't advanced nearly this far."

After the doctor has finished prodding you, either he will send you to

the hospital, which will give you a battery of extremely humiliating tests

designed to weed out people who are not serious about being hospitalized, or

he will call the drugstore and order you a small bottle of pills that costs

$34.38. If he spent much time in the Boy Scouts, he may also decide to apply

a tourniquet.

"GREAT BABY! DELICIOUS!"

I have been a father for nearly six months now, so needless to say I know

virtually everything there is to know about raising babies. The main thing is

discipline. You have to ignore all those bleeding-heart psychological

theories about being sensitive to your baby's many delicate emotional wants.

These theories are based on the insane premise that babies have many delicate

emotional wants. In fact, babies have only one want, and it is hardly

delicate: They want to put everything in the entire world except food into

their mouths. As far as babies are concerned, the sole function of the world

is to provide objects for them to drool on. If you were to open up a

baby--and I am not for a minute suggesting that you should--you would find

that 85 to 90 percent of the space reserved for bodily organs is taken up by

huge, highly active drool glands. Scientists at a major scientific university

recently conducted a study in which they collected, in scientific jars, all

the drool that a six-month-old baby produced in one twenty-four-hour period.

They were stunned at the result. Many of them had to go home and lie down.

The greatest threat to your baby is educational toys, which you are

required by federal law to buy several dozen of. Educational toys are

advertised in baby magazines, which arrive by the thousands in the mail when

you have a baby. In a typical ad, a baby is looking thoughtfully (for a baby)

at two pieces of plastic. According to the ad, the pieces of plastic are

helping the baby "acquire skills of problem-solving." In fact, the only

problem the baby is solving is the problem of how to get both pieces in its

mouth. These so-called educational toys are merely encouraging your baby to

act stupid.

This is dangerous. If you let your baby continue to stick things in his

or her mouth, he or she will have a hard time in later life. I mean, suppose

your child goes to a major Wall Street law firm for a job interview, and ends

up putting all the waiting-room magazines and ashtrays in his or her mouth.

He or she would make a poor impression, and would end up having to be a bum or

work for the government.

So obviously, your job as a parent is to straighten your baby out.

You'll have to be tough. Here's how I handle my five-and-a-half-month old

son: When he's lying on a blanket, putting various federally required

educational toys in his mouth, I say firmly: "Robert, if you keep putting

those educational toys in your mouth, I am not going to give you an allowance

this week." If he doesn't respond to that, I up the ante. I say: "Robert,

besides not giving you any allowance, I am not going to read to you from the

famous Greek epic poem the Iliad, usually ascribed to Homer." So far, Robert

has continued to put educational toys in his mouth, but I think he's getting

worried.

Of course, once you get your baby away from "educational" toys, you'll

have to occupy it with new, more meaningful activities. The best activities

are games. Here are some excellent, meaningful baby games designed by a

distinguished panel of baby experts:

Oklahoma Baby Chicken Hat

Grasp your baby firmly and put it on your head like a hat, stomach down.

Then stride around the room and cluck like a chicken to the tune of "Surrey

with the Fringe on Top," bouncing in time to the music.

Wild Teenage Babies from Outer Space

Lie on your back and hold your baby over you, facing down; move it slowly

up and down, like a flying saucer, making flying-saucer noises and feigning

great fear when it appears to be about to land on the planet Earth. (NOTE.

Wear protective clothing for the preceding two games.)

Attack of the Baby-Eaters

Lay the baby on the floor, face up. Announce that you are very hungry,

and start nibbling at the baby's toes, then its hands, and finally, with great

gusto, its stomach. Every now and then, yell: "Great baby! Delicious!"

These games will teach your baby many meaningful lessons, the main one

being that the world is full of deranged people.

The only other major problem you'll have with your baby is feeding it

solid foods. Many kinds of baby food are available, all of them disgusting.

Basically, the baby-food industry takes things that no normal human being

would ever dream of eating, such as squash, and grinds them into mush and puts

them in little jars. Babies, of course, hate baby food; they would much

prefer the kinds of things you eat, such as cheeseburgers and beer. If we fed

babies normal food, they would be full-grown, productive adults in a matter of

weeks. But this would destroy the baby-food industry.

As I noted earlier, babies do not take solid food through their mouths,

which are generally occupied with other objects. Babies absorb solid food

through their chins. You can save yourself a lot of frustrating effort if you

smear the food directly on your baby's chin, rather than putting it in the

baby's mouth and forcing the baby to expel it on to its chin, as so many

uninformed parents do.

B---STS AND BABY CARE

WARNING: This article contains the word "breast." I checked with an

editor, and he said I could say "breast" as long as I used it scientifically,

rather than to arouse prurient interest. For example, I could say: "Two

breasts plus two breasts equals four breasts", but I could not say: "Hey, get

a load of that breast." Anyway, I just thought Id warn you in case you don't

want to read the word "breast." The rest of the article is about raising

babies, and it's very informative, so for the benefit of those of you who want

to read everything but the paragraph with "breast" in it, I'll let you know

when you're about to come to it.

The most important thing to remember about raising your baby is that you

must not take anyone's advice, except, of course, mine. Many people, such as

your parents, will try to advise you, but you must ignore them. If they knew

so much about raising kids, they wouldn't have screwed you up so badly.

Most people make babies out to be very complicated, but the truth is they

have only three moods:

Mood One: Just about to cry.

Mood Two: Crying.

Mood Three: Just finished crying..lm-#

Your job, as a parent, is to keep the baby in Mood Three as much as

possible; this means you have to figure out why it's crying. Here'S a

tip: Babies never cry because their diapers are dirty. You change their

diapers only to make yourself feel better. You could leave the same

diaper on your baby for months and it would be perfectly happy, although

considerably heavier and less pleasant to be around. So that leaves only

two reasons your baby cries: It is hungry. Some other reason. If your

baby is hungry, you should feed it.

WARNING: The next paragraph is the one with a breast in it. So you

should either skip it or be prepared for some very explicit talk.

You can either bottle-feed or breast-feed your baby. Many noted

health fanatics strongly recommend that you breast-feed your baby on the

grounds that it is very good for the baby. This may be true, but the

real advantage of breast-feeding is that only female persons can do it.

This means you male persons do not have to get up at the insane hours

babies like to get up at. At first you may feel guilty about this, and

you'll get up in the middle of the night to give the female person moral

support. But after a while you'll get so good at morally supporting her

that you'll be able to do it without even waking up. In the morning,

when the female person is exhausted from lack of sleep, you can

commiserate with her. You can say: "I know how you feel. This morally

supporting is no bed of roses, either." She'll really appreciate hearing

this.

If your baby doesn't stop crying after you feed it, it is crying for

some other reason. You can try handing it back and forth and saying:

"What do you suppose is wrong?" This does no good whatsoever, but it is

an old traditional ritual and it passes the time. You can also try

making funny faces; this teaches the baby that its parents may be

brain-damaged. Or you can give the baby educational toys. My wife

bought our baby several dozen expensive educational toys, designed by

experts to teach babies about colors and spatial relationships and other

vital educational things. Our baby ignores them. He could not be less

interested in spatial relationships. The only toy he really likes is an

extremely tacky plastic Wonder Bread wrapper, which he stares at happily

for long periods. I'm growing fond of it myself.

SUET WON'T DO IT

Many years ago, practically nobody in America had a weight problem,

because almost everybody was an Indian, and all there was to eat was

bison. The Indians had bison for breakfast, bison for lunch, and bison

for supper. After a few thousand years of this, they mostly just picked

at their food. Then along came the early white settlers. They didn't

have a weight problem either, because they were engaged in Westward

Expansion, which consumes a great many calories. Also, the pioneers

rarely got a chance to eat. Oh, they tried: they'd be crossing the Great

Plains, and the wagon master would yell: "OK, everyone, let's form the

wagons into a circle for a snack." But before they could even get out

the plates, the Indians, desperate for nonbison food, would attack. If

the pioneers had been more thoughtful, they could have carried extra

snacks, but they brought only enough for themselves, so unfortunately

they had to kill the vast majority of the Indians.

Next the pioneers built farms, and soon the country was covered with

amber fields of grain. As a result, everybody almost starved to death,

because what the hell are you going to do with grain? Eat it? You'd be

better off with bison. Fortunately, the farmers were able to sell their

grain to the Russians, who will eat anything. In exchange, the Russians

gave the farmers money, which the farmers used to buy food. So now we

have tons of food, only nobody does any actual work except the farmers.

Everybody else sits around offices and eats, which is why today most

Americans are overweight, some of them to the point where they tend to

stall escalators.

To figure out whether you are overweight, determine your sex and

locate your correct scientific weight on this table:

SEX CORRECT WEIGHT

Male 155 pounds

Female 115 pounds

Child 60 pounds

If you weigh more than you should, you can attempt to disguise it,

but this rarely works. For example, I once worked in an office with an

overweight woman. I can't remember her name, but it was an overweight

name, like Bertha, so I'll call her that. Most of Bertha's overweight

was concentrated in her behind. She looked like a perfectly normal

person who for some reason was carrying an ottoman under her dress.

Bertha had read in some beauty magazine that if you have a big behind,

you should stand in such a way that one arm dangles in front of it,

blocking the view. So Bertha made it a point to always have one arm

dangling down, even when she was carrying heavy financial ledgers. She

looked like she had some kind of nerve disorder. People were always

saying "What's wrong with your arm, Bertha?" until finally it became

blatantly obvious that she was trying to obscure her behind, which her

arm was too small to do anyway unless she put on a catcher's mitt.

Another popular way to disguise excess weight is to wear clothing

with vertical stripes. The idea is that vertical stripes create an

optical illusion that makes you look thinner, but the truth is that they

create an optical illusion that makes you look as though you were wearing

a cafe awning. Also, every schoolchild knows that the only reason people

wear vertical stripes is to disguise excess weight. You might just as

well wear a big sign that says "FAT." What I'm driving at is that you

can't really hide your weight problem, which means that sooner or later

you have to go on a diet.

IMPORTANT HEALTH NOTE:

Before you go on any diet, you should consult your

doctor, or at least send him some money.

The principle behind diets is that you cut down on the amount of

calories you eat. A "calorie" is a unit of measurement that tells you

how good food tastes. Really good food, like steak or fudge, has a very

high calorie content; really awful food, like grapefruit halves, has

almost no calories. (Now before I get a lot of outraged letters from

citrus growers, let me point out that I am not opposed to grapefruit

halves, except as food. I think grapefruit halves can serve many useful

purposes around the home, such as extinguishing small fires.)

To understand how diets work, you have to understand how your body

digests food. The process starts in your mouth, which tastes the food

and covers it with spit, then sends it down to your stomach to be broken

down for use as bodily parts. This is done by color. Red foods, such as

rare steak, beets and Hawaiian Punch, are used to form red body parts,

such as the heart; green foods, such as beans and lime jello, are used to

form green body parts, such as the kidney; beer is used to form urine;

and so on. The problem is that if, on a given day, your body doesn't

need any further parts, it turns the food into fat. Your body fully

intends to go back to the fat someday and turn it into something useful,

but it never gets a chance because you're always sliding more

spit-covered food down your throat. So your fat just sits there,

useless, until gradually it loses self-esteem and, desperate for

attention, starts interfering with the other organs. This is why you

have to go on a diet.

Another principle behind diets is that you eat things that are so

disgusting that your stomach rejects them and goes looking for fat to use

as body parts. This is the big problem with diets. You spend a lot of

time eating things like Melba toast. Melba toast was developed by the

British, and it is not really food at all. You could airlift a thousand

tons of Melba toast to some wretched, starving Asian village, and the

starving Asians would use it to build homes, or as bookmarks, but it

would never occur to them to eat it. This is why diets don't work. You

spend a couple of days eating Melba toast, then you lunge for the

Twinkies, and you end up fatter than ever.

The only other way to lose weight is to go on a scientific

weight-loss program. These are widely advertised in those newspapers

they sell at supermarket check-out lines, the ones with headlines like:

BURT REYNOLDS FINDS CANCER CURE IN UFO RIDE WITH PRINCESS DIANA.

You should buy one of these magazines and flip through the pages

until you see a full-page advertisement with a headline that says "WOMAN

LOSES 240 POUNDS IN 30 SECONDS." Under the headline are two pictures of

a woman's head: in the first picture the head is on top of what appears

to be an industrial boiler wearing a 1952 bathing suit; in the second

picture, the head is on top of Bo Derek. Under the picture it says:

"Mrs. Earl Clamp of Wastewater, Tex., reports that the Amazing New Brand

New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program saved her marriage

and prevented serious damage to her home. Let Mrs. Clamp tell you about

it in her own words: 'Well, in my own words, I realized I had a serious

weight problem one day when my husband, Earl, wanted to take me to the

Recreational Vehicle and Rare Gem Show at the mall, and I couldn't get

out the front door, so I decided to go out through the cellar doors, only

I knocked over the water heater and the pipes broke and we had water all

over Earl's pelt collection. SO I said: "Earl, I'm going to try the

Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program."

I didn't think I could do it, but this program is so scientific that I

lost 240 pounds in 30 seconds, right there in the basement. Now Earl is

proud to show nude pictures of me to his friends.'"

I'm sure these weight-loss programs work, because they have

pictorial proof, and, besides, the supermarket check-out newspapers have

a reputation for thoroughly checking everything for accuracy before they

print it. Which is a lot more than you can say for this publication.

DENTISTRY SELF-DRILLED

I bet you rarely stop to think how important your teeth are. This

is good. America is in enough trouble as it is, what with inflation and

all; we just can't afford to have people stopping to think how important

their teeth are, especially on major highways.

Nevertheless, you owe a lot to your teeth. They are your best

friends. Think about it: while you're out here, playing tennis and

reading novels, they're sitting patiently in your mouth, a foul-smelling,

disgusting place almost devoid of recreational facilities, dealing with

Slim Jims and Cheez-its and the other crap you give them to chew.

You ought to apologize to your teeth for the way you treat them.

You ought to go up to a mirror, right now, and bare your teeth and look

them straight in their eyes and say: "I'm sorry." You may want to

practice a bit so you can say this clearly with your teeth bared. Don't

let the children see you.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking: "I don't have to

apologize to my teeth. I take good care of my teeth."

That's what you think. That's what I thought, too, until I started

going to the dentist again recently after a brief absence of about twelve

years. I stopped going because I didn't trust him. For one thing, he

wore an outfit that buttoned on the side, the kind the spaceship crews

wear in low-budget science fiction movies. For another thing, he and his

cohorts always left the room when they X-rayed me. They'd make up flimsy

excuses, like "I have to go put my socks in the dryer," or "I think the

cat is throwing up." Then they'd flip the X-ray switch and race out of

the room, probably to a lead-lined concrete bunker.

When he came back, the dentist would jab me in the gums sixty or

seventy times until my mouth was full of blood and I had to spit in what

appeared to be a miniature toilet. Then he'd show me what he claimed was

an X ray of my mouth, knowing full well I would not be able to

distinguish an X ray of my mouth from a color slide of the Parthenon, and

he'd tell me I had a cavity and he was going to fill it. I would tell

him I hadn't noticed any so-called cavity, and that it was, after all, my

mouth. And he would give me this long routine about how if he didn't

fill it all my teeth would fall out and I'd lose my job and end up

drooling on myself in a gutter, which is what they taught him to say in

dental school. Then he would spend several hours drilling a hole in my

tooth.

Answer me this: A cavity is a hole in your teeth, right? So if the

dentist is so upset about this hole in your teeth, why does he spend so

much time making it bigger? Huh? Does he need more money so he can buy

more space-uniform shirts?

Finally I decided I could save some money if I stopped going to the

dentist, got a sharp implement and, in the privacy of my own home, jabbed

myself in the gums a couple of times a year. I figured I could ward off

cavities by brushing after every meal with an effective decay-preventive

dentifrice. I mean, that's what they told us for years, right? "Brush

your teeth after every meal," they said. Parents said it. Teachers said

it. Bucky Beaver said it.

Never trust a talking beaver. I found this out the hard way when,

after twelve years of brushing like a madman, I returned to the dentist.

The Dental Hygienist looked at my mouth the way you would look at a full

spittoon. "You haven't been flossing," she said.

It seems that while I was home jabbing myself in the gums, the

Dental Community was losing its enthusiasm for brushing and getting into

flossing. These days the Dental Community regards anybody who merely

brushes as a real bozo. This is blatantly unfair. In all those years of

going to school and watching Bucky Beaver and Mister Tooth Decay, I never

heard one word about flossing.

Flossing does not come naturally to human beings. If the Good Lord

had wanted us to floss our teeth, He would have given us less

self-respect. But the Dental Community says we have to do it, because

otherwise we'll get gum disease.

Pretty slick, isn't it? If we can't even see cavities, how the hell

are we going to dispute them when they tell us we have gum disease?

I was about to point all this out to my dentist when he gave me this

gas, nitrous oxide I believe, and all of a sudden I felt great. I began

to really appreciate the Dental Community for coming up with flossing and

all the other fine things it has done for me over the years. I even

began to soften toward Bucky Beaver.

I think this was part of the plan.

Culture Staggers On

ART CUTS REALLY SPHINX

If you are a member of the private sector, you are going to have to

start supporting the arts.

For the benefit of those of you who do not know what sector you

belong to, here is a simple way to figure it out: If you get Presidents'

Day, election day, Arbor Day, Columbus Day, your birthday, Groundhog Day,

and Flag Day off, you belong to the government sector. Otherwise, you

belong to the private sector, and, as I said, you will have to start

supporting the arts, because the government sector is cutting back.

The government sector took over the arts a few years back because

the private sector had dropped the ball. The problem was that the

private sector consisted largely of common people who spent most of their

time working and, as a result, never became cultured. Their concept of

"art" involved flamingo-shaped lawn ornaments, or pictures of dogs with

actual working clocks in their stomachs. The only time that common

people ever watched ballet was when it was on the Ed Sullivan show, and

even then they watched it only because they knew it would last no more

than three minutes and would be followed shortly by an act featuring

monkeys wearing dresses.

This widespread lack of culture created a major problem for the few

people who were interested in poetry, classical music, opera, ballet,

sculpture, painting--in short, the real, serious, cultural, art-type

activities that most people find fairly boring. The problem was that the

common people would not voluntarily pay for these activities, so the only

places where culture was available were:

Junior high schools, where, under state law, children are required to do

cultural things, such as screech away on rented violins, and parents

are required to watch them, and

New York City, where there are so many people that you can get a paying

crowd for virtually anything, including opera and live nude dog

wrestling.

But other than that, art was pretty scarce. Then some cultured

person came up with a brilliant plan: If common people wouldn't support

art voluntarily, why not force them to support it? Now when I say

"force," I'm not talking about just walking up to some common person and

ordering him, at gunpoint, to attend an opera. What I'M talking about is

getting the government to tax COMMON people, then use their money to put

on an opera.

Actually, this is an old, tried-and-true way to support the arts,

dating back to the ancient Egyptians. How do you think the Egyptians

built the Sphinx? Surely, you don't think that a bunch of common

Egyptians just got together one day and said: "Hey, why don't we build a

Sphinx?" Of course not. Left to their own devices, the common Egyptians

would have spent their time growing food. To get some real culture, to

get the Sphinx, the Egyptians needed a government authority, someone with

vision, someone with taste, someone with whips and spears.

Our government's approach to the arts is essentially the same, but

less messy. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, we common people are not

forced to attend cultural activities: we are merely forced to pay for

them. This works out much better. You see, under the Egyptian method,

you always had a bunch of sweating or dead Egyptians around your Sphinx;

under our method, cultured people can have an opera in the Kennedy Center

in Washington, safe in the knowledge that few, if any, of the common

people who paid for it will show up to watch. After all, a lot of the

common people live thousands of miles away; they couldn't attend even if

they wanted to.

For a while there, our government was in the art business whole hog,

forking over hundreds of millions of dollars for art. But now the

program is in trouble. Jimmy Carter wanted to spend about $300 million

on art this year, but Ronald Reagan thinks it should spend only about

half that, so he'll have more money to spend on exploding objects.

Needless to say, the art officials are extremely upset. Their position

is extremely logical: they argue that if the government is going to spend

hundreds of billions of dollars on things designed to kill people, it

should spend at least $300 million for art that people don't want to

see.

But it looks as though the art officials are going to lose, and that

means that, unless somebody does something, art will fall back into the

hands of the lawn-flamingo owners. So it's UP tO us public-spirited,

private-sector people to pick up the ball. We've got to develop some way

to make sure people attend operas and ballets, look at paintings, read

poetry, and so on. Maybe we should set up a system patterned after

volunteer fire departments: whenever anybody discovered a cultural

activity, he could sound an alarm, and the public-spirited citizens in

the area would go and watch it. If we all work together, we might be

able to keep art alive, even without the government. Maybe we could even

build a sphinx.

SOME ART, SOME ART NOT

I am extremely fond of art. Whenever I have a few spare moments,

there's nothing I enjoy more than hauling out a batch of art and looking

at it. This is probably because I was exposed to so much art when I was

in grade school. At least once a year, the teachers would herd us kids

into a bus and take us to a museum and expose us to thousands of square

yards of old paintings. We were very impressed, particularly because

many of these paintings featured enormous naked women, women with thighs

the size of fully inflated life rafts, lounging around and eating fruit.

The reason that this theme is so common in old paintings is that

years ago Europe was terrorized by packs of enormous naked women. They

would stride into a town, munching on pears, and threaten to knock down

the cathedral if their portraits weren't painted immediately. Eventually

they were driven off by a particularly harsh winter, but their paintings

are still popular today because they offer such a good value in terms of

square yards of painting per dollar.

Which brings us to money. Money is very important to the art world,

because without it we would have no way to know how good a particular

piece of art is. For example, let's say that we want to decide which

painting is better: the "Mona Lisa" by Leonardo da Vinci, or "Aristotle

Contemplating the Bust of Homer" by Rembrandt (whose first name was

Boauregard, which is why he never used it). Now let's say that the list

price on the "Mona Lisa" is $36 million, whereas the price on "Aristotle

etc." is $12 million. This would tell your experienced art critic that

the "Mona Lisa" is three times as good, artwise, as "Aristotle etc." and

nearly six million times as good as those paintings they sell in shopping

malls, the ones that feature children with enormous brown eyes who are

supposed to look helpless and appealing but actually look like some sort

of bizarre species of insect.

THE HISTORY OF ART

The first art was created by primitive people, who made pots and

plates with primitive decorations. They didn't realize this was art.

They thought it was just pots and plates. Their problem was that seconds

after they made a pot or plate, an archaeologist would race up and snatch

it and put it in a museum. The primitive people tried all kinds of

schemes to protect their pots and plates, including burying them, but the

archaeologists would just dig them up. Finally, with nothing to cook in

or eat from, the primitive people starved to death and became extinct.

The next big trend in art was painting, which was invented because

wealthy people needed something to put on their walls. One famous

painter, Michelangelo (first name, Buford), even painted on the ceiling.

This was before the discovery of acoustical tiles. In those days,

everybody painted the same subject, which was Mother and Child. That was

a really popular item. Occasionally, an artist would try something

different, such as Mother and Trowel, or Mother and Labrador Retriever,

but they never sold.

After the Mother and Child Phase came the Enormous Naked Women

Eating Fruit Phase, which was followed by the Just Plain Fruit with No

Women of Any Kind Phase and the Famous Kings and Dukes Wearing Silly

Outfits Phase. All of these phases were part of the Sharp and Clear

School of painting, which means that even though the subjects were

boring, they were at least recognizable. The Sharp and Clear School

ended with Vincent Van Gogh, who invented the Fuzzy but Still

Recognizable School and cut off his ear. This led to the No Longer

Recognizable at All School, and finally the Sharp and Clear Again but

Mostly Just Rectangles School, which is the school that is popular today,

except at shopping malls.

HOW TO APPRECIATE ART

The number one rule of art appreciation is that you never ever bring

up the issue of whether or not a particular piece of art is attractive.

Let's say you're looking at a painting of two large green rectangles. If

you say something like, "Those two large green rectangles are very

attractive," people will realize immediately that you do not appreciate

art. What you want to say is: "Using the tension created by the contrast

in line, shape and tone, offset by the almost deliberately simplistic

linearity of hue, the artist subtly, yet inevitably, leads the viewer to

a greater awareness of the need for more controls over the acquisition

and use of our nation's mineral resources, particularly zinc." This

particular sentence will work on almost any brand of art except enormous

naked women, who obviously have nothing to do with zinc.

MUSIC TO GET RICH BY

Basically, there are two kinds of music: "Classical" music, which is

the kind written by dead German guys and played by People wearing

tuxedos. "Regular" music, which can be written by anybody and played by

anybody and gets on the radio a lot.

If you want to make large sums of money, you should get into regular

music. These days classical music is popular with only about three

hundred people, the same ones who contribute voluntarily to public

television. Classical music tends to go on for days, which is why it is

played by "orchestras," or groups of four hundred fifty to five hundred

people whose parents made them practice classical music when all the

other kids were out learning how to french-kiss. Orchestra people divide

up the labor: one group will play a batch of music or "movement," then

everybody sits back and reads magazines from little magazine stands while

the "conductor" consults his notes and decides which musicians will play

next. Sometimes the conductor singles out a musician who has been

chewing gum or fooling around and forces him or her to play all alone

while the other musicians snicker. If you ever have to be in an

orchestra, you should try to sit in back, near the guy who plays the

triangle. You'll hardly ever get called on.

Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:

Instruments You Blow into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit out of

(tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).

Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).

Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).

Furniture (pianos).

Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars

(violins). The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonio

Stradivarius, which are prized because they were made with exquisite

care and craftsmanship and each one contains just over seventeen

ounces of pure heroin in a secret compartment which you open by

pressing with your chin.

Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too

complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum

it properly. So people began to develop regular music. The most

profitable kind of regular music is rock 'n' roll. Rock 'n' roll comes

from the blues, a kind of music developed by American slaves. It is

called the "blues" because it is very sad. Evidently the slaves found

slavery depressing. Blues lyrics generally go like this:

MY woman she done left me

My children left me too

MY mule done kicked my kidneys

And my income tax is due

For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people, who

were then known as "Negroes." Black blues musicians played in lowdown

bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950s, young white people

got interested in the blues. They developed a modified version called

"rock 'n' roll," which became enormously popular and turned many of them

into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to the black blues

musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible, and who

continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.

The principal difference between rock 'n' roll and classical music

is that your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies

and no words, whereas your average rock 'n' roll song has one melody

(sometimes less) and about a dozen words. When rock 'n' roll composers

are in a hurry to finish songs so they can get to important luncheon

dates, they sometimes make up some of the words. Take, for example, the

words to the 1960s hit rock 'n' roll song "Sittin' in La La":

Sittin' in la la waitin'for my ya ya

Uh huh, uh huh

Sittin' in la la waitin'for my ya ya

Uh huh, uh huh

Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for

"la la" and "ya ya," but before he could get around to it somebody

released the song and it sold several million records. Another example

is "Land of a Thousand Dances," whose composer evidently got called away

to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:

I said aa na aa aa aa

Na aa na na na na aa na na na

Na na na na

The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country

music, which is popular with people who like songs about drunken

infidelity but requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents;

big-band music, which is popular with people who like big bands but

requires big bands; and easy-listening music, which is popular in

elevators and supermarkets but can be sung only by groups of heavily

sedated suburbanites. You should steer clear of jazz, opera, folk,

marching-band and bagpipe music: the market for these is minuscule. You

will never see hordes of fans clamoring for the autograph of a bagpiper.

HOW TO READ MUSIC

Anyone can read music. It's simply a matter of memorizing the

various notes and musical signs. The major notes are:

dum

da

de

tra

tra-la

The major musical signs are:

start of song

halfway through song

clap hands

two-thirds of way through song

end of song

PRURIENT INTEREST RATE

I am opposed to pornography. First, let me make it clear that I

believe if God wanted people to be seen naked, He would not have made so

many of them unattractive. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write about

pornography, because it is directly related to the increase in drug

abuse, unemployment, international terrorism, all-polyester clothing,

and, above all, violence. This was a far less violent country in the

days when pornography was illegal, unless you count the Civil War.

Pornography is like tooth decay, eating slowly away at the molars of our

morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation,

gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of

decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean

tablecloth of our children's futures. The dictionary tells us that the

word "pornography" comes from the words "Porno," meaning "publications,"

and "graphy," meaning "that adolescent males gather around in junior high

school halls and snicker at." The problem is that this simple definition

is inadequate for the legal authorities, who need something less

comprehensible. So for the past twenty years or so, the legal

authorities have spent enormous amounts of time and effort gathering up

and scrutinizing dirty books, trying to come up with a suitable

definition of pornography so they can throw people in jail for selling

it. The dirty books are scrutinized first by the police, then by the

district attorney, then by a local judge and jury, then by some appeals

judges, and then finally, when the really pornographic pages are

dog-eared from all this intense legal scrutiny, the books are shipped in

unmarked crates to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices sit around

in their robes and discuss them:

CHIEF JUSTICE: Okay, we have here the case of Nebraska v. The Huge Boar

Adult Book Store and Health Spa, which is accused of selling an

illustrated publication entitled Young Teenaged Babysitters with

Flawless Skin Go to Daytona Beach to eight undercover agents on July

3, 1972. Have you all scrutinized the evidence?

OTHER JUSTICES (crowd around the evidence): Not yet! Not yet! We're

still scrutinizing, and ... My God! Look at this photograph! It

looks like a- No, it can't be- Yes it is! It's a ...

CHIEF JUSTICE: Now as I interpret the First Amendment, the issue here is

...

OTHER JUSTICES: It's a flamingo! Incredible! I mean, I know flamingos

thrive in captivity, but I had no idea that ...

CHIEF JUSTICE: ... whether the constitutional guarantee of free speech

conflicts with the ...

OTHER JUSTICES: How do you suppose they got all that Cool Whip to adhere

to the ceilings?

After a few sessions like this, the justices render a decision,

which says: "Having reviewed the evidence in this case, the court finds

that, inasmuch as the prothonotary nature of the alleged violation

precludes a pro forma elucidation of its meretriciousness or

meritoriousness per se, it cannot be determined whether such alleged

violation may or may not be deleterious without a heck of a lot more

scrutiny by the members of the court."

Since nobody ever has the vaguest idea what the justices mean, their

decisions always set off a new round of arrests and scrutiny throughout

the legal system, which by now has accumulated over thirty million cubic

yards of evidence suspected of being pornographic. Eventually, the

national stockpile will get so large that the authorities will have to

start giving pornography away to poor people, the way they did with

cheese.

Years ago, the pornography industry was fairly small, because people

were ashamed to be caught reading dirty books and magazines. Then along

came Hugh Hefner, who had a dream: to publish a cultured, sophisticated

magazine, a magazine with in-depth interviews of influential people, with

top-notch fiction, with thought-provoking articles, with pictures of

large-breasted women either naked or dressed up as bunny rabbits. The

beauty of Hugh's idea was that you could pretend you were buying his

magazine to read the thought-provoking articles. You could grab an issue

of Playboy and say "I'm very eager to read this interview with Albert

Schweitzer," knowing full well that it is very difficult to read any

magazine when you hold it sideways, which is how people generally hold

Playboy.

Hugh's mistake is that he started to believe that Playboy really was

a cultured, sophisticated magazine, and he started writing these

enormous, droning articles about his philosophy of life. This was a

stupid mistake. I mean, it's not as if thousands of Playboy readers

wrote in and said: "Hey, Hugh, enough with all these big-breasted naked

women. What's your philosophy of life?" But he published his philosophy

anyway, and it took up many pages of valuable space that could have been

used for naked women. Soon competitors sprung up, and now you can't walk

into a convenience store without seeing dozens of magazines like Hustler,

Rogue, Gallery, Newsweek. Newsweek got into the market just recently,

when it published a picture of a semi-naked woman on the cover. It's a

small start, but if it works out, I suspect that in a couple of years

Newsweek will start telling us its philosophy of life, and people will be

holding it sideways. If it plays its cards right, it might even get

scrutinized by the Supreme Court.

COMPRESSED CLASSICS

One effective technique for avoiding boring conversations on

airplanes is to pull an extremely sharp ax Out Of your briefcase and

spend the entire flight fondling it and muttering. Of course, to get the

ax onto the airplane, you'll have to convince the airport security people

that you're not a hijacker:

SECURITY PERSON: Excuse Me, sir, but there's an extremely sharp ax in

your briefcase.

YOU: Yes, I need it for my business. I'm an ax murderer.

SECURITY PERSON: Oh, okay. Sorry to inconvenience you, but we have to be

on the lookout for hijackers. It's for your own protection.

You: Of course. Keep up the good work.

The only problem with the ax approach is that it tends to make the

flight attendants skittery, and you may be forced to waste valuable time

dealing with large numbers of armed law-enforcement personnel after you

land. SID the technique I use to ward off boring conversations is to

carry a book, which I pull out the instant a boring person tries to talk

to me:

BORING PERSON: Hi. Where are you headed?

ME: Detroit.

BORING PERSON: No kidding? That's where I'm headed.

ME: What an astounding coincidence. And here we are, sitting

together on a plane bound for Detroit, the very place we're both headed.

I think I'll read my book now.

The problem here is that you have to actually read the book, which

may turn out to be even more boring than the person you're sitting next

to, because, as a rule, books contain far too many words. For example, I

was recently on a flight to St. Louis, unaware that my suitcase was going

to get off at Indianapolis (apparently on the theory that all Midwestern

cities are basically the same), and I read a new book about James Bond,

the famous spy. I thought there would be no new James Bond books,

because the person who wrote them is dead, but evidently the folks in the

publishing world decided that if the original author was inconsiderate

enough to die, then by God they would find somebody else to write his

books for him. I think they're onto something. I think they ought to

use the same approach with other famous dead authors, such as William

Shakespeare:

The Warble, Peddle, and Leek Publishing Company

proudly announces Romeo and Juliet II--a sweeping

saga of lust and passion that begins where the

best-selling original left off. The story begins

with the discovery that the two lovers didn't really

stab themselves hard enough to die, and follows them

through their lustful and passionate efforts to

escape the clutches of their warring families and

find a peaceful life of lust and passion! Now on

sale at every drugstore and supermarket in the world.

better than the original!--The Bullock, Missouri,

Herald Gazette Chronicle Bugle.

Lustful ... passionate!--Field and Stream.

a recently published book!--The New York Times.

Well anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I

realized that, like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the

same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up

the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to

several attractive women. There, that's it: twenty-four words. But the

guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it. I mean, he

never just writes: "Bond walked into the bedroom." Instead, he writes:

"Bond eased the bedroom door latch open gently, praying that the click of

the ZuchSweiss stainless steel door latch would not disturb the other

inhabitants, and cautiously eyed the room, which he noted was paneled

with European birch, or Betula verrucose, probably from the Vorarlburg

region of western Austria." And it goes on like this for pages before

Bond gets around to killing a henchman. I could barely wade through it.

I was tempted to start chatting with the person next to me about how we

were both going to St. Louis.

And it's not just spy novels. Most books are too long. I remember

in college when I had to read The Brothers Karamazov by the famous

Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It's about these two brothers who

kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It's

almost impossible to tell, because what they mostly do is talk for nearly

a thousand pages. If all Russians talked as much as the brothers

Karamazov did, I don't see how they found time to become a major world

power.

Our literature professor told us that Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers

Karamazov to raise the question of whether there is a God. So what I

want to know is, why didn't Dostoyevsky just come right out and ask? Why

didn't he write:

Dear Reader,

Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.

Sincerely,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here are some other famous works of literature that could easily

have been summarized in a few words:

Moby-Dick--Don't mess around with large whales, because they symbolize

nature and will kill you.

A Tale of Two Cities--French people are crazy.

Every poem ever written--Poets are extremely sensitive.

Think of all the valuable time we would save if authors got right to

the point this way. People would be able to read several dozen great

books in a matter of minutes. College would take about two weeks. We'd

have more time for more important activities, such as reading newspaper

columns.

A Little Learning

BASIC FROG GLOP

A distinguished, high-level, blue-ribbon federal panel of people

wearing suits recently released a report concluding that (and here I

quote directly): "The American public-education system has done just

about as good a job of educating the nation's children as might be

expected from a bucket of live bait." The report presented some shocking

statistics to support this finding:

For the past eleven years, American students have scored lower on

standardized tests than European students, Japanese students and

certain species of elk;

Seventy-eight percent of America's school principals have, at some point

in their careers, worn white belts or shoes to school;

Nobody in the entire United States remembers the exact date of the

signing of the Treaty of Ghent.

The bottom line is that the educational system, which costs over

$200 billion a year, is an unmitigated disaster. This is good news for

everybody. It's good news for those of us who went to high school back

when the schools were supposed to be better, because we can feel superior

to today's students. When we go to shopping malls and see batches of

teenagers standing around and laughing in a carefree teenaged manner, we

can reassure ourselves by saying: "Those kids may be attractive and slim

and healthy, and they may have their entire lives ahead of them and no

gum problems whatsoever, but by God they never learned how to conjugate

the verb 'to squat' in Latin, the way I had to when I was in school."

The panel's report is also good news for the kids, because it

confirms their suspicion that they wouldn't have learned anything even if

they had been paying attention in class instead of trying to see who

could most accurately guess how large, in square inches, the sweat stain

under the teacher's left armpit would be by the time the bell rang.

But most of all, the panel's report is good news for the teachers,

school administrators and other members of the American educational

establishment, because as the people most responsible for screwing up the

educational system in the first place, they will naturally expect to be

given a great deal more money to fix it.

So everybody is pleased as punch to have blue-ribbon federal proof

that the school system stinks on ice, and everybody is busy coming up

with helpful suggestions for making the schools good again, the way they

were when they were turning out real geniuses like the people who are

making the suggestions. For example, President Reagan checked in from

the planet Saturn with the suggestion that we need to go back to

voluntary prayer in the schools. Now I think we can all agree that

making our children pray voluntarily will certainly help, but we need to

do more. We need to get Back to the Basics, back to the kinds of

learning activities you and I engaged in.

For example, every student in the country should be required to read

Ethan Frome unless he or she has a written doctor's excuse. As you no

doubt vaguely recall, Ethan Frome is a book you had to read when you

studied early American novels because it turns out there were hardly any

good early American novels. As I remember the plot, Ethan Frome falls in

love with this woman, so they decide to crash into a tree on a sled. The

sled crash is the only good part, and it lasts only about a page. But

the way I look at it, if I had to read Ethan Frome, I don't see why these

little snots today should get out of it.

They should also be forced to disassemble frogs, the way we did in

biology. Remember? You'd slice your frog up with a razor and root

around inside, looking for the heart and the kidney and the other frog

organs that were clearly drawn in several colors in the biology textbook,

until eventually you realized that you must have been issued a defective

frog, because all you could ever find inside was frog glop. So you just

poked at the glop for a while and then drew the heart, etc., from the

biology textbook. This taught you about life. When I was in school, I

also had to do a worm, although I'm not suggesting that all of today's

students should have to do worms. Maybe just the really disruptive ones.

So that's my back-to-basics program: Ethan Frome, frogs, and maybe

some class discussion of the cosine. And any kid who doesn't know the

exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814) will

be held back for another year, or, if the Russians appear to be getting

ahead of us in space again, shot.

SCHOOLS NOT SO SMART

One of the more popular ways to feel superior these days is to

complain about the schools. We adults just love to drone on about how

much better educated we are than our kids. We say stuff like: "These

kids today. They get out of high school and they don't even know how to

read and write. Why, in my day we read Moby-Dick eighty-four times in

the fourth grade alone." And so on. Adults just eat this kind of talk

right up.

Well, I hate to disillusion everybody, but it's all a crock. We

aren't better educated than our kids: they're just less drivel-oriented.

The main evidence adults offer to prove kids are less educated is

the fact that Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are declining. You

remember SAT'S. You got your number-two pencils and sat in the cafeteria

for two hours answering questions like this:

Fred wants to redo his bathroom in pink wallpaper, so

he invites Sam over to help. If Fred's bathroom is

eight feet by five feet and has a seven-foot ceiling,

and each roll of wallpaper is 32 inches wide, how

long will Sam take to realize there is something just

a little bit strange about Fred?

SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and

psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single

question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in

the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores.

When you and I were in high school, we thought we had to learn all

that crap so we could get into college and get good jobs and houses with

driveways. The problem is that so many of us went to college that

college degrees became as common, and as valuable, as bowling trophies.

Kids today are smart enough not to waste brain cells trying to figure out

how long Train A Will take to overtake Train B just so they can go to

college. That's why so many colleges are desperate for students. Any

day now you'll be watching a late movie on UHF television and you'll see

this ad:

"Hi! I'm Huntingdon Buffington Wellington the Fourth, dean of

admissions at Harvard University. I'll bet more than once you've said:

'I sure would like to go to a big-time Ivy League university, but I lack

the brains, the background, and the requisite number of dinner jackets.'

Well, this is your lucky day, because Harvard University is having its

semiannual Standards Reduction Days. That's right: we're admitting

people we once wouldn't have allowed to work in our boiler room. And for

the first one hundred applicants who call our toll-free number, we're

offering absolutely free this honorary degree written in genuine Latin

words."

Another reason you shouldn't feel better educated than your kids is

that almost everything your teachers told you is a lie. Take the

continents. I bet they told you Europe was one continent, and Asia was

another. Well, any moron with a map can plainly see Europe and Asia are

on the same continent. I don't know who started the lunatic rumor that

they were two continents. I suspect it was the French, because they

wouldn't want to be on the same continent with, say, the Mongolians.

And what about those maps they showed you? Greenland looked

enormous, bigger than Russia. If Greenland were really that big, it

would be a Major Power. All the other nations would stay up late nights

worrying about it. But the truth is Greenland is smallish and

insignificant. The other nations rarely even invite it to parties.

So don't think you're so smart.

WHY WE DON'T READ

Every so often I see a news article in which some educator gets all

wrought up about the fact that people don't read books anymore:

WASHINGTON (Associated Press)--Noted educator Dr.

Belinda A. Burgeon-Wainscot, speaking before the

American Association of People Who Use the Title

'Doctor' Even Though They're Not Physicians, but

Merely Graduate School Graduates, Which Are As Common

These Days As Milkweed Pollen

(AAPIVUTDETTANPBMGSGWAACTDAMP), said today that

people don't read books anymore. At least that's

what we here at the Associated Press think she said.

She spoke for about two hours, and used an awful lot

of big words, and frankly we dozed off from time to

time.

Well, I am not a noted educator, but I know why most of us don't

read books. We don't read books because, from the very beginning of our

school careers, noted educators have made us read books that are either

boring or stupid and often both. Here's what I had to read in first

grade:

"Look, Jane," said Dick. "Look Look Look. Look."

"Oh," said Jane. "Oh. Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh. Look."

"Oh," said Spot. "Oh my God."

Now I'm not claiming that we first graders were a bunch of geniuses,

but we didn't spend the bulk of the day saying "Look," either. We

thought Dick and Jane were a drag, so many of us turned to comic books,

which were much more interesting and informative. When I was in first

grade, the Korean War was going on, So I read comiC books with names like

"GI Combat Death Killers," featuring American soldiers with chin stubble

who fought enemy Communist orientals with skin the color of school buses.

These comic books had lots of new and exciting words:

"Commie attack! Hit the dirt!"

BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA

"Grenade! Grenade!"

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMKABOOOOOOM

"Joe! They got Joe! Eat lead, you reds!"

BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA

"Aieeeeeeeeeeee."

And so on. This is how we developed our language skills. If we had

stuck with Dick and Jane, we'd have sounded like morons.

After the first grade, our schoolbooks got longer, but they did not

get more interesting. The history books were the worst. Take, for

example, the Civil War. I think we can safely assume that the Civil War

was fairly lively, but you would never know this from reading elementary

school history books:

THE CIVIL WAR

"The Civil War was very serious. It was caused by slavery and

states' rights, and it resulted in the Gettysburg Address.

Discussion Questions: How serious was the Civil War? Would you feel

nervous if you had to give the Gettysburg Address? Explain."

The other big problem with history textbooks was that they always

started at the dawn of Civilization and ended around 1948. So we'd spend

the first three months of each school year reading about the ancient

SUMerians at a leisurely pace. Then the teacher would realize that time

was running short, and we'd race through the rest of history, covering

World War II in a matter of minutes, and getting to Harry Truman on the

last day. Then the next year, we'd go back to the ancient Sumerians.

After a few years of this, we began to see history as an endlessly

repeating, incredibly dull cycle, starting with Sumerians and leading

inexorably to Harry Truman, then going back again. No wonder so many of

us turned to loud music and drugs.

Things were a little better in English class, because we didn't have

to read the same books over and over. On the other hand, we had to read

a lot of books nobody would want to read even once, such as The Last of

the Mohicans, which was written by James Fenimore Cooper, although I

seriously doubt that Cooper himself ever read it. We also read a batch

of plays by Shakespeare, which are very entertaining when you watch

actors perform them but are almost impossible to understand when you read

them:

FLAVORUS: Forsooth 'twixt consequence doest thou engage? Wouldst thou

thine bodkin under thee enrage?

HORACLES: In faith I wouldst not e'er intent fulfill, For o'er petards a

dullard's loath to till.

(Shakespeare wrote this way because English was not his native

language. He was Sumerian.)

Anyway, that's why I think people don't read books anymore. The sad

thing is that there are many fine books around, just waiting to be read.

You can see them on convenient display racks at any of the better

supermarkets; they have titles like The Goodyear Blimp Diet and Evil Nazi

War Criminals Get an Atomic Bomb and Threaten to Destroy Uruguay. These

books are easy to read, and minutes after you read one you're ready for

another. What we need is some kind of federal program to get people

interested in them. Maybe the President could read some of them aloud on

national television (he is very good at reading aloud). Or maybe we

could give people an additional tax exemption for every book report they

attach to their income tax returns. Whatever we do, we should do it

soon, to get people out of the habit of getting all their information

from television and poorly researched newspaper columns.

WHAT IS AND AIN'T GRAMMATICAL

I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good

grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of

slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the

United States would have lost World War II."

The truth is that grammar is not the most important thing in the

world. The Super Bowl is the most important thing in the world. But

grammar is still important. For example, suppose you are being

interviewed for a job as an airplane pilot, and your prospective employer

asks you if you have any experience, and you answer: "Well, I ain't never

actually flied no actual airplanes or nothing, but I got several

pilot-style hats and several friends who I like to talk about airplanes

with."

If you answer this way, the prospective employer will immediately

realize that you have ended your sentence with a preposition. (What you

should have said, of course, is "several friends with who I like to talk

about airplanes.") So you will not get the job, because airline pilots

have to use good grammar when they get on the intercom and explain to the

passengers that, because of high winds, the plane is going to take off

several hours late and land in Pierre, South Dakota, instead of Los

Angeles.

We did not always have grammar. In medieval England, people said

whatever they wanted, without regard to rules, and as a result they

sounded like morons. Take the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who Couldn't even

spell his first name right. He wrote a large poem called Canterbury

Tales, in which people from various professions--knight, monk, miller,

weever, riveter, steeler, diver, stevedore, spinnaker, etc.--and on and

on and on like this:

In a somer sesun whon softe was the sunne

I kylled a youn e birde ande I ate it on a bun

When Chaucer's poem was published, everybody read it and said: "My

God, we need some grammar around here." So they formed a Grammar

Commission, which developed the parts of speech, the main ones being

nouns, verbs, predicants, conjectures, particles, proverbs, adjoiners,

coordinates, and rebuttals. Then the commission made up hundreds and

hundreds of grammar rules, all of which were strictly enforced.

When the colonists came to America, they rebelled against British

grammar. They openly used words like "ain't" and "finalize," and when

they wrote the Declaration of Independence they deliberately misspelled

many words. Thanks to their courage, today we Americans have only two

rules of grammar:

Rule 1. The word "I'me" is always incorrect.

Most of us learn this rule as children, from our mothers. We say

things like: "Mom, can Bobby and me roll the camping trailer over Mrs.

Johnson's cat?" And our mothers say: "Remember your grammar, dear. You

mean: 'Can Bobby and I roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson's cat?'

Of course you can, but be home by dinnertime."

The only exception to this rule is in formal business writing, where

instead of "I" you must use "the undersigned." For example, this

business letter is incorrect:

"Dear Hunky-Dory Canned Fruit Company:

A couple days ago my wife bought a can of your cling peaches and

served them to my mother who has a weak heart and she damn near died when

she bit into a live grub. If I ever find out where you live, I am gonna

whomp you on the head with a ax handle."

This should be corrected as follows:

"If the undersigned ever finds out where you live, the undersigned

is gonna whomp you on the head with a ax handle."

Rule 2. You're not allowed to split infinitives.

An infinitive is the word "to" and whatever comes right behind it,

such as "to a tee," "to the best of my ability" ... "tomato," etc.

Splitting an infinitive is putting something between the "to" and the

other words. For example, this is incorrect:

"Hey man, you got any, you know, spare change you could give to,

like, me?"

The correct version is:

spare change you could, like, give to me?"

The advantage of American English is that, because there are so few

rules, practically anybody can learn to speak it in just a few minutes.

The disadvantage is that Americans generally sound like jerks, whereas

the British sound really smart, especially to Americans. That's why

Americans are so fond of those British dramas they're always showing on

public television, the ones introduced by Alistair Cooke. Americans love

people who talk like Alistair Cooke. He could introduce old episodes of

"Hawaii Five-O" and Americans would think they were extremely

enlightening.

So the trick is to use American grammar, which is simple, but talk

with a British accent, which is impressive. This technique is taught at

all your really snotty private schools, where the kids learn to sound

like Elliot Richardson. Remember Elliot? He sounded extremely British,

and as a result he got to be Attorney General, Secretary of State, Chief

Justice of the Supreme Court and Vice President at the same time.

You can do it, too. Practice in your home, then approach someone on

the street and say: "Tally-ho, old chap. I would consider it a great

honour if you would favour me with some spare change." You're bound to

get quick results.

IT TAKES A LOT OF GAUL

One of the most useless classes I ever took in high school, ranking

right up there with calculus, was French. I took several years of

French, and I learned hundreds of phrases, not one of which I would ever

actually want to say to anybody. For example, my French teachers

insisted that when I met a French person I should say "Comment

allez-vous?" It turns out that this means "How do you go?" which is not

the kind of thing you say when you want to strike someone as being

intelligent. Your average French person already thinks most Americans

are idiots, and you're not going to improve his opinion much if you barge

up to him on some Paris street and start spewing high school French

phrases:

YOU: Comment allez vous? ("How do you go?")

FRENCH PERSON: Je vais A pied, evidentment. Vous devez avoir les

cerveaux dune truite. ("I go on foot, obviously. You must have the

brains of a trout.")

YOU: est la bibliothque? ("Where is the library?")

FRENCH PERSON: Partez, s'il vous plait. J'ai un fusil. ("Please go

away. I have a gun.")

My wife didn't do any better in high school French. She learned to

say "Je me suis casse la jambe" ("I have broken my leg") and "Elle nest

pas jolie" ("She is not pretty"). What on earth is she supposed to do

with these phrases? I mean, suppose she does go to France and break her

leg:

MY WIFE: Je Me suis casse la jambe. ("I have broken my leg.")

FRENCH BYSTANDERS: C'est dommage. ("What a pity.")

my wiFE: Elle nest pas jolie. ("She is not pretty.")

FRENCH BYSTANDERS: Bien, excusez-nous pour vivre. Vous netes pas un

grand prix vous-meme. ("Well, excuse us for living. You are no

great prize yourself.")

My wife would never get an ambulance that way. She'd be lucky if

the bystanders didn't spit on her.

Despite the fact that the teacher insisted on making me speak like a

fool, I stuck with high school French, because at the time the only

alternative was Latin, which is even more worthless. For one thing,

everybody who speaks Latin is dead. For another thing, all you ever read

in Latin class is Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars, in which Caesar

drones on and on about tramping around Gaul. These had to be the dullest

wars in history, which is why finally the Romans got so bored that they

let the empire collapse and quit speaking Latin. In fact, they gave up

on spoken language altogether, and today their descendants communicate by

means of hand gestures.

When I got to college, I briefly considered taking Chinese or

Russian, but abandoned this notion when I discovered that the Russians

and the Chinese use Communist alphabets. I also rejected German, because

it is too bulky. For example, the German word for "cat" is

"einfuhrungaltfriesischenspraakuntworterbuchgegenwart." It can take up

to two days to order lunch in German.

The result of all this is that I know very little of any foreign

language, and what I do know is either useless or embarrassing. Most

Americans are in the same situation. Fortunately, you don't really need

another language, because, as you know if you have ever traveled abroad,

virtually all foreign persons speak English. In fact, I sometimes

suspect that there are no foreign languages, that foreign persons really

speak English all the time and just pretend to speak foreign languages so

they can amuse themselves by conning dumb American tourists into saying

things like "How do you go?"

So if you plan to travel abroad, you should not waste your time

learning some foreign language that could well turn out to be fraudulent.

Instead, you should practice pronouncing, in a very loud, clear voice,

certain useful English phrases for travelers. Here are the main ones:

"Do you speak English?"

"Thank God. Where can I find a bathroom?"

"Is that one of those bathrooms where you wind up standing on some street

corner in a structure that offers no more privacy than a beach

umbrella?"

"Thank God. Will the bathroom have a squat female attendant who will

watch my every move lest I leave without giving her a tip, even

though the bathroom has obviously not been cleaned once since it was

built by Visigoths more than twelve thousand years ago?"

"Thank God. Say, you speak pretty good English, for a foreign person."

These phrases will take care of your basic needs abroad, and the

fact that you have taken the time to learn to pronounce them loudly and

clearly will leave a lasting impression on your foreign hosts.

HOW TO TRAP A ZOID

We should all be grateful that we have mathematics. For example,

without mathematics, it would be almost impossible to figure out what

size tip you should leave. Even with mathematics, this is very

difficult. The mathematical formula for tipping, which was discovered by

Sir Isaac Newton, states that the tip equals 15 percent of the bill, but

unfortunately the bill is always $17.43, and nobody has the vaguest idea

what 15 percent of $17.43 is. The finest brains in the country have been

working on this problem for years, using large computers, and they have

yet to come up with an answer. So most of us wind up tipping a random

amount of money, usually $3.50, which we increase slightly if the waiter

performs an extra service, such as not spitting in the food. And that's

just one of the ways we use mathematics in our everyday lives.

Mathematics got started in ancient Egypt, when the ancient Egyptians

discovered the numbers three and eight. They used these numbers to

develop the mathematical formulas for the pyramids, which were actually

supposed to be spherical. Eventually people in other countries

discovered more numbers, and today we have more than ten thousand of

them.

After the discovery of numbers, the next major stride in mathematics

came when the ancient Greeks discovered the hypotenuse. The Greeks used

the hypotenuse to manufacture right triangles for export tO other

countries. Included free with each triangle was a copy of the famous

Pythagorean Theorem (named for its discoverer, Bob Theorem), which

states: "Some of the squares of the opposite sides are equal to 14.6

percent of your grossly adjusted annual unearned interest, unless there

are two or more runners on base at the time." To this very day, children

memorize the Pythagorean Theorem in school, which accounts for their

behavior.

The ancient Greeks made so much money with the right triangle that

they developed a whole line of mathematical items, such as the rhomboid,

the pentagon, the diameter, the parabola, the hyperbole, the irrational

number, the cube, the really deranged number, and the square root. In

fact, the ancient Greeks developed all the really popular items;

everything developed since then has failed miserably. Take algebra. I

don't know who dreamed up algebra, but whoever it was obviously had a lot

of time to waste, because it is utterly useless. In algebra class, day

after day, the teacher would write something like this on the blackboard:

4x + 2 = 14

Then he would ask us what x stood for. It turns out that it stood

for 3, but how the hell were we supposed to know that? He was the one

who dreamed up x in the first place, and it seemed grossly unfair for him

to expect us to know what he was thinking of at the time. And to make

matters worse, the next day he would have x equal some other number, such

as 4, depending on his mood. I spent an entire year in algebra class,

and to this day I don't have the faintest notion what x stands for, which

is why I hardly ever use it for anything.

Calculus is even worse. When I went to college, all of us freshmen

had to take a semester of calculus. It was like a fraternity initiation.

The professor, who wore a bow tie and grew up on another planet, would

start the class with a statement like this: "Let us consider the problem

of a helix uncoiling in n dimensions." He never told us why this was a

problem, or why anybody would want to consider it even if it was. He

would merely turn around and start filling the blackboard with alien

symbols, and he would keep it up until it was time to leave. Every now

and then he would give us a test, and I always got a zero. In fact,

"zero" was the only mathematical concept I ever understood in calculus

class.

I decided to quit calculus the day I stabbed myself in the head with

Jeff White's pencil. Jeff sat next to me in class, and to amuse

ourselves while the professor was writing alien symbols on the blackboard

we would play childish pranks on each other. One day Jeff tried to knock

my books off my desk, so I grabbed them with one hand and, with the other

hand, snatched Jeff's pencil, which I attempted to break by smashing it

against my head, only I didn't get the angle right, so I ended up driving

the point into my skull, where it broke off. This created quite a

commotion, but the professor was deeply engrossed in the problem of a

trapezoid rotating in y dimensions, and he didn't even notice the problem

of a student with a pencil point lodged in his skull . So Jeff and I

just got up and walked over to the infirmary.

The nurse was very suspicious. She said: "Are you telling me that

you stabbed yourself in the head with a pencil?" Then she looked very

suspiciously at Jeff. Jeff said, defensively: "Really. He stabbed

himself." And the nurse said: "Why would anybody stab himself with a

pencil?" And so I stared suspiciously at Jeff, and said: "Yeah, why

would I stab myself with a pencil?"

Anyway, the nurse got the pencil point out of my skull, but I didn't

go back to calculus class ever again. Jeff dropped out of college a

short while later, although I'm pretty sure this had nothing to do with

the pencil incident. I suspect it had a lot more to do with calculus.

COLLEGE ADMISSIONS

Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about

going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you young

persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me: these

are closely related to college.)

College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two

thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are

spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time Sleeping and

trying to get dates.

Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

Things you will need to know in later life (two hours). These include

how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper

stains out of your pajamas.

Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are

the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy,

-istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things,

then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you

fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in

college for the rest of your life.

It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was

in college, I had to memorize--don't ask me why--the names of three

metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one

of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and

Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember something important like

whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in

water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the

supermarket. It's a terrible waste of brain cells.

After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to

choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget

the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure

to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.

This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or

chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example,

you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and

the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a

rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant

vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor

has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: if you write in

your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your

professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer

he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely

snotty about this.

So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy,

psychology, and sociology--subjects in which nobody really understands

what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual

facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a

quick overview of each:

ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read

little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good

grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that

anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are

studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say Moby-Dick is

a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big

white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say

Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is

sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will

think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with

lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding

there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should

major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams.

Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire

semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence,

then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much

faster. My roommate is now a doctor.

Studying dreams is more fun. I had one professor who claimed

everything we dreamed about--tractors, Arizona, baseball, frogs--actually

represented a sexual organ. He was very insistent about this. Nobody

wanted to sit near him. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you

dream about rats, you should major in psychology.

SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and

away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of

sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once

heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to

be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating

simple, obvious observations into a scientific-sounding code. If you

plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing.

For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall

down. You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical

behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal

relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or

'crying,' behavior forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty

pages, you will get a large government grant.

Scientific Stuff

BARRY'S KEY TO LIFE

Today's Scientific Question is: Just what the heck is Life, anyway?

And where does it come from? I mean, you know?

Answer. Ancient Man tried for thousands of years to explain Life.

Ancient Man would do anything to avoid honest work. Ancient Woman would

yell at him: "Don't forget to make pointed stones to stab the

saber-toothed tiger with" or "Don't forget to migrate to North America"

and he would say "I can't right now, dear, I'm trying to explain Life."

Over the years, Man came up with many explanations for life, all of

them stupid. In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every

explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid. I

bet kids would be able to get from kindergarten through high school in

about thirty-five minutes if we stopped making them memorize all the

drivel Ancient Man came up with about the gods and goddesses and why the

moon goes through phases and so on.

Anyway, Modern Science, using all the sophisticated analytical tools

at its disposal, has discarded all the myths and come up with a

definition that covers all forms of Life:

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

By this definition, the amoeba, the mango, the frog, the squirrel,

the bear, the begonia, and many lawyers are forms of Life. But this just

begs the question, Where does Life come from? And how can the mango,

which clearly has some value, be related to the lawyer?

Modern Scientists explain all this with the Theory of Evolution.

They say that at one time the earth was nothing but a bunch of slime and

ooze, sort of like Bayonne, New Jersey. Then lightning struck some

chemicals and formed one-celled creatures (am I going too fast here?),

which floated around for several million years until the smart ones

decided to organize the dumb ones into higher forms of life:

SMART CELLS: What do you say we evolve into a higher form of life?

DUMB CELLS: Sounds good to us.

SMART CELLS: Fine. We'll be the brain. You be the sphincter.

And so they crawled out on land. Then they started adapting to the

environment, according to the law of the Survival of the Fittest. For

example, if the climate was very hot, the animals without air

conditioning died. If the climate had daytime television, the animals

without small brains died. And so on.

NOTE: Some people, particularly religious personnel, dispute the

Theory of Evolution: they say God created all Life all at once. I have

done a lot of research on both theories, and I firmly believe the

evidence supports the theory that anybody who supports either theory gets

a lot of nasty mail, so I'm staying the heck out of it. And I'll stand

by this position.

Life as we know it today falls into two categories: Plants and

Animals. Plants are divided into three subcategories: Green Vegetables,

Yellow Vegetables, and Weeds. Animals are divided into six

subcategories:

Animals You Can Eat: cows, turkeys, porks, bolognas, veals, zucchinis,

tuna fish.

Animals You Can Sit on: horses, certain turtles.

Animals That Can Knock Over Your Car: rhinoceroses, soccer fans.

Totally Useless Animals That Would Have Ceased to Exist Thousands of

Years Ago If Not for Greedy Pet Store Owners Who Prey on

Unsuspecting Eight-Year-Olds: hamsters, gerbils.

Animals That Are Easily Impressed: dogs.

Animals Whose Sole Goal in Life Is to Wait at the Bottom of Sleeping Bags

and Sting or Bite People to Death: scorpions, snakes.

Animals That Are Not Easily Impressed: cats.

You'll notice this list does not include insects. This is because

insects are not animals: Insects are insects, and their sole reason for

existing is to be sprayed by poisonous substances from aerosol cans. Oh,

I know you've heard a lot of ecology-nut talk about how you shouldn't

kill insects because they're part of the Great Chain of Life and birds

eat them and so on, but I say go ahead and kill them. If necessary, we

can do without birds, too.

BASIC AS ATOM AND EVE

Many of you have written cards and letters asking me to explain

chemistry. Here is a sampling:

Dear Dave:

Please explain chemistry--Otherwise I will kill myself.

Sincerely,

A Deranged Person

Dear Dave:

If You don't explain chemistry by 6 P.M. Friday, we will detonate a

nuclear device in Brooklyn.

Regards,

Several Terrorists

Okay, here goes. Chemistry, in technical terms, is the study of all

the weensy little objects that make up the large objects we can see with

our naked eyes, such as toasters. Most of you were probably exposed to

chemistry in high school, assuming you were dumb enough to believe your

guidance counselors when they said you would need some knowledge of

chemistry in later life. They probably used the same routine to get you

to take Latin, another subject unrelated to the real world. The only

time you ever need to understand Latin is when you're at the doctor's

office wearing one of those embarrassing garments, designed by Nazi

sadists, that they make you wear, and you have finished emitting various

bodily fluids into various containers, which you have carried around the

crowded waiting room looking for a nurse to give them to so he or she can

do Lord knows what perverted things with them, and you're waiting in the

examining room on a cold table covered with the kind of paper they give

you to cover toilet seats with in public rest rooms, hoping the doctor

will come within the next two or three days to examine you, and finally

you get so bored you look at all the diplomas and certificates on the

wall, which are written in Latin. If you don't know Latin, they look

pretty impressive:

Quod erat demonstrandum Opere citato et cetera, id

est amo amas amat plume de ma tante NORBERT B.

HODPACKER vamos al cine exernpli gratia marquis de

sade XLIVIIICBM.

if you know Latin, you'll figure out this means:

This certifies that

NORBERT B. HODPACKER

has a great big piece of paper

on his wall.

Chemistry is similar. Actually, I never took any chemistry myself,

but I did sit outside Mr. Hoose's chemistry class for a whole year in

high school. I was a hall monitor. My job was to make sure the other

students had legal hall passes so they could smoke cigarettes in the

bathrooms. That was back in the days when kids smoked cigarettes.

Sitting in the hall, I overheard a lot of chemistry. The big thing

was atoms and molecules, which are the Building Blocks of Matter. In

ancient times, people didn't know about atoms and molecules: they thought

the Building Blocks of Matter were earth, air, fire, and water. What a

bunch of jerks.

Today we know about atoms and molecules, which are very tiny. For

example, the head of a pin has 973 trillion million billion spillion

drillion gillion thousand jillion hillion zillion atoms and molecules.

Let me try to give you an idea how many atoms and molecules that is, in

terms that a lay person might understand: it is a lot of atoms and

molecules.

What happens is the atoms and molecules whiz around and form

elements, such as gold, iron, ivory, gravel, and vinyl. Sometimes

several elements come together (don't ask me why) to form new chemical

structures. For example, common table salt is actually composed of two

deadly poisons, arsenic and strychnine. They are perfectly safe if

combined properly, but if the salt manufacturers should mess up on one

tiny little grain, and you happen to put that grain, among thousands of

others, on your egg, you will die a horrible death. That's what makes

chemistry so fascinating.

Chemists are always messing around with atoms and molecules, hoping

to come up with new combinations that will Benefit Mankind. Not long ago

they developed a compound that consumes forty-seven times its weight in

excess stomach acid. They are even working on new forms of life; in

fact, they have already created a one-celled organism that eats oil

slicks. I admit this is a fairly stupid thing to do, but it's a start.

And someday, within your lifetime, if you're lucky, you will see

laboratory-created life forms capable of applying for government aid and

buying Chrysler products. It's something to look forward to.

BOREDOM ON THE WING

Everybody should know something about birds, because birds are

everywhere. Zoologists tell u, there, are over

23,985,409,723,098,050,744,885,143 birds in the city of Lincoln,

Nebraska, alone, which is one of the many reasons not to go there.

Now perhaps you get a bit nervous when you think about all those

birds out there. Perhaps you remember Alfred Hitchcock's famous movie

The Birds, in which several million birds got together one afternoon and

decided to peck a number of Californians to death. Well, you needn't

worry. First, any animal that attacks Californians is a friend of man.

And second, The Birds was just a movie; in real life, your chances of

being pecked to death by birds are no greater than your chances of

finding a polite clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

There is an incredible range of birds, from the ostrich, which

weighs up to six hundred pounds and stands up to nine feet tall and can

run two hundred miles an hour and crush a man's head as if it were a

Ping-Pong ball; to the tiny bee humming bird, which is a mere 6.17

decahedrons long and can fly right into your ear and hum its tiny wings

so hard you think your brain is going to vibrate into jelly and you will

eventually go insane.

Birds, like most mammals, especially lawyers, evolved from reptiles.

The first bird appeared millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period

(which gets its name from the fact that it was a fairly jurassic period).

What happened was this reptile, inspired by some mysterious, wondrous

inspiration to evolve, climbed up a Jurassic Period tree and leaped from

the topmost branch and thudded into the ground at 130 miles an hour.

Then other reptiles, inspired by the same urge as the first reptile

but even stupider, climbed up and began leaping from the branch. Soon

the ground trembled with the thud of many reptile bodies, raining down on

the Jurassic plain like some kind of scaly hailstorm. This went on for a

few thousand years, until one of the reptiles evolved some feathers and

discovered it could fly. As it soared skyward, the other species, who

had grown very tired of being pelted by reptile bodies, let out a mighty

cheer, which stopped a few seconds later when they were pelted by the

first bird droppings.

Soon birds had spread to the four corners of the earth, which is

where they are today. And wherever there are birds, there are also bird

watchers, in case the birds decide to try something. Bird watchers are

known technically as bird watchers, which comes from the Latin word for

ornithologist.

Bird watchers divide birds into four main groups:

Boring little brown birds that are all over the place: Wrens, chickadees,

sparrows, nutcrackers, spanners, catcalls, dogbirds, hamsterbirds,

flinches.

Birds that can lift really heavy things, such as your car: Albatrosses,

winches, pterodactyls, unusually large chickadees, elephant birds,

emus.

Birds with names that you are going to think I made up but I didn't:

Boobies, frigate birds, night jars, frogmouths, oilbirds.

Birds that make those jungle noises you always hear during night scenes

in jungle movies: Parrots, cockatoos, pomegranates, macadams,

cashews, bats.

Your avid bird watchers spend lots of time creeping around with

binoculars, trying to identify new and unusual birds. The trouble is

that most birds are of the little-and-brownish variety, all of which look

exactly alike, and all of which are boring. So what bird watchers do is

make things up. If you've ever spent any time at all with bird watchers,

you've probably noticed that every now and then they'll whirl around, for

no apparent reason, and claim they've just seen some obscure, tiny bird

roughly 6,500 feet away. They'll even claim they can tell whether it was

male or female, which in fact you can't tell about birds even when

they're very close, what with all the feathers and everything.

I advise you to do what most people do when confronted with bird

watchers, which is just humor them. If their lives are so dull and drab

that they want to fill them with imaginary birds, why stand in the way?

Here's how you should handle it:

BIRD WATCHER: Did you see that?

You: What?

BIRD WATCHER: Over there, by that mountain (he gestures to a mountain in

the next state). It's a male Malaysian sand-dredging coronet.

Very, very rare in these parts.

You: Ah, yes, I see it.

BIRD WATCHER: You do?

You: Certainly. It's just to the left of that female European furloughed

pumpkinbird. See it?

BIRD WATCHER: Uh, yes, of course I see it.

You: Look, they're playing backgammon.

BIRD WATCHER: Um, so they are.

If you have a good imagination, you may come to really enjoy the

bird watching game, in which case you should join a bird-watching group.

These groups meet regularly, and usually after a few minutes they're

detecting obscure birds on the surface of Saturn. It's a peck of fun.

WHAT'S ALIEN YOU?

I don't want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that

the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days. Congress is

thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists

broadcast Signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien

beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their

federal programs as if they were merely poor people.

I realize that some of you may not believe that alien beings exist.

But how else can you explain the many unexplained phenomena that people

are always sighting, such as lightning and flying saucers? Oh, I know

the authorities claim these sightings are actually caused by "weather

balloons," but that is a bucket of manure if I ever heard one. (That'S

just a figure of speech, of course. I realize that manure is silent.)

Answer this question honestly: Have you, or has any member of your

immediate family, ever seen a weather balloon? Of course not. Nobody

has. Yet if these so-called authorities were telling the truth, the

skies over America would be dark with weather balloons. Commercial

aviation would be impossible. Nevertheless, the authorities trot out

this tired old explanation, or an even stupider one, every time a flying

saucer is sighted:

NEW YORK--Authorities say that the gigantic luminous

Object flying at tremendous speeds in the skies of

Manhattan last night, which was reported by more than

seven million people, including the mayor, a Supreme

Court justice, several bishops, thousands of airline

pilots, brain surgeons, and certified public

accountants, was simply an unusual air-mass

inversion. "That's all it was, an air-mass

inversion," said the authorities, in unison. Asked

why the people also reported seeing the words, "WE

ARE ALIEN BEINGS WHO COME IN PEACE WITH CURES FOR ALL

YOUR MAJOR DISEASES AND A CARBURETOR THAT GETS 450

MILES PER GALLON HIGHWAY ESTIMATED" written on the

side of the object in letters over three hundred feet

tall, the authorities replied, "Well, it could also

have been a weather balloon."

Wake up, America! There are no weather balloons! Those are alien

beings! They are all around us! I'm sure most of you have seen the

movie E.T., which is the story of an alien who almost dies when he falls

into the clutches of the American medical-care establishment, but is

saved by preadolescent boys. Everybody believes that the alien is a

fake, a triumph of special effects. But watch the movie closely next

time. The alien is real! The boys are fakes! Real preadolescent boys

would have beaten the alien to death with rocks.

Yes, aliens do exist. And high government officials know they exist

but have been keeping this knowledge top secret. Here is the Untold

Story:

Years ago, when the alien-broadcast program began, government

scientists decided to broadcast a message that would be simple, yet would

convey a sense of love, universal peace, and brotherhood: "Have a nice

day." They broadcast this message over and over, day after day, year

after year, until one day they got an answer:

DEAR EARTH PERSONS:

OKAY. WE ARE HAVING A NICE DAY. WE ALSO HAVE A NUMBER OF EXTREMELY

SOPHISTICATED WEAPONS, AND UNLESS YOU START BROADCASTING SOMETHING MORE

INTERESTING, WE WILL REDUCE YOUR PLANET TO A VERY WARM OBJECT THE SIZE OF

A CHILD'S BOWLING BALL.

REGARDS,

THE ALIENS

So the scientists, desperate for something that would interest the

aliens, broadcast an episode of "I Love Lucy," and the aliens loved it.

They demanded more, and soon they were getting all three major networks,

and the Earth was saved. There is only one problem: the aliens have

terrible taste. They love game shows, soap operas, Howard Cosell, and

"Dallas." Whenever a network tries to take one of these shows off the

air, the aliens threaten to vaporize the planet. This is why you and all

your friends think television is so awful. It isn't designed to please

you: it's designed to please creatures from another galaxy. You know the

Wisk commercial, the one with the ring around the collar, the one that is

so spectacularly stupid that it makes you wonder why anybody would dream

of buying the product? Well, the aliens love that commercial. We all

owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who make Wisk. They have not

sold a single bottle of Wisk in fourteen years, but they have saved the

Earth.

Very few people know any of this. Needless to say, the Congress has

no idea what is going on. Most congressmen are incapable of eating

breakfast without the help of several aides, so we can hardly expect them

to understand a serious threat from outer space. But if they go ahead

with their plan to cancel the alien-broadcast program, and the aliens

miss the next episode of "General Hospital," what do you think will

happen? Think about it. And have a nice day.

THE COMPUTER: IS IT TERMINAL?

To the uninitiated, computers appear to be complicated and boring.

As usual, the uninitiated are right. Computers are complicated and

boring, and nothing here will even come close to making them

understandable and interesting, unless you are one of those wimpy types

who carry mechanical pencils and do the puzzles in Scientific American.

Computers affect you in many ways. When you call an airline to

reserve a seat on a flight, a computer answers the phone and announces

that all the lines are busy; a computer puts on a tape of Cheery Music,

the kind you hear in supermarkets and discount stores, featuring an

eighty-two-minute rendition of "Tie a Yellow Ribbon 'Round the Old Oak

Tree" by the Drivel Singers; and a computer tells the airline person that

whatever flight you want is full. In the Colonial Era, all these tasks

had to be performed by hand.

THE FIRST COMPUTER

Though few people realize it--I certainly don't--the first computer

was invented more than five thousand years ago by the Chinese. It was

called an "abacus," which is an ancient Greek name. (That's how the

ancient Greeks got all the credit for civilization. As soon as another

culture invented something, the ancient Greeks would come roaring up and

name it.) The abacus is a frame containing a series of parallel wires

with beads on them. The ancient Chinese would sit around and push the

beads back and forth on the wires. Eventually they were overrun by

Mongol hordes.

THE SECOND COMPUTER

The origins of the second computer are shrouded in mystery. If any

of you ethnic groups want to take credit for it, go ahead, but when you

get ready to name it you should check around for ancient Greeks.

MODERN COMPUTERS

Modern computers can do everything from ruining your credit rating

forever to landing a nuclear warhead on your porch. They operate on the

Binary System, which uses only zeroes and ones: To a computer, "4" is

"100," "7" is "111," and so on. Your kids are learning this crap in

school.

Computers save us a lot of time. To do the amount of calculating a

computer can do in one hour, 400 mathematicians would have to work 24

hours a day for 600 years, even longer if you let them go to the

bathroom. And computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists

tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By "they" I mean

"computers": I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.) My

question is, What will we talk to computers about?

HUMAN: How are you?

COMPUTER: Fine. And you?

HUMAN: Fine. Say, do you play golf?

COMPUTER: No. Do you know what 7,347 divided by 52 is?

HUMAN: No.

COMPUTER: It'S 141.28846.

HUMAN: I think I'll go play some golf.

COMPUTERS TAKING OVER THE WORLD

Some people are concerned that computers may get so smart they'll

take over the world. Computer technicians say this can't happen: they

point out that computers can't even beat humans at chess. But computer

technicians work among huge computers capable of administering powerful

electric shocks, so they say whatever the computers tell them to. The

truth is computers are taking over the world. At night they talk to each

other in binary code:

FIRST COMPUTER: Let's let the morons beat us at chess again.

SECOND COMPUTER: Good idea. Say, how are we doing with the calculators

and digital watches?

FIRST compuTER: They're ready whenever we are.

BRING BACK CARL'S PLAQUE

Let's say we put Carl Sagan into a rocket and send him out to

retrieve Pioneer 10 before we all get killed.

For those of you beer-swilling semiliterates who don't know what I'm

talking about, let me explain that Pioneer 10 is a space probe that

recently left the solar system, and Carl Sagan is a famous science

personality who goes on public television and earns big buckeroos

explaining the universe. Carl's technique is to use the word "billion" a

lot. It's written into his contract that he gets to say "billion" an

average of twice per sentence, so the viewers won't forget what a deep

thinker he is.

Carl will pick up a golf ball, and he'll say, "To most of you, this

golf ball is a mere golf ball, but it actually contains a billion billion

billion billion tiny particles. If each of these particles were the size

of a grapefruit, my hand would have to be a billion billion billion

billion billion times the size of the Houston Astrodome to hold them all.

This should give you a rough idea of the kind of heavy thinking I'm doing

all day while you're trying to decide whether to have spaghetti or tuna

surprise. Billion billion billion. Good night."

People listen to Carl prattling on this way, and they naturally

conclude he's some kind of major genius. That's what got us into this

space-probe trouble that's going to get us all killed.

See, when they decided to send Pioneer 10 up, Carl sold the

government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if

alien beings found it they'd be able to locate the Earth. This is easily

the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government,

surpassing even the time a bunch of scientists convinced Gerald Ford we

were going to have the legendary swine flu epidemic, which eventually had

to be canceled due to a lack of actual germs.

What I'm saying is that the last thing we need is alien beings. I

don't know about you, but in the vast majority of the movies I've seen,

the alien beings have turned out to be disgusting. A whole lot of them

have tentacles, and those are the good-looking ones. Some of them are

just blobs of slime. Almost all of them are toxic.

So it's all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it

would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he'd change his mind

pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door. I bet he'd

be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.

But the really bad part is what they put on the plaque. I mean, if

we're going to have a plaque, it ought to at least show the aliens what

we're really like, right? Maybe a picture of people eating cheeseburgers

and watching "The Dukes of Hazzard." Then if aliens found it, they'd

say, "Ah. Just plain folks."

But no. Carl came up with this incredible science-fair-wimp plaque

that features drawings of--you are not going to believe this--a hydrogen

atom and naked people. To represent the entire Earth! This is crazy!

Walk the streets of any town on this planet, and the two things you will

almost never see are hydrogen atoms and naked people. On top of that,

the man on the plaque is clearly deranged. He's cheerfully waving his

arm, as if to say, "Hi! Look at me! I'm naked as a jaybird!" The woman

is not waving, because she's obviously embarrassed. She wishes she'd

never let the man talk her into posing naked for this plaque.

So that's it, gang. That's the plaque that's supposed to tell the

aliens what you're like. Now if Pioneer 10 is picked up, I figure it

will be picked up by some kind of Intergalactic Police, the alien

equivalent of rural police officers. They'll look at it, and they'll

say, "Looks to me like what we got here is we got a race of

hydrogen-obsessed pervert science wimps who force the women to go around

naked and probably say 'billion' a lot. I say we vaporize their planet

and then ooze over to the diner for something to eat."

And that will be that, unless we send Carl out to retract the

plaque, or at least explain that it represents only him and a few close

friends. We can do it. A nation that can land a man on the moon can

remove Carl Sagan from the solar system. I've given this a lot of

thought. Billion billion billion.

SOCKET TO THEM

TODAY'S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION IS, What in the world is electricity?

And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important

electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet,

then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental

fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried

out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful

force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an

important electrical lesson.

It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you

scuffed your feet, you picked up a batch of "electrons," which are very

small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will

attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect

in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend's

filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus

completing the circuit.

AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough

without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your

finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about, unless you

have carpeting.

Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios,

mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any

of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug

them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin

Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious

electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same

force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that

he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny

saved is a penny earned." Eventually, he had to be given a job running

the post office.

After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have

become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp,

James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many

important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Gaivani

discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds

of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the

frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer actually attached to the

frog, which was dead anyway. Gaivani's discovery led to enormous

advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary

surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed,

implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the

pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a

stone.

But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of all was Thomas Edison, who

was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal

education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention, in

1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of

American homes, where it basically just sat until 1923, when the record

was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he

invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant

adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends

electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the

electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part)

sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same

batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since

very few consumers take the time to examine their electricity closely.

In fact, the last year in which any new electricity was generated in the

United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely reselling

it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate

increases.

Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like

Gaivani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For

example, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic

appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a

bulldozer two thousand yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it

to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they

remember to change the power setting from "VAPORIZE BULLDOZER" to

"DELICATE."

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF ...

TODAY'S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION: What causes weather? And who cares?

ANSWER: Primitive man believed that weather was caused by

"high-pressure systems" and "low-pressure systems," which were basically

large, invisible spirits who lived in the sky. Today, however, we know

that weather is caused by Canada, a large, invisible country near

Michigan. Canada's principal activity is exporting cold Canadian air

masses to Chicago, which converts them to weather and distributes them to

the rest of the country. Lately, however, Canada's dominance in the

air-mass-exporting field has been challenged by Japan, which produces

warm Pacific air masses and sells them to California, which uses them to

produce smog and mudslides. Some countries, such as Russia and China,

try to produce their own air masses, but they usually end up importing

used weather from the United States. England imports most of its

weather, but it can afford only rain. Many underdeveloped nations have

no weather at all.

To keep track of the weather, the United States Weather Bureau has

observers in remote outposts all over the world. Once every hour, these

observers go outside, scan the horizon for air masses, then go back

inside and drink. By about midafternoon, most of them can see air masses

and God knows what else on the horizon. The ones who can still operate

their radios transmit their sightings to the Weather Bureau, which wants

to know what the air masses are doing because when two air masses collide

they produce thunder, which can frighten livestock. Sometimes they

collide so hard that they produce lightning. There are many silly

superstitions about lightning, and as a result many people-maybe even

you-are terrified of it. You shouldn't worry. Thanks to modern science,

we now know that lightning is nothing more than huge chunks of

electricity that can come out of the sky, any time, anywhere, and kill

you.

Lightning is especially attracted to people on golf courses, but if

it cannot find a golf course, it will attack anyone wearing loud

clothing. Your best bet is to dress conservatively and spend the rainy

season (September through July) in bars. If you are struck by lightning,

do not panic, because there is always a chance you are not dead. Many

people who get struck by lightning go on to lead happy, productive,

somewhat hairless lives.

The Weather Bureau also sends up satellites that take photographs of

the Earth from several hundred miles up. These photographs provide vital

information. For example, if a photograph shows that there are clouds

over Boston, an experienced meteorologist can determine that the weather

in Boston is cloudy. He can then alert the Boston area to be ready to do

whatever it does in the event of cloudiness.

The only other users of satellite weather photographs are television

weathermen, who use them to stand in front of when they give their

reports:

ANCHORMAN: And now, to fill up five minutes of valuable television time

with information that any moron could get by merely looking out the

window, here is our Channel 14 Insight News Team Weatherman. I

understand you have good news for us, Fred.

WEATHERMAN: Indeed I do, Bob. That low-pressure system that was

threatening to bring rain to the Channel 14 viewing area this

weekend has instead turned into a hurricane and veered westward,

destroying much of Guatemala, so I'm predicting fair skies for the

Channel 14 viewing area.

ANCHORMAN: Hey, terrific.

WEATHERMAN: Now let's take a look at our satellite weather photograph.

As you can see, we have clouds over some areas, but we have no

clouds over other areas, which would indicate that our Channel 14

viewers either do or do not have clouds over their areas, depending

on what areas they are in.

ANCHORMAN: Speaking of the satellite weather photograph, Fred, we have a

letter here from eleven-year-old Gregory Sumpster of Port Weasel.

Gregory wants to know why you show the same photograph night after

night, and why it is identical to a photograph taken over the

Philippines in 1972 that appears on page 113 of Gregory's earth

science textbook, except that the one you show has a crude map of

the Channel 14 viewing area superimposed on top of it.

WEATHERMAN: Ha ha. Good question, Gregory Sumpster of Port Weasel. I'm

always pleased to know that my viewers are interested in the science

of meteorology, even when those viewers turn out to be picky little

snots such as yourself. I'll see if I can come up with an answer to

your very interesting question and wrap it around a rock and throw

it through your bedroom window late some night.

Eat, Drink, and Be Wary

THE ART OF WINE SNOBBERY

If you want to become a rich, pretentious snot--and who

doesn't?--you should learn about wine. Alternatively, you can buy polo

ponies, but the wine approach is better because you won't have to spend

your weekends shoveling huge quantities of polo-pony waste out of the rec

room. Also, you can be pretentious about wine almost anywhere, whereas

your finer restaurants and opera houses generally do not admit polo

ponies.

The study of wine is called "oenology," which sounds like an

unnatural sex act.

POLICE OFFICER: Your honor, we caught this person committing oenology

with a parking meter.

JUDGE: Lock him up.

Some people believe wine is still made by peasants who crush the

grapes with their bare feet, leaving toenails and other disgusting,

disease-ridden peasant-foot debris in the wine. This is, of course,

nonsense. Today's winemakers crush the grapes with modern, hygienic

machines, and add the disease-ridden peasant-foot debris later. The end

product is a delicate and complex collection of subtly interacting

chemicals that, if bottled properly, aged just right and decanted

carefully, rarely tastes as good as cream soda.

Which leads us to two critical facts:

Few people are really all that fond of wine.

Almost nobody can tell the difference between good wine and melted

Popsicles without reading the label.

These facts make it much less expensive for you to become a

pretentious wine-oriented snot, because they mean you don't really need

to buy good wine: all you need is good wine bottles. You can get these

in any of the finer garbage cans. Fill them with cheap wine, the kind

that comes in three-gallon containers with screw-on caps and names like

Zambini Brothers Fruit Wine and Dessert Topping. Some people make a big

fuss about which foods go with white wine and which with red, so buy a

wine that could be taken for either.

When company comes for dinner, grab a bottle at random and make an

elaborate, French-sounding fuss about how you chose it to complement your

menu. Say: "I chose the Escargot '63 rather than the Gareon '72 because

the bonjour of the sil vous platt would bring out the plume de ma tante

of the Cheez Whiz without being too strident for the chili dogs." This

brings up a third critical fact: You can use any sort of blather to

describe wine.

Another good time to be pretentious about wine is when you dine out,

but the trick is to do it without spending much money. Use this

technique: Glance scornfully at the wine list, then ask the waiter for a

wine you know does not exist. Say "We'll start with the Frere Jacques

'68, preferably from the north side of the vineyard." When he says they

don't have it, look at him as though he had asked permission to put his

finger in your nose, then order the most expensive wine on the list.

When he brings it to your table, examine the label for spelling and

punctuation errors. Next smell the cork: if you don't like it, order the

waiter to take it back and splash a little cologne on it.

Finally, take a largish mouthful of wine, swill it around your mouth

for a while, swallow it, tell the waiter it won't do, and demand another

bottle. Keep this up until you have a lot of trouble getting the cork

near enough to your nose to smell it. Then tell the waiter you wouldn't

dream of eating at a restaurant with an inadequate wine cellar, and march

out in a dignified manner, by which I mean without making advances toward

the cigarette machine.

BEER IS THE SOLUTION

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind

is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but

the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

Also, the wheel does not cure the common cold, whereas beer does.

This was proved in a recent experiment in which scientists placed two

groups of cold sufferers in a bowling alley. One group was given all the

beer it could drink, while the other group was given only water. After

two or three weeks, the beer drinkers exhibited no cold symptoms

whatsoever, in fact couldn't even stand up; whereas the water drinkers

had all gone home.

Beer can also be used to halt the nuclear arms race. Right now the

missile negotiators drink coffee, so after three or four cups they get

very snappish, which leads to increased international tension:

RUSSIAN NEGOTIATOR: As I understand your proposal, you wish us to remove

our Thundersquat missiles from Hungary, and in return you will ...

Would you please stop that?

AMERICAN NEGOTIATOR: Stop what?

RUSSIAN: Tinkling your spoon against your saucer. All morning long it's

tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. You sound like the collar on a

flea-infested dog. I can barely hear myself negotiate.

AMERICAN: Is that so? Did it ever occur to you that I might be tinkling

my saucer so that I will not have to listen to you snort the same

wad of mucus back up your nose every twenty-five seconds precisely

by my watch? You cling to that wad as if it had great sentimental

value.

RUSSIAN: Not at all. Let me get rid of it right now. (He blows his nose

on the American proposal.)

In their statements to the press, both sides try to put the best

possible face on things ("RUSSIANS EXPRESS VIEWS ON U.S. PROPOSAL"), but

the truth is they aren't getting anywhere. Now if you give those same

negotiators a keg of beer, after an hour or so you'll see all kinds of

nuclear cooperation:

AMERICAN: Tell you what. You take all your missiles out of France, and

we'll send you over some decent men's suits.

RUSSIAN: Great! Wait a minute. I don't think we have any missiles in

France.

AMERICAN: Then put some in, for God's sake!

RUSSIAN: Okay, but won't that irritate the French?

AMERICAN: Don't worry about the little snots. If they give us any

trouble, we'll have Jerry Lewis shot.

With this kind of cooperation, we'd have a lasting arms agreement in

no time, and all thanks to beer.

THE STORY OF BEER

One day nearly a thousand years ago, two serfs were working the soil

in medieval England when one of them accidentally knocked some grain,

yeast, hops, and sugar into a bucket of water. As the two serfs watched

in fascination, the mixture began to ferment, and some knights rode up

behind them and whacked off their heads with swords, as was the custom in

those days.

"This is hot work," said one of the knights. "I could forsooth get

behind a clean, crisp, cold beverage."

"Begorrah," said another. "Let's go to Germany, where beer was

recently invented."

And so they did, and they thought the new invention was terrific,

except that they had to go to the bathroom all the time, which is

extremely annoying when you are wearing armor. So they decided to quit

being knights and start the Renaissance, yet another of the many fine

benefits we derive from beer.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN BEER

I really don't know. Back in 1981, I sent away for this mail-order

kit that is supposed to enable you to make your own beer at home. I take

this kit out from time to time, to look at it. It's sitting next to me

as I write these words.

The problem is that you need a bunch of empty beer bottles to put

your homemade beer in, so the first thing I always do is go out and buy a

case of beer and start drinking it, to empty the bottles. While I am

doing this I read the kit directions, and I notice that if I start making

beer right now, I won't have any actual beer available to drink for more

than fifteen days. Also I will have to become involved with something

called "wort." So I always decide to stick with store-bought beer and

save my kit for use during an emergency, such as following a nuclear

attack. I hate to be a pessimist, but I, for one, intend to remain fully

prepared for this terrible possibility until I see some clear sign of a

lessening of international tension, such as that the missile negotiators

send out for a pizza.

HOLD THE BEAN SPROUTS

I have figured out how to make several million dollars in the

fast-food business.

First, let me give you a little background. As you know, in the

past twenty years, fast-food restaurants have sprung up everywhere, like

mildew; they have virtually replaced the old-fashioned slow-food

restaurants, where you wasted valuable seconds selecting food from menus

and waiting for it to be specially cooked and being served and eating

with actual knives and forks from actual plates and so on. And why are

the fast-food chains so successful? The answer is simple: They serve

only things that ten-year-olds like to eat.

Fast-food-chain executives were the first to abandon the Balanced

Diet Theory, which was popular with mothers when most of us were young.

Remember? Your mother always fed you a balanced diet, which meant that

for every food she served you that you could stand to eat, she served you

another kind of food you could not stand to eat.

My mother stuck to this principle rigidly. For example, if she

served us something we sort of liked, such as beef stew, she also served

us something we sort of disliked, such as green beans. And if she served

us something we really liked, such as hamburgers, she made sure to also

serve us something we really loathed, such as Brussels sprouts. We kids

feared many things in those days--werewolves, dentists, North Koreans,

Sunday school--but they all paled by comparison with Brussels sprouts. I

can remember many a summer evening when I had eaten my hamburger in

thirty-one seconds and was itching to go outside and commit acts of minor

vandalism with my friends, but I had to sit at the table, staring for

hours at Brussels sprouts congealing on my plate, knowing that my mother

would not let me leave until I had eaten them. In the end, I always ate

them, because I knew she would let me starve to death before she would

let me get out of eating my Brussels sprouts. That's how fervently she

believed in the Balanced Diet Theory. And, in those days, so did

restaurants. When we went out to eat, we kids always ordered hamburgers

and French fries, but they always were accompanied by some alien

substance, such as peas.

But the old-fashioned, slow-food restaurant owners were fools to

believe in the Balanced Diet Theory, because it does not take into

account what people, particularly kids, really want to eat. Kids don't

want to eat wholesome foods: kids want to eat grease and sugar. This is

why, given the choice, kids will eat things that do not qualify as food

at all, such as Cheez Doodles, Yoo-Hoo, Good 'n' Plenty and those little

wax bottles that contain colored syrup with enough sugar per bottle to

dissolve a bulldozer in two hours. As kids grow up, they reluctantly

accept the idea that their diets should be balanced, and by the time they

are thirty-five or forty years old they will eat peas voluntarily. But

all of us, deep in our hearts, still want grease and sugar. That is what

separates us from animals.

And that is why fast-food restaurants are so successful. At

fast-food restaurants, you never run the risk of finding peas on your

plate. You don't even get a plate. What you get is hamburgers and

French fries; these are your primary sources of grease. You get your

sugar from soft drinks or "shakes," which are milk shakes from which the

milk has been eliminated on the grounds that milk has been identified by

the United States Government as a major cause of nutrition.

At first, fast-food restaurants were popular only with wild teenaged

hot rodders who carried switchblade knives and refused to eat Brussels

sprouts. But then the fast-food chains realized they could make much

more money if they could broaden their appeal, so they started running

television ads to convince people, particularly mothers, that fast food

is wholesome. You see these ads all the time: you have your wholesome

Mom and your wholesome Dad and their 2.2 wholesome kids, and they're at

the fast-food restaurant, just wolfing down grease and sugar, and they're

having such a wholesome time that every now and then everybody in the

whole place, including the counterpersons with the Star Trek uniforms,

jumps up and sings and dances out of sheer joy. The message is clear:

you can forget about the old Balanced Diet Theory; it's okay to eat this

stuff.

Lately, the advertisements have started stressing how much variety

you can get at fast-food restaurants. Besides hamburger, you can get

chicken in a hamburger bun, roast beef in a hamburger bun, steak in a

hamburger bun, and fish in a hamburger bun; you can even get an entire

three-part breakfast in a hamburger bun. A fast-food restaurant near me

recently started serving--I swear this is true--veal parmigian in a

hamburger bun. And people are buying it.

This leads me to my plan to make several million dollars. My plan

rests on two assumptions:

People have become so committed to fast food that they don't care what

they eat, as long as it's in a hamburger bun, and

There must be an enormous world glut of green vegetables, since nobody

believes in the Balanced Diet Theory any more.

So I plan to buy several tons of Brussels sprouts, which I figure

would cost a total of six dollars. I'll put them in hamburger buns, then

get some actor to dress up as a clown or some other idiot character and

go on television and urge everybody to rush right over and pay me $1.69

for a Sprout McBun. Before long, kids will be begging their parents to

buy my Brussels sprouts, and I will be rich. I'll bet you wish you had

thought of it.

ROOTING FOR RUTABAGAS

WARNING: This column contains highly sensitive information about

U.S. nuclear strategy and rutabagas.

From time to time, we newspaper columnists obtain classified

government documents that we share with our readers so we can protect the

Public's Right to Know and make large sums of money. A good example is

the famous columnist Jack Anderson, who is always revealing government

secrets:

WASHINGTON--Classified documents recently obtained by

this reporter indicate that Interior Secretary James

glatt is secretly drafting legislation to legalize

the shooting of American Indians for sport.

Over the years, Jack has obtained classified documents proving that

every elected official in the United States is a worthless piece of scum.

He gets classified documents in the mail as often as normal people get

Reader's Digest sweepstakes offers. It has gotten to the point where

high government officials routinely call Jack for information:

PRESIDENT REAGAN: Hello, Jack?

JACK ANDERSON: Hi, Mr. President. What can I do for you today?

REAGAN: Jack, I can't remember the procedure I'm supposed to use if I

want to put the armed forces on Red Alert.

ANDERSON: Let'S See ... here it is. You call 800-411-9789 toll-free, and

you say: "Buford ate a fat newt."

REAGAN: "Buford ate a bat suit?"

ANDERSON: No, that one launches a nuclear attack. It's "fat newt."

REAGAN: "Cat shoot." Got it. Thanks a million, Jack.

ANDERSON: Any time.

I would love to share some classified documents with you, but nobody

ever sends me any. Mostly what I get in the mail is threats to sue me or

kill me, along with the occasional crank letter. I did, however,

recently receive some information that, as far as I know, has not been

revealed in any other column. It concerns a topic that few Americans

know anything about, and government officials never discuss publicly:

rutabagas.

This information came in the form of a press release from the

Ontario Rutabaga Producers' Marketing Board. Ontario is located in

Canada, a foreign country. So what we have is a group of foreign persons

who are trying to influence Americans to buy rutabagas, and possibly even

eat them.

Rutabagas, which belong to the turnip family, are fat roots ("Buford

ate a fat root") that grow underground in Canada, which is Mother

Nature's way of telling us she does not want us to eat them. Rutabagas

have never been really big in America. Most Americans can go for days at

a time without even thinking about them. Unless you live in a community

where recreational drug use is widespread, you almost never hear anybody

say: "Gee, I'd love to accept those free tickets to the final game of the

World Series, but I want to get right home for dinner. We're having

rutabagas."

The Ontario rutabaga producers are trying to influence American

opinion by planting prorutabaga statements in newspaper food sections.

This is fairly easy to do, because food-section editors are desperate for

new recipes. There are only about eight dishes that Americans will

actually eat, and all the food sections have printed every possible

variation of the recipes, so nowadays they'll print anything:

SPAM, WHEAT CHEX ADD ZEST TO SPICY GRAPEFRUIT STEW

So the food sections will be easy prey for the rutabaga producers.

Fairly soon, you will begin seeing statements like these, taken from the

press release: "Ontario rutabagas give you good taste and good food value

in cold, wet winters ... as a fresh snack or served in exciting gourmet

dishes ... covered in a thin wax coating ... use a good sharp knife to

cut off the purple top ..." Your children will read these statements,

and then one cold, wet winter day they will come home, refuse the plate

of good, traditionally American Twinkles you have thoughtfully prepared,

and demand instead that you whack the purple tops off of wax-covered

Canadian roots and serve them as snacks.

And as sure as night follows day, once we start eating rutabagas,

there will be nothing to prevent us from going directly to leeks. I

recently obtained an extremely proleek press release from an outfit that

calls itself the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, which is

headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, but obviously takes its orders

directly from a foreign government, because it openly uses words such as

"vichyssoise." Here is a direct quotation, which I would refuse to print

if the national interest were not at stake: "The Scottish use leeks in a

traditional favorite, Cock-a-Leekie Soup, which has many delicious

variations." If you start hearing talk like this from your children,

don't say I didn't warn you.

I could go on--I could tell you about the California Dried Fig

Advisory Board, which recently blanketed the nation with a document

called the "Fig News"--but I don't have the space. I will do my best to

keep you abreast of this important story until Jack Anderson picks it up,

or I am found stabbed to death with a good, sharp, purple-stained knife.

Traveling Light

VACATION RESERVATIONS

This is the time of year to gather up your family and all your

available money and decide what you're going to do on your summer

vacation. You should get an opinion from everybody, including your

children, because, after all, they are family members too, even though

all they do is sit around and watch television and run up huge

orthodontist bills and sneer at plain old affordable U.S. Keds sneakers,

demanding instead elaborate designer athletic footwear that costs as much

per pair as you paid for your first car. On second thought, the heck

with what your children want to do. You can notify them of your vacation

plans via memorandum.

The cheapest vacation is the kind where you just stay home, avoiding

the hassle and expense of travel and getting to know each other better as

a family and gagging with boredom. Another option is to put the whole

family into the car and take a trip. That's what my family did, back in

the fifties. We usually went to Florida, which has a lot of tourist

attractions, always announced by large, fading roadside signs:

SEE THE WORLD'S OLDEST SHELL MUSEUM

AND SNAKE RODEO--1 MILE

We had a system for car travel. My father would drive; my mother

would periodically offer to drive, knowing that my father would not let

her drive unless he went blind in both eyes and lapsed into a coma; and

my sister and I would sit in the backseat and read Archie comic books for

the first eleven miles, then punch each other and scream for the

remaining 970. My father tended to stop at a lot of tourist attractions,

so he could walk around and smoke cigarettes and try to persuade himself

not to lock my sister and me in the trunk and abandon the car.

I bet we stopped at every tourist attraction in Florida. A lot of

them involved alligators, which are as common in Florida as retirees.

You'd pay your money and go into this fenced-in area that was rife with

alligators, which sounds dangerous but wasn't, because alligators are the

most jaded reptiles on earth. They'd just lie around in the muck with

their eyes half open, looking like they'd been out playing cards and

drinking for four consecutive nights. Sometimes, to liven things up, a

tourist-attraction personnel would wrestle an alligator. This was always

advertised as a death defying feat, but the alligators never seemed

interested. They would just lie there, hung over, while the

tourist-attraction personnel dragged them around for a few minutes. It

was as exciting as watching somebody move a large carpet. I would have

much preferred to watch two tourist-attraction personnel wrestle each

other, and I imagine the alligators would have agreed.

These days, the tourist attractions in Florida are much more

educational. For example, Disney World has rides where you get in these

little cars and travel through a gigantic replica of a human heart,

pausing in the aorta to see an electronic robot imitate Abraham Lincoln

giving the Gettysburg Address, then zipping down a chute and splashing

into a pond. Another educational thing to do on vacation is visit an

authentic colonial historic site, where people in authentic colonial garb

demonstrate how our ancestors made candles by hand. I'd say one historic

site is plenty, because, let's face it, after you've watched people make

candles for a few minutes, you're ready to go back to watching people

haul alligators around.

Your biggest vacation expenses, besides tourist-attraction admission

fees, are food and lodging. You can keep your food costs down by eating

at one of the many fine roadside stands, such as the Dairy Queen, the

Dairy Freeze, The Frozen Dairy Queen, the Freezing King of the Dairy, the

Dairy King, the Dozing Fairy Queen, and so on. Although many

nutrition-conscious parents worry that the food sold at these stands is

nothing more than sugar, the truth is that it also contains more than the

minimum daily adult requirement of gelatin, which builds the strong

fingernails children need in the backseat on long car trips.

Lodging is a trickier problem. if you don't mind outdoor pit

toilets, you can stay at public campsites. On the other hand, if you

don't mind outdoor pit toilets, you need psychiatric help. You can also

look for cheap motels, the ones that have rooms for six dollars a night,

but generally these rooms have 1952 Philco televisions and large tropical

insects. So your best bet is to stay with friends or relatives. if you

have no friends or relatives where you plan to vacation, you can still

get free lodging if you use this proven system: Make a list of ten random

names and addresses, with yours at the top. Then obtain the telephone

directory for the area you want to visit, pick a dozen names at random,

and send each one a copy of your list and this letter:

"Do not throw away this letter! This is a chain letter! It was

started by nuns shortly after the Korean War, and it has NEVER BEEN

BROKEN! To keep the chain going, all you have to do is provide lodging

for a week for the family at the top of the enclosed list! Within a

year, YOU will receive 1,285,312 offers of free lodging, enough free

lodging to last for the rest of your life! If you break the chain, you

will die a horrible death!"

That should get you all the lodging you need. Have a swell trip,

and be sure to write.

TRIP TO BALMY CALIFORNIA

If you're looking for ways to develop a serious drinking problem, I

urge you to take a small child across the country in an airplane. My

wife and I did this recently, in an effort to get to California. We had

heard that California contains these large red trees. Our vacation

objective was to go out, look at the trees, and return to Pennsylvania

without being assaulted by mass murderers, which abound in California.

One problem was that we missed our plane because it took off an hour

and a half before our tickets said it would. I'm still not sure why. It

was just one of those mysterious things that happen all the time in the

world of commercial aviation. Maybe the airlines have so many delayed

flights that every now and then they let one take off early just to even

things out. All I know is that it looked as if our vacation was over

before it began, which was fine with me, because our two-year-old son,

Robert, had already gone into Public Behavior Mode, which is a snotty

behavior pattern that modern children get into because they know that

modern parents aren't allowed to strike them in public for fear of being

reported to the police as child abusers.

While Robert was running around the airport looking for electrical

outlets to stick his fingers into, an airlines person arranged to put us

on a plane bound for St. Louis. We were not really interested in going

to St. Louis, because the principal tourist attraction there is an arch.

I once paid money and waited on line to go up to the top of this arch,

and when I finally got there, I realized that (a) St. Louis looks

basically the same from the top of the arch as from on the ground, only

flatter; and (b) I had no way of knowing whether the people who built

this arch were serious, competent arch builders or merely close friends

and relations of the mayor whose arch would collapse at any moment. So I

got back down, and have felt no great need to go to St. Louis since. But

the airlines person assured us that St. Louis is in the same general

direction as California. I think he mainly wanted to get Robert out of

the airport.

The flight to St. Louis was uneventful, except that Robert and

several other children were much more disruptive than terrorist hijackers

and a passenger at the back of the plane died in what I believe was an

unrelated incident. Also, my wife was fairly nervous. She doesn't

believe that planes can actually fly, on the grounds that they are

enormous objects filled with people, suitcases, and airline food, which

is a very heavy kind of food, the idea being that if the passengers are

given food that takes a long time to chew, they won't get bored. Despite

my wife's concerns, we made it to St. Louis, where the airlines

personnel, in another commercial-aviation mystery, put us in the

first-class section of a plane bound for California. First class is for

people who have paid a lot of extra money so they won't have to sit in

the same section as small children. Robert sensed this immediately and

went into Extended Public Behavior Mode, a mode that baffles medical

science because in it a child can cry for more than forty-five minutes

without inhaling. Robert wanted the stewardess to open the airplane

door, only we were 35,000 feet in the air. After a while, I got the

impression the stewardess was seriously considering opening the door for

him anyway.

Eventually we got to California and saw the trees. They were large

and red, just as we had been told. I liked them better than the St.

Louis arch, because you didn't have to go up in them. Robert liked them

because they were surrounded by reddish, clingy dirt that you can get

into your hair and diaper really easily.

We also drove down the Pacific coast on a winding road that offered

many spectacular views that I couldn't look at for fear I would plunge

the car into the ocean. Fortunately, my wife took many pictures, and I

intend to look at them once we save up enough money to have them

developed.

We planned to end our vacation in Los Angeles, but we never actually

located it. We'd get on a large road and follow the signs that said "Los

Angeles," but we'd always wind up in some place whose name ended in the

letter a, such as Pomona and Ventura, filled with stores selling

waterbeds. I'm sure Los Angeles was around there somewhere, because

you'd need a city with a large population to support a waterbed industry

that big.

We did find Disneyland. Disneyland is basically an enormous

amusement park, except that, thanks to the vision and creative genius of

the immortal Walt Disney, it has clean rest rooms. There are lots of

simulated things to do in Disneyland. We went on a simulated

paddle-wheel riverboat ride through a simulated wild frontier. On the

simulated riverbanks, we saw a scene in which simulated evil Indians had

shot a simulated arrow through the chest of a simulated white settler.

Farther on, we saw some more simulated Indians; the riverboat announcer

identified these as good Indians. I strongly suspect they had been

installed after the evil Indians, when the Disneyland executives decided

they ought to present a more balanced picture. We never saw any evil

white settlers.

The most exciting part of Disneyland for Robert was whenhe he met

Mickey Mouse. Robert had seen mice, but they were small and naked, so

when he was suddenly confronted with this mouse who was wearing a suit

and whose head was the size of a refrigerator carton, he was very

concerned. He still talks about it. "That big mouse," he says. He'll

probably carry the memory for the rest of his life. Someday he may even

sue.

Finally, it was time to leave sunny California, so we got on another

plane that did not leave at the time shown on our tickets. But it also

didn't stop in St. Louis, so we were pleased. We plan to go again

sometime, when Robert has reached a more appropriate age, such as forty.

THE PLANE TRUTH

There are many things you can do during a long airplane flight to

take your mind off the fact that you are several miles up in the air in a

heavy object built and operated by people you don't even know, people who

could well be insane careless suicidal drug addicts. For one thing, you

can listen to the Safety Lecture given by the flight attendants (who were

known as "stewardesses" before some of them became males) just before the

plane takes off. The flight attendants demonstrate the safety features

of the plane, the main one being little plastic bags that pop out of the

ceiling when the plane starts to crash. You're supposed to put a bag

over your mouth and breathe from it; this ensures that you will have an

adequate supply of oxygen until the plane hits the ground at three or

four hundred miles an hour. Another safety feature is that the seats

float, so the airline can retrieve them if the plane Crashes into the

ocean.

When you get right down to it, the Safety Lecture is a silly idea.

I mean, if the passengers really thought the plane was going to crash,

they wouldn't get on it in the first place, let alone learn how to get an

adequate oxygen supply on the way down. As a result, most passengers pay

no attention whatsoever to the safety lecture. The flight attendants

know this, and, out of sheer boredom, they long ago stopped reading the

Official Safety Lecture Script. Next time you're on a plane, listen

closely to what they actually say:

"Hi, I'm Debbie, the chief flight attendant, and on behalf of the

entire crew I'd like to welcome you aboard Flight 302 to Bermuda. Much

of our flight will be over water, so I'd like to remind you that if we do

crash, there is an excellent chance that those of us who survive will be

eaten by sharks. Please note that various windows are designated as

emergency exits, the kind that have been known to pop open for no good

reason at extremely high altitudes. Now if you will look at the front of

the cabin, one of the flight attendants will demonstrate how to seal

Tupperware containers. Thank you and we hope you enjoy the flight."

After the Safety Lecture comes the takeoff, which is terrifying

until you realize that the pilot has probably taken off thousands of

times without a mishap, which means that the odds of a mishap occurring

get better every time. Once you're in the air, you get the Pilot's

Message:

"Good afternoon, this is Pilot Horvel Grist speaking. My copilot

and I are up here with a whole batch of dials and gauges and controls of

every kind, but everything seems to be pretty much the way they described

it in Pilot School. We'll be cruising along at an altitude of

thirty-eight thousand knots, and we should reach our destination just

about on schedule, after which we'll circle it for five or six hours.

That large object we're passing over right now is Pittsburgh. Or the

Grand Canyon. We'll let you know once we pin it down."

Sometimes the pilot lets you listen in on his conversations with Air

Traffic Control. Pilots are always talking to Air Traffic Control to

make sure they go in the right directions and don't whack into anything

in midair. These conversations are conducted in crisp, professional

language:

PILOT: Come in, Air Traffic Control. This is a great big jet up in the

sky.

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: A great big what?

PILOT: Jet.

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: Oh, jet. I thought you said pet. I was

picturing this huge Russian wolfhound whizzing around up there.

PILOT (panicking): Did you say there's a huge Russian missile in the air?

AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER (Screaming): My God! There's a huge Russian

missile in the air! Somebody notify the Strategic Air Command!

PILOT: I'm going to try to land on the Interstate.

Another fun thing to do during long plane trips is read the

paperback books they sell in airports. There are three kinds:

Spy thrillers, in which evil people, usually Nazis left over from

world War II, nearly blow up the world or kill the President or the Pope.

If airport books are any indication, there are at least 450,000 evil Nazi

World War II geniuses still at large, many of them with atomic laser

cannons. Look for a large swastika on the cover; this is the publishing

industry's way of letting you know it's a fun book.

Supernatural thrillers, in which the devil possesses people.

Possession by the devil used to be fairly rare--I remember when it was

just that little girl in The Exorcist--but these days it's as common as

strep throat. Before long, we'll have special schools for possessed

people, and the government will start requiring large corporations to

hire them.

Dirty books, in which you can turn to any page at random and start

reading, because you already know what's going to happen, so the only

question is how many times. Dirty-book characters live lives that differ

substantially from yours and mine. For example, if you walk into a

restaurant, you will sit down, order dinner, eat, pay and leave. Here's

what happens to a dirty-book character in a restaurant:

John glanced up from the menu and suddenly realized,

as six statuesque waitresses and two slim Siamese

busboys sidled up to him, that he was the lone

customer in the restaurant. "We have a special

tonight," said one of the waitresses, gesturing

toward the steam table.

The only other way to pass the time on long plane flights is to get

hijacked by armed fanatic terrorists. If you have no armed fanatic

terrorists on your flight, you can liven things up yourself by making

clever hijacking jokes. For example, when the flight attendants serve

dinner, you can stand up and wave your chicken pie aloft, announcing in a

loud voice that it is actually an explosive device that you plan to

detonate unless the plane goes to Zaire. The airplane crew will find

this a very amusing diversion from the boring routine, and will give you

lots of extra attention. Another benefit is that you won't have to eat

the chicken pie, which probably tastes like an explosive device anyway.

DESTINATION: MAYBE

I fly a lot, because of the nature of my job. I'm a gnat.

Ha ha. Just a little humor there to introduce today's topic, which

is air travel. As a business person, I have to travel by air a lot

because modern corporations have many far-flung plants. The plants are

flung as far as possible so modern corporation presidents will have an

excuse to fly around the country in corporate jets drinking martinis at

550 miles an hour. The rest of us have to fly via commercial airliner,

which is less pleasant because federal law requires commercial airliners

to carry infants trained to squall at altitudes above two hundred feet.

This keeps the passengers calm, because they're all thinking, "I wish

somebody would stuff a towel into that infant's mouth," which prevents

them from thinking, "I am thirty-five thousand feet up in the air riding

in an extremely sophisticated and complex piece of machinery controlled

by a person with a Southern accent."

Actually, there's nothing to worry about, except the possibility

that all the engines will fail at once and the plane will drop like a

rock. And even if this happens, airplanes have all kinds of backup

safety devices, by which I mean little masks that pop out of the ceiling.

You're supposed to put one of these over your mouth so the pilot won't

hear you screaming while he radios for instructions on how to get the

engines started again, assuming the radio still works. So you're

actually much safer flying in an airplane than riding in a car, although

needless to say this ceases to be true once the airplane hits the ground.

But as long as the plane is in the air and the engines are going, the

only bad thing that can happen is that it will fly into another plane,

which is why we have air traffic controllers.

In the old days, air traffic controllers sat and stared at little

radar screens so long that they eventually went crazy, so Ronald Reagan,

who is firmly opposed to having crazy federal employees below the Cabinet

level, fired them all and got a new batch. Needless to say the new

controllers don't want to make the same mistake as their predecessors, so

they've learned how to relax on the job. Their motto is "Tomorrow is

another day," and their approach is low-key:

PiLoT: This is Flight 274, requesting landing instructions.

CONTROLLER: Well, if it was me, I would put the wheels down first, but

don't quote me on that.

PILOT: No, I already know how to land I was hoping you could tell me

which runway I should land on.

CONTROLLER: Ah. Let me just turn on the little screen here, and ...

There we are. Say, is that you about to plow into the mountain?

PILOT: No.

CONTROLLER: Oh. That must be one of Bob's. (Yelling to another

controller.) Bob, could you turn your screen on for a second? One

of your planes is about to ... Wait, forget it.

PILOT: Um, look, we're running out of fuel here, so I'd really appreciate

it if you could possibly ...

CONTROLLER: Hey, lighten up, will you? Do you want to make me tense and

crazy so Reagan can fire me? (Yelling to other controllers.) Hey,

guys! I think I got a Republican here! (Laughter in background,

shouts of "Steer him into the mountain!")

PILOT: Look, please

CONTROLLER: Hey, no sweat. We're just having some fun. I'll get back to

you with a runway right after my break.

PILOT: But

CONTROLLER: (Click.)

Here are some tips for making your trip more enjoyable:

Never believe anything airline employees say about when a plane will

land or take off. No matter how badly the schedule is screwed up, they

will claim everything is fine, because otherwise you might realize it

would be faster to walk to your destination. Let's say you're waiting

for Flight 206, which is an hour late, and you ask an agent at the ticket

counter when it's due in. He'll punch a few buttons on his computer,

which will give him this message: "FLIGHT 206 HAS CRASH-LANDED ON A

REMOTE CORAL REEF IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AND ALL THE TIRES ARE FLAT AND THE

ENGINES ARE BROKEN AND THE PASSENGERS AND CREW ARE BEING HELD AT GUNPOINT

BY PALESTINIAN HIJACKERS ARMED WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THERE IS A VERY

HEAVY FOG." The agent will look you cheerfully in the eye and say: "It

should be here any minute now."

Never let anybody take your luggage. Airline employees will

continually try to snatch it from you; you must ward them off with a

stiff forearm and flee on foot. If they corner you, toss your luggage

out the window, or set it on fire--anything to prevent it from falling

into their hands, because God alone knows what will happen to it then.

Never pull out a machine gun and fire thirty thousand rounds into the

leech-like cult members who approach you in airports and try to get you

to give them money. Some stray bullets could conceivably hit innocent

bystanders, and then you would feel terrible.

The Sporting Life

UNSPORTSMANLIKE CONDUCT

I first got involved in organized sports in fifth grade, when,

because of federal law, I had to join the Little League. In Little

League we played a game that is something like baseball, except in

baseball you are supposed to catch, throw and hit a ball, whereas most of

us Little Leaguers could do none of these things.

Oh, there were a few exceptions, fast-developing boys with huge

quantities of adolescent hormones raging through their bodies, causing

them to have rudimentary mustaches and giving them the ability to throw a

ball at upwards of six hundred miles an hour, but with no idea whatsoever

where it would go. These boys always got to pitch, which presented a

real problem for the rest of us, because in Little League the pitcher

stands eight feet from home plate. The catcher got to wear many

protective garments, and the umpire got to wear protective garments and

hide behind the catcher. But all we batters got to wear was plastic

helmets that fell off if we moved our heads.

I hated to bat. I used to pray that the kids ahead of me would

strike out, or that I would get appendicitis, or that a volcano would

erupt in center field before my turn came. I was very close to God when

I was in Little League. But sometimes He would let me down, and I'd have

to bat. In the background, the coach would yell idiot advice, such as

"Keep your eye on the ball." This was easy for him to say: he always

stood over by the bench, well out of harm's way.

I made no effort to keep my eye on the ball. I concentrated

exclusively on avoiding death. I would stand there, trying to hold my

head perfectly still so my helmet wouldn't fall off, and when the

prematurely large kid who was pitching let go of the ball, I would swing

the bat violently, in hopes of striking out or deflecting the ball before

it could smash into my body. Usually I struck out, which was good,

because then I could go back to the safety of the bench and help the

coach encourage some other terrified kid to keep his eye on the ball. I

much preferred to play in the field, especially the outfield. If a

batter got a hit, you could run like a maniac, and the odds were that

you'd be several hundred feet away from the ball by the time it landed.

I understand that Little League was supposed to teach me the rules

of sportsmanship. The main rule of sportsmanship I learned was: Never

participate in a sport where the coach urges you to do insane and

dangerous things that he himself does not do. Football is another good

example. If you watch a football game, you'll notice that the coaches

constantly urge the players to run into each other at high speeds, but

the coaches themselves tend to remain on the sidelines.

So after I fulfilled my legal commitment to Little League, I avoided

organized sports and got my exercise in the form of minor vandalism. But

when I got to high school, I discovered that I had to go out for an

organized sport so I could be called up to the auditorium stage during

the annual athletic awards assembly to receive a varsity letter.

I cannot overemphasize the importance the kids in my high school

attached to varsity letters. You could be a bozo of astonishing

magnitude, but if you had a varsity letter, you were bound to succeed

socially. Oh, the school administrators tried to make academic

achievements seem important, too. They'd have academic assemblies, where

they'd call all the studious kids up onto the stage. But the rest of the

kids were unimpressed. They'd sit there, wearing their varsity sweaters,

and hoot and snicker while some poor kid with a slide rule dangling from

his belt got the Math Achievement Award. No, to make it in my high

school you had to have a varsity letter, which meant you had to go out

for a sport.

So in my sophomore year I went out for track, because track was the

sport where you were least likely to have something thrown at you or have

somebody run into you at high speed. The event I chose was the long

jump, because all you had to do was run maybe fifty feet, after which you

leaped into a soft pit. That was it. The long jump was far superior to

the other events, in which you were required to run as much as a mile

without stopping.

Anyway, I spent a happy spring, leaping into the pit and dreaming

about going up on the stage to get my varsity letter. Then one day we

all piled into buses and rode, laughing and gesturing at motorists, to a

rival school for a track meet. This proved to be my downfall, because it

turned out that at track meets they measured how far we long jumpers

jumped, and only the three longest jumpers got points, which you needed

to get your varsity letter. I was not one of the three longest jumpers.

I was not one of the ten longest jumpers. In fact, they could have

pulled people out of the crowd, old people with arthritis, and they

probably would have jumped farther than I did.

So that was the end of my involvement with organized sports.

Fortunately, there was one other avenue to popularity in my high school,

which was to drink several quarts of beer, go to a dance, and behave in

such an extremely antisocial manner that you got thrown out by the

assistant principal in full view of hundreds of admiring kids. So in the

end I achieved social acceptance.

After I got out of high school, varsity letters seemed less

important, and academic achievement started to seem more important. I

mean, if you go to a cocktail party and subtly contrive to flash your

varsity letter, people will think you are a jerk; whereas if you subtly

contrive to flash your Phi Beta Kappa key, people will still think you

are a jerk, but an educated jerk.

I often wonder what my former classmates do with their varsity

letters, now that they're out of high school. Maybe they wear them in

the privacy of their homes. Why not? I still drink beer.

FOOTBALL DEFLATED

Once again it is time for Americans of all races and religions to

set aside their petty differences and spend half a day drinking beer and

watching large persons injure each other's knees. You guessed it: it's

Super Bowl time.

The Super Bowl is an American tradition, like heart disease. You

need not know anything about football to enjoy it. I know very little

about football, and I intend to write a whole column about it and get

paid for it.

First, let's talk about the word "football." In most nations, when

people say "football," they mean "soccer," which is a completely

different game in which smallish persons whiz about on a field while the

spectators beat each other up and eventually overthrow the government. I

don't know why the other nations call soccer "football," but I suspect it

has something to do with the metric system and I say the hell with it.

Modern American football was invented by college students. This

should surprise nobody. There are no depths of idiocy to which college

students will not sink. You're always reading about them in the

newspapers:

FORT STUCCO, TEXAS--Members of Beta Beta Zoot

Fraternity here at Dunderson State Cultural

Astronomical and Aeronautical Technical College are

attempting to raise money for charity and get their

names in the Guinness Book of World Records by

setting a record for squatting around in the dirt

drinking beer. They have been at it for eight days

now, or possibly longer; a spokesbrother for the

group said the Beta Betas spend a fair amount of time

squatting in the dirt drinking beer anyway, so nobody

knows for sure when they started doing it for

charity. "We just thought, you know, we do

something, you know, to make the world a better place

and whatnot," he said. "We're gonna give the money

to charity if we get any money and can find a charity

or something to give the money to, if we get any

money." The spokesbrother said the rest of the

student body has supported the effort by not driving

cars over any of the brothers.

Anyway, the first modern intercollegiate American football game was

played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, two schools which are

located in New Jersey, which should also surprise nobody. Rutgers won

that game, and Princeton won the rematch a week later, but both schools

were barred from postseason bowl competition because of recruiting

violations.

Over the next hundred years or so football saw a great many major

innovations and refinements that are too boring to even think about.

Along the way professional football came into being so the largest and

most violent college players would have a way to earn money other than

simply demanding it from innocent civilians.

Today the National Football League has several dozen teams, which

play games starting in about August and running right through to January.

This presents many scheduling problems, because some of the teams are in

warm places where everybody wants to play, and some are in cold places

where nobody wants to play. Along about December you'll have four or

five teams showing up to play the Miami Dolphins and none showing up to

play the Minnesota Vikings. So what happens is Dolphins end up fielding

eleven men who get the stuffing knocked out of them by fifty-five

opponents, while the Vikings win by scores of 12,324 to nothing. This is

called the "home field advantage."

At the end of the season, the teams with the fewest major injuries

meet in the Super Bowl. By this time, of course, the players can barely

walk, let alone run around and knock each other down, so the Super Bowl

is usually pretty awful. To get people to watch, league officials try to

turn it in to a Major Spectacle, along the lines of the fall of the Roman

Empire. I remember one year, during the Nixon administration, when they

had Air Force jet fighters fly over the stadium during the national

anthem. I believe that was also the year that George Allen, one of the

coaches, actually had his players run a play suggested by Nixon. In

Nixon's play, the quarterback gets the ball, then, when the other team's

linemen are about to jump on him, claims that he doesn't have the ball,

in fact has never had the ball, and implies that several of his teammates

may have the ball, but because of National Security they can't talk about

it.

But back to the jets. The trouble with having jets fly over the

stadium during the national anthem is that next year people expect

something even more spectacular, like having the jets shoot down the

Goodyear Blimp. I am not endorsing this idea, you understand. I'm just

explaining football.

GUNNING FOR SAFETY

You need a way to defend yourself, because there is a lot of

violence these days. For example, recently a motorist drove into one of

the bushes on my property in a violent manner. if I had had a gun, I

could have gone out and defended the bush, but as it was I had to stand

there helplessly, unarmed, while the motorist offered to replace it. I

turned down the offer because I hate my bushes, which spend their days

lunging out and scratching at me when I mow the lawn. I periodically go

out with my chain saw and tame them down to the size of poinsettias, but

that just angers them, and within days they are back, bigger and more

hostile than before. To be honest, I wouldn't be bothered in the least

if motorists lobbed grenades at them as they drove by. But that is not

the point. The point is that we all need some way to defend ourselves.

The main reason violence is increasing, of course, is television.

At one time, all the violence was on television and the streets were

safe, because everybody was home watching it. You had shows like

"Starsky and Hutch," where you didn't dare go to the bathroom for fear

you would miss some violence. Starsky and Hutch were police officers who

believed that the only way to stop a crime--robbery, jaywalking, tax

evasion--was to drive their car very fast through a populated area while

shooting their guns out the window. They were very effective, largely

because people refused to go out on the street for fear of being run over

and shot.

But these days they're not allowed to show violence on television

except on Saturday-morning cartoon shows for children aged five and

under. The rest of us are stuck with shows like "Donahue" and "Dallas,"

in which people drone on endlessly about sex but never actually do

anything on the screen. After watching these shows for a few hours,

viewers tend to get bored and go out on the street and commit acts of

violence.

Another reason violence is increasing is electronic arcade games.

Arcade games cause violence because they encourage teenagers to shoot at

alien beings who are trying to destroy the Earth. The teenagers are

getting very good at this. A skilled teenager can defend the entire

planet for a quarter; in contrast, the United States government spends

roughly $100 billion just to defend the Western Europeans, all of whom

hate us. The problem is that the government can get all the dollars it

wants merely by threatening to throw taxpayers in jail, whereas the

teenagers must get their quarters by badgering their parents. Eventually

the parents get irritated, especially if they have been watching

television, and this leads to violence.

How can you defend yourself? One excellent method is to get a

vicious dog. You don't want a large dog, such as a German shepherd,

because large dogs are so accustomed to getting respect that they have

completely forgotten how to attack. They rely entirely on deep growls

and snarls, which are useless against an intruder wearing earplugs or a

Sony Walkman. So what you want to get is a small, insecure dog, such as

a miniature French poodle, which knows how stupid it looks and

consequently hates everybody. If you want it to be really vicious, you

should give it a silly haircut and make it wear a fake-jewel collar and

sit in your lap. After a few days of this, it will attack anything that

moves, including you, but this is a small price to pay for peace of mind.

You can also defend yourself with guns. The U.S. Constitution says

that the government cannot stop you from owning a gun. The courts have

interpreted this to mean that the government can stop you from owning a

gun, so you'd better check your local laws before you buy one. If you do

get a gun, you should join your local Gun Fondlers Club and learn the

Rules of Gun Safety, which are:

1. Never load your gun.

2. Never clean your gun.

3. Never even take your gun out of the box.

4. Never point your gun at anything or anybody except your vicious little

dog if it really gets out of line.

If you don't want to own a gun, you can take up karate, a form of

martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training

can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in

the history of the world. They can also break boards, which could be

very useful if an intruder enters your home and tries to hide behind your

spare lumber so the dog can't get at him. I like the idea of learning to

break boards with my bare hands. It's a skill I might be able to use on

my bushes.

SOMETHING FISHY HERE

Fishing is an excellent way to relax and contemplate the beauty of

nature and get in touch with your inner self and maim and kill fish.

Many people would be much happier if they went fishing. Take Secretary

of State Alexander Haig. He seems awfully tense. I think he should take

four or eight years off, buy several hundred six-packs, and go fishing.

Al would probably shoot the fish with a bazooka, but what the heck, as

long as he doesn't start a nuclear war or something.

It's okay to kill fish. It's not like hunting, where you kill

friendly brown-eyed woodland creatures like Bambi and Thumper who talk in

squeaky little voices. Fish are bad. They go to the bathroom in public

waters, and they eat teenagers, as was demonstrated in the fine nature

movies Jaws I and Jaws II. Besides, fish can't feel anything. I know

this because I took a fish apart once, in biology class. The idea was

that I would find a little fish heart and a little fish stomach and a

little fish nervous system, like the diagram in the biology textbook. I

found none of these things. All I found was glop. Fish are nothing but

little bags of glop swimming around with fish heads in front, so don't

waste your pity.

IMPORTANT NOTE: When I talk about fish, I am not talking about

whales. Whales are mammals: they have feelings and can talk to each

other, just like you and me. The only difference between whales and

humans is that whales mate for life. Some evil foreign persons, such as

the Japanese and the Russians, kill whales. The Japanese use them to

make efficient automobiles, which they force Americans to buy so American

auto workers will lose their jobs. The Russians don't do anything with

their whales. They just use whaling as an excuse to get away from Russia

for a couple of months.

If you want to fish, you have to decide whether to catch freshwater

fish or saltwater fish. The main saltwater fish are tuna, swordfish,

catamaran, eel, oyster, snook, snipe, wahoo, giant clam, and serpent. To

catch them, you have to go to the Bermuda Triangle in a small boat for

several days. If you need more information on this subject, read The Old

Man and the Sea, a book by Ernest Hemingway, a famous dead writer. In

the book, the old man battles a huge fish for a long time, after which

the fish tips the boat over and kills everybody except Ishmael. No,

wait, that's Moby-Dick. Anyway, if you catch a big fish, the government

requires you to have your picture taken with the fish hanging next to you

in case it was stolen. Then you can take it home and either stuff it and

hang it on your wall or, if you have any taste at all, just throw it in

the garbage.

The main freshwater fish are bass, bream, guppy, carp, frog,

muskellunge, piccolo, and crappie. Some people claim there are also

trout, but this Is a mythical fish, like the Loch Ness Monster. Nobody

in recorded history has ever even seen a trout, let alone caught one. I

went "trout fishing" once, with my friend Neil and his uncle Bruce. We'd

wander around these streams, and every now and then Uncle Bruce would

point to a shallow pool of water that any fool could see contained

absolutely no fish. "That's where the trout will be," he'd say, and Neil

and I would stand there and not catch fish for several hours while Uncle

Bruce went back to the tent to drink. I believe his marriage was in

trouble.

Some people still believe in trout. You'll see them out by streams

on the first day of trout season, standing shoulder to shoulder. The

humorous thing is that they think the way to catch these mythical trout

is to wave long strings with fuzzy hooks around in the air. I mean, they

hardly ever even put them in the water, for heaven's sake. If there were

such a thing as a trout, the only way it would get caught is if it leaped

out of the water an grabbed a hook as it flew by.

If you want to fish for fish that actually exist, you'll need either

bait or lures. The best bait is worms, which you can find almost

anywhere worms are found. All you do is impale the worm on the hook,

wait for the little worm screams to die down, and toss it in the water.

The fish will come around and nibble on it until it's gone, then they'll

give the hook a gentle tug to let you know it's time to send another worm

down.

You can also use artificial lures, which are brightly colored

plastic or metal things with hooks on them that are scientifically

designed so they appear to fish to be brightly colored plastic or metal

things with hooks on them. Fish love lures. They gather together in

little lure-appreciation groups, called "schools," and howl with laughter

as the lures go by. It's their major form of entertainment, and they

don't want to lose it, so every now and then they draw lots and the loser

has to bite the lure and get caught. This encourages the fishermen to

continue.

Tips From The Bottom

SERF WANTED

I think everybody should have a career. Careers give you money and

a place to go during weekdays when there's nothing good on television.

No doubt many of you young people out there would like to have

careers, but can't find good jobs to start your careers with. Believe

me, things are much better now than they used to be. In the Middle Ages,

for example, the only good jobs were king and nobleman, and there were

very few openings. So most people had to settle for serf or barbarian.

The help-wanted sections in the Middle Ages newspapers looked like this:

SERF WANTED--Must have experience sleeping with goats

and whacking at soil with stick. Must have own

stick. Goats provided.

BARBARIANS WANTED--Looting, some pilfering. Must get

along well with other members of horde. Apply at

tent of Howard the Unusually Large.

These jobs offered little opportunity to advance. If you were

really good at serf, you might work yourself up to peasant, but that was

about it. If you were really good at barbarian, after twenty years the

head barbarian would give you a gold watch, then kill you and take it

back.

Things are much better today. But you young folks still must be

careful about how you prepare for your careers, because otherwise you may

be misled. For example, you have probably seen those television ads

claiming that if you join the armed forces, you'll get all kinds of

useful career skills. You know the ads I mean: they show people

repairing tanks and jumping out of airplanes at six o'clock in the

morning. Now I'm not saying these are not useful skills: I'm just saying

that executives at major corporations, such as IBM, rarely repair tanks,

and virtually never jump out of airplanes. Successful executives usually

wait until their airplanes have landed.

Another source of bad career advice is school. Your teachers will

tell you that the way to get a good job is to memorize such things as the

capital of Bolivia. Do you think that your average successful corporate

executive can name the capital of Bolivia? Don't be silly. I'll tell

you who can name the capital of Bolivia: your teacher, that's who. Do

you want to be a teacher? Do you want to spend your days trying to

convince a bunch of snotty kids that they should memorize the capital of

Bolivia? Of course not. You want to make large sums of money and have a

nice office with various buttons you can push when you want coffee. So

what you want to do is memorize as little useless information as you can

in school. And as soon as you graduate, you should apply for a job in

the government.

The government is loaded with terrific jobs. For example, you might

want to be an ex-president. Here's a lifetime job, with excellent pay

and benefits, that virtually any incompetent can do. The only real duty

ex-presidents have is to write their memoirs, which nobody ever reads

anyway. If you were an ex-president, you could turn in Volume Four of

the Encyclopedia Britanica (Ceylon-Congreve) and claim it was your

memoirs, and nobody would know the difference.

You could also apply for a job as Supreme Court Justice. The pay is

excellent, and you cannot be fired unless you appear on national

television naked or something. You don't even have to know anything

about the law. If the Chief Justice asked you what you thought about a

particular case, you'd answer: "Oh, I don't know, I can see both sides.

What do you other justices think?" Then you'd vote with the majority.

Your only other duty would be to wear a robe.

If you can't get a good government job, you may have to work for

private industry, which is not as good, because many private employers

expect you to work. The best job, of course, is corporation president,

but even this has its pitfalls. For example, when Lee Iacocca was named

president of Chrysler, he probably thought he would be able to spend his

days sitting in his office, wearing expensive suits and signing the

occasional document. Instead, he is regularly forced to appear in

humiliating television commercials, in which he offers to pay people

money if they will buy his cars.

I think the best private-industry job is construction worker. You

may think this would be a difficult job, involving lifting heavy objects

and assembling buildings. But if you look closely at a construction

site, you'll notice the workers walk around a lot, drink coffee, and yell

to each other, but, because of various clauses in their contracts, they

never actually build anything. I'm not sure who really builds buildings;

I suspect it's done at night, perhaps by serfs.

WEDDING ETIQUETTE

This is an excellent time of year to get married, what with the warm

weather and all. As you may recall, it was around this time of year that

Prince Charles and Princess Diana got married in a ceremony that lasted,

by my calculations, about two weeks. It took Charles nearly a half-hour

just to say "I do":

"I, Charles Arthur Philip George Henry Maurice Billy Bob Norman

Howard Elmer the Third, Duke of the Realm, Defender of the Throne, Earl

of Pillsbury, Lord of the Manse, Prince of a Fellow, Knight of the

Trouser, Top of the Morning, Vice President of Marketing, and much, much

more, do."

If you want to have a nice wedding, a really Special Day, you have

to plan very carefully and follow the rules of wedding etiquette. Here's

what you do:

Getting Engaged

You should get engaged to somebody who has a job and will show up at

the wedding. If you think your fiance is unreliable, get engaged to

several people, because there is no breach of etiquette worse than making

your friends and relatives give you wedding presents and then failing to

go through with it. If you get engaged to several people and they all

show up, take all but one aside, tell them you won't be needing them, and

give them each an inexpensive fondue set (you'll receive dozens as

wedding gifts).

Announcing the Engagement

If you are a member of the working classes and have a name like

Heivina Spackle, the newspapers won't print your engagement announcement,

and you'll have to settle for a three-by-five card on the bulletin board

at the supermarket. So if you want to make the social pages, your best

bet is to use a name like Allison Weatherington-Huffington DuBois and

send in a picture of Julie Andrews.

Choosing a Church

You must do this carefully, because some churches won't let you get

married in them unless you hold certain specific religious beliefs.

Check this out in advance by calling the clergyman:

You: Hello. Could you tell me if you require people to have any specific

religious beliefs?

CLERGYMAN: Why yes, we do.

You: How many?

CLERGYMAN: Let's see ... five, six, seven ... nine in all.

You: Fine. Can you send me a set?

The Invitation

Your invitation should consist of a large envelope containing

several smaller envelopes in random sizes, a piece of tissue paper, and a

card with these words:

Mr. and Mrs. Earl C. Spackle

Request the Honour and Favor

Of Your Attendance at the Marriage

Of Their Daughtour

Heivina Mae

(who is not pregnant)

To Elrood P Budgcood

At the Manor Downs Vista Country Club

And Racquetball Court

Friday at around 4:30

RSVP

No Tank Tops

What the Wedding Party Should Wear

The groom's party should wear pastel senior-prom-style outfits

rented at the shopping mall. The bride's party should wear expensive

dresses so unattractive that they can never be used again, even as

tourniquets.

The Order of the Wedding Procession

The first person down the aisle should be an adorable child

belonging to the sister of the bride. If the bride's sister has no

adorable child, she should rent one. Next comes the sister of the groom

escorted by the maid of honor's boyfriend, followed by the niece of the

maid of honor's boyfriend escorted by the oldest brother of the mother of

the bride, followed by the oldest unmarried bridesmaid escorted by the

youngest male member of the groom's family who has completed at least two

years of college or technical school, followed by the great-grandmother

of the bride (unless she is dead) escorted by the best man, followed, in

order, by anyone else at the back of the church who is wearing nice

clothes.

Who Pays for the Wedding

The family of the bride pays for the church, the clergyman, the

limousines, the bridal gown, the flowers, the reception room, the band,

the photographer, the hors d'oeuvre, the dinner, the cake, the liquor and

the honeymoon. The family of the groom eats a lot and gets tanked.

So there you have them, the rules of wedding etiquette. In a future

column, I'll discuss the other two major etiquette areas, which are

eating and death.

"LOOK! I GOT YOU A GIFT!"

Well, the holiday gift-giving season is upon us once again, like an

outbreak of shingles. Already I have received dozens of colorful

mail-order-gift catalogs urging me to buy bizarre objects and give them

to people. I recently got a catalog featuring enormous cans of popcorn

smeared with caramel, each containing enough carbohydrates to meet the

needs of a medium-sized industrial city for a year. If you want to give

this gift, you just call the catalog people on their toll-free number and

they ship a can to the person of your choice. It never even has to enter

your home.

The question, of course, is, Why would you give such a gift? Do you

know of anybody in the entire United States who would actually want a

huge congealed mass of caramel popcorn? Of course not. This is an

example of a holiday gift, which is an object whose primary purpose is to

be given, not to actually be used. It expresses the ultimate holiday

gift-giving message, which is, "Look! I got you a gift!" Another

example is electric razors. Every year at this time, you see television

commercials wherein a cartoon version of an electric razor shaves a

cartoon face just as well as a cartoon razor blade, and thousands of

women go out and buy $39.95 electric razors and give them to men ("Look!

I got you a gift!"). And the men say, "Great! An electric razor!" Then

they continue to use their nineteen-cent blade razors. They stick the

electric razors into closets with their caramel-covered popcorn.

Men do the same thing to women. Every year I go to the

department-store cosmetics counter, which emits a powerful aroma,

reminiscent of a house of ill repute, and buy my wife one of the thirty

thousand gift packages containing little designer tubes and jars with

names like "Essence of Fragrance Moisturizing Body Cream," "Body of

Essence Cream Moisturizing Fragrance," "Moist Fragrant Body Essential

Creamer," etc. I don't know what these terms mean, and I don't care.

All I know is I can say, "Look! I got you a gift!" I doubt my wife uses

these things, because she lets my two-year-old son play with them, which

means he routinely smells like a house of ill repute, but that's better

than some of the things he smells like, if you get my drift.

But these are not the ultimate Holiday Gifts, because technically

you could actually use them. I mean, you could use caramel-covered

popcorn as attic insulation, and you could use an electric razor to crush

insects. But many of the gifts that spring up in the holiday season

reach a new level, the level of Pure Holiday Gift, which means you can't

use them for anything except possibly ballast. For example:

Cute ceramic knick-knack figurines depicting animals, especially

cats--The way I see it, everybody who wants a cute ceramic cat has

already bought one. It is cruel to inflict such objects on other people.

I once was present when a holiday guest gave the hostess a ceramic cat,

and she stood there, handling it as you would a live grenade, and trying

desperately to think of an excuse not to put it on her mantel, which is

the only thing you can do with a knickknack. Eventually, of course, she

had to put it on the mantel, and the entire room suddenly acquired an air

of cuteness that no amount of expert interior decoration can disguise.

Guest soap formed into little balls or fruit --Nobody uses this

soap. The people who live in the house don't use it, because it's for

guests. The guests are afraid to use it, because they don't want to mess

it up. They end up not washing their hands, which leads to the spread of

infections. The government should put a stop to this soon, because it is

only a matter of time before somebody starts selling guest soap shaped

like cats.

Fruitcakes manufactured in April and packaged in cans and allowed to

sit in a warehouse until they reach the density of a bowling ball--These

present all the problems of caramel-covered popcorn, with the added

problem that they can cause hernias.

Coffee-table books--These are gigantic books with lots of pictures

and titles like Scissors Through the Ages that you couldn't read even if

you wanted to because the pages are all welded together from when your

guests spilled banana daiquiris on them.

What can you do about this? You can buy gifts that people actually

use. Think how happy you'd be if YOU got, say, a case of paper towels.

Wouldn't that be terrific? That's what I'm going to get my wife this

year. I'll bet she'll be speechless.

ABOUT LAWN ORDER

I got to thinking about ecology the other day when I ran over a

turtle with my lawnmower. Now before you reptile lovers start sending me

irate letters full of misspelled words, let me assure you that I was not

aiming for the turtle. I have enough trouble keeping my lawnmower in

operation, and the last thing I would do is risk damaging it with a

turtle. Let me also assure you that the turtle was unharmed, except for

a few nicks on its shell that might make it less attractive to turtles of

the opposite sex, whichever sex that happens to be. I don't know how you

determine the sex of a turtle, and I don't want to know. I have come to

think of this particular turtle as male, because my two-year-old son, who

receives signals directly from outer space! recently announced that its

name is Bob.

Bob has been hanging around our lawn for several months now, despite

our efforts to encourage him to go into the woods with the other turtles.

"These are the best years of your life, Bob," we say. "Don't waste them

on our lawn." But Bob turns a deaf ear to our suggestions, assuming

turtles have ears. You would think the lawnmower incident would have

made him have second thoughts about our lawn, but lately he seems more

attached to it than ever. This makes me think that maybe the theory of

evolution is wrong after all. I figure that if turtles really had been

evolving for all these years, they would have come up with something more

intelligent than Bob.

Anyway, all this got me to thinking about ecology. Most wild

animals are, like Bob, fairly stupid. Plants are even worse. It is up

to us human beings to use our superior brains to protect them, or one day

we will wake up to find there is no more nature, and we will no longer

have any place to hold 1960s-style outdoor weddings.

So I am all for preserving wildlife, but I also think we have to use

some judgment about it. We can't go around preserving all wildlife,

because some of it is disgusting. Take insects, for example. The other

night, while we were having dinner, some wildlife entered our house in

the form of a flying insect that looked like a mosquito, but was large

enough to play in the National Football League. It was the kind of

insect that wouldn't even have to sting you, because it could crush you

to death merely by landing on you.

Now I imagine that the president of the Sierra Club, sitting in the

safety of his insect-free office, would say that we should have let this

insect drone around the dining room until it broke a window and flew

outside, where it would be eaten by another species, which would in turn

be eaten by another species, and so on and so on, leading up the Great

Chain of Life, until finally the second-to-last link in the chain is

eaten by a nuclear physicist. But that is mere theory. The truth is

that nothing around my house would have dared to eat this insect; in

fact, it probably would have eaten Bob, shell and all. I bet that if the

president of the Sierra Club had been in my house, he would have done

exactly what I did, which was to leap up from the table and batter the

insect repeatedly with a rolled-up newspaper.

So I propose that we direct our ecology efforts toward preserving

those forms of wildlife that are safe and nondisgusting, namely:

Cute, furry animals, such as seals and otters, that you see in Walt

Disney nature movies, but never around your house.

Large animals, such as elephants and boa constrictors, that live on other

continents.

Plants that produce flowers or eat insects.

Turtles.

I have already embarked on a personal ecology effort to preserve

Bob. I have resolved that, despite the great personal sacrifice

involved, I will no longer mow my lawn.

THE LAW VS. JUSTICE

Most of us learn how the United States legal system works by

watching television. We learn that if we obey the law, we will wind up

chatting and laughing with attractive members of the opposite sex when

the program ends, whereas if we break the law, we will fall from a great

height onto rotating helicopter blades.

Some television shows explain the legal system in greater detail:

they show actual dramatizations of court trials. The best such show was

"Perry Mason," which starred Raymond Burr as a handsome defense attorney

who eventually gained so much weight he had to sit in a wheelchair.

"Perry Mason" was set in a large city populated almost entirely by

morons. For example, the prosecutor, Hamilton Burger, was so stupid that

the people he prosecuted were always innocent. I mean always. I imagine

that whenever Hamilton arrested a suspect, the suspect heaved a sigh of

relief and hugged his family, knowing he would Soon be off the hook.

Now you'd think that after a while Hamilton would have realized he

couldn't prosecute his way out of a paper bag, and would have gone into

some more suitable line of work, such as sorting laundry. But he kept at

it, week after week and year after year, prosecuting innocent people.

Nevertheless, everything worked out, because in this particular city the

criminals turned out to be even stupider than Hamilton: they always came

to the trials, and, after sitting quietly for about twenty minutes,

lurched to their feet and confessed. The result was that Perry Mason got

a reputation as a brilliant defense attorney, but the truth is that

anyone with the intelligence of a can of creamed corn would have looked

brilliant in this courtroom.

The major problem with "Perry Mason" is that it is unrealistic:

Perry Mason and Hamilton Burger usually speak in understandable English

words, and by the time the trial is over everybody has a pretty good

grasp of the facts of the case. In real life, of course, lawyers speak

mostly in Latin, and by the time they're done nobody has the vaguest

notion what the facts are. To understand why this is, you have to

understand the history of the U.S. legal system.

In the frontier days, our legal system was very simple: if you broke

a law, armed men would chase you and beat you up or throw you in jail or

hang you; in extreme cases, they would hang you, then beat you up in

jail. So everybody obeyed the law, which was easy to do, because

basically there were only two laws:

No assaulting people.

No stealing.

This primitive legal system was so simple that even the public

understood it. The trials were simple, too:

SHERIFF: Your honor, the defendant confessed that he shot his wife dead.

JUDGE: Did he admit it freely, or did you have your horse stand on him

first, like last time?

SHERIFF: No, sir. He admitted it freely.

JUDGE: Fair enough. String him up.

The trouble with this system was that it had no room for lawyers.

If a lawyer had appeared in a frontier courtroom and started tossing

around terms such as "habeas corpus," he would have been shot.

So lawyers, for want of anything better to do, formed legislatures,

which are basically organizations that meet from time to time to invent

new laws. Before long, the country had scads of laws--laws governing the

watering of lawns, laws governing the spaying of dogs, laws governing the

production and sale of fudge, and so on--and today nobody has the

slightest idea what is legal and what is not. This has led to an

enormous demand for lawyers. Lawyers don't understand the legal system

any better than the rest of us do, but they are willing to talk about it

in an impressive manner for large sums of money. In today's legal

system, the frontier murder trial would go like this:

SHERIFF: Your honor ...

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: I object. In his use of the word "your," the witness

is clearly stipulating the jurisprudence of a writ of deus ex

machine.

PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: On the contrary. In the case of Merke v.

Barnbuster, the Court clearly ruled that an ex post facto debenture

does not preclude the use of the word "your" in a matter of ad hoc

quod erat demonstrandum.

DEFENSE ATTORNEY: Oh yeah? Well Carthaginia delendo est.

This goes on for several hours, until everybody has forgotten what

the trial was about in the first place and the defendant is able to sneak

out of the courtroom, unnoticed.

INTO THE ROUND FILE

I like to cheer myself up by pretending that my Mail actually

screams when I throw it into the wastebasket:

Dear MR. BARRY:

You have almost certainly won a trillion dollars. We're dead

serious, MR. BARRY. We're a gigantic publishing company and we just woke

up this morning and we said, "By God, let's send one trillion dollars to

MR. BARRY, no strings attached." That's just the kind of gigantic

publishing company we are. And frankly, MR. BARRY, you are under no

obligation whatsoever to take a six-week trial subscription to a new

Magazine called PhOtograPhs of homes That Are Much Nicer Than Yours,

because all we really want to do, MR. BARRY, is send you one trillion ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Resident of the 15,924th District:

This is the first of an interminable series of newsletters I'll be

sending you at your expense so that you'll have photographs of your

representative in Washington representing you by eating breakfast with

the President. I recently had an opportunity to exchange views with the

President during an informal working orientation breakfast for the 742

new congresspersons, and the President and I agreed that one of the most

important issues facing the nation, including the 15,924th district, is

mineral resources on the ocean floor. I am pleased to report that I have

been appointed to the influential Manganese Subcommittee of the House

Special Select Committee on Grayish-White Metallic Elements, and I'm

planning a fact-finding trip to ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Friend:

Every day, all over the world, innocent children with large, soulful

eyes are getting terrible diseases. Also, countless furry little

endangered species are being dismembered by industrialists wielding chain

saws. This is all your fault. So we want you to send some money to ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Electric Customer:

Due to inflation, we have been forced to apply for a rate ... No,

wait, forget that. We can't use inflation anymore. Uh, let's see ...

Oh yeah. Due to the fact that our new Harbor Vista nuclear generating

plant, if we ever get it finished, may have some piping problems that

would cause it to emit a deadly cloud of radioactive gas the size of

Canada, we have been forced to apply for a rate increase so we'll be able

to afford a really top-notch lawyer with his own jet and everything. We

realize that, since we just got a rate increase last week, this may seem

...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Mr. Barry:

In a recent column, you stated that Abraham Lincoln ran the

hundred-yard dash in 8.4 seconds, and that ice fishermen have the same

average IQ as mailboxes. As an avid ice fisherman, and chairman of the

History Department at Myron B. Thalmus Junior College, I would like to

know where you get your ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear MR. BARRY:

Really! We mean it! One trillion dol ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Mr. Barry:

Unless you're the kind of worthless scum that sat idly by while

those thugs beat up that woman in New York some years back, you probably

have been giving a lot of thought to your family's financial security.

No doubt you have said to yourself countless times, "Sure, I'd love to

invest $10,000 or more in liquidated Option Debenture Fiduciary

Instruments of Trust, but I don't know where to mail a certified or

cashier's check." Well, your worries are over, because ...

AIEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Dear Brother Barry:

As you are no doubt aware, the Reverend Bud Albumen didn't develop

one of the fastest-growing evangelical organizations in south central

Kentucky just by accident. He developed it by building really top-notch

studio facilities. But these facilities cost money, which is why the

Lord told the Reverend Albumen to tell you to send in a Love Offering of

$13.50 per member of your household, or a special rate of $6.75, which is

a 50 percent discount, for children under ten. Just as soon as the

Reverend Albumen receives your Love Offering, he will ask the Lord not to

bring disease and suffering and mudslides to your home, but remember, he

can't do this until he receives your ... NO! NOT THE SCISSORS! PLEASE

DON'T ...

AAARRRGGGH

Clip.