Europe On Five Vowels A Day

   Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the past 30
   years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages. Oh, sure, they speak some English, but usually just barely well enough to receive a high-school diploma here in the United States. This can lead to problems for you, the international traveler, when you need to convey important information to them, such as “Which foreign country is this?” and “You call this toilet paper?”
   To their credit, some countries have made a sincere effort to adopt English as their native language, a good example being England, but even there you have problems. My wife and I were driving around England once, and we came to a section called “Wales,” which is this linguistically deformed area that apparently is too poor to afford vowels. All the road signs look like this:
   LLWLNCWNRLLWNWRLLN—3 km It is a tragic sight indeed to see Welsh parents attempting to sing traditional songs such as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” to their children and lapsing into heart-rending silence when they get to the part about “E-I-E-I-O.” If any of you in our reading audience have extra vowels that you no longer need, because for example your children have grown up, I urge you to send them (your children) to: Vowels for Wales, c/o Lord Chesterfield, Parliament Luckystrike, the Duke of Earl, Pondwater-on-Gahardine, England.
   But the point I am trying to make here is that since the rest of the world appears to be taking its sweet time about becoming fluent in English, it looks like, in the interest of improving world peace and understanding, it’s up to us Americans to strike the bull on the horns while the iron is hot and learn to speak a foreign language.
   This is not an area where we are strong, as a nation: A recent poll showed that 82 percent of the Americans surveyed speak no foreign language at all. Unfortunately, the same poll showed that 41 percent also cannot speak English, 53 percent cannot name the state they live in, and 62 percent believe that the Declaration of Independence is “a kind of fish.” So we can see that we have a tough educational row to hoe here, in the sense that Americans, not to put too fine a point on it, have the IQs of bait. I mean, let’s face it, this is obviously why the Japanese are capable of building sophisticated videocassette recorders, whereas we view it as a major achievement if we can hook them up correctly to our TV sets. This is nothing to be ashamed of, Americans! Say it out loud! “We’re pretty stupid!” See? Doesn’t that feel good? Let’s stop blaming the educational system for the fact that our children score lower on standardized tests than any other vertebrate life form on the planet! Let’s stop all this anguished whiny self-critical fretting over the recently discovered fact that the guiding hand on the tiller of the ship of state belongs to Mister Magoo! Remember: We still have nuclear weapons. Ha ha!
   Getting back to the central point, we should all learn to speak a foreign language. Fortunately, this is easy.
   HOW TO SPEAK A FOREIGN LANGUAGE:
   The key is to understand that foreigners communicate by means of “idiomatic expressions,” the main ones being:
   GERMAN: “Ach du lieber!” (“Darn it!”) SPANISH: “Caramba!” (“Darn it!”) FRENCH: “Zut alors!” (“Look! A lors!”)
   Also you should bear in mind that foreign persons for some reason believe that everyday household objects and vegetables are “masculine” or “feminine.” For example, French persons believe that potatoes are feminine, even though they (potatoes) do not have sexual organs, that I have noticed. Dogs, on the other hand, are masculine, even if they are not. (This does not mean, by the way, that a dog can have sex with a potato, although it will probably try.)
   PRONUNCIATION HINT: In most foreign languages, the letter “r” is pronounced incorrectly. Also, if you are speaking German, at certain points during each sentence you should give the impression you’re about to expel a major gob.
   OK? Practice these techniques in front of a mirror until you’re comfortable with them, then go to a country that is frequented by foreigners and see if you can’t increase their international understanding, the way jimmy Carter did during his 1977 presidential visit to Poland, when he told a large welcoming crowd, through an official State Department translator, that he was “pleased to be grasping your secret parts.”

When You Grotto Go

   The travel rule I wish to stress here is: Never trust anything you read in a travel article. Travel articles appear in publications that sell large expensive advertisements to tourism-related industries, and these industries do not wish to see articles with headlines like:
   URUGUAY: DON’T BOTHER
   So no matter what kind of leech-infested, plumbing-free destination travel writers are writing about, they always stress the positive. If a travel article describes the native denizens of a particular country as reserved, this means that when you ask them for directions, they spit on your rental car. Another word you want to especially watch out for is “enchanting.” A few years back, my wife and I visited The Blue Grotto, a Famous Tourist Attraction on the island of Capri off the coast of Italy that is always described in travel articles as “enchanting,” and I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one Travel Adventure that will forever remain a large stone lodged in the kidney of my memory.
   We never asked to see The Blue Grotto. We had entered Italy in the firm grip of one tour, which handed us over to another in such a way that there was never any clear chance to escape, and the next thing we knew, they were loading us into this smallish boat and telling us we were going to see The Blue Grotto. They told us it was Very Beautiful. “But what is it?” we said. “It is Very Beautiful,” they said.
   So our boat got into this long line of boats, each containing roughly 25 captured tourists sitting in the hot sun, bobbing up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down, and soon we were all thinking how truly wonderful it would be to go sit in a nice, quiet, shady sidewalk cafe somewhere and throw up. We were out there in the sun for two hours, during which time—I cannot emphasize this point too strongly—we continued to bob up as well as down. We agreed that this had damn well better be one tremendous grotto they were taking us to.
   When we got close to it, all we could see was this hole in the rock at the bottom of a cliff, and it became clear that they intended to put us into even smaller boats, boats that would bob violently on dry land, and take us into this hole. So at this point an elderly woman on our tour told the tour leader that maybe she and her husband better not go along, as her husband, a very nice man named Frank, was a stroke victim who had some trouble getting around, but the tour leader said, in a word, no. He said the way the system was set up, you had to see The Blue Grotto. He said there was no other way out. He said it was Very Beautiful.
   At this point I am going to interject a seemingly irrelevant fact, which you will see the significance of later on: Also on the boat with us were three recently divorced women from California who had been drinking wine.
   So finally our boat was next to the hole, and they had us climb down, four at a time, into the tiny boats, which were rowed by surly men with low centers of gravity who smelled like the Budweiser Clydesdales. The rowers were in a great impatient hurry to load us into the boats, such that if my wife and I had not been right there to grab Frank, the stroke victim, by his shirt, he would have been—this is not an exaggeration—pitched right directly into what travel writers traditionally refer to as the Sparkling Blue Mediterranean Waters. So we scrambled in after him, and so did his wife, and we all went bobbing off, away from the main boat, toward The Hole.
   I have since read, in travel articles, that because of the way the sunlight bounces off the bottom, or something, The Blue Grotto is a Natural Wonder Transfused with a Blue Light of Almost Unearthly Beauty. It looked to us more like a dank cave transfused with gloom and rower-perspiration fumes and the sound of the official Blue Grotto Rower’s Spiel bouncing off the walls. The spiel has been handed down through the generations of rowers from father to son, neither of whom spoke English. The part I remember is: “You pudda you handa inna da wadda, you handa looka blue.” We didn’t want to put our hands in the water, but we were about to do it anyway, just so we could get out. This was when our boat got hit by the wave that ensued when one of the recently divorced California women decided that it might be fun, after being out in that hot sun, to leap out of her boat and go swimming in the famous Blue Grotto.
   Well. You cannot imagine the stir of excitement this caused. This was clearly a situation that had not been covered in Blue Grotto Rowers Training School. Some of the rowers attempted to render assistance to the woman’s boat, which was sort of tipping over; some of them were trying to get the woman out of the water, which she was against (“Stop it!” she said. “You’re hitting me with your goddam oar.”); and some of them continued to announce, in case anybody was listening, that if you pudda you handa inna the wadda, you handa looka blue. I think I speak for all the passengers on my boat when I say I felt exactly the way Dorothy did when she realized that all she had ever really wanted was to go back to Kansas.
   We finally got out of there, back into the sunlight. Frank’s skin was the color of Aqua-Velva. His wife was saying, “Are you OK, Frank?” and Frank, who could not talk, was clutching the side of the boat with his good hand and giving her what he probably hoped was a reassuring smile, but which came out looking the way a person looks when he pulls a hostile Indian arrow out of his own shoulder. You could just tell that, no matter what his doctor gave him permission to do, he was never, ever again, for the rest of his life, going to travel more than 15 feet from his BarcaLounger. The rower wouldn’t let us out of the boat—he literally blocked our path with his squat and surly body—until we gave him a tip.
   Someday, this rower is going to come to the United States, and I will be waiting for him. I am going to take him to Disney World, which any travel writer will tell you is a Fantasy Come True, and I am going to put him on the ride where you get into a little boat and nine jillion dolls shriek at you repeatedly that It’s a Small World after All, and when he is right in the middle of it I am going to hurl Fodor’s Guide to Florida into the machinery so he will be stuck there forever. Wouldn’t that be enchanting?

Ground Control To Major Tomb

   I have good news and bad news on the death front. The good news is that within a very short time, sooner than you dared hope, you can have your ashes leave the immediate solar system. The bad news is that it may soon be impossible to purchase your casket needs wholesale in Wendell, Idaho.
   We’ll start with the good news. I don’t know about you, but I was starting to wonder if the space program was ever going to produce any practical benefits. Oh, I realize it produced Tang, the instant breakfast drink, but my feeling about Tang is that I would consider consuming it only if I were stuck in space and had already eaten everything else in the capsule, including my fellow astronauts.
   So I was very pleased when the Reagan administration gave the OK to an outfit called the Celestis Group, which plans to send up a special reflective capsule filled with the ashes of deceased persons, each packed into a little container about the size of a tube of lipstick. Your container would have your name on it, and of course your Social Security number. God forbid you should be in a burial orbit without your Social Security number, in case there should be some kind of tax problems down the road and the IRS needs to send an unintelligible and threatening letter to your container.
   What I like about this plan is, it’s a chance for the common person, a person who does not happen to be a United States senator or a military personnel with a nickname such as “Crip,” “Buzz,” or “Deke,” to get into the space environment. And the negative aspect, which is to say the aspect of being in a lipstick tube, is I believe more than outweighed by the fact that, according to the Celestis Group people, if you take the Earth orbit package, you’ll be up there for 63 million years. Plus, your capsule, as I pointed out earlier, will have a highly reflective surface, which means your Loved Ones will be able to watch you pass overhead. “Look,” they’ll say. “See that little pinpoint of light? That’s the capsule containing Uncle Ted! Either that or it’s an early Russian satellite, containing a frozen experimental dog!”
   And that’s just for the Earth Orbit Package. If you can wait a couple more years, and pony up $4,600, you can get the Escape Velocity Package, which will take you right out of the Solar System, such that your remains, as Celestis Group Vice President james Kuhl explained it to me, “will be sailing forever through deep space, etc.”
   My only concern here is this: Let’s just say this particular capsule, a couple of billion light years from Earth, gets picked up by those alien beings Carl Sagan is always trying to get in touch with. And let’s say they open it up, and they see all these tubes resembling lipstick, which is a concept they would be familiar with from intercepting transmissions of “Dynasty,” and they naturally assume we are sending them, as a friendly gesture, a large supply of cosmetics. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, we like to think of our dear departed ones as being with their maker at last and resting in eternal peace. We are not comfortable with the concept of their being smeared upon the humongous lips of jabba the Hutt.
   But other than that, I think the whole idea is terrific, and I urge all of you who feel that you or a loved one may at some future date be dead, to look into it. Please note that you should not contact the Celestis Group directly, because, as Mr. Kuhl explained it to me, “We enter the picture after the cremation has taken effect.”
   This means you have to deal with your local funeral director, which you will find a very interesting experience, because funeral directors, at least the ones I’ve dealt with, generally manage to make you feel like a Nazi war criminal if you don’t purchase one of the better caskets. Never mind that they’re just going to set fire to it; somehow, you’ll get the message that, OK, sure, they can use a plain old el cheapo $900 pine box, if you’re comfortable with the idea of having your loved one’s ashes spend 63 million years mixed in with the ashes from a common, sap-filled softwood of the same type used to make Popsicle sticks, whereas all the other loved ones in the entire reflective capsule will be mixed with, at the very least, walnut. If that’s what you want, fine.
   So I think those of us who are not bog scum will want to purchase a higher-quality casket. This is why it’s such a shame about the situation out in Wendell, Idaho. That’s where Roger King, who’s a woodworker, has got himself into this big hassle with the funeral directors because he’s trying to sell caskets directly to the consumer. He has a showroom, right in Wendell, where he has some caskets on display, in addition to furniture, and he claims he charges a third to half as much per casket as a funeral director. “We’ve got a pine for $489,” he said, “and a solid walnut for $1,500.”
   So naturally the Idaho funeral directors association fired off a letter to the state, claiming that King was selling caskets without a license. This of course would be a violation of the law designed to protect the public from buying caskets from unlicensed people, which as you can imagine would lead to who knows what kind of consumer tragedies. I don’t even want to think about it. And I’m not making this up.
   So then King sued the funeral directors, claiming they were discouraging people from buying his caskets. When I talked to him, he had sold only two in about six months, and he sounded kind of desperate. He had even started running radio casket advertisements, which is something you might look forward to if your travel plans call for you to be in the Wendell area. But to be brutally frank, I doubt that Roger’s going to make it in the direct-to-the-consumer casket business. This means you’re going to have to continue purchasing your caskets retail, from your local funeral director. Be sure to ask him about the space burial plan. My guess is he’ll somehow manage to suggest that, if you really cared for the deceased person, you’ll want the Escape Velocity Package.

Where Saxophones Come From

   Today’s science topic is: The Universe
   The universe has fascinated mankind for many, many years, dating back to the very earliest episodes of “Star Trek” when the brave crew of the starship Enterprise set out, wearing pajamas, to explore the boundless voids of space, which turned out to be as densely populated as Queens, New York. Virtually every planet they found was inhabited, usually by evil beings with cheap costumes and Russian accents, so finally the brave crew of the Enterprise returned to Earth to gain weight and make movies.
   To really understand the mysteries of the universe, you should look at it first-hand. The best time to do this is at night, when the universe is clearly visible from lawns. As you gaze at it, many age-old questions will probably run through your mind, the main one being: Are you wearing shoes? The reason I ask is, recently I was standing barefoot on my lawn, and I got attacked on the right big toe by a fire ant. This is an extremely ungracious style of insect that was accidentally imported into the southern United States from somewhere else, probably hell. I once saw a TV documentary wherein a group of fire ants ate a cow. When a fire ant attacks your toe, he is actually hoping you’ll fight back, so the other fire ants can jump you, after which the documentary makers will beat you senseless with their camera tripods. They all work together.
   But we are getting off the track. When we gaze upward at the boundless star-studded reaches of space, we should be thinking about more than ants in our lawn: We should also be thinking about snakes.
   FEDERAL PORNOGRAPHY WARNING: The Attorney General Has Determined That the Following Paragraph Contains Explicit Sexual Words, Which Could Cause Insanity and Death.
   I used to think snakes were bad, until I got this document from an alert reader named Rob Strait, who is a member of the Chicago Herpetological Society (“herpetologist” is Greek for “alert reader”). This document is a sales brochure from an outfit in Taiwan that I am not making up called “Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House” (Cable address: “SNAKE”). Do not be misled by the name. The folks at the Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House do not think that you would be so stupid as to purchase a poisonous snake. They think you might be so stupid as to purchase snake penis pills.
   To quote the brochure: “Made of 5 species of the penises, livers, and galls of the snakes processed by modern scientific ways. The pills possess the efficacy to strengthen the kidney in order to increase the ability of reproductive function and keep the energy as well as the physical healthy, is a kind of good nutriment.”
   Sold me! My only question would be: “What?” I mean, until I got this document, I was unaware that snakes had penises. Where do they keep them? In special little cases? Then how do they carry them? These are some of the mysteries that make it so fascinating to think about today’s Science Topic, which is: The Universe. (Really! Go back and check!)
   The big mystery, of course, is: Where did the universe come from? Although this question baffled mankind for thousands of years, we now know, thanks to reading science books to our son, that the universe was actually formed 4.5 billion years ago this coming Saturday when an infinitesimally small object, smaller than an atom, smaller even than the “individual” butter servings they give you in restaurants, suddenly exploded, perhaps because of faulty wiring, in a cataclysmic event that caused the parts of the universe to go shooting out in all directions and expand at an incredibly rapid rate, an expansion that continues to this day, especially in the case of Raymond Burr. According to this hypothesis, after a couple of million years, various weensy particles began clumping together to form stars, planets, saxophones, etc., which is why we refer to this as the “Big Band” theory.
   The Big Band theory is now widely accepted in the scientific community, although it still has a few technical bugs in it, such as that anybody who took it seriously would have to have the IQ of soup. There is no way you could fit everything in the universe into a little dot. I base this statement on my garage, which contains approximately one-half of the things in the universe, because my wife refuses to throw them out, scrunched together at the absolute maximum possible density, so that if you try to yank any one thing out, all the other things, attracted by gravity, fall on your head. From this we can calculate that the universe was roughly twice the size of my garage when it (the universe) exploded.
   We certainly hope this has cleared up any lingering questions you may have had regarding the universe. We are looking forward to bringing you equally thoughtful discussions of other interesting Science Topics. We are also looking forward to receiving our order from the Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House.

The Secrets Of Life Itself

   I propose that we pass a federal law stating that the government will no longer pay for any scientific research if taxpayers cannot clearly see the results with their naked eyes. I don’t know about you, but I’M getting tired of reading newspaper articles like this:
   “LOS ANGELES—A team of physicists at UCLA announced yesterday that they have made a major scientific breakthrough with the discovery of an important new subatomic particle. This was the team’s eighth major particle this month, giving them a three-particle lead over MIT.
   ‘These particles are very difficult to detect, even with the aid of enormous federal grants,’ said Head Physicist Dr. Ernest Viewfinder. ‘But we definitely saw an important new one. At least I saw it, and Dr. Hubbleman here thinks he did, too.’ Dr. Viewfinder said he could not show this particle to newsmen because it was ‘resting.’”
   I’m starting to wonder whether the physicists are pulling some kind of elaborate scam here. I’m starting to wonder if they don’t sit around their $23 million atomic accelerators all day, drinking frozen daiquiris, and shrieking “There goes one now!” and then laughing themselves sick. Maybe it’s time we laypersons asked some hard questions about this idea that all matter consists of tiny invisible particles whizzing around. I’m willing to believe that uranium does, because physicists have demonstrated that they can use it to vaporize cities. But I’d like to see them do this with some kind of matter that the layperson is more familiar with, such as cheese. I have examined cheese very closely, and as far as I can tell it consists of cheese. I have obtained similar results with celery.
   Then you have your biologists, always getting into Newsweek by claiming they’ve isolated an important new virus. By way of “proof,” they show you this blurred photograph that looks like, yes, it could be an important new virus, but it also could be an extreme close-up of Peru or Anthony Quinn. The biologists always promise that just as soon as they get a few million more dollars they’re going to give us a cure for the common cold, but we veteran laypersons tend to hang on to our nasal spray, because we know that all they’re really going to give us is more photographs of Anthony Quinn.
   Another invisible thing biologists love to talk about is DNA, which is of course the Key to Unlocking the Secret of Life Itself. Biologists have learned that the public, particularly the journalist public, will take anything they do seriously, as long as they claim it has something to do with DNA. Not long ago biologists managed to get two rats on national TV news by claiming they had the same DNA molecules inside them, or something like that. Of course you didn’t see any DNA molecules; you saw these rats, being broadcast to the nation as if they were the joint Chiefs of Staff.
   I have here in front of me a recent front-page newspaper story about a biologist who claims that he isolated the genes of an animal called a “quagga,” which used to live in South Africa before it became extinct. The story says the biologist got the genes from the skin of a stuffed quagga in St. Louis, and that there are 25,000 different gene fragments, each of which is being reproduced in a separate culture of bacteria. So what we have here is a biologist telling reporters, with a straight face, that he has 25,000
   dishes containing pieces of genes that they cannot see, which belong to an animal that they never heard of, which exists only in stuffed form in St. Louis. And instead of spitting into the dishes and striding disdainfully from the room, the reporters take notes and actually put the story in the newspaper.
   And don’t get me started on astronomers, with their $57 million atomic laser telescopes, and their breakthrough photographs of “new galaxies” that look remarkably like important viruses, and their “black holes,” which are of course invisible to the layperson because they suck up all the light around them. Of course. In fact this very phenomenon probably contributed to the extinction of the quagga.
   I say it’s time the government stopped giving money to the particle-and-virus crowd, and started giving it to scientists who will do experiments that the public can understand and appreciate. Mister Wizard comes to mind. Think of what he could do with several million federal dollars:
   “NEW YORK—Mister Wizard announced that he has successfully demonstrated the existence of gravity by dropping a mobile home onto Long Island from a height of 60,000 feet. ‘To my knowledge,’ Mister Wizard told reporters, ‘this is the first time this has been done, and we intend to look at slow-motion videotapes over and over in hopes of furthering our understanding of what happens when gravity causes a mobile home to strike Long Island at a high rate of speed.’ He added that ‘in the very near future’ he will attempt to determine ‘what happens when you pump 300 gallons of grape juice into a cow.’”

Heat? No Sweat

   The best way I know of to deal with heat is to wait until the middle of a major jungle-style heat wave, when if you lie still for more than 20 minutes patches of fungus form on your skin, when birds are bursting into flames in midair and nuns are cursing openly on the street, then go down to Sears and try to buy an air conditioner. Or, if you already have an air conditioner, you can try to get somebody to fix it.
   But as of the last heat wave, we didn’t have one, and after about the fourth or fifth day my wife was getting that look where, later on, the neighbors tell the homicide detective: “We knew she was feeling emotional strain, but we had no idea she owned a scythe.” So I went down to Sears and joined the crowd of people thrusting credit cards at the appliance salesperson, who was of course being extra surly and slow. Who could blame him? Throughout spring, he had stood alone in Major Appliances, an outcast, wearing a suit whose fabric originated outside the immediate solar system, drumming his fingers on a washer until he had drummed little finger holes right through the lid, and we had all strode right past him. And now we were clustered around him like Titanic passengers hoping to obtain lifeboat seating.
   CUSTOMER: Please please PLEASE can I buy an air conditioner?
   SALESPERSON: That depends. Will you be wanting the service warranty?
   CUSTOMER: Yes of course.
   SALESPERSON: JUST one?
   CUSTOMER: No, no, of course not. Several service warranties. Eight service warranties.
   SALESPERSON: Well, I don’t know ...
   CUSTOMER: And these two dishwashers.
   Wise consumer that I am, I bought the air conditioner with the maximum number of “BTUs,” an electronic measurement of how heavy an air conditioner is. To get it into the house, my wife and I used the standard husband-and-wife team lifting system whereby the wife hovers and frets and asks “Can I help?” and the husband, sensing from deep within his manhood that if he lets a woman help him, all the males he feared in tenth grade gym class, the ones who shaved because they actually had to, will suddenly barge into the house and snap him with towels, says “No, I’m fine,” when in fact he also senses deep within his manhood that he is on the verge of experiencing a horrible medical development that would require him to wear a lifetime helpful groin device.
   To install my air conditioner, all I had to do was get a hammer and whack out a large permanent metal part of our window that was not shown in the official Sears instruction diagram, then plug it in, using of course a plug adaptor, which you need to void any potential warranty. This particular air conditioner is one of those new “energy-efficient” models, which means that rather than draw electricity from the power company, which would cost money, it operates by sucking power out of all the other appliances in the house. You can actually see them get smaller and writhe in pain, when it kicks in. More than once we have been awakened in the dead of night by the pitiful shrieks of the toaster, which has been with us for many years and does not understand what is happening.
   Sometimes my wife expresses concern about “overloading the circuit,” a term I suspect she read in one of her magazines. In the past decade or so, the women’s magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that men know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is look at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home. So I looked at our air conditioner, which appeared, in what feeble brownish light the lamp was able to give off, to be getting larger and chuckling softly, and I gave my wife a reassuring home-handyman speech featuring the term “ampere,” which I believe is a BTU that has broken loose from the air conditioner and lodged in the wiring.
   If you cannot install air conditioning, I suggest you perspire. Perspiring is Mother Nature’s own natural cooling system. When you’re in a situation involving great warmth or stress, such as summer or an audience with the queen, your sweat glands, located in your armpits, rouse themselves and start pumping out perspiration, which makes your garments smell like a dead rodent, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling you she wants you to take them off and get naked. Of course the average person cannot always get naked, let alone the queen, so many people put antiperspirant chemicals on their armpits; this forces Mother Nature to reroute the perspiration to the mouth, where it forms bad breath, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling you she is basically a vicious irresponsible slut.
   One final note: Do not be tempted to beat the heat by drinking alcoholic beverages. A far better route is to inject them straight into your veins. No, ha ha, seriously, the experts tell us that alcohol actually makes us warmer! Of course, these are the same experts who tell us, during cold weather, that alcohol actually makes us colder, so we have to ask ourselves exactly how stupid these experts think we are. My common-sense advice to you is: If you must drink alcoholic beverages, fine, but for your own sake as well as the sake of others, take sensible precautions to insure you don’t spill them on your clothing, which is already disgusting enough.

Blowing The Big Game

   A recent consumer near-tragedy has demonstrated once again, as if we needed any more demonstrations, why the federal government must act immediately to prohibit the sale and possession of plaid carpeting. I feel especially strong about this issue, because the near-tragedy in question involved an eight-year-old girl named Natalie who happens to be the daughter of two friends of mine, Debbie and Bill. They have agreed to let me tell their story in exchange for a promise that I would not reveal that their last name is Ordine (pronounced “Ore-dean”).
   Our story begins a few months ago, when Bill bought Natalie two birthday presents, one of which was a gumball machine. Natalie of course immediately got a major wad of gum stuck in her hair and chose to correct the problem personally, without any discussion with a parent or guardian, by getting some scissors and whacking off a large segment of the right side of her hair, but that is not the near-tragedy in question. I mention it only so you’ll grasp that when it comes to buying birthday presents for an eight-year-old, Bill has no more sense than a cinder block. This is why, as the other present, he bought Natalie a popular children’s dexterity game called Operation, in which you attempt to put little humorous simulated organs into a humorous simulated person without setting off a buzzer.
   Ordinarily, there would be nothing wrong with this, but it happens that Bill and Debbie have a carpet with large plaid squares on it. So as most of you have no doubt already guessed, on the afternoon of her class Christmas play, Natalie invented a game whereby she would put the little plastic heart of the Operation game into her nose to see how many squares of carpeting she could blow it across. Which is fine, provided it is done in the context of an organized league with uniforms, coaches, etc., but Natalie was doing this all on her own, and the result is that she got the heart stuck up her nose. You hate to have this kind of thing happen, because it’s not the kind of problem that will just go away by itself, like, say, a broken leg. No, if you want to deal with a heart stuck up your nose, you pretty much have to expose yourself to an assault by Modern Medicine.
   So Debbie called the Emergency Room, which has of course heard of every conceivable thing being stuck in every conceivable orifice and consequently told Debbie that this was nothing to worry about, plus they were busy with some real emergencies, so Natalie should go ahead and be in her class play and come in later that evening. So Natalie performed with the heart in her nose—she was one of the Rough Kids Who Wouldn’t Go to Sleep on Christmas Eve—and then went to the hospital, where the doctor tried to get the heart out with forceps, but of course couldn’t reach it. So he decided to keep Natalie overnight and operate the next day, which he did, and of course he couldn’t find the heart.
   “What do you mean, you can’t find the (bad swear word) heart?” is the parental concern Bill recalls voicing to the doctor before he (Bill) stomped off in search of a small helpless furry animal to kick in the ribs. Meanwhile, the doctor ordered a CAT scan, which is the medical procedure that evidently requires the destruction of rare porcelain figurines because it costs $810, and which of course showed no trace of the heart. So the doctor concluded that the heart must have gotten into Natalie’s digestive system, and everything would be fine and nobody should worry about it.
   The bill for this medical treatment was of course $3,200.
   Bill and Debbie, when they are not whimpering softly like the radiation victims in The Day After, admit they find the whole episode somewhat ironic, seeing as how it began with a game that has a medical theme. But as Bill points out, the difference is that “in real life, the doctor gets the bucks no matter what happens. In the game, you actually have to do it right.”
   I should point out that the heart was, in fact, in Natalie’s digestive system. We know this because Debbie conducted a Stool Search, which I will not discuss in detail here except to say that if anybody should have been paid $3,200, it is Debbie. Also, here’s a useful tip from Debbie for those of you consumers who for some reason might wish to conduct your own stool searches at home: Make use of your freezer.
   Natalie, the victim, is fine now, and will never ever ever ever put a heart of any kind in her nose again for at least several months. Bill says she took the heart to school in a Ziplock bag so she could tell her classmates the whole story. “She really spread the word about the dangers of putting pieces of games in your nose,” said Bill. “She became real evangelistic, sort of like a reformed alcoholic, or Chuck Colson.”
   None of this would have happened, of course, if Bill and Debbie, who are not bad parents, really, did not have plaid carpeting. And who knows how many other unsuspecting parents have exactly the same consumer menace lurking in their family rooms? How do we know that some child is not at this very moment inserting a pretend organ into his or her nose to see how far he or she can shoot it? This child might bear in mind that the current record, held by eight-year-old Natalie Ordine, who got her name in the newspaper and everything, is only two big squares, which should be easy to beat.

The Swamp Man Cometh

   Summer is almost here, boys and girls, and do you know what that means? It means it’s time to go to ... SUMMER CAMP! Neat-o, right boys and girls?! Let’s hear it for summer camp!! Hip-Hip ...”
   (Long silent pause)
   Listen up, boys and girls. When Uncle Dave says “Hip-Hip,” you say “Hooray!” in loud cheerful voices, OK? Because summer camp is going to be A LOT OF FUN, and if you don’t SHOW SOME ENTHUSIASM, Uncle Dave might just decide to take you on a NATURE HIKE where we IDENTIFY EVERY SINGLE TREE IN THE FOREST.
   I happen to know a lot about summer camp, because, back when I was 18, I was a counselor at a camp named “Camp Sharparoon.” There is some kind of rule that says summer camps have to have comical-sounding Indian names and hold big “pow-wows” where everybody wears feathers and goes whooooo. Actual Indians, on the other hand, give their summer camps names like “Camp Stirling Hotchkiss IV” and hold dinner dances.
   Camp Sharparoon was a camp for youths from inner-city New York who were popularly known at the time as “disadvantaged,” which meant they knew a LOT more about sex than I did. I was in charge of a group of 12—and 13-year-old boys, and when they’d get to talking about sex, I, the counselor, the Voice of Maturity, the Father Figure for these Troubled Children, would listen intently, occasionally contributing helpful words of guidance such as: “Really?” And: “Gosh!” There were times I would have given my right arm to be a disadvantaged youth.
   Talking about sex was one of our major activities when we went camping out overnight in the woods. We counselors mostly hated camping out, but we felt obligated to do it because these kids had come from the dirty, filthy streets of the urban environment, and it seemed that they should have the opportunity to experience the untamed forest wilderness. Of course, the untamed forest wilderness contained infinitely more dirt and filth than the urban environment, not to mention a great deal of nature in the form of insects. This is why we built the urban environment in the first place.
   Nevertheless, we’d set off into the woods, carrying our bedrolls, which we took along so the campers would have a safe place to go to the bathroom. Bed-wetting was a problem on camping trips, because the campers would never go out to the latrine at night. They were concerned that they might be attacked by the Swamp Man, who, according to the traditional fun campfire story we wise mature helpful counselors always told at bedtime to put the camper in the proper emotional state for sleep, was this man with slime in his hair and roots growing out of his nose who would grab you and suck your brains out through your eye sockets. So we generally woke up with at least one bedroll dampened by more than the dew, if you get my drift.
   Fortunately, the campers always handled this potentially embarrassing situation with enormous sensitivity and tact. “VICTOR PEED IN HIS BED!!” they would shriek, their happy voices shattering the stillness of the forest morn, alerting the tiny woodland creatures that it was time to flee unless they wished to become the subjects of primitive biological experiments involving sharp sticks and rocks. Heaven help the toad that wandered into our campsite. One minute it would be a normal toad, maybe two inches high, and the next minute, having become the subject in the Two Heavy Flat Rocks Experiment, it would be a completely different style of toad, no thicker than a wedding invitation but with much larger total square footage.
   You ask: “Well, why didn’t you, as the Voice of Maturity, stop them from doing this horrible thing?” To which I reply: (a) If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of toads, He would have made them cute and furry. (b) As the old saying goes: “A disadvantaged youth who is crushing a toad with a rock is a disadvantaged youth who is not, at least for the moment, crushing the skull of another disadvantaged youth.”
   You must realize that these campers needed to work off a great deal of nervous energy caused by eating nothing, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes. The raccoons always got everything else. When I hear scientists claim that, after human beings and game-show contestants, dolphins are the smartest animals on Earth, I have to wonder what kinds of designer chemical compounds they (the scientists) have been snorking up their noses, because anybody who has ever dealt with raccoons knows that they are far more intelligent than we are. My campers and I would spend hours rigging up these elaborate Crafty Old Woodperson devices whereby you hung your food between two trees so the raccoons couldn’t get it. The raccoons would watch us on closed-circuit TV from their underground headquarters, laughing themselves sick, and as soon as it got dark they’d put on their little black masks and destroy our devices instantly using advanced laser technology.
   If we ever decide to get serious about space travel, what we need to do is convince the raccoons somehow that campers have placed food on Jupiter. The raccoons will find a way to get it.
   Well, boys and girls, looks like Uncle Dave got so caught up in telling old “war stories” that he completely forgot about you! That’s one of the great things about camp, boys and girls: It leaves you with so many memories that will stay wedged in your brain until you die! Possibly on your way to the latrine.

Clan Of The Cave Rhinoceros

   PLAY REVIEW: THE CAVE PEOPLE, written and performed by the Rose Valley School Kindergarten class, featured ROBERT BARRY as one of the woolly rhinoceroses.
   As is true of most serious dramatic works, The Cave People works on several levels: on one level, it is the story of a group of primitive people who sit outside their cave while various animals run by; yet, on another level, it is the story of a group of primitive people who go inside their cave and get trapped by a giant rock.
   But I am getting ahead of myself. For if one is to truly understand this work, one must first examine the philosophical underpinnings of its creators, the Rose Valley School Kindergarten Class, which has devoted several months to studying the Origins of Man, interrupting this effort only for Story Time, Music, Lunch, Cleanup, Rest Time, Sharing Time, Free Time, painting Pictures to Go on the Refrigerator, Running Around Pretending to Be jet Robots, Trying to Remember Where Your Sweater Is, and Snacks.
   As a result of this course of study, the class developed several concepts, which were posted on the bulletin board over near the Really Tall Tower Made from Blocks. These concepts reveal a wide diversity of opinion about the Origins of Man, ranging from the traditional Judeo-Christian Biblical concept:
   “This is Adam and Eve. They ate the bad fruit. They went back to God. They didn’t have any clothes.”
   To the less-conventional Big Bird and Oak Tree concept:
   “In the beginning of the world there was a big bird and an oak tree. The big bird had a coconut, and the moon was out.”
   And yet from this eclecticism of belief has emerged The Cave People, a work that has not only a strong sense of cohesiveness, but also has a great big gray cave made out of papier-mache standing right next to the piano, which is sort of holding it up.
   As Act One opens, some Cave People are sitting in front of the cave, and almost immediately the theme of Animals Running By is established by two woolly rhinoceroses, portrayed by Owen Smith and ROBERT BARRY, running by and making a noise like a 33 rpm recording, played at 45 rpm, of a bull elephant with its private parts caught in a trash compactor. And although the audience was unable to see the faces of these two fine young actors directly due to the fact that they were wearing yarn-covered paper bags over their heads, the power of their performance, especially that of the lead rhinoceros, ROBERT BARRY (the one who did not have his arm stuck through the eyehole), was such that even veteran drama critics such as myself were moved to take upwards of 20 color photographs.
   This was followed by deer running by wearing antlers and brown underpants and waving at their parents, which set the stage for a moment of powerful drama as the dreaded saber-toothed tiger, played superbly if somewhat blindly by Matt Dorio with something on his head, came prowling by, bonking into things, causing the Cave People to poke each other with their spears and laugh. “They were really scared,” explained the narrator.
   The Getting Trapped in the Cave by a Giant Rock theme is then introduced by means of having the Cave People go inside the cave, then having the giant rock, which had been held up by a piece of yarn, fall down and almost block the entrance. In fact it probably did block the entrance, in rehearsal, although in the actual play, the piano player had to shove the giant rock over with her left hand, but she did this with a very natural and convincing motion. just then another group of Cave People emerged from behind the piano and had the following realistic primitive dialogue with the ones that were trapped:
   PEOPLE OUTSIDE THE CAVE (in unison): You guys inside! Push hard on the rock! PEOPLE INSIDE THE CAVE (in unison): OK!
   This is followed by an absolutely stunning bit of staging as the Cave People all push on the giant rock and, as if by magic, it rises straight up in the air. Believe me when I tell you that there was not a dry set of underwear in the audience at this point.
   The Animals Running By theme is then reintroduced as the dreaded saber-toothed tiger bonks its way back on stage, and the Cave People stab it about 50,000 times with their spears until it is, in the words of the narrator, “totally dead.” The theme of Getting Everybody Back Onstage is then established as the Cave People invite the deer and the woolly rhinoceroses to help them eat the tiger. In the cheerful words of the narrator: “They all sat down, roasted him, ripped him apart, and had a delicious meal.” The concept of the meal being delicious was dramatically reinforced by having the Cave People say: “Yummy!” and “This is a delicious meal!” Of course, the woolly rhinoceroses, being unable to speak, could only pat their stomachs in a satisfied manner, but they did this in such a convincing and moving way that even veteran critics wanted to rush right up and give them a great big hug

Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need

Dave Barry

Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One. Planning Your “Trip To Paradise,” Or Possibly Beirut
Planning Your Travel Budget
Traveler’s Checks
Working With A Travel Agent
Renting A Car
Choosing A Car-Rental Company
Types Of Luggage
How Much Luggage You Can Carry On A Commercial Airline Flight
What To Pack
Bonus Packing Tip: How To Pack A Suit So It Won’t Come Out Wrinkled
Chapter Two. How To Speak A Foreign Language In Just 30 Minutes
Without Necessarily Having Any Idea What You Are Saying
Practical French Restaurant Phrases
Other Practical French Phrases
Practical Spanish Phrases
Riding Public Transportation:
During Festivals:
Emergency Medical Phrases:
Practical Italian Phrases
Practical German Phrases
Chapter Three. Air Travel (Or: Why Birds Never Look Truly Relaxed)
Airport Security
How to Act While Going Through Security
Baggage Searches
“For Kids Only”: Fun with Airport Security Personnel
Note From The Publisher
An Open Letter To Airline Passengers
Chapter Four. Traveling As A Family (Or: No, We Are Not There Yet!)
Examples
The Walt “You Will Have Fun” Disney World Themed Shopping Complex And Resort Compound
Seeing Other Attractions in the Disney World Area
Educational Historic Sites
Traveling With Teenagers
Two Major Rules for Traveling with Teenagers
Chapter Five. See The U.S.A. First! (While We Still Own Part Of It)
The Fifty States
Alabama
Alaska
Arizona
Arkansas
California
Colorado
Connecticut
Delaware
Florida
Georgia
Hawaii
Idaho
Illinois
Indiana
Iowa
Kansas
Kentucky
Louisiana
Maine
Maryland
Massachusetts
Michigan
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
New Hampshire
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Carolina and Dakota
Ohio
Oklahoma
Oregon
Pennsylvania
Rhode Island
South Carolina and Dakota
Tennessee
Texas
Utah
Vermont
Virginia
Washington
Washington, D.C.
West Virginia
Wisconsin
Wyoming
Other Countries Besides Us In The Western Hemisphere
Canada
The History of Canada
What to See in Canada
Mexico
The History of Mexico
What to Do in Mexico
Chapter Six. Traveling In Europe (“Excuse Me! Where Is The Big Mona Lisa?”)
A Brief History Of Europe
Passport
Medical Care In Europe
Customs
Helpful Hints for Getting Through Customs
Measurements In Europe
Driving In Europe
Changing Money
How To Use A Bidet
Specific Nations In Europe
Austria
Belgium
Bulgaria
Denmark
England
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Holland
Iceland
Ireland
Italy
Liechtenstein and Luxembourg
Norway
Poland
Portugal
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Chapter Seven. Staying In Hotels (Or: We’re Very Sorry, But Your Chapter Is Not Ready Yet)
Staying At Quaint Little Country Inns
Chapter Eight. Camping: Nature’s Way Of Promoting The Motel Industry
Where Nature Is Located
Selecting The Proper Campsite
What To Do In A Wilderness Medical Emergency
Fun Family Wilderness Activities
Welcome Home! Or: “That’s Odd! Our House Used To Be Right Here!”
About The Author

Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need

Dedication

   This book is dedicated to Wilbur and Orville Wright, without whom air sickness would still be just a dream.

Introduction

   Mankind has always had a yen to travel. Millions of years ago, Mankind would be sitting around the cave, eating raw mastodon parts, and he’d say, “Marge, I have a yen to travel.” And Marge would agree instantly, because she had frankly reached the point where if she saw one more mastodon part, she was going to scream. So off they’d go, these primitive tourists, exploring new territory, seeing new sights, encountering new cultures, and eventually having their skulls bashed into tiny fragments by the Big Rock Tribe.
   But that has not stopped us. No, the human race is far too stupid to be deterred from tourism by a mere several million years of bad experiences, and today we’re traveling in larger numbers than ever. We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there’s a part of us that wants—that needs—to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler’s checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for “transfusion,” and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to French-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.
   Of course, traveling is much easier today than it used to be. A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California, whereas today, because of equipment problems at O’Hare, you can’t get there at all. Also, in the olden days a major drawback to traveling was the fact that much of the world was occupied by foreign countries, which had no concept whatsoever of how a country is supposed to operate. Many of them did not accept major credit cards. Sometimes the people would not understand plain English unless you spoke very loud. A few of these countries—it’s hard to believe this was even legal—did not have television in the hotel rooms.
   So as you can imagine, traveling was often a harsh and brutal experience. In one case, a group of innocent American tourists was taken on a tour bus through a country the members later described as “either France or Sweden” and subjected to three days of looking at old, dirty buildings in cities where it was not possible to get a cheeseburger. It reached the point where the U.S. government was considering having U.S. troops, with special military minibars strapped to their backs, parachute into these countries to set up emergency restaurants.
   Fortunately, however, most of these countries eventually realized the marketing advantages of not being so foreign. Today you can go to almost any country in the world and barely realize that you’ve left Akron, Ohio, unless of course you are so stupid as to go outside the hotel. “Never go outside the hotel”: this is one of the cardinal rules of travel. Another one is: “Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top.”
   These are just two of the many vital nuggets of information you’ll find throughout this book. Another good thing about this book is, it doesn’t mince words. The problem with most so-called experts in the travel industry is that they are—no offense—lying scum. These people want you to travel. That’s how they make money. That’s why they’re called “the travel industry.” So naturally they’re going to tell you whatever they think you want to hear.
   You: So, are there modern hotels in Latvia? TRAVEL AGENT: Oh, yes. Very modern. Extremely modern. YOU: Have you been there? TRAVEL AGENT: Not technically, no, but I have perused almost all the way through a brochure about it, and I can assure you that the modernity of Latvian hotels is pretty much of a legend. “As modern as a Latvian hotel” is an expression that we frequently bandy about, here in the travel industry.
   And then, of course, when you get there, you discover that the hotel elevator is powered by oxen, and you have to share a communal bathroom with several Baltic republics, and the toilet paper could be used to deflect small-arms fire. But at that point there are no representatives of the travel industry within a thousand miles. You’ll never find them in Latvia. They spend their vacations at the mall.
   Most travel guidebooks are the same way. For one thing, most of these books are filled with information that was gathered during the Truman administration. The writers never have time to update the information, because they’re too busy cranking out next year’s edition (NEW! REVISED! HIGHLY INACCURATE!). Also, no matter what destination these books are talking about, they’ll tell you it’s wonderful: “Even the most demanding traveler is bound to feel a warm glow after only a few days in Chernobyl ...”
   This is not that kind of travel book. We call them as we see them. If we think a country is awful, we’re going to say so, even if we’ve never been to this country and know virtually nothing about it. That’s the kind of integrity we have. Right off the bat, for example, we’re rejecting Paraguay as a destination. “Stay the hell out of Paraguay” is another one of the cardinal rules of travel, and we’ll be giving you many, many more of these time-tested axioms as we think them up.
   And what qualifies us as a travel expert? For one thing, we frequently refer to ourselves in the plural. For another thing, we have been traveling for many years, dating back to when we were a young boy in the early 1950’s and our father used to drive our entire family from New York to Florida in a car that actually got smaller with every passing mile, so that by the time we got to Georgia the interior was the size of a standard mailbox, but not as comfortable, and the backseat hostility level between our sister and us routinely reached the point where any object placed between us would instantly burst into flame.
   Yes, we have many fond travel memories. You are going to read about every damned one of them. Also, we may decide to make you look at the color slides we took of our trip to the Virgin Islands, featuring nearly two dozen shots of the airplane wing alone.
   But mostly this book is intended to help you, the modern traveler, plan and carry out your business and vacation travel adventures with a minimum of unpleasantness and death. Throughout this effort, we will try to remember the famous thirteenth century tourist Marco Polo, who, having managed against all odds and with great effort to cross Persia, the plateau of the Pamir, the forbidden regions of Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan, and the Gobi Desert, finally arrived at the legendary Kublai Khan’s palace at Shang-tu, where he uttered the words that have served as an inspiration for travelers ever since: “What do you mean, you don’t have my reservation?”

Chapter One. Planning Your “Trip To Paradise,” Or Possibly Beirut

   Planning is a very important part of travel. Just ask Amelia Earhart, the famous woman aviatrix (“Aviatrix” means “deceased person”) who in 1937
   attempted to fly around the world in a twin-engine Lockheed and disappeared somewhere in the South Pacific and was never heard from again. This kind of thing can really put a damper on your vacation, yet it can easily be prevented if you do a little advance research by asking some basic travel questions, such as:
   1. Will you be flying on a twin-engine Lock—heed?
   2. Will you ever be heard from again?
   3. Will there be meal service?
   Oh, I realize that not everybody likes to plan every step of a vacation. Some people would rather just grab a backpack and a sleeping bag, stick out their thumbs and start hitchhiking down the highway, enjoying the fun and adventure of not knowing “what’s around the bend.” Most of these people are dead within hours. So planning is definitely the way to go.
   Step One is to decide on a destination. The two most popular travel destinations are:
   1. Domestic
   2. Foreign
   The major advantage of domestic travel is that, with a few exceptions such as Miami, most domestic locations are conveniently situated right here in the United States. This means that, on a domestic vacation, you are never far from the convenience of American culture in the form of malls, motels, Chicken McNuggets, Charming Bathroom Tissue, carwindow suction-cup Garfield dolls, lawyers, etc. Also, the United States contains an enormous amount of natural beauty, although I do not personally prefer Nature as a vacation destination, because of various factors such as the Dirt Factor, the Insect Factor, and, of course, the Snake Factor (see Chapter Eight, “Camping: Nature’s Way of Promoting the Motel Industry”).
   The United States also contains some history, most of which is located in special humidity-controlled rooms in Washington, D.C., heavily guarded by armed civil servants. Or, if you prefer to get “off the beaten path,” you can simply hop in the car and travel the highways and byways of this great land of ours, visiting its many proud little dirtbag towns:
   Dweebmont, Ohio
   “Styptic Pencil Capital of the World
   Often there will be local fairs and festivals where the kids can ride on the Whirl-’n’-Puke while Mom and Dad enjoy tasty local cuisine such as french fried potatoes, fried chicken, fried onion rings, fried dough, and fried frying oil fried with fried sugar.
   Of course, if rides are what you’re after, you’ll definitely want to visit one of the major Themed Attractions, such as Six Flags over a Large Flat Region, or the world-famous Walt Disney World of Hot Irritable Popcorn-Bloated Families Waiting in Enormous Lines (see Chapter Four, “Disney World on $263,508 a Day”). Many of these attractions feature exhibits simulating foreign nations such as Europe, thus enabling you to experience exactly what it would be like to be in another country, provided that it was a foreign country staffed by Americans and located inside a Themed Attraction.
   But if you prefer the “real thing,” you’ll want to choose a foreign travel destination. The major problem here, as I mentioned in the Introduction, is that foreign destinations tend to contain enormous quantities of foreigners (In the form of Japanese tourists). There’s nothing you can do about this except grin and bear it, unless you’re in some foreign country where grinning is considered rude and is punishable by death, in which case you should frown and bear it. or stick a finger up each nostril and bear it, or whatever they do when they bear it in that country.
   But that’s exactly the problem. As an American who was raised in America and attended American schools—where, despite years of instruction, the only thing you learned how to say in a foreign language is “The dog has eaten my brother”—you will often find yourself totally disoriented in foreign situations. Europe, for example, is filled with knots of confused Americans, squinting at menus with no more comprehension than a sea gull examining the Space Shuttle (“What the hell does this mean?” “I think it means ‘Chicken of the Hot Trouser Parts.’”).
   Also, you will have to accept the fact that, in foreign countries, you will never have the vaguest idea how much anything costs. All foreign countries have confusing money, with names like the Pound, the Yen, the Libra, the Mark, the Frank, the Duane, the Doubloon, and the Kilometer, all of which appear to have been designed by preschool children. Not one of these monetary units is equal to a dollar, or anything else, and all of them change in value on an hourly basis. This is all a result of the Marshall Plan, which was set up by General Marshall Plan after World War II as a means of making the entire rest of the world rich at our expense, the idea being that Americans traveling abroad would be so disoriented by foreign currency that every now and then one of them will buy a single croissant and leave a tip large enough to enable the waiter to retire for life.
   But that’s the fun of traveling abroad: the sense of romance and mystery that comes from being an out of-it bozo, from not knowing for sure whether the sign you’re looking at says PUBLIC PARK or RADIOACTIVE WASTE AREA. One time I was with a group of five people driving around Germany, and it took us an entire week to figure out that “Einbahnstrasse” meant “One-Way Street.” We’d be driving around some German city, frowning at our map, scratching our pointy American heads and saying, “Geez! We’re on Einbahnstrasse again!” Ha ha! What a bunch of gooberheads we were! Fortunately, everybody in Germany, including domestic animals, speaks English better than the average U.S. high school graduate, So we were able to get clear directions from passing pedestrians. At times like these, you might tend to feel culturally inferior, as an American, but it’s always heartening to remember that, no matter what country you’re in, it probably doesn’t rank anywhere near the U.S.A. in the nuclear-warhead department (also we have Wayne Newton).

Planning Your Travel Budget

   The standard formula for computing travel costs is to figure out the total amount of available money you have, total, then multiply this by at least six. But even this formula is probably going to give you a low estimate, because you usually have unexpected expences. I do want to stress that, whatever amount it was, I am certain the nun turned it directly over to the church (Or she bought a Ferrari). My point is that whenever and wherever you travel, you’re going to have unanticipated expenses, and you need to anticipate them. Fortunately the Visa and MasterCard people have a fine program for travelers, under which you can charge everything, and then when you get back, you simply pay them small convenient amounts for several years, which turns out to be nowhere near enough, so they confiscate your children, which is not entirely a bad thing (see Chapter Four, “Traveling as a Family”).

Traveler’s Checks

   Travelers checks are very impressive pieces of paper that are backed by the full faith and credit of actor Karl Malden. They are accepted at thousands of shopping locations around the world, although almost never the location that you personally are shopping in. Nevertheless, traveler’s checks are very popular with those travelers who have the brains of frozen vegetables. You’ve seen these people in those American Express traveler’s check commercials:
   FIRST TRAVELER: Oh no!
   SECOND TRAVELER: What’s wrong!
   FIRST TRAVELER: I left my wallet unguarded on a cafe table here in the middle of this squalid, poverty-ridden, crime-infested foreign city, and now it’s gone!
   SECOND TRAVELER: But that’s impossible!
   KARL MALDEN (to camera): Hi, I’m Karl Malden.
   FIRST TRAVELER: Look! It’s Raymond Burr!
   KARL MALDEN: If you lose your American Express traveler’s checks, you can call for an immediate refund.
   FIRST TRAVELER: But we don’t even know how to operate a telephone!
   SECOND TRAVELER: I don’t even remember which Traveler I am! I think I’m the Second Traveler!
   FIRST TRAVELER: No! I’m the Second Traveler!
   KARL MALDEN (tO camera): American Express traveler’s checks. A lot of people never even figure out how to cash them.

Working With A Travel Agent

   You should definitely have a travel agent. Why go through all the hassle of dealing with airlines, hotels, and rental-car agencies yourself, only to see the arrangements get all screwed up, when with just a single phone call you can have a trained professional screw them up for you?
   No, seriously, travel agents are wonderful. At least mine is. Her name is Ramona, and I’d literally be lost without her. I’ll be on a business trip, and I’ll wake up in a strange hotel room in bed with traces of minibar cheeses (At $127.50 per ounce) in my hair, and in a disoriented panic I’ll call Ramona, and we’ll have the following conversation:
   ME: Where am I? RAMONA (checking her computer): You’re in Houston. ME (alarmed): Why? RAMONA: You’re on a business trip.
   ME: Can I come home yet?
   RAMONA (checking her computer): No. You have to go to Detroit.
   ME (very alarmed): Detroit?
   RAMONA (checking her computer): And get that cheese out of your hair.
   I always do what Ramona says, because she has the computer. Ramona could ship me off to the Falkland Islands if she felt like it.
   Ramona also is good at attempting to explain the airline fare system, which is governed by a powerful, state-of-the-art computer that somebody apparently spilled a pitcher of Hawaiian Punch into the brain of, and it has been insane ever since. I base this statement on the fact that if I fly from Miami to, for example, Tampa, the round-trip fare is often hundreds of dollars more than what it costs to fly from Miami to, say, Singapore. This makes no sense. Singapore is in a completely different continent (Possibly Africa), whereas Tampa is so close to Miami that our stray bullets frequently land there. And what is worse, there is never just one fare to Tampa. There are dozens of them, and they are constantly mutating. and the more Ramona explains them to me, the more disoriented I become.
   ME: I need to go to Tampa on Thursday.
   RAMONA (checking her computer): No, not Thursday.
   ME: No?
   RAMONA: No, because there’s a $600 penalty if you fly on a Thursday during a month whose name contains two or more vowels following two straight quarters of increased unemployment unless you are a joint taxpayer filing singly with two or more men on base provided that you spend at least one Saturday night in a hotel room within twelve feet of a malfunctioning ice machine and you undergo a ritual initiation ceremony wherein airline ticket agents dance around you and put honey-roasted peanuts up your nose. me: Book me on the Singapore flight.

Renting A Car

   Renting a car offers many attractive advantages to the traveler: independence, convenience, dependability, and a sudden, massive lowering of the IQ. I know what I’m talking about here. I live in Miami, and every winter we have a huge infestation of rental-car drivers, who come down here seeking warm weather and the opportunity to make sudden left turns without signaling across six lanes of traffic into convenience stores (No, not into the parking lots. Into the stores). My wife and I have affectionately nicknamed these people “Alamos,” because so many of them seem to rent their cars from Alamo, which evidently requires that every driver leave several major brain lobes as a deposit. We’ll be driving along, and the driver in front of us will engage in some maneuver that is boneheaded even by the standards of Miami (official motoring motto: “Death Before Yielding”), and we’ll shout, “Look out! Alamos!” We’re tempted to stay off the highways altogether during tourist season, just stockpile food and spend the entire winter huddled in our bedrooms, but we’re not sure we’d be safe there.
   Not that I feel superior to the Alamos. I’ve rented many cars myself, and I have to admit that as soon as I get behind the wheel, I go into Bozo Mode. For one thing, I am instantly lost, and the only guidance I have is the rental-car-agency map, the sole function of which apparently is to show you the location of the rental-car agency. So I’m disoriented, plus I’m constantly trying to adjust the mirrors, seat, air conditioning, steering wheel, etc., plus—this is the most important part—I have to find a good radio station. This means I am devoting only about 2 percent of my brain to actually driving the car. And thus I—a person who tends to be extremely critical of other people’s driving—am transformed into an Alamo, drifting along at 27 miles per hour in the left lane of the interstate, with my left blinker on, trying to locate the FM button. Maybe, as a warning to other drivers, the federal government should require that all rental cars must have giant orange question marks sticking up out of their roofs.

Choosing A Car-Rental Company

   The car-rental industry is extremely competitive, and often you can find some really good “deals” by keeping your eyes “peeled” for advertisements that look like this:
   Why Pay More? Rent a Car for Just $3.99 a Week!! Including Unlimited Mileage!! Big Bob’s Car Rental & Miniature Golf & Full-Body Massage
   Certain restrictions apply to this offer, such as to get the actual car you have to ride our “Courtesy Van,” which runs only during Lent, from the airport to our rental facility, which is in the Soviet Union, where you will have to wait in line behind people who have been there since the Ford administration because our rental fleet consists of a 1971 Plymouth Valiant with a tendency to catch fire, so we definitely recommend the insurance.
   As a “smart shopper,” you will definitely save “big money” by taking advantage of bargains such as these, although you should of course insist that the agency person explain the terms of the rental agreement before you sign it:
   You: What does this mean?
   AGENCY PERSON: What does what mean?
   YOU: This part here, where it says, “Renter agrees that we get to keep his house.”
   AGENCY PERSON: Oh, that. Nothing. You (relieved): Whew.

Types Of Luggage

   The type of luggage you carry says a lot about you. For example, if you’re carrying somebody else’s luggage, it says you’re a thief.
   No, seriously, luggage is important, which is why most frequent travelers spend their entire lives looking for Exactly the Right Piece of Luggage, the one that is nice and compact but holds a lot of stuff. This is a waste of time, of course, because the truth is that a piece of luggage is nothing but a bag or a box with a handle on it, and under the laws of physics, which are strictly enforced in luggage, the size of the bag or the box determines how much it will hold, as can be seen in the following chart:
   Size Of Luggage Unit Amount Of Stuff Luggage Unit Will Hold
   Small Small amount
   Medium Medium amount
   Large Large amounts But still not enough
   The infrequent traveler generally accepts these limitations and purchases one of those enormous, hard-sided suitcases that have wheels and weigh about 87 pounds even when they’re empty. But your frequent traveler never abandons the quest to find a miracle luggage unit that can hold more than it can actually hold. Over the course of a lifetime the frequent traveler will purchase dozens of luggage units, frequently from advertisements in airline in-flight magazines. You’ve probably seen the advertisements. There’s a picture of what appears to be an ordinary carry-on suitcase, underneath which are about 70,000 words, which begin:
   AMAZING LUGGAGE BREAKTHROUGH!
   A recent scientific discovery by researchers at the Stanford University School of Luggage Science has made possible the REVOLUTIONARY new Laser 300OX Total Carry-on Wardrobe Unit! Although smaller than a standard clarinet case, this incredible unit, thanks to advanced luggage technology, can easily hold: Eight men’s suits OR 14
   women’s full-length evening gowns PLUS All the shirts, socks, ties, underwear, and clothing accessories you would need for two terms in Congress PLUS All your toiletries
   PLUS An actual working toilet And that’s not all! How many times have you said to yourself, as a busy business traveler: “Why can’t they design a carry-on bag with a space for my tennis rackets, golf clubs, skis, and volleyball equipment?” Well, look no farther, because the Laser 300OX ...
   And so on. Ordinarily you would take one look at this kind of advertisement and say, hey, get serious. But in the airplane environment, where you have nothing else to do except watch the movie, (Rocky XVII, the one where he has surgery so his eyelids can open all the way) you find yourself reading all the way through it, and by the time you’re on your third Bloody Mary, and you’ve reached the part where the advertisement claims that this suitcase will do your tax returns for you, you’re thinking, “Hey! This could be the answer to my luggage needs!” So you whip out your Visa or MasterCard and fill out the order form, and six to ten weeks later you receive: a bag with a handle. A small bag with a handle. Which, if you really pack it right, will hold two pairs of socks PLUS your dental floss. I know what I’m talking about! I have seventeen of these things!

How Much Luggage You Can Carry On A Commercial Airline Flight

   Federal Airline Administration regulations state that each passenger may have up to 17,000 pounds of carry-on luggage provided that he or she can jam it all into the overhead baggage compartment. I am a veteran traveler, but I am still amazed at how much stuff some people will try to get up there. Entire households, sometimes. These people are always directly in front of me. “What do you mean, I can’t carry this on?!” they’ll say to the airline personnel. “I ALWAYS carry this on!”
   “Sir,” the airline personnel will say, “that’s a lawn tractor.
   “But look!” the person will say. “It fits in the overhead baggage compartment!” And the person will actually attempt to shove it in there, which is of course impossible because (a) the tractor is too large, and (b) the compartment already contains some other passenger’s upright piano. But this will not stop the person from trying. No human emotion is more powerful than the grim determination of an airline passenger attempting to shove an inappropriate object into the overhead baggage compartment.

What To Pack

   There are two major schools of thought on how to pack for traveling. These are known technically as “my school” and “my wife’s school.” My school of packing is that you should never carry more things than you can fit into a standard sandwich bag. This way you never put yourself in a position where you have to turn your belongings over to a commercial airline’s crack Luggage Hiding Department (traces of airline luggage have been found on Mars). So I travel very light, and I’ve found that this is really not a problem, once I get adjusted to the stench resulting from wearing the same shirts and socks and, of course, underwear for as long as two weeks running. The advantage of this is that I get plenty of room to stretch out on airplanes, because nobody will sit near me. The disadvantage is that the flight attendants also stay away, preferring to serve my dinner entree by flipping it at me Frisbee-style from as far as 25 feet away, and some of those airline entrees are hard enough to kill a person (Such as lasagna).
   My wife, on the other hand, would not think of leaving the house for even a half hour without sufficient possessions in her purse alone to establish a comfortable wilderness homestead. So when we travel, she packs many, many items. She buys these giant suitcases, manufactured by shipbuilders, and she packs them with items for every conceivable contingency. Like, if we’re going someplace in the tropics, she’ll naturally pack an entire set of lightweight outfits, but she’ll also pack an entire set of medium-weight outfits, in case we have a cool snap; and a set of heavy outfits, in case we get locked inside a meat freezer; and a waffle iron, in case we get hungry for waffles while we’re in there; and so on. So we generally arrive at the airport with virtually all of our worldly possessions, looking like Cambodian refugees, except that we appear to be actually taking Cambodia with us. Our carry-on luggage alone is enough to prevent many planes from ever leaving the ground. They’ll taxi down the runway, gaining speed, then, after a violent grunting effort to take off, they’ll continue right on taxiing, sometimes right into a harbor. This doesn’t worry us, however, because my wife always brings plenty of scuba equipment.

Bonus Packing Tip: How To Pack A Suit So It Won’t Come Out Wrinkled

   Lay the suit on its back on a flat surface such as a tennis court. Take the sleeves and place them at the side. Take the left sleeve and place it on the suit’s hip, and hold the right sleeve over the suit’s head as though the suit is waving in a jaunty manner. Now put both sleeves straight up over the suit’s head and shout, “Touchdown!” Ha ha! Isn’t this fun? You may feel stupid, but trust me, you’re not half as stupid as the people who think they can fold a suit so it won’t come out wrinkled.

Chapter Two. How To Speak A Foreign Language In Just 30 Minutes

Without Necessarily Having Any Idea What You Are Saying

   One of the great things about being an American, aside from the constitutionally guaranteed freedom to have obscene bumper stickers, is that so many foreign people speak our language (English). You can walk the streets of just about any major city in the world, and as soon as the natives realize that you’re an American, they’ll make you feel right at home.
   “Stick them up!” they’ll say. “Please to be handing over your American Express traveler’s checks! Don’t leave home without them!”
   Yes, they are clever, those natives. Nevertheless, you may sometimes find yourself in a foreign situation wherein members of the local population, because of a poor educational system or sheer laziness, have not learned to speak your language fluently. This can lead to serious problems, as when for example you’re in Spain, attempting to obtain a chicken-salad sandwich, and you wind up with a dish whose name, when you look it up in your Spanish/English dictionary, turns out to mean “Eel with the Big Abscess.” This is why I strongly recommend that before you travel abroad, you learn to speak a foreign language, ideally the same one that is spoken in whatever country you’re going to.
   Of course you probably think it’s hard to learn another language, because you spent years studying foreign languages in high school, and all you can remember is being forced to confiscate verbs and memorize those moronic dialogues wherein everybody seemed to be obsessed with furniture:
   PIERRE: Voici le bureau de mon oncle. (“Here is the bureau of my uncle.”)
   JACQUES: Le bureau de votre oncle est right prochain de la table de ma tante. (“The bureau of your uncle is right next to the table of my aunt.”)
   MARIE: Qui donne un merde? (“Who gives a shit?”)
   I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn’t know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation. I could say, “Show me the fish of your brother Raoul,” but I could not say, “Madame, if you poke me one more time with that umbrella I am going to jam it right up one of your primary nasal passages,” which would have been extremely useful.
   So what you need, as a traveler, is to learn practical foreign expressions. Let’s say you’re in a very swanky Paris restaurant that has earned the coveted “Five-Booger” ranking from the prestigious Michelin Guide to How Snotty a Restaurant Is. You cannot be asking these people to show you the fish of their brother Raoul. You will want to use simple, foolproof phrases such as the following.

Practical French Restaurant Phrases

   Garr,on! Je suis capable de manger un cheval! (“Waiter! I could eat a horse!”) Apportez-moi quelques aliments franqaise ici pronto sur la double! (“Bring me some French food immediately!”) Mettez-le smaque dabbe sur la table. (“Put it smack dab on the table.”) Attendez une minute au jus dernier! (“Wait just a darned minute!”) Qu’est-ce 1’enfer que c’est? (“What is this the hell that this is?”) Attemptez-vous A yanquer ma chaine, boudet? (“Are you trying to yank my chain, buddy?”) Je donne madam CHAT plus viande que cette! (“I give my damn CAT more meat than this!”) Sacre moo! Ce EST mon chat! (“Holy cow! This IS my cat!”)

Other Practical French Phrases

   Nous sommes suppose a faire peepee ICI? (“We’re supposed to pee HERE?”)
   Mais nous sommes droit dans le friggant RUE. (“But we’re right in the goshdarn STREET.”)
   y a des RELIGIEUSES regardant nous. (“There are NUNS watching us.”)
   Dites, cette religieuse est hot. (“Say, that nun is fairly attractive.”)
   Peut-etre j’ai been en France trop longue. (“Perhaps I have been in France too long.”)

Practical Spanish Phrases

   In the Restaurant:
   Camarero, hay una mosca en mi sopa. (“Waiter, there is a fly in my soup.”)
   Pero esa mosca es atarado al pantalones. (“But this fly is attached to a pair of pants.”)

Riding Public Transportation:

   Jey, no es anybody pilotando ese autobus? (“Hey, isn’t anybody driving this bus?”)
   ESE es el piloto? (“THAT’S the driver?”)
   El hombre que dormir en el charco de saliva? (“The man sleeping in the Puddle of saliva?.”)
   Quiza deberias empujar los frenos. (“Maybe we should apply the brakes.”)
   Que the hell usted decir, una cabra ha comido los frenos? (“What do you mean, a goat ate the brakes?”)
   Porque estan mi frente marcas de preguntas al reves? (“Why are my front question marks upside down?”)

During Festivals:

   Mi (esposo, esposa) es been tramplado por toros. (“My [husband, wife] has been trampled by bulls.”)
   No, no estoy quejarsando. (“No, I’m not complaining.”)

Emergency Medical Phrases:

   Muchacho, es mi booty dolorido desde ese caso de los trots! (“Boy, is my butt sore from this diarrhea!”)
   El hace yo pasar como el tarde Campos de Totie! (“It’s making me walk like the late Totie Fields!”)

Practical Italian Phrases

   Non desear chiunque ferire or nothing. (“We don’t want anybody should get hurt.”)
   Tuo fratello Raoul dormi con los pesces. (“Your brother Raoul sleeps with the fishes.”)

Practical German Phrases

   Achtung! (“Gesundheit!”)
   Enschreitenblatten Schalteniedlich Verkehrsge sellschaft! (“Ha ha!”)
   Ich veranlassenarbeitenworken mein Mojo. (“I have got my mojo working.”)

Chapter Three. Air Travel (Or: Why Birds Never Look Truly Relaxed)

   You’re probably not going to believe this, but there are still some people, in this modern day and age, who are afraid of air travel. Ha ha! Are they a bunch of Nervous Nellies, or what?
   Oh, sure, air travel seems dangerous to the ignorant layperson, inasmuch as it involves hurtling through the air seven miles straight up trapped inside an object the size of a suburban ranch home in total defiance of all known laws of physics. But statistics show that, when you’re in an airplane, you’re actually four times as safe as when you’re driving your car on an interstate highway (Provided that you are driving drunk and blindfolded)!
   Nevertheless, many of us, even veteran fliers, tend to be a little edgy about air travel these days, because it seems as if hardly a day goes by that we don’t pick up a newspaper and see headlines like:
   ENGINE FALLS OFF PLANE
   WING FALLS OFF PLANE
   PILOT SUCKED OUT OF PLANE
   PLANE POSSESSED BY DEMONS
   FAA Orders Exorcism of Entire L-1011 Fleet
   But the truth is that, thanks to improvements in technology, air travel today is safer than it has been at any time for the past three weeks. Yes, we’ve come a long way since the Age of Aviation began back in the historic year of 19-something in Kitty Hawk, North or South Carolina, when two young mechanics named Wilbur and Orville Wright, using some canvas and old bicycle parts, constructed the very first airline omelet. There have been many important commercial-aviation innovations since then, including:
   Airline magazines featuring articles with titles like “Akron: Meeting Yesterday’s Challenges Tomorrow.” “Turbulence.” This is what pilots announce that you have encountered when your plane strikes an object in midair. You’ll be flying along, and there will be an enormous, shuddering WHUMP, and clearly the plane has rammed into an airborne object at least the size of a water buffalo, and the pilot will say, “Folks, we’re encountering a little turbulence.” Meanwhile they are up there in the cockpit trying desperately to clean waterbuffalo organs off the windshield. Frequent-flier programs, wherein each time you take a commercial flight, you earn a certain number of miles, plus bonus miles if you actually reach your intended destination within your lifetime. After you’ve accumulated enough miles, you can redeem them for another flight, unless you have the intelligence of a turnip, in which case you’ll remain in your recreation room, where it’s safe. The Baggage Carousel, where passengers traditionally gather at the end of a flight to spend several relaxing hours watching the arrival of luggage from some other flight, which comes randomly spurting out of a mysterious troll-infested tunnel that is apparently connected to another airport, possibly in a different dimension. The baby in the seat behind you whose parents are obviously poking it with hat pins because there is no other way that a child could shriek that loudly all the way from New York to Los Angeles. The 475-pound man in the adjacent seat who smells like a municipal landfill and whose forearm (which by itself is the size of Roseanne Barr) spends the entire flight oozing, like the Blob, over the armrest until it occupies virtually your entire seat and starts absorbing your in-flight meal through some of its larger pores. This in itself is not a bad thing, because airline food is not intended for human consumption. It’s intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as “mineral” and
   “linoleum.” When the flight attendants ask, “Do you want roast beef or lasagna?” they don’t mean, “Do you want roast beef, or do you want lasagna?” They mean: “Do you want this dinner substance, which could be roast beef, or it could be lasagna? Or possibly peat moss?”
   And speaking of airline food, another important aviation development has been: The barf bag. Early barf bags were large canvas sacks; a severely airsick passenger would be placed inside, and the bag would then be sealed up and, in an act of aviation mercy, shoved out the cargo door at 12,000 feet. Today’s passenger doesn’t get that kind of personalized service, and must place a small bag over his nose and mouth in hopes of cutting off his oxygen supply.
   Despite these strides forward, there have been a few problems caused by the belt-tightening in the airline industry that has resulted from “deregulation,” a new government policy under which the only requirement to purchase an airline is that you have to produce two forms of identification. Even Donald Trump was allowed to purchase an airline, which he immediately named after himself (“Air Jerk”). This led to some dramatic aviation moments when Trump got into financial difficulty and had to sell some of his aircraft while they were still in the air. (“This is your captain speaking. We’ve just been advised that instead of Boston, we will be landing in Iran. We regret any incon ...”)
   Of course, this kind of adventure only adds to the fun of flying. My family has had many fun flights, including an extremely exciting one in which we went from Miami to Honolulu via the following itinerary, which I am not making up:
   1. We flew from Miami to Denver on a plane that seemed to be working fine, so naturally they made us get off of it and get on another plane that was supposed to fly the rest of the way to Honolulu. This happened to be on Halloween. “Never Fly on Halloween,” that is our new aviation motto.
   2. They put a bunch of fuel on our new plane, and we got on it. One of the flight attendants was wearing devil ears, which struck us as hilarious at the time but which we later on realized was an omen. “Never Get on a Flight Where a Crew Member Is Wearing Devil Ears” is another one of our aviation mottoes.
   3. When we got out to the end of the runway, the pilot announced that we had too much fuel, which struck us ignorant laypersons as odd, because we were under the impression that having a lot of fuel is good, especially when you’re flying over a major ocean such as the Pacific. Nevertheless we went back to the gate and got off the plane while they removed fuel, apparently using eyedroppers, because it took them two hours.
   4. We got back on the plane and the pilot announced that—remember I am not making this up—we were going to fly to Los Angeles to get some more fuel. So needless to say ...
   5. We landed in San Francisco. There they told us (why not?) that we had to change planes, so we all got off, only to be met by a gate attendant wearing an entire devil costume, which was seeming less and less amusing. Also the pilot was not inspiring a great deal of confidence in us. You know how pilots are generally trim, military-looking individuals who remain up in the cockpit looking aloof but competent? Well, our pilot was a chunky, slightly disheveled man who looked like a minor character in Police Academy XIII. He was walking around the lounge area, chatting with us passengers as though he had nothing else to do, and holding a computer printout the thickness of War and Peace, which he announced was our “flight plan,” although we couldn’t help but note that (a) he wasn’t reading it, and (b) pages were falling out of it. Some of us were starting to suspect that he wasn’t a real pilot at all, but merely a man who had dressed up in a realistic pilot costume for Halloween. But we were desperate, so we followed him aboard yet another plane. As we taxied out to the runway, the pilot said—I swear—”Hopefully, this one will fly all the way.”
   6. So we took off from San Francisco, and for a while everything was fine except for the aroma coming from the seat behind us, which was occupied by a wretched woman who was attempting to get to Australia with two very small children, whom she evidently intended to enter in the World Pooping Championships. But this ceased to be our main concern when, after about an hour over the Pacific, which is famous for not having anyplace on it where you can land, the pilot announced that we had a “minor engine problem.”
   7. So we turned around and headed back toward, you guessed it, San Francisco, which we were beginning to think of as home. All the way back the pilot kept reassuring us about how minor this engine problem was, so you can imagine our excitement when we got to the airport and saw what appeared to be the entire San Francisco Fire Department lining the runway.
   8. We landed safely and scuttled off the plane to be greeted, once again, by the devil, who was now being assisted by a witch. Of course by this point, Hell seemed like a major improvement over commercial air travel.
   9. Several hours later our pilot led us onto yet another plane. By this point
   a lot of people had dropped out of the flight, but we were determined to see what would ultimately happen, with a lot of smart money betting that this would become the first commercial airliner ever to be sucked into a black hole. During the Preflight Safety Lecture—I swear this is true—the flight attendant said, “If you gotta go, go with a smile.”
   10. We took off from San Francisco again and flew back out over the Pacific, where, to judge from the amount of “turbulence,” we flew smack into a whole herd of airborne water buffalo. The in-flight movie was The Dead Poets Society.
   11. We landed in Honolulu, 21 hours after we left Miami. To apologize for our inconvenience, the flight attendants gave us coupons that were good for discounts on future flights, although they new full well that we were all planning to return to the mainland via canoe.
   I do not mean to suggest here that all flights take this long to reach their destinations. Some of them never reach their destinations. And I understand that there are even some, the ones that I personally am not on, that arrive right on schedule. YOu just never know, which is why air travel is the ongoing adventure that it is.

Airport Security

   The important thing to remember about airport security procedures is that they have been created for your protection. Sure, it can be annoying to have to stop at the security checkpoint when you’re on a tight schedule, but look at it this way: If the security personnel do their job properly, they just might cause YOU tO miss your plane, thereby Possibly saving your life.
   The heart of the airport security system is the metal detector, a device that shoots invisible rays into your body. These rays are perfectly harmless, according to security personnel, although you notice that THEY never go through the metal detector. In fact, when nobody’s around, they use it to cook their lunch. So most travel experts recommend that, to avoid turning your internal organs into baked lasagna, you go through the detector as fast as possible, maybe even back up fifty yards or so and get a running start.
   The purpose of the metal detector is to make sure that you’re not carrying a bomb or a deadly weapon or a set of car keys. If the detector detects one of these items, it will beep; security personnel will ask you to place the item on a plastic tray and go through the detector again. Your item will be returned to you on the other side (“Wait, sir! You forgot your bomb!”)

How to Act While Going Through Security

   Security personnel are on the lookout for people who fit the Profile of Suspected Terrorists, which is as follows:
   PROFILE OF SUSPECTED TERRORISTS
   SEX: Male
   AGE: 15 through 74
   LOOKS SUSPICIOUS: Yes
   As a smart traveler who wishes to avoid the inconvenience of being taken to a small airless interrogation room and having electrical wiring attached to your various genitals, you should make every effort to avoid fitting this profile. This means that if you are, for example, a male, you should try to deflect the security personnel’s attention away from this fact via such techniques as:
   Wearing a dress (This is how Oliver North handles it). Periodically remarking out loud to nobody in particular: “I certainly have a lot of body hair, for a woman!”

Baggage Searches

   At the security checkpoint, your carry-on baggage must be placed on a conveyor belt and passed through an X-ray machine so the security personnel can see if you are carrying questionable items, because if you are, federal law requires them to open up your luggage and root around among your personal belongings like starving boars in a full Dumpster. If they find anything suspicious, For Your Own Protection they will ask you certain standard security questions, such as:
   “What’s this stain in your underwear? Cheez Whiz?” “This is a vibrator? I never seen a vibrator this big! HEY, NORM! TAKE A LOOK AT THIS LADY’S VIBRATOR!”

“For Kids Only”: Fun with Airport Security Personnel

   Airport security personnel are chosen for their sense of humor, and there is nothing they enjoy so much as a good joke. A fun game you kids can play with them is “Uncle Ted.” What you do is, when you get near the security checkpoint, you walk up to a passenger selected at random and say in a loud voice, “Uncle Ted, can I see the bomb again?” Ha ha! Those wacky, fun-loving security personnel will sure come running! They might even take “Uncle Ted” for a ride in the electric cart! They might even take YOU for a ride in the electric cart if you mention the detonator in Mom’s purse!

Note From The Publisher

   In this chapter Mr. Barry has been quite critical of commercial air travel, so we have decided, in the interest of fairness, to allow the airline industry an opportunity to respond. The following point-by-point rebuttal was written by Mr. M. Duane LeGrout, president of the American Association of Associated Airline Companies in Association with Each Other.

An Open Letter To Airline Passengers

   Dear Airline Passenger:
   We will be starting this rebuttal in just a few moments. Please remain in the area, as we are almost ready to start this point-by-point rebuttal. Thank you.
   We apologize for the delay. We will begin rebutting very soon now, and we are grateful for your patience.
   We have an announcement for those readers who are waiting for the point-by-point rebuttal. We are experiencing a minor equipment problem with our word processor at this time, but we do expect to have an announcement very soon and we do ask for your continued patience. In the meantime, we regret to announce that we have overbooked this rebuttal, and we are asking for readers who are willing to give up their space in exchange for an opportunity to read two future rebuttals on a topic of your choice. Thank you, and we expect to have another announcement shortly.
   Okay, we do apologize for any inconvenience, but we have been informed that the word-processor problems have been corrected and we will begin rebutting any moment now. We ask that those of you with small shrieking children pLeAse asssidaisaas *(*A*&AA hey can someBoDy fiX this goddam
   REBUTTAL CANCELED! SEE AGENT!
   Sincerely,
   M. Duane LeGrout President