B–Sts And Baby Care

   WARNING: This article contains the word “breast.” I checked with an editor, and he said I could say “breast” as long as I used it scientifically, rather than to arouse prurient interest. For example, I could say: “Two breasts plus two breasts equals four breasts”, but I could not say: “Hey, get a load of that breast.” Anyway, I just thought Id warn you in case you don’t want to read the word “breast.” The rest of the article is about raising babies, and it’s very informative, so for the benefit of those of you who want to read everything but the paragraph with “breast” in it, I’ll let you know when you’re about to come to it.
   The most important thing to remember about raising your baby is that you must not take anyone’s advice, except, of course, mine. Many people, such as your parents, will try to advise you, but you must ignore them. If they knew so much about raising kids, they wouldn’t have screwed you up so badly.
   Most people make babies out to be very complicated, but the truth is they have only three moods:
   Mood One: Just about to cry. Mood Two: Crying. Mood Three: Just finished crying..lm-# Your job, as a parent, is to keep the baby in Mood Three as much as possible; this means you have to figure out why it’s crying. Here’S a tip: Babies never cry because their diapers are dirty. You change their diapers only to make yourself feel better. You could leave the same diaper on your baby for months and it would be perfectly happy, although considerably heavier and less pleasant to be around. So that leaves only two reasons your baby cries: It is hungry. Some other reason. If your baby is hungry, you should feed it.
   WARNING: The next paragraph is the one with a breast in it. So you should either skip it or be prepared for some very explicit talk.
   You can either bottle-feed or breast-feed your baby. Many noted health fanatics strongly recommend that you breast-feed your baby on the grounds that it is very good for the baby. This may be true, but the real advantage of breast-feeding is that only female persons can do it. This means you male persons do not have to get up at the insane hours babies like to get up at. At first you may feel guilty about this, and you’ll get up in the middle of the night to give the female person moral support. But after a while you’ll get so good at morally supporting her that you’ll be able to do it without even waking up. In the morning, when the female person is exhausted from lack of sleep, you can commiserate with her. You can say: “I know how you feel. This morally supporting is no bed of roses, either.” She’ll really appreciate hearing this.
   If your baby doesn’t stop crying after you feed it, it is crying for some other reason. You can try handing it back and forth and saying: “What do you suppose is wrong?” This does no good whatsoever, but it is an old traditional ritual and it passes the time. You can also try making funny faces; this teaches the baby that its parents may be brain-damaged. Or you can give the baby educational toys. My wife bought our baby several dozen expensive educational toys, designed by experts to teach babies about colors and spatial relationships and other vital educational things. Our baby ignores them. He could not be less interested in spatial relationships. The only toy he really likes is an extremely tacky plastic Wonder Bread wrapper, which he stares at happily for long periods. I’m growing fond of it myself.

Suet Won’t Do It

   Many years ago, practically nobody in America had a weight problem, because almost everybody was an Indian, and all there was to eat was bison. The Indians had bison for breakfast, bison for lunch, and bison for supper. After a few thousand years of this, they mostly just picked at their food. Then along came the early white settlers. They didn’t have a weight problem either, because they were engaged in Westward Expansion, which consumes a great many calories. Also, the pioneers rarely got a chance to eat. Oh, they tried: they’d be crossing the Great Plains, and the wagon master would yell: “OK, everyone, let’s form the wagons into a circle for a snack.” But before they could even get out the plates, the Indians, desperate for nonbison food, would attack. If the pioneers had been more thoughtful, they could have carried extra snacks, but they brought only enough for themselves, so unfortunately they had to kill the vast majority of the Indians.
   Next the pioneers built farms, and soon the country was covered with amber fields of grain. As a result, everybody almost starved to death, because what the hell are you going to do with grain? Eat it? You’d be better off with bison. Fortunately, the farmers were able to sell their grain to the Russians, who will eat anything. In exchange, the Russians gave the farmers money, which the farmers used to buy food. So now we have tons of food, only nobody does any actual work except the farmers. Everybody else sits around offices and eats, which is why today most Americans are overweight, some of them to the point where they tend to stall escalators.
   To figure out whether you are overweight, determine your sex and locate your correct scientific weight on this table:
   SEX CORRECT WEIGHT
   Male 155 pounds
   Female 115 pounds
   Child 60 pounds
   If you weigh more than you should, you can attempt to disguise it, but this rarely works. For example, I once worked in an office with an overweight woman. I can’t remember her name, but it was an overweight name, like Bertha, so I’ll call her that. Most of Bertha’s overweight was concentrated in her behind. She looked like a perfectly normal person who for some reason was carrying an ottoman under her dress. Bertha had read in some beauty magazine that if you have a big behind, you should stand in such a way that one arm dangles in front of it, blocking the view. So Bertha made it a point to always have one arm dangling down, even when she was carrying heavy financial ledgers. She looked like she had some kind of nerve disorder. People were always saying “What’s wrong with your arm, Bertha?” until finally it became blatantly obvious that she was trying to obscure her behind, which her arm was too small to do anyway unless she put on a catcher’s mitt.
   Another popular way to disguise excess weight is to wear clothing with vertical stripes. The idea is that vertical stripes create an optical illusion that makes you look thinner, but the truth is that they create an optical illusion that makes you look as though you were wearing a cafe awning. Also, every schoolchild knows that the only reason people wear vertical stripes is to disguise excess weight. You might just as well wear a big sign that says “FAT.” What I’m driving at is that you can’t really hide your weight problem, which means that sooner or later you have to go on a diet.

Important Health Note:

   Before you go on any diet, you should consult your doctor, or at least send him some money.
   The principle behind diets is that you cut down on the amount of calories you eat. A “calorie” is a unit of measurement that tells you how good food tastes. Really good food, like steak or fudge, has a very high calorie content; really awful food, like grapefruit halves, has almost no calories. (Now before I get a lot of outraged letters from citrus growers, let me point out that I am not opposed to grapefruit halves, except as food. I think grapefruit halves can serve many useful purposes around the home, such as extinguishing small fires.)
   To understand how diets work, you have to understand how your body digests food. The process starts in your mouth, which tastes the food and covers it with spit, then sends it down to your stomach to be broken down for use as bodily parts. This is done by color. Red foods, such as rare steak, beets and Hawaiian Punch, are used to form red body parts, such as the heart; green foods, such as beans and lime jello, are used to form green body parts, such as the kidney; beer is used to form urine; and so on. The problem is that if, on a given day, your body doesn’t need any further parts, it turns the food into fat. Your body fully intends to go back to the fat someday and turn it into something useful, but it never gets a chance because you’re always sliding more spit-covered food down your throat. So your fat just sits there, useless, until gradually it loses self-esteem and, desperate for attention, starts interfering with the other organs. This is why you have to go on a diet.
   Another principle behind diets is that you eat things that are so disgusting that your stomach rejects them and goes looking for fat to use as body parts. This is the big problem with diets. You spend a lot of time eating things like Melba toast. Melba toast was developed by the British, and it is not really food at all. You could airlift a thousand tons of Melba toast to some wretched, starving Asian village, and the starving Asians would use it to build homes, or as bookmarks, but it would never occur to them to eat it. This is why diets don’t work. You spend a couple of days eating Melba toast, then you lunge for the Twinkies, and you end up fatter than ever.
   The only other way to lose weight is to go on a scientific weight-loss program. These are widely advertised in those newspapers they sell at supermarket check-out lines, the ones with headlines like: BURT REYNOLDS FINDS CANCER CURE IN UFO RIDE WITH PRINCESS DIANA.
   You should buy one of these magazines and flip through the pages until you see a full-page advertisement with a headline that says “WOMAN LOSES 240 POUNDS IN 30 SECONDS.” Under the headline are two pictures of a woman’s head: in the first picture the head is on top of what appears to be an industrial boiler wearing a 1952 bathing suit; in the second picture, the head is on top of Bo Derek. Under the picture it says: “Mrs. Earl Clamp of Wastewater, Tex., reports that the Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program saved her marriage and prevented serious damage to her home. Let Mrs. Clamp tell you about it in her own words: ‘Well, in my own words, I realized I had a serious weight problem one day when my husband, Earl, wanted to take me to the Recreational Vehicle and Rare Gem Show at the mall, and I couldn’t get out the front door, so I decided to go out through the cellar doors, only I knocked over the water heater and the pipes broke and we had water all over Earl’s pelt collection.
   SO I said: “Earl, I’m going to try the Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program.” I didn’t think I could do it, but this program is so scientific that I lost 240 pounds in 30 seconds, right there in the basement. Now Earl is proud to show nude pictures of me to his friends.’”
   I’m sure these weight-loss programs work, because they have pictorial proof, and, besides, the supermarket check-out newspapers have a reputation for thoroughly checking everything for accuracy before they print it. Which is a lot more than you can say for this publication.

Dentistry Self-Drilled

   I bet you rarely stop to think how important your teeth are. This is good. America is in enough trouble as it is, what with inflation and all; we just can’t afford to have people stopping to think how important their teeth are, especially on major highways.
   Nevertheless, you owe a lot to your teeth. They are your best friends. Think about it: while you’re out here, playing tennis and reading novels, they’re sitting patiently in your mouth, a foul-smelling, disgusting place almost devoid of recreational facilities, dealing with Slim Jims and Cheez-its and the other crap you give them to chew.
   You ought to apologize to your teeth for the way you treat them. You ought to go up to a mirror, right now, and bare your teeth and look them straight in their eyes and say: “I’m sorry.” You may want to practice a bit so you can say this clearly with your teeth bared. Don’t let the children see you.
   Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “I don’t have to apologize to my teeth. I take good care of my teeth.”
   That’s what you think. That’s what I thought, too, until I started going to the dentist again recently after a brief absence of about twelve years. I stopped going because I didn’t trust him. For one thing, he wore an outfit that buttoned on the side, the kind the spaceship crews wear in low-budget science fiction movies. For another thing, he and his cohorts always left the room when they X-rayed me. They’d make up flimsy excuses, like “I have to go put my socks in the dryer,” or “I think the cat is throwing up.” Then they’d flip the X-ray switch and race out of the room, probably to a lead-lined concrete bunker.
   When he came back, the dentist would jab me in the gums sixty or seventy times until my mouth was full of blood and I had to spit in what appeared to be a miniature toilet. Then he’d show me what he claimed was an X ray of my mouth, knowing full well I would not be able to distinguish an X ray of my mouth from a color slide of the Parthenon, and he’d tell me I had a cavity and he was going to fill it. I would tell him I hadn’t noticed any so-called cavity, and that it was, after all, my mouth. And he would give me this long routine about how if he didn’t fill it all my teeth would fall out and I’d lose my job and end up drooling on myself in a gutter, which is what they taught him to say in dental school. Then he would spend several hours drilling a hole in my tooth.
   Answer me this: A cavity is a hole in your teeth, right? So if the dentist is so upset about this hole in your teeth, why does he spend so much time making it bigger? Huh? Does he need more money so he can buy more space-uniform shirts?
   Finally I decided I could save some money if I stopped going to the dentist, got a sharp implement and, in the privacy of my own home, jabbed myself in the gums a couple of times a year. I figured I could ward off cavities by brushing after every meal with an effective decay-preventive dentifrice. I mean, that’s what they told us for years, right? “Brush your teeth after every meal,” they said. Parents said it. Teachers said it. Bucky Beaver said it.
   Never trust a talking beaver. I found this out the hard way when, after twelve years of brushing like a madman, I returned to the dentist. The Dental Hygienist looked at my mouth the way you would look at a full spittoon. “You haven’t been flossing,” she said.
   It seems that while I was home jabbing myself in the gums, the Dental Community was losing its enthusiasm for brushing and getting into flossing. These days the Dental Community regards anybody who merely brushes as a real bozo. This is blatantly unfair. In all those years of going to school and watching Bucky Beaver and Mister Tooth Decay, I never heard one word about flossing.
   Flossing does not come naturally to human beings. If the Good Lord had wanted us to floss our teeth, He would have given us less self-respect. But the Dental Community says we have to do it, because otherwise we’ll get gum disease.
   Pretty slick, isn’t it? If we can’t even see cavities, how the hell are we going to dispute them when they tell us we have gum disease?
   I was about to point all this out to my dentist when he gave me this gas, nitrous oxide I believe, and all of a sudden I felt great. I began to really appreciate the Dental Community for coming up with flossing and all the other fine things it has done for me over the years. I even began to soften toward Bucky Beaver.
   I think this was part of the plan.

Culture Staggers On

Art Cuts Really Sphinx

   If you are a member of the private sector, you are going to have to start supporting the arts.
   For the benefit of those of you who do not know what sector you belong to, here is a simple way to figure it out: If you get Presidents’ Day, election day, Arbor Day, Columbus Day, your birthday, Groundhog Day, and Flag Day off, you belong to the government sector. Otherwise, you belong to the private sector, and, as I said, you will have to start supporting the arts, because the government sector is cutting back.
   The government sector took over the arts a few years back because the private sector had dropped the ball. The problem was that the private sector consisted largely of common people who spent most of their time working and, as a result, never became cultured. Their concept of “art” involved flamingo-shaped lawn ornaments, or pictures of dogs with actual working clocks in their stomachs. The only time that common people ever watched ballet was when it was on the Ed Sullivan show, and even then they watched it only because they knew it would last no more than three minutes and would be followed shortly by an act featuring monkeys wearing dresses.
   This widespread lack of culture created a major problem for the few people who were interested in poetry, classical music, opera, ballet, sculpture, painting—in short, the real, serious, cultural, art-type activities that most people find fairly boring. The problem was that the common people would not voluntarily pay for these activities, so the only places where culture was available were:
   Junior high schools, where, under state law, children are required to do cultural things, such as screech away on rented violins, and parents are required to watch them, and New York City, where there are so many people that you can get a paying crowd for virtually anything, including opera and live nude dog wrestling.
   But other than that, art was pretty scarce. Then some cultured person came up with a brilliant plan: If common people wouldn’t support art voluntarily, why not force them to support it? Now when I say “force,” I’m not talking about just walking up to some common person and ordering him, at gunpoint, to attend an opera. What I’M talking about is getting the government to tax COMMON people, then use their money to put on an opera.
   Actually, this is an old, tried-and-true way to support the arts, dating back to the ancient Egyptians. How do you think the Egyptians built the Sphinx? Surely, you don’t think that a bunch of common Egyptians just got together one day and said: “Hey, why don’t we build a Sphinx?” Of course not. Left to their own devices, the common Egyptians would have spent their time growing food. To get some real culture, to get the Sphinx, the Egyptians needed a government authority, someone with vision, someone with taste, someone with whips and spears.
   Our government’s approach to the arts is essentially the same, but less messy. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, we common people are not forced to attend cultural activities: we are merely forced to pay for them. This works out much better. You see, under the Egyptian method, you always had a bunch of sweating or dead Egyptians around your Sphinx; under our method, cultured people can have an opera in the Kennedy Center in Washington, safe in the knowledge that few, if any, of the common people who paid for it will show up to watch. After all, a lot of the common people live thousands of miles away; they couldn’t attend even if they wanted to.
   For a while there, our government was in the art business whole hog, forking over hundreds of millions of dollars for art. But now the program is in trouble. Jimmy Carter wanted to spend about $300 million on art this year, but Ronald Reagan thinks it should spend only about half that, so he’ll have more money to spend on exploding objects. Needless to say, the art officials are extremely upset. Their position is extremely logical: they argue that if the government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on things designed to kill people, it should spend at least $300 million for art that people don’t want to see.
   But it looks as though the art officials are going to lose, and that means that, unless somebody does something, art will fall back into the hands of the lawn-flamingo owners. So it’s UP tO us public-spirited, private-sector people to pick up the ball. We’ve got to develop some way to make sure people attend operas and ballets, look at paintings, read poetry, and so on. Maybe we should set up a system patterned after volunteer fire departments: whenever anybody discovered a cultural activity, he could sound an alarm, and the public-spirited citizens in the area would go and watch it. If we all work together, we might be able to keep art alive, even without the government. Maybe we could even build a sphinx.

Some Art, Some Art Not

   I am extremely fond of art. Whenever I have a few spare moments, there’s nothing I enjoy more than hauling out a batch of art and looking at it. This is probably because I was exposed to so much art when I was in grade school. At least once a year, the teachers would herd us kids into a bus and take us to a museum and expose us to thousands of square yards of old paintings. We were very impressed, particularly because many of these paintings featured enormous naked women, women with thighs the size of fully inflated life rafts, lounging around and eating fruit.
   The reason that this theme is so common in old paintings is that years ago Europe was terrorized by packs of enormous naked women. They would stride into a town, munching on pears, and threaten to knock down the cathedral if their portraits weren’t painted immediately. Eventually they were driven off by a particularly harsh winter, but their paintings are still popular today because they offer such a good value in terms of square yards of painting per dollar.
   Which brings us to money. Money is very important to the art world, because without it we would have no way to know how good a particular piece of art is. For example, let’s say that we want to decide which painting is better: the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci, or “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” by Rembrandt (whose first name was Boauregard, which is why he never used it). Now let’s say that the list price on the “Mona Lisa” is $36 million, whereas the price on “Aristotle etc.” is $12 million. This would tell your experienced art critic that the “Mona Lisa” is three times as good, artwise, as “Aristotle etc.” and nearly six million times as good as those paintings they sell in shopping malls, the ones that feature children with enormous brown eyes who are supposed to look helpless and appealing but actually look like some sort of bizarre species of insect.

The History Of Art

   The first art was created by primitive people, who made pots and plates with primitive decorations. They didn’t realize this was art. They thought it was just pots and plates. Their problem was that seconds after they made a pot or plate, an archaeologist would race up and snatch it and put it in a museum. The primitive people tried all kinds of schemes to protect their pots and plates, including burying them, but the archaeologists would just dig them up. Finally, with nothing to cook in or eat from, the primitive people starved to death and became extinct.
   The next big trend in art was painting, which was invented because wealthy people needed something to put on their walls. One famous painter, Michelangelo (first name, Buford), even painted on the ceiling. This was before the discovery of acoustical tiles. In those days, everybody painted the same subject, which was Mother and Child. That was a really popular item. Occasionally, an artist would try something different, such as Mother and Trowel, or Mother and Labrador Retriever, but they never sold.
   After the Mother and Child Phase came the Enormous Naked Women Eating Fruit Phase, which was followed by the Just Plain Fruit with No Women of Any Kind Phase and the Famous Kings and Dukes Wearing Silly Outfits Phase. All of these phases were part of the Sharp and Clear School of painting, which means that even though the subjects were boring, they were at least recognizable. The Sharp and Clear School ended with Vincent Van Gogh, who invented the Fuzzy but Still Recognizable School and cut off his ear. This led to the No Longer Recognizable at All School, and finally the Sharp and Clear Again but Mostly Just Rectangles School, which is the school that is popular today, except at shopping malls.

How To Appreciate Art

   The number one rule of art appreciation is that you never ever bring up the issue of whether or not a particular piece of art is attractive. Let’s say you’re looking at a painting of two large green rectangles. If you say something like, “Those two large green rectangles are very attractive,” people will realize immediately that you do not appreciate art. What you want to say is: “Using the tension created by the contrast in line, shape and tone, offset by the almost deliberately simplistic linearity of hue, the artist subtly, yet inevitably, leads the viewer to a greater awareness of the need for more controls over the acquisition and use of our nation’s mineral resources, particularly zinc.” This particular sentence will work on almost any brand of art except enormous naked women, who obviously have nothing to do with zinc.

Music To Get Rich By

   Basically, there are two kinds of music: “Classical” music, which is the kind written by dead German guys and played by People wearing tuxedos. “Regular” music, which can be written by anybody and played by anybody and gets on the radio a lot.
   If you want to make large sums of money, you should get into regular music. These days classical music is popular with only about three hundred people, the same ones who contribute voluntarily to public television. Classical music tends to go on for days, which is why it is played by “orchestras,” or groups of four hundred fifty to five hundred people whose parents made them practice classical music when all the other kids were out learning how to french-kiss. Orchestra people divide up the labor: one group will play a batch of music or “movement,” then everybody sits back and reads magazines from little magazine stands while the “conductor” consults his notes and decides which musicians will play next. Sometimes the conductor singles out a musician who has been chewing gum or fooling around and forces him or her to play all alone while the other musicians snicker. If you ever have to be in an orchestra, you should try to sit in back, near the guy who plays the triangle. You’ll hardly ever get called on.
   Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:
   Instruments You Blow into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit out of (tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).
   Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).
   Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).
   Furniture (pianos).
   Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars (violins). The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonio Stradivarius, which are prized because they were made with exquisite care and craftsmanship and each one contains just over seventeen ounces of pure heroin in a secret compartment which you open by pressing with your chin.
   Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music. The most profitable kind of regular music is rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll comes from the blues, a kind of music developed by American slaves. It is called the “blues” because it is very sad. Evidently the slaves found slavery depressing. Blues lyrics generally go like this:
   My woman she done left me
   My children left me too
   My mule done kicked my kidneys
   And my income tax is due
   For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people, who were then known as “Negroes.” Black blues musicians played in lowdown bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950s, young white people got interested in the blues. They developed a modified version called “rock ‘n’ roll,” which became enormously popular and turned many of them into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to the black blues musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible, and who continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.
   The principal difference between rock ‘n’ roll and classical music is that your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies and no words, whereas your average rock ‘n’ roll song has one melody (sometimes less) and about a dozen words. When rock ‘n’ roll composers are in a hurry to finish songs so they can get to important luncheon dates, they sometimes make up some of the words. Take, for example, the words to the 1960s hit rock ‘n’ roll song “Sittin’ in La La”:
   Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya
   Uh huh, uh huh
   Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya
   Uh huh, uh huh
   Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for “la la” and “ya ya,” but before he could get around to it somebody released the song and it sold several million records. Another example is “Land of a Thousand Dances,” whose composer evidently got called away to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:
   I said aa na aa aa aa Na aa na na na na aa na na na Na na na na
   The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country music, which is popular with people who like songs about drunken infidelity but requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents; big-band music, which is popular with people who like big bands but requires big bands; and easy-listening music, which is popular in elevators and supermarkets but can be sung only by groups of heavily sedated suburbanites. You should steer clear of jazz, opera, folk, marching-band and bagpipe music: the market for these is minuscule. You will never see hordes of fans clamoring for the autograph of a bagpiper.

How To Read Music

   Anyone can read music. It’s simply a matter of memorizing the various notes and musical signs. The major notes are:
   dum da de tra tra-la
   The major musical signs are:
   start of song
   halfway through song
   clap hands two-thirds of way through song
   end of song

Prurient Interest Rate

   I am opposed to pornography. First, let me make it clear that I believe if God wanted people to be seen naked, He would not have made so many of them unattractive. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write about pornography, because it is directly related to the increase in drug abuse, unemployment, international terrorism, all-polyester clothing, and, above all, violence. This was a far less violent country in the days when pornography was illegal, unless you count the Civil War. Pornography is like tooth decay, eating slowly away at the molars of our morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation, gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean tablecloth of our children’s futures. The dictionary tells us that the word “pornography” comes from the words “Porno,” meaning “publications,” and “graphy,” meaning “that adolescent males gather around in junior high school halls and snicker at.” The problem is that this simple definition is inadequate for the legal authorities, who need something less comprehensible. So for the past twenty years or so, the legal authorities have spent enormous amounts of time and effort gathering up and scrutinizing dirty books, trying to come up with a suitable definition of pornography so they can throw people in jail for selling it. The dirty books are scrutinized first by the police, then by the district attorney, then by a local judge and jury, then by some appeals judges, and then finally, when the really pornographic pages are dog-eared from all this intense legal scrutiny, the books are shipped in unmarked crates to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices sit around in their robes and discuss them:
   CHIEF JUSTICE: Okay, we have here the case of Nebraska v. The Huge Boar Adult Book Store and Health Spa, which is accused of selling an illustrated publication entitled Young Teenaged Babysitters with Flawless Skin Go to Daytona Beach to eight undercover agents on July 3, 1972. Have you all scrutinized the evidence?
   OTHER JUSTICES (crowd around the evidence): Not yet! Not yet! We’re still scrutinizing, and ... My God! Look at this photograph! It looks like a—No, it can’t be—Yes it is! It’s a ...
   CHIEF JUSTICE: Now as I interpret the First Amendment, the issue here is ... OTHER JUSTICES: It’s a flamingo! Incredible! I mean, I know flamingos thrive in captivity, but I had no idea that ... CHIEF JUSTICE: ... whether the constitutional guarantee of free speech conflicts with the ... OTHER JUSTICES: How do you suppose they got all that Cool Whip to adhere to the ceilings?
   After a few sessions like this, the justices render a decision, which says: “Having reviewed the evidence in this case, the court finds that, inasmuch as the prothonotary nature of the alleged violation precludes a pro forma elucidation of its meretriciousness or meritoriousness per se, it cannot be determined whether such alleged violation may or may not be deleterious without a heck of a lot more scrutiny by the members of the court.”
   Since nobody ever has the vaguest idea what the justices mean, their decisions always set off a new round of arrests and scrutiny throughout the legal system, which by now has accumulated over thirty million cubic yards of evidence suspected of being pornographic. Eventually, the national stockpile will get so large that the authorities will have to start giving pornography away to poor people, the way they did with cheese.
   Years ago, the pornography industry was fairly small, because people were ashamed to be caught reading dirty books and magazines. Then along came Hugh Hefner, who had a dream: to publish a cultured, sophisticated magazine, a magazine with in-depth interviews of influential people, with top-notch fiction, with thought-provoking articles, with pictures of large-breasted women either naked or dressed up as bunny rabbits. The beauty of Hugh’s idea was that you could pretend you were buying his magazine to read the thought-provoking articles. You could grab an issue of Playboy and say “I’m very eager to read this interview with Albert Schweitzer,” knowing full well that it is very difficult to read any magazine when you hold it sideways, which is how people generally hold Playboy.
   Hugh’s mistake is that he started to believe that Playboy really was a cultured, sophisticated magazine, and he started writing these enormous, droning articles about his philosophy of life. This was a stupid mistake. I mean, it’s not as if thousands of Playboy readers wrote in and said: “Hey, Hugh, enough with all these big-breasted naked women. What’s your philosophy of life?” But he published his philosophy anyway, and it took up many pages of valuable space that could have been used for naked women. Soon competitors sprung up, and now you can’t walk into a convenience store without seeing dozens of magazines like Hustler, Rogue, Gallery, Newsweek. Newsweek got into the market just recently, when it published a picture of a semi-naked woman on the cover. It’s a small start, but if it works out, I suspect that in a couple of years Newsweek will start telling us its philosophy of life, and people will be holding it sideways. If it plays its cards right, it might even get scrutinized by the Supreme Court.

Compressed Classics

   One effective technique for avoiding boring conversations on airplanes is to pull an extremely sharp ax Out Of your briefcase and spend the entire flight fondling it and muttering. Of course, to get the ax onto the airplane, you’ll have to convince the airport security people that you’re not a hijacker:
   SECURITY PERSON: Excuse Me, sir, but there’s an extremely sharp ax in your briefcase.
   YOU: Yes, I need it for my business. I’m an ax murderer.
   SECURITY PERSON: Oh, okay. Sorry to inconvenience you, but we have to be on the lookout for hijackers. It’s for your own protection.
   YOU: Of course. Keep up the good work.
   The only problem with the ax approach is that it tends to make the flight attendants skittery, and you may be forced to waste valuable time dealing with large numbers of armed law-enforcement personnel after you land.
   SID: the technique I use to ward off boring conversations is to carry a book, which I pull out the instant a boring person tries to talk to me:
   BORING PERSON: Hi. Where are you headed?
   ME: Detroit.
   BORING PERSON: No kidding? That’s where I’m headed.
   ME: What an astounding coincidence. And here we are, sitting together on a plane bound for Detroit, the very place we’re both headed.
   I think I’ll read my book now.
   The problem here is that you have to actually read the book, which may turn out to be even more boring than the person you’re sitting next to, because, as a rule, books contain far too many words. For example, I was recently on a flight to St. Louis, unaware that my suitcase was going to get off at Indianapolis (apparently on the theory that all Midwestern cities are basically the same), and I read a new book about James Bond, the famous spy. I thought there would be no new James Bond books, because the person who wrote them is dead, but evidently the folks in the publishing world decided that if the original author was inconsiderate enough to die, then by God they would find somebody else to write his books for him. I think they’re onto something. I think they ought to use the same approach with other famous dead authors, such as William Shakespeare:
   The Warble, Peddle, and Leek Publishing Company proudly announces Romeo and Juliet II–a sweeping saga of lust and passion that begins where the best-selling original left off. The story begins with the discovery that the two lovers didn’t really stab themselves hard enough to die, and follows them through their lustful and passionate efforts to escape the clutches of their warring families and find a peaceful life of lust and passion! Now on sale at every drugstore and supermarket in the world.
   Better than the original!—The Bullock, Missouri, Herald Gazette Chronicle Bugle.
   Lustful ... passionate!—Field and Stream.
   A recently published book!—The New York Times.
   Well anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that’s it: twenty-four words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it. I mean, he never just writes: “Bond walked into the bedroom.” Instead, he writes:
   “Bond eased the bedroom door latch open gently, praying that the click of the ZuchSweiss stainless steel door latch would not disturb the other inhabitants, and cautiously eyed the room, which he noted was paneled with European birch, or Betula verrucose, probably from the Vorarlburg region of western Austria.” And it goes on like this for pages before Bond gets around to killing a henchman. I could barely wade through it.
   I was tempted to start chatting with the person next to me about how we were both going to St. Louis.
   And it’s not just spy novels. Most books are too long. I remember in college when I had to read The Brothers Karamazovby the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It’s almost impossible to tell, because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talked as much as the brothers Karamazov did, I don’t see how they found time to become a major world power.
   Our literature professor told us that Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazovto raise the question of whether there is a God. So what I want to know is, why didn’t Dostoyevsky just come right out and ask? Why didn’t he write:
   Dear Reader,
   Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.
   Sincerely,
   Fyodor Dostoyevsky
   Here are some other famous works of literature that could easily have been summarized in a few words:
   Moby-Dick–Don’t mess around with large whales, because they symbolize nature and will kill you.
   A Tale of Two Cities–French people are crazy. Every poem ever written—Poets are extremely sensitive.
   Think of all the valuable time we would save if authors got right to the point this way. People would be able to read several dozen great books in a matter of minutes. College would take about two weeks. We’d have more time for more important activities, such as reading newspaper columns.

A Little Learning

Basic Frog Glop

   A distinguished, high-level, blue-ribbon federal panel of people wearing suits recently released a report concluding that (and here I quote directly): “The American public-education system has done just about as good a job of educating the nation’s children as might be expected from a bucket of live bait.” The report presented some shocking statistics to support this finding:
   For the past eleven years, American students have scored lower on standardized tests than European students, Japanese students and certain species of elk; Seventy-eight percent of America’s school principals have, at some point in their careers, worn white belts or shoes to school; Nobody in the entire United States remembers the exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.
   The bottom line is that the educational system, which costs over
   $200 billion a year, is an unmitigated disaster. This is good news for everybody. It’s good news for those of us who went to high school back when the schools were supposed to be better, because we can feel superior to today’s students. When we go to shopping malls and see batches of teenagers standing around and laughing in a carefree teenaged manner, we can reassure ourselves by saying: “Those kids may be attractive and slim and healthy, and they may have their entire lives ahead of them and no gum problems whatsoever, but by God they never learned how to conjugate the verb ‘to squat’ in Latin, the way I had to when I was in school.”
   The panel’s report is also good news for the kids, because it confirms their suspicion that they wouldn’t have learned anything even if they had been paying attention in class instead of trying to see who could most accurately guess how large, in square inches, the sweat stain under the teacher’s left armpit would be by the time the bell rang.
   But most of all, the panel’s report is good news for the teachers, school administrators and other members of the American educational establishment, because as the people most responsible for screwing up the educational system in the first place, they will naturally expect to be given a great deal more money to fix it.
   So everybody is pleased as punch to have blue-ribbon federal proof that the school system stinks on ice, and everybody is busy coming up with helpful suggestions for making the schools good again, the way they were when they were turning out real geniuses like the people who are making the suggestions. For example, President Reagan checked in from the planet Saturn with the suggestion that we need to go back to voluntary prayer in the schools. Now I think we can all agree that making our children pray voluntarily will certainly help, but we need to do more. We need to get Back to the Basics, back to the kinds of learning activities you and I engaged in.
   For example, every student in the country should be required to read Ethan Frome unless he or she has a written doctor’s excuse. As you no doubt vaguely recall, Ethan Frome is a book you had to read when you studied early American novels because it turns out there were hardly any good early American novels. As I remember the plot, Ethan Frome falls in love with this woman, so they decide to crash into a tree on a sled. The sled crash is the only good part, and it lasts only about a page. But the way I look at it, if I had to read Ethan Frome, I don’t see why these little snots today should get out of it.
   They should also be forced to disassemble frogs, the way we did in biology. Remember? You’d slice your frog up with a razor and root around inside, looking for the heart and the kidney and the other frog organs that were clearly drawn in several colors in the biology textbook, until eventually you realized that you must have been issued a defective frog, because all you could ever find inside was frog glop. So you just poked at the glop for a while and then drew the heart, etc., from the biology textbook. This taught you about life. When I was in school, I also had to do a worm, although I’m not suggesting that all of today’s students should have to do worms. Maybe just the really disruptive ones.
   So that’s my back-to-basics program: Ethan Frome, frogs, and maybe some class discussion of the cosine. And any kid who doesn’t know the exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent (December 24, 1814) will be held back for another year, or, if the Russians appear to be getting ahead of us in space again, shot.

Schools Not So Smart

   One of the more popular ways to feel superior these days is to complain about the schools. We adults just love to drone on about how much better educated we are than our kids. We say stuff like: “These kids today. They get out of high school and they don’t even know how to read and write. Why, in my day we read Moby-Dick eighty-four times in the fourth grade alone.” And so on. Adults just eat this kind of talk right up.
   Well, I hate to disillusion everybody, but it’s all a crock. We aren’t better educated than our kids: they’re just less drivel-oriented.
   The main evidence adults offer to prove kids are less educated is the fact that Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores are declining. You remember SAT’S. You got your number-two pencils and sat in the cafeteria for two hours answering questions like this:
   Fred wants to redo his bathroom in pink wallpaper, so he invites Sam over to help. If Fred’s bathroom is eight feet by five feet and has a seven-foot ceiling, and each roll of wallpaper is 32 inches wide, how long will Sam take to realize there is something just
   a little bit strange about Fred?
   SAT tests are designed by huge panels of experts in education and psychology who work for years to design tests in which not one single question measures any bit of knowledge that anyone might actually need in the real world. We should applaud kids for getting lower scores.
   When you and I were in high school, we thought we had to learn all that crap so we could get into college and get good jobs and houses with driveways. The problem is that so many of us went to college that college degrees became as common, and as valuable, as bowling trophies. Kids today are smart enough not to waste brain cells trying to figure out how long Train A Will take to overtake Train B just so they can go to college. That’s why so many colleges are desperate for students. Any day now you’ll be watching a late movie on UHF television and you’ll see this ad:
   “Hi! I’m Huntingdon Buffington Wellington the Fourth, dean of admissions at Harvard University. I’ll bet more than once you’ve said:
   ‘I sure would like to go to a big-time Ivy League university, but I lack the brains, the background, and the requisite number of dinner jackets.’ Well, this is your lucky day, because Harvard University is having its semiannual Standards Reduction Days. That’s right: we’re admitting people we once wouldn’t have allowed to work in our boiler room. And for the first one hundred applicants who call our toll-free number, we’re offering absolutely free this honorary degree written in genuine Latin words.”
   Another reason you shouldn’t feel better educated than your kids is that almost everything your teachers told you is a lie. Take the continents. I bet they told you Europe was one continent, and Asia was another. Well, any moron with a map can plainly see Europe and Asia are on the same continent. I don’t know who started the lunatic rumor that they were two continents. I suspect it was the French, because they wouldn’t want to be on the same continent with, say, the Mongolians.
   And what about those maps they showed you? Greenland looked enormous, bigger than Russia. If Greenland were really that big, it would be a Major Power. All the other nations would stay up late nights worrying about it. But the truth is Greenland is smallish and insignificant. The other nations rarely even invite it to parties.
   So don’t think you’re so smart.

Why We Don’t Read

   Every so often I see a news article in which some educator gets all wrought up about the fact that people don’t read books anymore:
   WASHINGTON (Associated Press)—Noted educator Dr. Belinda
   A. Burgeon-Wainscot, speaking before the American Association of People Who Use the Title
   ‘Doctor’ Even Though They’re Not Physicians, but Merely Graduate School Graduates, Which Are As Common These Days As Milkweed Pollen
   (AAPIVUTDETTANPBMGSGWAACTDAMP), said today that people don’t read books anymore. At least that’s what we here at the Associated Press think she said. She spoke for about two hours, and used an awful lot of big words, and frankly we dozed off from time to time.
   Well, I am not a noted educator, but I know why most of us don’t read books. We don’t read books because, from the very beginning of our school careers, noted educators have made us read books that are either boring or stupid and often both. Here’s what I had to read in first grade:
   “Look, Jane,” said Dick. “Look Look Look. Look.”
   “Oh,” said Jane. “Oh. Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh. Look.”
   “Oh,” said Spot. “Oh my God.”
   Now I’m not claiming that we first graders were a bunch of geniuses, but we didn’t spend the bulk of the day saying “Look,” either. We thought Dick and Jane were a drag, so many of us turned to comic books, which were much more interesting and informative. When I was in first grade, the Korean War was going on, So I read comiC books with names like
   “GI Combat Death Killers,” featuring American soldiers with chin stubble who fought enemy Communist orientals with skin the color of school buses. These comic books had lots of new and exciting words:
   “Commie attack! Hit the dirt!”
   BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA
   “Grenade! Grenade!”
   WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMKABOOOO OOM
   “Joe! They got Joe! Eat lead, you reds!”
   BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA-BUDDA
   “Aieeeeeeeeeeee.”
   And so on. This is how we developed our language skills. If we had stuck with Dick and Jane, we’d have sounded like morons.
   After the first grade, our schoolbooks got longer, but they did not get more interesting. The history books were the worst. Take, for example, the Civil War. I think we can safely assume that the Civil War was fairly lively, but you would never know this from reading elementary school history books:
   THE CIVIL WAR
   “The Civil War was very serious. It was caused by slavery and states’ rights, and it resulted in the Gettysburg Address.
   Discussion Questions: How serious was the Civil War? Would you feel nervous if you had to give the Gettysburg Address? Explain.”
   The other big problem with history textbooks was that they always started at the dawn of Civilization and ended around 1948. So we’d spend the first three months of each school year reading about the ancient
   SUMerians at a leisurely pace. Then the teacher would realize that time was running short, and we’d race through the rest of history, covering World War II in a matter of minutes, and getting to Harry Truman on the last day. Then the next year, we’d go back to the ancient Sumerians. After a few years of this, we began to see history as an endlessly repeating, incredibly dull cycle, starting with Sumerians and leading inexorably to Harry Truman, then going back again. No wonder so many of us turned to loud music and drugs.
   Things were a little better in English class, because we didn’t have to read the same books over and over. On the other hand, we had to read
   a lot of books nobody would want to read even once, such as The Last of the Mohicans, which was written by James Fenimore Cooper, although I seriously doubt that Cooper himself ever read it. We also read a batch of plays by Shakespeare, which are very entertaining when you watch actors perform them but are almost impossible to understand when you read them:
   FLAVORUS: Forsooth ‘twixt consequence doest thou engage? Wouldst thou thine bodkin under thee enrage?
   HORACLES: In faith I wouldst not e’er intent fulfill, For o’er petards a dullard’s loath to till.
   (Shakespeare wrote this way because English was not his native language. He was Sumerian.)
   Anyway, that’s why I think people don’t read books anymore. The sad thing is that there are many fine books around, just waiting to be read. You can see them on convenient display racks at any of the better supermarkets; they have titles like The Goodyear Blimp Diet and Evil Nazi War Criminals Get an Atomic Bomb and Threaten to Destroy Uruguay. These books are easy to read, and minutes after you read one you’re ready for another. What we need is some kind of federal program to get people interested in them. Maybe the President could read some of them aloud on national television (he is very good at reading aloud). Or maybe we could give people an additional tax exemption for every book report they attach to their income tax returns. Whatever we do, we should do it soon, to get people out of the habit of getting all their information from television and poorly researched newspaper columns.

What Is And Ain’t Grammatical

   I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.
   What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: “Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America,” or “Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.”
   The truth is that grammar is not the most important thing in the world. The Super Bowl is the most important thing in the world. But grammar is still important. For example, suppose you are being interviewed for a job as an airplane pilot, and your prospective employer asks you if you have any experience, and you answer: “Well, I ain’t never actually flied no actual airplanes or nothing, but I got several pilot-style hats and several friends who I like to talk about airplanes with.”
   If you answer this way, the prospective employer will immediately realize that you have ended your sentence with a preposition. (What you should have said, of course, is “several friends with who I like to talk about airplanes.”) So you will not get the job, because airline pilots have to use good grammar when they get on the intercom and explain to the passengers that, because of high winds, the plane is going to take off several hours late and land in Pierre, South Dakota, instead of Los Angeles.
   We did not always have grammar. In medieval England, people said whatever they wanted, without regard to rules, and as a result they sounded like morons. Take the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who Couldn’t even spell his first name right. He wrote a large poem called Canterbury Tales, in which people from various professions—knight, monk, miller, weever, riveter, steeler, diver, stevedore, spinnaker, etc.—and on and on and on like this:
   In a somer sesun whon softe was the sunne
   I kylled a youn e birde ande I ate it on a bun
   When Chaucer’s poem was published, everybody read it and said: “My God, we need some grammar around here.” So they formed a Grammar Commission, which developed the parts of speech, the main ones being nouns, verbs, predicants, conjectures, particles, proverbs, adjoiners, coordinates, and rebuttals. Then the commission made up hundreds and hundreds of grammar rules, all of which were strictly enforced.
   When the colonists came to America, they rebelled against British grammar. They openly used words like “ain’t” and “finalize,” and when they wrote the Declaration of Independence they deliberately misspelled many words. Thanks to their courage, today we Americans have only two rules of grammar:
   Rule 1. The word “I’me” is always incorrect.
   Most of us learn this rule as children, from our mothers. We say things like: “Mom, can Bobby and me roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson’s cat?” And our mothers say: “Remember your grammar, dear. You mean: ‘Can Bobby and I roll the camping trailer over Mrs. Johnson’s cat?’ Of course you can, but be home by dinnertime.”
   The only exception to this rule is in formal business writing, where instead of “I” you must use “the undersigned.” For example, this business letter is incorrect:
   “Dear Hunky-Dory Canned Fruit Company:
   A couple days ago my wife bought a can of your cling peaches and served them to my mother who has a weak heart and she damn near died when she bit into a live grub. If I ever find out where you live, I am gonna whomp you on the head with a ax handle.”
   This should be corrected as follows:
   “If the undersigned ever finds out where you live, the undersigned is gonna whomp you on the head with a ax handle.”
   Rule 2. You’re not allowed to split infinitives.
   An infinitive is the word “to” and whatever comes right behind it, such as “to a tee,” “to the best of my ability” ... “tomato,” etc. Splitting an infinitive is putting something between the “to” and the other words. For example, this is incorrect:
   “Hey man, you got any, you know, spare change you could give to, like, me?”
   The correct version is:
   spare change you could, like, give to me?”
   The advantage of American English is that, because there are so few rules, practically anybody can learn to speak it in just a few minutes. The disadvantage is that Americans generally sound like jerks, whereas the British sound really smart, especially to Americans. That’s why Americans are so fond of those British dramas they’re always showing on public television, the ones introduced by Alistair Cooke. Americans love people who talk like Alistair Cooke. He could introduce old episodes of
   “Hawaii Five-O” and Americans would think they were extremely enlightening.
   So the trick is to use American grammar, which is simple, but talk with a British accent, which is impressive. This technique is taught at all your really snotty private schools, where the kids learn to sound like Elliot Richardson. Remember Elliot? He sounded extremely British, and as a result he got to be Attorney General, Secretary of State, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and Vice President at the same time.
   You can do it, too. Practice in your home, then approach someone on the street and say: “Tally-ho, old chap. I would consider it a great honour if you would favour me with some spare change.” You’re bound to get quick results.

It Takes A Lot Of Gaul

   One of the most useless classes I ever took in high school, ranking right up there with calculus, was French. I took several years of French, and I learned hundreds of phrases, not one of which I would ever actually want to say to anybody. For example, my French teachers insisted that when I met a French person I should say “Comment allez-vous?” It turns out that this means “How do you go?” which is not the kind of thing you say when you want to strike someone as being intelligent. Your average French person already thinks most Americans are idiots, and you’re not going to improve his opinion much if you barge up to him on some Paris street and start spewing high school French phrases:
   YOU: Comment allez vous? (“How do you go?”)
   FRENCH PERSON: Je vais A pied, evidentment. Vous devez avoir les cerveaux dune truite. (“I go on foot, obviously. You must have the brains of a trout.”)
   YOU: est la bibliothque? (“Where is the library?”)
   FRENCH PERSON: Partez, s’il vous plait. J’ai un fusil. (“Please go away. I have a gun.”)
   My wife didn’t do any better in high school French. She learned to say “Je me suis casse la jambe” (“I have broken my leg”) and “Elle nest pas jolie” (“She is not pretty”). What on earth is she supposed to do with these phrases? I mean, suppose she does go to France and break her leg:
   MY WIFE: Je Me suis casse la jambe. (“I have broken my leg.”)
   FRENCH BYSTANDERS: C’est dommage. (“What a pity.”)
   MY WIFE: Elle nest pas jolie. (“She is not pretty.”)
   FRENCH BYSTANDERS: Bien, excusez-nous pour vivre. Vous netes pas un grand prix vous-meme. (“Well, excuse us for living. You are no great prize yourself.”)
   My wife would never get an ambulance that way. She’d be lucky if the bystanders didn’t spit on her.
   Despite the fact that the teacher insisted on making me speak like a fool, I stuck with high school French, because at the time the only alternative was Latin, which is even more worthless. For one thing, everybody who speaks Latin is dead. For another thing, all you ever read in Latin class is Caesar’s account of the Gallic Wars, in which Caesar drones on and on about tramping around Gaul. These had to be the dullest wars in history, which is why finally the Romans got so bored that they let the empire collapse and quit speaking Latin. In fact, they gave up on spoken language altogether, and today their descendants communicate by means of hand gestures.
   When I got to college, I briefly considered taking Chinese or Russian, but abandoned this notion when I discovered that the Russians and the Chinese use Communist alphabets. I also rejected German, because it is too bulky. For example, the German word for “cat” is
   “einfuhrungaltfriesischenspraakuntworterbuchgegenwart.” It can take up to two days to order lunch in German.
   The result of all this is that I know very little of any foreign language, and what I do know is either useless or embarrassing. Most Americans are in the same situation. Fortunately, you don’t really need another language, because, as you know if you have ever traveled abroad, virtually all foreign persons speak English. In fact, I sometimes suspect that there are no foreign languages, that foreign persons really speak English all the time and just pretend to speak foreign languages so they can amuse themselves by conning dumb American tourists into saying things like “How do you go?”
   So if you plan to travel abroad, you should not waste your time learning some foreign language that could well turn out to be fraudulent. Instead, you should practice pronouncing, in a very loud, clear voice, certain useful English phrases for travelers. Here are the main ones:
   “Do you speak English?”
   “Thank God. Where can I find a bathroom?”
   “Is that one of those bathrooms where you wind up standing on some street corner in a structure that offers no more privacy than a beach umbrella?”
   “Thank God. Will the bathroom have a squat female attendant who will watch my every move lest I leave without giving her a tip, even though the bathroom has obviously not been cleaned once since it was built by Visigoths more than twelve thousand years ago?”
   “Thank God. Say, you speak pretty good English, for a foreign person.”
   These phrases will take care of your basic needs abroad, and the fact that you have taken the time to learn to pronounce them loudly and clearly will leave a lasting impression on your foreign hosts.

How To Trap A Zoid

   We should all be grateful that we have mathematics. For example, without mathematics, it would be almost impossible to figure out what size tip you should leave. Even with mathematics, this is very difficult. The mathematical formula for tipping, which was discovered by Sir Isaac Newton, states that the tip equals 15 percent of the bill, but unfortunately the bill is always $17.43, and nobody has the vaguest idea what 15 percent of $17.43 is. The finest brains in the country have been working on this problem for years, using large computers, and they have yet to come up with an answer. So most of us wind up tipping a random amount of money, usually $3.50, which we increase slightly if the waiter performs an extra service, such as not spitting in the food. And that’s just one of the ways we use mathematics in our everyday lives.
   Mathematics got started in ancient Egypt, when the ancient Egyptians discovered the numbers three and eight. They used these numbers to develop the mathematical formulas for the pyramids, which were actually supposed to be spherical. Eventually people in other countries discovered more numbers, and today we have more than ten thousand of them.
   After the discovery of numbers, the next major stride in mathematics came when the ancient Greeks discovered the hypotenuse. The Greeks used the hypotenuse to manufacture right triangles for export tO other countries. Included free with each triangle was a copy of the famous Pythagorean Theorem (named for its discoverer, Bob Theorem), which states: “Some of the squares of the opposite sides are equal to 14.6
   percent of your grossly adjusted annual unearned interest, unless there are two or more runners on base at the time.” To this very day, children memorize the Pythagorean Theorem in school, which accounts for their behavior.
   The ancient Greeks made so much money with the right triangle that they developed a whole line of mathematical items, such as the rhomboid, the pentagon, the diameter, the parabola, the hyperbole, the irrational number, the cube, the really deranged number, and the square root. In fact, the ancient Greeks developed all the really popular items; everything developed since then has failed miserably. Take algebra. I don’t know who dreamed up algebra, but whoever it was obviously had a lot of time to waste, because it is utterly useless. In algebra class, day after day, the teacher would write something like this on the blackboard:
   4x + 2 = 14
   Then he would ask us what x stood for. It turns out that it stood for 3, but how the hell were we supposed to know that? He was the one who dreamed up x in the first place, and it seemed grossly unfair for him to expect us to know what he was thinking of at the time. And to make matters worse, the next day he would have x equal some other number, such as 4, depending on his mood. I spent an entire year in algebra class, and to this day I don’t have the faintest notion what x stands for, which is why I hardly ever use it for anything.
   Calculus is even worse. When I went to college, all of us freshmen had to take a semester of calculus. It was like a fraternity initiation. The professor, who wore a bow tie and grew up on another planet, would start the class with a statement like this: “Let us consider the problem of a helix uncoiling in n dimensions.” He never told us why this was a problem, or why anybody would want to consider it even if it was. He would merely turn around and start filling the blackboard with alien symbols, and he would keep it up until it was time to leave. Every now and then he would give us a test, and I always got a zero. In fact,
   “zero” was the only mathematical concept I ever understood in calculus class.
   I decided to quit calculus the day I stabbed myself in the head with Jeff White’s pencil. Jeff sat next to me in class, and to amuse ourselves while the professor was writing alien symbols on the blackboard we would play childish pranks on each other. One day Jeff tried to knock my books off my desk, so I grabbed them with one hand and, with the other hand, snatched Jeff’s pencil, which I attempted to break by smashing it against my head, only I didn’t get the angle right, so I ended up driving the point into my skull, where it broke off. This created quite a commotion, but the professor was deeply engrossed in the problem of a trapezoid rotating in y dimensions, and he didn’t even notice the problem of a student with a pencil point lodged in his skull . So Jeff and I just got up and walked over to the infirmary.
   The nurse was very suspicious. She said: “Are you telling me that you stabbed yourself in the head with a pencil?” Then she looked very suspiciously at Jeff. Jeff said, defensively: “Really. He stabbed himself.” And the nurse said: “Why would anybody stab himself with a pencil?” And so I stared suspiciously at Jeff, and said: “Yeah, why would I stab myself with a pencil?”
   Anyway, the nurse got the pencil point out of my skull, but I didn’t go back to calculus class ever again. Jeff dropped out of college a short while later, although I’m pretty sure this had nothing to do with the pencil incident. I suspect it had a lot more to do with calculus.

College Admissions

   Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust me: these are closely related to college.)
   College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time Sleeping and trying to get dates.
   Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:
   Things you will need to know in later life (two hours). These include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and crepe-paper stains out of your pajamas. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours). These are the things you learn in classes whose names end in—ology,—osophy,
   –istry,—ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in college for the rest of your life.
   It’s very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was in college, I had to memorize—don’t ask me why—the names of three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I’m trying to remember something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in my mind, right there in the supermarket. It’s a terrible waste of brain cells.
   After you’ve been in college for a year or so, you’re supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers.
   This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you’re going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: “Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices.” If you don’t come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
   So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology—subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I’ll give you a quick overview of each:
   ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say Moby-Dick is
   a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand times. So in your paper, you say Moby-Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.
   PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
   PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor.
   Studying dreams is more fun. I had one professor who claimed everything we dreamed about—tractors, Arizona, baseball, frogs—actually represented a sexual organ. He was very insistent about this. Nobody wanted to sit near him. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
   SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into a scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you’ll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: “Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or
   ‘crying,’ behavior forms.” If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will get a large government grant.