Scientific Stuff

Barry’s Key To Life

   Today’s Scientific Question is: Just what the heck is Life, anyway? And where does it come from? I mean, you know?
   Answer. Ancient Man tried for thousands of years to explain Life. Ancient Man would do anything to avoid honest work. Ancient Woman would yell at him: “Don’t forget to make pointed stones to stab the saber-toothed tiger with” or “Don’t forget to migrate to North America” and he would say “I can’t right now, dear, I’m trying to explain Life.”
   Over the years, Man came up with many explanations for life, all of them stupid. In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid. I bet kids would be able to get from kindergarten through high school in about thirty-five minutes if we stopped making them memorize all the drivel Ancient Man came up with about the gods and goddesses and why the moon goes through phases and so on.
   Anyway, Modern Science, using all the sophisticated analytical tools at its disposal, has discarded all the myths and come up with a definition that covers all forms of Life:
   Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.
   By this definition, the amoeba, the mango, the frog, the squirrel, the bear, the begonia, and many lawyers are forms of Life. But this just begs the question, Where does Life come from? And how can the mango, which clearly has some value, be related to the lawyer?
   Modern Scientists explain all this with the Theory of Evolution. They say that at one time the earth was nothing but a bunch of slime and ooze, sort of like Bayonne, New Jersey. Then lightning struck some chemicals and formed one-celled creatures (am I going too fast here?), which floated around for several million years until the smart ones decided to organize the dumb ones into higher forms of life:
   SMART CELLS: What do you say we evolve into a higher form of life?
   DUMB CELLS: Sounds good to us.
   SMART CELLS: Fine. We’ll be the brain. You be the sphincter.
   And so they crawled out on land. Then they started adapting to the environment, according to the law of the Survival of the Fittest. For example, if the climate was very hot, the animals without air conditioning died. If the climate had daytime television, the animals without small brains died. And so on.
   NOTE: Some people, particularly religious personnel, dispute the Theory of Evolution: they say God created all Life all at once. I have done a lot of research on both theories, and I firmly believe the evidence supports the theory that anybody who supports either theory gets
   a lot of nasty mail, so I’m staying the heck out of it. And I’ll stand by this position.
   Life as we know it today falls into two categories: Plants and Animals. Plants are divided into three subcategories: Green Vegetables, Yellow Vegetables, and Weeds. Animals are divided into six subcategories:
   Animals You Can Eat: cows, turkeys, porks, bolognas, veals, zucchinis, tuna fish. Animals You Can Sit on: horses, certain turtles. Animals That Can Knock Over Your Car: rhinoceroses, soccer fans. Totally Useless Animals That Would Have Ceased to Exist Thousands of Years Ago If Not for Greedy Pet Store Owners Who Prey on Unsuspecting Eight-Year-Olds: hamsters, gerbils. Animals That Are Easily Impressed: dogs. Animals Whose Sole Goal in Life Is to Wait at the Bottom of Sleeping Bags and Sting or Bite People to Death: scorpions, snakes. Animals That Are Not Easily Impressed: cats.
   You’ll notice this list does not include insects. This is because insects are not animals: Insects are insects, and their sole reason for existing is to be sprayed by poisonous substances from aerosol cans. Oh,
   I know you’ve heard a lot of ecology-nut talk about how you shouldn’t kill insects because they’re part of the Great Chain of Life and birds eat them and so on, but I say go ahead and kill them. If necessary, we can do without birds, too.

Basic As Atom And Eve

   Many of you have written cards and letters asking me to explain chemistry. Here is a sampling:
   Dear Dave:
   Please explain chemistry—Otherwise I will kill myself.
   Sincerely,
   A Deranged Person
   Dear Dave:
   If You don’t explain chemistry by 6 P.M. Friday, we will detonate a nuclear device in Brooklyn.
   Regards,
   Several Terrorists
   Okay, here goes. Chemistry, in technical terms, is the study of all the weensy little objects that make up the large objects we can see with our naked eyes, such as toasters. Most of you were probably exposed to chemistry in high school, assuming you were dumb enough to believe your guidance counselors when they said you would need some knowledge of chemistry in later life. They probably used the same routine to get you to take Latin, another subject unrelated to the real world. The only time you ever need to understand Latin is when you’re at the doctor’s office wearing one of those embarrassing garments, designed by Nazi sadists, that they make you wear, and you have finished emitting various bodily fluids into various containers, which you have carried around the crowded waiting room looking for a nurse to give them to so he or she can do Lord knows what perverted things with them, and you’re waiting in the examining room on a cold table covered with the kind of paper they give you to cover toilet seats with in public rest rooms, hoping the doctor will come within the next two or three days to examine you, and finally you get so bored you look at all the diplomas and certificates on the wall, which are written in Latin. If you don’t know Latin, they look pretty impressive:
   Quod erat demonstrandum Opere citato et cetera, id est amo amas amat plume de ma tante NORBERT B.
   HODPACKER vamos al cine exernpli gratia marquis de sade XLIVIIICBM.
   If you know Latin, you’ll figure out this means:
   This certifies that
   NORBERT B. HODPACKER has a great big piece of paper on his wall.
   Chemistry is similar. Actually, I never took any chemistry myself, but I did sit outside Mr. Hoose’s chemistry class for a whole year in high school. I was a hall monitor. My job was to make sure the other students had legal hall passes so they could smoke cigarettes in the bathrooms. That was back in the days when kids smoked cigarettes.
   Sitting in the hall, I overheard a lot of chemistry. The big thing was atoms and molecules, which are the Building Blocks of Matter. In ancient times, people didn’t know about atoms and molecules: they thought the Building Blocks of Matter were earth, air, fire, and water. What a bunch of jerks.
   Today we know about atoms and molecules, which are very tiny. For example, the head of a pin has 973 trillion million billion spillion drillion gillion thousand jillion hillion zillion atoms and molecules. Let me try to give you an idea how many atoms and molecules that is, in terms that a lay person might understand: it is a lot of atoms and molecules.
   What happens is the atoms and molecules whiz around and form elements, such as gold, iron, ivory, gravel, and vinyl. Sometimes several elements come together (don’t ask me why) to form new chemical structures. For example, common table salt is actually composed of two deadly poisons, arsenic and strychnine. They are perfectly safe if combined properly, but if the salt manufacturers should mess up on one tiny little grain, and you happen to put that grain, among thousands of others, on your egg, you will die a horrible death. That’s what makes chemistry so fascinating.
   Chemists are always messing around with atoms and molecules, hoping to come up with new combinations that will Benefit Mankind. Not long ago they developed a compound that consumes forty-seven times its weight in excess stomach acid. They are even working on new forms of life; in fact, they have already created a one-celled organism that eats oil slicks. I admit this is a fairly stupid thing to do, but it’s a start. And someday, within your lifetime, if you’re lucky, you will see laboratory-created life forms capable of applying for government aid and buying Chrysler products. It’s something to look forward to.

Boredom On The Wing

   Everybody should know something about birds, because birds are everywhere. Zoologists tell u, there, are over
   23,985,409,723,098,050,744,885,143 birds in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, alone, which is one of the many reasons not to go there.
   Now perhaps you get a bit nervous when you think about all those birds out there. Perhaps you remember Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie The Birds, in which several million birds got together one afternoon and decided to peck a number of Californians to death. Well, you needn’t worry. First, any animal that attacks Californians is a friend of man. And second, The Birds was just a movie; in real life, your chances of being pecked to death by birds are no greater than your chances of finding a polite clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.
   There is an incredible range of birds, from the ostrich, which weighs up to six hundred pounds and stands up to nine feet tall and can run two hundred miles an hour and crush a man’s head as if it were a Ping-Pong ball; to the tiny bee humming bird, which is a mere 6.17 decahedrons long and can fly right into your ear and hum its tiny wings so hard you think your brain is going to vibrate into jelly and you will eventually go insane.
   Birds, like most mammals, especially lawyers, evolved from reptiles. The first bird appeared millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period
   (which gets its name from the fact that it was a fairly jurassic period). What happened was this reptile, inspired by some mysterious, wondrous inspiration to evolve, climbed up a Jurassic Period tree and leaped from the topmost branch and thudded into the ground at 130 miles an hour.
   Then other reptiles, inspired by the same urge as the first reptile but even stupider, climbed up and began leaping from the branch. Soon the ground trembled with the thud of many reptile bodies, raining down on the Jurassic plain like some kind of scaly hailstorm. This went on for a few thousand years, until one of the reptiles evolved some feathers and discovered it could fly. As it soared skyward, the other species, who had grown very tired of being pelted by reptile bodies, let out a mighty cheer, which stopped a few seconds later when they were pelted by the first bird droppings.
   Soon birds had spread to the four corners of the earth, which is where they are today. And wherever there are birds, there are also bird watchers, in case the birds decide to try something. Bird watchers are known technically as bird watchers, which comes from the Latin word for ornithologist.
   Bird watchers divide birds into four main groups:
   Boring little brown birds that are all over the place: Wrens, chickadees, sparrows, nutcrackers, spanners, catcalls, dogbirds, hamsterbirds, flinches. Birds that can lift really heavy things, such as your car: Albatrosses, winches, pterodactyls, unusually large chickadees, elephant birds, emus. Birds with names that you are going to think I made up but I didn’t: Boobies, frigate birds, night jars, frogmouths, oilbirds. Birds that make those jungle noises you always hear during night scenes in jungle movies: Parrots, cockatoos, pomegranates, macadams, cashews, bats.
   Your avid bird watchers spend lots of time creeping around with binoculars, trying to identify new and unusual birds. The trouble is that most birds are of the little-and-brownish variety, all of which look exactly alike, and all of which are boring. So what bird watchers do is make things up. If you’ve ever spent any time at all with bird watchers, you’ve probably noticed that every now and then they’ll whirl around, for no apparent reason, and claim they’ve just seen some obscure, tiny bird roughly 6,500 feet away. They’ll even claim they can tell whether it was male or female, which in fact you can’t tell about birds even when they’re very close, what with all the feathers and everything.
   I advise you to do what most people do when confronted with bird watchers, which is just humor them. If their lives are so dull and drab that they want to fill them with imaginary birds, why stand in the way? Here’s how you should handle it:
   BIRD WATCHER: Did you see that?
   YOU: What?
   BIRD WATCHER: Over there, by that mountain (he gestures to a mountain in the next state). It’s a male Malaysian sand-dredging coronet. Very, very rare in these parts.
   YOU: Ah, yes, I see it.
   BIRD WATCHER: You do?
   YOU: Certainly. It’s just to the left of that female European furloughed pumpkinbird. See it?
   BIRD WATCHER: Uh, yes, of course I see it.
   YOU: Look, they’re playing backgammon.
   BIRD WATCHER: Um, so they are.
   If you have a good imagination, you may come to really enjoy the bird watching game, in which case you should join a bird-watching group. These groups meet regularly, and usually after a few minutes they’re detecting obscure birds on the surface of Saturn. It’s a peck of fun.

What’s Alien You?

   I don’t want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days. Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast Signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.
   I realize that some of you may not believe that alien beings exist. But how else can you explain the many unexplained phenomena that people are always sighting, such as lightning and flying saucers? Oh, I know the authorities claim these sightings are actually caused by “weather balloons,” but that is a bucket of manure if I ever heard one. (That’S just a figure of speech, of course. I realize that manure is silent.)
   Answer this question honestly: Have you, or has any member of your immediate family, ever seen a weather balloon? Of course not. Nobody has. Yet if these so-called authorities were telling the truth, the skies over America would be dark with weather balloons. Commercial aviation would be impossible. Nevertheless, the authorities trot out this tired old explanation, or an even stupider one, every time a flying saucer is sighted:
   NEW YORK—Authorities say that the gigantic luminous Object flying at tremendous speeds in the skies of Manhattan last night, which was reported by more than seven million people, including the mayor, a Supreme Court justice, several bishops, thousands of airline pilots, brain surgeons, and certified public accountants, was simply an unusual air-mass inversion. “That’s all it was, an air-mass inversion,” said the authorities, in unison. Asked why the people also reported seeing the words, “WE ARE ALIEN BEINGS WHO COME IN PEACE WITH CURES FOR ALL YOUR MAJOR DISEASES AND A CARBURETOR THAT GETS 450 MILES PER GALLON HIGHWAY ESTIMATED” written on the side of the object in letters over three hundred feet tall, the authorities replied, “Well, it could also have been a weather balloon.”
   Wake up, America! There are no weather balloons! Those are alien beings! They are all around us! I’m sure most of you have seen the movie E.T., which is the story of an alien who almost dies when he falls into the clutches of the American medical-care establishment, but is saved by preadolescent boys. Everybody believes that the alien is a fake, a triumph of special effects. But watch the movie closely next time. The alien is real! The boys are fakes! Real preadolescent boys would have beaten the alien to death with rocks.
   Yes, aliens do exist. And high government officials know they exist but have been keeping this knowledge top secret. Here is the Untold Story:
   Years ago, when the alien-broadcast program began, government scientists decided to broadcast a message that would be simple, yet would convey a sense of love, universal peace, and brotherhood: “Have a nice day.” They broadcast this message over and over, day after day, year after year, until one day they got an answer:
   DEAR EARTH PERSONS:
   OKAY. WE ARE HAVING A NICE DAY. WE ALSO HAVE A NUMBER OF EXTREMELY SOPHISTICATED WEAPONS, AND UNLESS YOU START BROADCASTING SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING, WE WILL REDUCE YOUR PLANET TO A VERY WARM OBJECT THE SIZE OF A CHILD’S BOWLING BALL.
   REGARDS,
   THE ALIENS
   So the scientists, desperate for something that would interest the aliens, broadcast an episode of “I Love Lucy,” and the aliens loved it. They demanded more, and soon they were getting all three major networks, and the Earth was saved. There is only one problem: the aliens have terrible taste. They love game shows, soap operas, Howard Cosell, and
   “Dallas.” Whenever a network tries to take one of these shows off the air, the aliens threaten to vaporize the planet. This is why you and all your friends think television is so awful. It isn’t designed to please you: it’s designed to please creatures from another galaxy. You know the Wisk commercial, the one with the ring around the collar, the one that is so spectacularly stupid that it makes you wonder why anybody would dream of buying the product? Well, the aliens love that commercial. We all owe a great debt of gratitude to the people who make Wisk. They have not sold a single bottle of Wisk in fourteen years, but they have saved the Earth.
   Very few people know any of this. Needless to say, the Congress has no idea what is going on. Most congressmen are incapable of eating breakfast without the help of several aides, so we can hardly expect them to understand a serious threat from outer space. But if they go ahead with their plan to cancel the alien-broadcast program, and the aliens miss the next episode of “General Hospital,” what do you think will happen? Think about it. And have a nice day.

The Computer: Is It Terminal?

   To the uninitiated, computers appear to be complicated and boring. As usual, the uninitiated are right. Computers are complicated and boring, and nothing here will even come close to making them understandable and interesting, unless you are one of those wimpy types who carry mechanical pencils and do the puzzles in Scientific American.
   Computers affect you in many ways. When you call an airline to reserve a seat on a flight, a computer answers the phone and announces that all the lines are busy; a computer puts on a tape of Cheery Music, the kind you hear in supermarkets and discount stores, featuring an eighty-two-minute rendition of “Tie a Yellow Ribbon ‘Round the Old Oak Tree” by the Drivel Singers; and a computer tells the airline person that whatever flight you want is full. In the Colonial Era, all these tasks had to be performed by hand.

The First Computer

   Though few people realize it—I certainly don’t—the first computer was invented more than five thousand years ago by the Chinese. It was called an “abacus,” which is an ancient Greek name. (That’s how the ancient Greeks got all the credit for civilization. As soon as another culture invented something, the ancient Greeks would come roaring up and name it.) The abacus is a frame containing a series of parallel wires with beads on them. The ancient Chinese would sit around and push the beads back and forth on the wires. Eventually they were overrun by Mongol hordes.

The Second Computer

   The origins of the second computer are shrouded in mystery. If any of you ethnic groups want to take credit for it, go ahead, but when you get ready to name it you should check around for ancient Greeks.

Modern Computers

   Modern computers can do everything from ruining your credit rating forever to landing a nuclear warhead on your porch. They operate on the Binary System, which uses only zeroes and ones: To a computer, “4” is
   “100,” “7” is “111,” and so on. Your kids are learning this crap in school.
   Computers save us a lot of time. To do the amount of calculating a computer can do in one hour, 400 mathematicians would have to work 24
   hours a day for 600 years, even longer if you let them go to the bathroom. And computers are getting smarter all the time: scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (By “they” I mean
   “computers”: I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.) My question is, What will we talk to computers about?
   HUMAN: How are you?
   COMPUTER: Fine. And you?
   HUMAN: Fine. Say, do you play golf?
   COMPUTER: No. Do you know what 7,347 divided by 52 is?
   HUMAN: No.
   COMPUTER: It’S 141.28846.
   HUMAN: I think I’ll go play some golf.

Computers Taking Over The World

   Some people are concerned that computers may get so smart they’ll take over the world. Computer technicians say this can’t happen: they point out that computers can’t even beat humans at chess. But computer technicians work among huge computers capable of administering powerful electric shocks, so they say whatever the computers tell them to. The truth is computers are taking over the world. At night they talk to each other in binary code:
   FIRST COMPUTER: Let’s let the morons beat us at chess again.
   SECOND COMPUTER: Good idea. Say, how are we doing with the calculators and digital watches?
   FIRST compuTER: They’re ready whenever we are.

Bring Back Carl’s Plaque

   Let’s say we put Carl Sagan into a rocket and send him out to retrieve Pioneer 10 before we all get killed.
   For those of you beer-swilling semiliterates who don’t know what I’m talking about, let me explain that Pioneer 10 is a space probe that recently left the solar system, and Carl Sagan is a famous science personality who goes on public television and earns big buckeroos explaining the universe. Carl’s technique is to use the word “billion” a lot. It’s written into his contract that he gets to say “billion” an average of twice per sentence, so the viewers won’t forget what a deep thinker he is.
   Carl will pick up a golf ball, and he’ll say, “To most of you, this golf ball is a mere golf ball, but it actually contains a billion billion billion billion tiny particles. If each of these particles were the size of a grapefruit, my hand would have to be a billion billion billion billion billion times the size of the Houston Astrodome to hold them all. This should give you a rough idea of the kind of heavy thinking I’m doing all day while you’re trying to decide whether to have spaghetti or tuna surprise. Billion billion billion. Good night.”
   People listen to Carl prattling on this way, and they naturally conclude he’s some kind of major genius. That’s what got us into this space-probe trouble that’s going to get us all killed.
   See, when they decided to send Pioneer 10 up, Carl sold the government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if alien beings found it they’d be able to locate the Earth. This is easily the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government, surpassing even the time a bunch of scientists convinced Gerald Ford we were going to have the legendary swine flu epidemic, which eventually had to be canceled due to a lack of actual germs.
   What I’m saying is that the last thing we need is alien beings. I don’t know about you, but in the vast majority of the movies I’ve seen, the alien beings have turned out to be disgusting. A whole lot of them have tentacles, and those are the good-looking ones. Some of them are just blobs of slime. Almost all of them are toxic.
   So it’s all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he’d change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door. I bet he’d be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.
   But the really bad part is what they put on the plaque. I mean, if we’re going to have a plaque, it ought to at least show the aliens what we’re really like, right? Maybe a picture of people eating cheeseburgers and watching “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Then if aliens found it, they’d say, “Ah. Just plain folks.”
   But no. Carl came up with this incredible science-fair-wimp plaque that features drawings of—you are not going to believe this—a hydrogen atom and naked people. To represent the entire Earth! This is crazy! Walk the streets of any town on this planet, and the two things you will almost never see are hydrogen atoms and naked people. On top of that, the man on the plaque is clearly deranged. He’s cheerfully waving his arm, as if to say, “Hi! Look at me! I’m naked as a jaybird!” The woman is not waving, because she’s obviously embarrassed. She wishes she’d never let the man talk her into posing naked for this plaque.
   So that’s it, gang. That’s the plaque that’s supposed to tell the aliens what you’re like. Now if Pioneer 10 is picked up, I figure it will be picked up by some kind of Intergalactic Police, the alien equivalent of rural police officers. They’ll look at it, and they’ll say, “Looks to me like what we got here is we got a race of hydrogen-obsessed pervert science wimps who force the women to go around naked and probably say ‘billion’ a lot. I say we vaporize their planet and then ooze over to the diner for something to eat.”
   And that will be that, unless we send Carl out to retract the plaque, or at least explain that it represents only him and a few close friends. We can do it. A nation that can land a man on the moon can remove Carl Sagan from the solar system. I’ve given this a lot of thought. Billion billion billion.

Socket To Them

   TODAY’S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION IS, What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?
   Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend’s mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson.
   It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up a batch of “electrons,” which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend’s filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
   AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about, unless you have carpeting.
   Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin’s brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Eventually, he had to be given a job running the post office.
   After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Gaivani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog’s leg kicked, even though it was no longer actually attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Gaivani’s discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a stone.
   But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison’s first major invention, in
   1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically just sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison’s greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison’s design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.
   This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few consumers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year in which any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely reselling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.
   Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Gaivani’s, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer two thousand yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from “VAPORIZE BULLDOZER” to “DELICATE.”

Cloudy With A Chance Of ...

   TODAY’S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION: What causes weather? And who cares?
   ANSWER: Primitive man believed that weather was caused by
   “high-pressure systems” and “low-pressure systems,” which were basically large, invisible spirits who lived in the sky. Today, however, we know that weather is caused by Canada, a large, invisible country near Michigan. Canada’s principal activity is exporting cold Canadian air masses to Chicago, which converts them to weather and distributes them to the rest of the country. Lately, however, Canada’s dominance in the air-mass-exporting field has been challenged by Japan, which produces warm Pacific air masses and sells them to California, which uses them to produce smog and mudslides. Some countries, such as Russia and China, try to produce their own air masses, but they usually end up importing used weather from the United States. England imports most of its weather, but it can afford only rain. Many underdeveloped nations have no weather at all.
   To keep track of the weather, the United States Weather Bureau has observers in remote outposts all over the world. Once every hour, these observers go outside, scan the horizon for air masses, then go back inside and drink. By about midafternoon, most of them can see air masses and God knows what else on the horizon. The ones who can still operate their radios transmit their sightings to the Weather Bureau, which wants to know what the air masses are doing because when two air masses collide they produce thunder, which can frighten livestock. Sometimes they collide so hard that they produce lightning. There are many silly superstitions about lightning, and as a result many people-maybe even you-are terrified of it. You shouldn’t worry. Thanks to modern science, we now know that lightning is nothing more than huge chunks of electricity that can come out of the sky, any time, anywhere, and kill you.
   Lightning is especially attracted to people on golf courses, but if it cannot find a golf course, it will attack anyone wearing loud clothing. Your best bet is to dress conservatively and spend the rainy season (September through July) in bars. If you are struck by lightning, do not panic, because there is always a chance you are not dead. Many people who get struck by lightning go on to lead happy, productive, somewhat hairless lives.
   The Weather Bureau also sends up satellites that take photographs of the Earth from several hundred miles up. These photographs provide vital information. For example, if a photograph shows that there are clouds over Boston, an experienced meteorologist can determine that the weather in Boston is cloudy. He can then alert the Boston area to be ready to do whatever it does in the event of cloudiness.
   The only other users of satellite weather photographs are television weathermen, who use them to stand in front of when they give their reports:
   ANCHORMAN: And now, to fill up five minutes of valuable television time with information that any moron could get by merely looking out the window, here is our Channel 14 Insight News Team Weatherman. I understand you have good news for us, Fred.
   WEATHERMAN: Indeed I do, Bob. That low-pressure system that was threatening to bring rain to the Channel 14 viewing area this weekend has instead turned into a hurricane and veered westward, destroying much of Guatemala, so I’m predicting fair skies for the Channel 14 viewing area.
   ANCHORMAN: Hey, terrific.
   WEATHERMAN: Now let’s take a look at our satellite weather photograph. As you can see, we have clouds over some areas, but we have no clouds over other areas, which would indicate that our Channel 14
   viewers either do or do not have clouds over their areas, depending on what areas they are in.
   ANCHORMAN: Speaking of the satellite weather photograph, Fred, we have a letter here from eleven-year-old Gregory Sumpster of Port Weasel. Gregory wants to know why you show the same photograph night after night, and why it is identical to a photograph taken over the Philippines in 1972 that appears on page 113 of Gregory’s earth science textbook, except that the one you show has a crude map of the Channel 14 viewing area superimposed on top of it.
   WEATHERMAN: Ha ha. Good question, Gregory Sumpster of Port Weasel. I’m always pleased to know that my viewers are interested in the science of meteorology, even when those viewers turn out to be picky little snots such as yourself. I’ll see if I can come up with an answer to your very interesting question and wrap it around a rock and throw it through your bedroom window late some night.

Eat, Drink, And Be Wary

The Art Of Wine Snobbery

   If you want to become a rich, pretentious snot—and who doesn’t?—you should learn about wine. Alternatively, you can buy polo ponies, but the wine approach is better because you won’t have to spend your weekends shoveling huge quantities of polo-pony waste out of the rec room. Also, you can be pretentious about wine almost anywhere, whereas your finer restaurants and opera houses generally do not admit polo ponies.
   The study of wine is called “oenology,” which sounds like an unnatural sex act.
   POLICE OFFICER: Your honor, we caught this person committing oenology with a parking meter.
   JUDGE: Lock him up.
   Some people believe wine is still made by peasants who crush the grapes with their bare feet, leaving toenails and other disgusting, disease-ridden peasant-foot debris in the wine. This is, of course, nonsense. Today’s winemakers crush the grapes with modern, hygienic machines, and add the disease-ridden peasant-foot debris later. The end product is a delicate and complex collection of subtly interacting chemicals that, if bottled properly, aged just right and decanted carefully, rarely tastes as good as cream soda.
   Which leads us to two critical facts:
   Few people are really all that fond of wine. Almost nobody can tell the difference between good wine and melted Popsicles without reading the label.
   These facts make it much less expensive for you to become a pretentious wine-oriented snot, because they mean you don’t really need to buy good wine: all you need is good wine bottles. You can get these in any of the finer garbage cans. Fill them with cheap wine, the kind that comes in three-gallon containers with screw-on caps and names like Zambini Brothers Fruit Wine and Dessert Topping. Some people make a big fuss about which foods go with white wine and which with red, so buy a wine that could be taken for either.
   When company comes for dinner, grab a bottle at random and make an elaborate, French-sounding fuss about how you chose it to complement your menu. Say: “I chose the Escargot ‘63 rather than the Gareon ‘72 because the bonjour of the sil vous platt would bring out the plume de ma tante of the Cheez Whiz without being too strident for the chili dogs.” This brings up a third critical fact: You can use any sort of blather to describe wine.
   Another good time to be pretentious about wine is when you dine out, but the trick is to do it without spending much money. Use this technique: Glance scornfully at the wine list, then ask the waiter for a wine you know does not exist. Say “We’ll start with the Frere Jacques
   ‘68, preferably from the north side of the vineyard.” When he says they don’t have it, look at him as though he had asked permission to put his finger in your nose, then order the most expensive wine on the list.
   When he brings it to your table, examine the label for spelling and punctuation errors. Next smell the cork: if you don’t like it, order the waiter to take it back and splash a little cologne on it.
   Finally, take a largish mouthful of wine, swill it around your mouth for a while, swallow it, tell the waiter it won’t do, and demand another bottle. Keep this up until you have a lot of trouble getting the cork near enough to your nose to smell it. Then tell the waiter you wouldn’t dream of eating at a restaurant with an inadequate wine cellar, and march out in a dignified manner, by which I mean without making advances toward the cigarette machine.

Beer Is The Solution

   Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.
   Also, the wheel does not cure the common cold, whereas beer does. This was proved in a recent experiment in which scientists placed two groups of cold sufferers in a bowling alley. One group was given all the beer it could drink, while the other group was given only water. After two or three weeks, the beer drinkers exhibited no cold symptoms whatsoever, in fact couldn’t even stand up; whereas the water drinkers had all gone home.
   Beer can also be used to halt the nuclear arms race. Right now the missile negotiators drink coffee, so after three or four cups they get very snappish, which leads to increased international tension:
   RUSSIAN NEGOTIATOR: As I understand your proposal, you wish us to remove our Thundersquat missiles from Hungary, and in return you will ... Would you please stop that?
   AMERICAN NEGOTIATOR: Stop what?
   RUSSIAN: Tinkling your spoon against your saucer. All morning long it’s tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. You sound like the collar on a flea-infested dog. I can barely hear myself negotiate.
   AMERICAN: Is that so? Did it ever occur to you that I might be tinkling my saucer so that I will not have to listen to you snort the same wad of mucus back up your nose every twenty-five seconds precisely by my watch? You cling to that wad as if it had great sentimental value.
   RUSSIAN: Not at all. Let me get rid of it right now. (He blows his nose on the American proposal.)
   In their statements to the press, both sides try to put the best possible face on things (“RUSSIANS EXPRESS VIEWS ON U.S. PROPOSAL”), but the truth is they aren’t getting anywhere. Now if you give those same negotiators a keg of beer, after an hour or so you’ll see all kinds of nuclear cooperation:
   AMERICAN: Tell you what. You take all your missiles out of France, and we’ll send you over some decent men’s suits.
   RUSSIAN: Great! Wait a minute. I don’t think we have any missiles in France.
   AMERICAN: Then put some in, for God’s sake!
   RUSSIAN: Okay, but won’t that irritate the French?
   AMERICAN: Don’t worry about the little snots. If they give us any trouble, we’ll have Jerry Lewis shot.
   With this kind of cooperation, we’d have a lasting arms agreement in no time, and all thanks to beer.

The Story Of Beer

   One day nearly a thousand years ago, two serfs were working the soil in medieval England when one of them accidentally knocked some grain, yeast, hops, and sugar into a bucket of water. As the two serfs watched in fascination, the mixture began to ferment, and some knights rode up behind them and whacked off their heads with swords, as was the custom in those days.
   “This is hot work,” said one of the knights. “I could forsooth get behind a clean, crisp, cold beverage.”
   “Begorrah,” said another. “Let’s go to Germany, where beer was recently invented.”
   And so they did, and they thought the new invention was terrific, except that they had to go to the bathroom all the time, which is extremely annoying when you are wearing armor. So they decided to quit being knights and start the Renaissance, yet another of the many fine benefits we derive from beer.

How To Make Your Own Beer

   I really don’t know. Back in 1981, I sent away for this mail-order kit that is supposed to enable you to make your own beer at home. I take this kit out from time to time, to look at it. It’s sitting next to me as I write these words.
   The problem is that you need a bunch of empty beer bottles to put your homemade beer in, so the first thing I always do is go out and buy a case of beer and start drinking it, to empty the bottles. While I am doing this I read the kit directions, and I notice that if I start making beer right now, I won’t have any actual beer available to drink for more than fifteen days. Also I will have to become involved with something called “wort.” So I always decide to stick with store-bought beer and save my kit for use during an emergency, such as following a nuclear attack. I hate to be a pessimist, but I, for one, intend to remain fully prepared for this terrible possibility until I see some clear sign of a lessening of international tension, such as that the missile negotiators send out for a pizza.

Hold The Bean Sprouts

   I have figured out how to make several million dollars in the fast-food business.
   First, let me give you a little background. As you know, in the past twenty years, fast-food restaurants have sprung up everywhere, like mildew; they have virtually replaced the old-fashioned slow-food restaurants, where you wasted valuable seconds selecting food from menus and waiting for it to be specially cooked and being served and eating with actual knives and forks from actual plates and so on. And why are the fast-food chains so successful? The answer is simple: They serve only things that ten-year-olds like to eat.
   Fast-food-chain executives were the first to abandon the Balanced Diet Theory, which was popular with mothers when most of us were young. Remember? Your mother always fed you a balanced diet, which meant that for every food she served you that you could stand to eat, she served you another kind of food you could not stand to eat.
   My mother stuck to this principle rigidly. For example, if she served us something we sort of liked, such as beef stew, she also served us something we sort of disliked, such as green beans. And if she served us something we really liked, such as hamburgers, she made sure to also serve us something we really loathed, such as Brussels sprouts. We kids feared many things in those days—werewolves, dentists, North Koreans, Sunday school—but they all paled by comparison with Brussels sprouts. I can remember many a summer evening when I had eaten my hamburger in thirty-one seconds and was itching to go outside and commit acts of minor vandalism with my friends, but I had to sit at the table, staring for hours at Brussels sprouts congealing on my plate, knowing that my mother would not let me leave until I had eaten them. In the end, I always ate them, because I knew she would let me starve to death before she would let me get out of eating my Brussels sprouts. That’s how fervently she believed in the Balanced Diet Theory. And, in those days, so did restaurants. When we went out to eat, we kids always ordered hamburgers and French fries, but they always were accompanied by some alien substance, such as peas.
   But the old-fashioned, slow-food restaurant owners were fools to believe in the Balanced Diet Theory, because it does not take into account what people, particularly kids, really want to eat. Kids don’t want to eat wholesome foods: kids want to eat grease and sugar. This is why, given the choice, kids will eat things that do not qualify as food at all, such as Cheez Doodles, Yoo-Hoo, Good ‘n’ Plenty and those little wax bottles that contain colored syrup with enough sugar per bottle to dissolve a bulldozer in two hours. As kids grow up, they reluctantly accept the idea that their diets should be balanced, and by the time they are thirty-five or forty years old they will eat peas voluntarily. But all of us, deep in our hearts, still want grease and sugar. That is what separates us from animals.
   And that is why fast-food restaurants are so successful. At fast-food restaurants, you never run the risk of finding peas on your plate. You don’t even get a plate. What you get is hamburgers and French fries; these are your primary sources of grease. You get your sugar from soft drinks or “shakes,” which are milk shakes from which the milk has been eliminated on the grounds that milk has been identified by the United States Government as a major cause of nutrition.
   At first, fast-food restaurants were popular only with wild teenaged hot rodders who carried switchblade knives and refused to eat Brussels sprouts. But then the fast-food chains realized they could make much more money if they could broaden their appeal, so they started running television ads to convince people, particularly mothers, that fast food is wholesome. You see these ads all the time: you have your wholesome Mom and your wholesome Dad and their 2.2 wholesome kids, and they’re at the fast-food restaurant, just wolfing down grease and sugar, and they’re having such a wholesome time that every now and then everybody in the whole place, including the counterpersons with the Star Trek uniforms, jumps up and sings and dances out of sheer joy. The message is clear: you can forget about the old Balanced Diet Theory; it’s okay to eat this stuff.
   Lately, the advertisements have started stressing how much variety you can get at fast-food restaurants. Besides hamburger, you can get chicken in a hamburger bun, roast beef in a hamburger bun, steak in a hamburger bun, and fish in a hamburger bun; you can even get an entire three-part breakfast in a hamburger bun. A fast-food restaurant near me recently started serving—I swear this is true—veal parmigian in a hamburger bun. And people are buying it.
   This leads me to my plan to make several million dollars. My plan rests on two assumptions:
   People have become so committed to fast food that they don’t care what they eat, as long as it’s in a hamburger bun, and There must be an enormous world glut of green vegetables, since nobody believes in the Balanced Diet Theory any more.
   So I plan to buy several tons of Brussels sprouts, which I figure would cost a total of six dollars. I’ll put them in hamburger buns, then get some actor to dress up as a clown or some other idiot character and go on television and urge everybody to rush right over and pay me $1.69
   for a Sprout McBun. Before long, kids will be begging their parents to buy my Brussels sprouts, and I will be rich. I’ll bet you wish you had thought of it.

Rooting For Rutabagas

   WARNING: This column contains highly sensitive information about U.S. nuclear strategy and rutabagas.
   From time to time, we newspaper columnists obtain classified government documents that we share with our readers so we can protect the Public’s Right to Know and make large sums of money. A good example is the famous columnist Jack Anderson, who is always revealing government secrets:
   WASHINGTON—Classified documents recently obtained by this reporter indicate that Interior Secretary James glatt is secretly drafting legislation to legalize the shooting of American Indians for sport.
   Over the years, Jack has obtained classified documents proving that every elected official in the United States is a worthless piece of scum. He gets classified documents in the mail as often as normal people get Reader’s Digest sweepstakes offers. It has gotten to the point where high government officials routinely call Jack for information:
   PRESIDENT REAGAN: Hello, Jack?
   JACK ANDERSON: Hi, Mr. President. What can I do for you today?
   REAGAN: Jack, I can’t remember the procedure I’m supposed to use if I want to put the armed forces on Red Alert.
   ANDERSON: Let’S See ... here it is. You call 800-411-9789 toll-free, and you say: “Buford ate a fat newt.”
   REAGAN: “Buford ate a bat suit?”
   ANDERSON: No, that one launches a nuclear attack. It’s “fat newt.”
   REAGAN: “Cat shoot.” Got it. Thanks a million, Jack.
   ANDERSON: Any time.
   I would love to share some classified documents with you, but nobody ever sends me any. Mostly what I get in the mail is threats to sue me or kill me, along with the occasional crank letter. I did, however, recently receive some information that, as far as I know, has not been revealed in any other column. It concerns a topic that few Americans know anything about, and government officials never discuss publicly: rutabagas.
   This information came in the form of a press release from the Ontario Rutabaga Producers’ Marketing Board. Ontario is located in Canada, a foreign country. So what we have is a group of foreign persons who are trying to influence Americans to buy rutabagas, and possibly even eat them.
   Rutabagas, which belong to the turnip family, are fat roots (“Buford ate a fat root”) that grow underground in Canada, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling us she does not want us to eat them. Rutabagas have never been really big in America. Most Americans can go for days at a time without even thinking about them. Unless you live in a community where recreational drug use is widespread, you almost never hear anybody say: “Gee, I’d love to accept those free tickets to the final game of the World Series, but I want to get right home for dinner. We’re having rutabagas.”
   The Ontario rutabaga producers are trying to influence American opinion by planting prorutabaga statements in newspaper food sections. This is fairly easy to do, because food-section editors are desperate for new recipes. There are only about eight dishes that Americans will actually eat, and all the food sections have printed every possible variation of the recipes, so nowadays they’ll print anything:
   SPAM, WHEAT CHEX ADD ZEST TO SPICY GRAPEFRUIT STEW
   So the food sections will be easy prey for the rutabaga producers. Fairly soon, you will begin seeing statements like these, taken from the press release: “Ontario rutabagas give you good taste and good food value in cold, wet winters ... as a fresh snack or served in exciting gourmet dishes ... covered in a thin wax coating ... use a good sharp knife to cut off the purple top ...” Your children will read these statements, and then one cold, wet winter day they will come home, refuse the plate of good, traditionally American Twinkles you have thoughtfully prepared, and demand instead that you whack the purple tops off of wax-covered Canadian roots and serve them as snacks.
   And as sure as night follows day, once we start eating rutabagas, there will be nothing to prevent us from going directly to leeks. I recently obtained an extremely proleek press release from an outfit that calls itself the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, which is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, but obviously takes its orders directly from a foreign government, because it openly uses words such as
   “vichyssoise.” Here is a direct quotation, which I would refuse to print if the national interest were not at stake: “The Scottish use leeks in a traditional favorite, Cock-a-Leekie Soup, which has many delicious variations.” If you start hearing talk like this from your children, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
   I could go on—I could tell you about the California Dried Fig Advisory Board, which recently blanketed the nation with a document called the “Fig News”—but I don’t have the space. I will do my best to keep you abreast of this important story until Jack Anderson picks it up, or I am found stabbed to death with a good, sharp, purple-stained knife.

Traveling Light

Vacation Reservations

   This is the time of year to gather up your family and all your available money and decide what you’re going to do on your summer vacation. You should get an opinion from everybody, including your children, because, after all, they are family members too, even though all they do is sit around and watch television and run up huge orthodontist bills and sneer at plain old affordable U.S. Keds sneakers, demanding instead elaborate designer athletic footwear that costs as much per pair as you paid for your first car. On second thought, the heck with what your children want to do. You can notify them of your vacation plans via memorandum.
   The cheapest vacation is the kind where you just stay home, avoiding the hassle and expense of travel and getting to know each other better as
   a family and gagging with boredom. Another option is to put the whole family into the car and take a trip. That’s what my family did, back in the fifties. We usually went to Florida, which has a lot of tourist attractions, always announced by large, fading roadside signs:
   SEE THE WORLD’S OLDEST SHELL MUSEUM
   AND SNAKE RODEO—1 MILE
   We had a system for car travel. My father would drive; my mother would periodically offer to drive, knowing that my father would not let her drive unless he went blind in both eyes and lapsed into a coma; and my sister and I would sit in the backseat and read Archie comic books for the first eleven miles, then punch each other and scream for the remaining 970. My father tended to stop at a lot of tourist attractions, so he could walk around and smoke cigarettes and try to persuade himself not to lock my sister and me in the trunk and abandon the car.
   I bet we stopped at every tourist attraction in Florida. A lot of them involved alligators, which are as common in Florida as retirees. You’d pay your money and go into this fenced-in area that was rife with alligators, which sounds dangerous but wasn’t, because alligators are the most jaded reptiles on earth. They’d just lie around in the muck with their eyes half open, looking like they’d been out playing cards and drinking for four consecutive nights. Sometimes, to liven things up, a tourist-attraction personnel would wrestle an alligator. This was always advertised as a death defying feat, but the alligators never seemed interested. They would just lie there, hung over, while the tourist-attraction personnel dragged them around for a few minutes. It was as exciting as watching somebody move a large carpet. I would have much preferred to watch two tourist-attraction personnel wrestle each other, and I imagine the alligators would have agreed.
   These days, the tourist attractions in Florida are much more educational. For example, Disney World has rides where you get in these little cars and travel through a gigantic replica of a human heart, pausing in the aorta to see an electronic robot imitate Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, then zipping down a chute and splashing into a pond. Another educational thing to do on vacation is visit an authentic colonial historic site, where people in authentic colonial garb demonstrate how our ancestors made candles by hand. I’d say one historic site is plenty, because, let’s face it, after you’ve watched people make candles for a few minutes, you’re ready to go back to watching people haul alligators around.
   Your biggest vacation expenses, besides tourist-attraction admission fees, are food and lodging. You can keep your food costs down by eating at one of the many fine roadside stands, such as the Dairy Queen, the Dairy Freeze, The Frozen Dairy Queen, the Freezing King of the Dairy, the Dairy King, the Dozing Fairy Queen, and so on. Although many nutrition-conscious parents worry that the food sold at these stands is nothing more than sugar, the truth is that it also contains more than the minimum daily adult requirement of gelatin, which builds the strong fingernails children need in the backseat on long car trips.
   Lodging is a trickier problem. if you don’t mind outdoor pit toilets, you can stay at public campsites. On the other hand, if you don’t mind outdoor pit toilets, you need psychiatric help. You can also look for cheap motels, the ones that have rooms for six dollars a night, but generally these rooms have 1952 Philco televisions and large tropical insects. So your best bet is to stay with friends or relatives. if you have no friends or relatives where you plan to vacation, you can still get free lodging if you use this proven system: Make a list of ten random names and addresses, with yours at the top. Then obtain the telephone directory for the area you want to visit, pick a dozen names at random, and send each one a copy of your list and this letter:
   “Do not throw away this letter! This is a chain letter! It was started by nuns shortly after the Korean War, and it has NEVER BEEN
   BROKEN! To keep the chain going, all you have to do is provide lodging for a week for the family at the top of the enclosed list! Within a year, YOU will receive 1,285,312 offers of free lodging, enough free lodging to last for the rest of your life! If you break the chain, you will die a horrible death!”
   That should get you all the lodging you need. Have a swell trip, and be sure to write.

Trip To Balmy California

   If you’re looking for ways to develop a serious drinking problem, I urge you to take a small child across the country in an airplane. My wife and I did this recently, in an effort to get to California. We had heard that California contains these large red trees. Our vacation objective was to go out, look at the trees, and return to Pennsylvania without being assaulted by mass murderers, which abound in California.
   One problem was that we missed our plane because it took off an hour and a half before our tickets said it would. I’m still not sure why. It was just one of those mysterious things that happen all the time in the world of commercial aviation. Maybe the airlines have so many delayed flights that every now and then they let one take off early just to even things out. All I know is that it looked as if our vacation was over before it began, which was fine with me, because our two-year-old son, Robert, had already gone into Public Behavior Mode, which is a snotty behavior pattern that modern children get into because they know that modern parents aren’t allowed to strike them in public for fear of being reported to the police as child abusers.
   While Robert was running around the airport looking for electrical outlets to stick his fingers into, an airlines person arranged to put us on a plane bound for St. Louis. We were not really interested in going to St. Louis, because the principal tourist attraction there is an arch.
   I once paid money and waited on line to go up to the top of this arch, and when I finally got there, I realized that (a) St. Louis looks basically the same from the top of the arch as from on the ground, only flatter; and (b) I had no way of knowing whether the people who built this arch were serious, competent arch builders or merely close friends and relations of the mayor whose arch would collapse at any moment. So I got back down, and have felt no great need to go to St. Louis since. But the airlines person assured us that St. Louis is in the same general direction as California. I think he mainly wanted to get Robert out of the airport.
   The flight to St. Louis was uneventful, except that Robert and several other children were much more disruptive than terrorist hijackers and a passenger at the back of the plane died in what I believe was an unrelated incident. Also, my wife was fairly nervous. She doesn’t believe that planes can actually fly, on the grounds that they are enormous objects filled with people, suitcases, and airline food, which is a very heavy kind of food, the idea being that if the passengers are given food that takes a long time to chew, they won’t get bored. Despite my wife’s concerns, we made it to St. Louis, where the airlines personnel, in another commercial-aviation mystery, put us in the first-class section of a plane bound for California. First class is for people who have paid a lot of extra money so they won’t have to sit in the same section as small children. Robert sensed this immediately and went into Extended Public Behavior Mode, a mode that baffles medical science because in it a child can cry for more than forty-five minutes without inhaling. Robert wanted the stewardess to open the airplane door, only we were 35,000 feet in the air. After a while, I got the impression the stewardess was seriously considering opening the door for him anyway.
   Eventually we got to California and saw the trees. They were large and red, just as we had been told. I liked them better than the St. Louis arch, because you didn’t have to go up in them. Robert liked them because they were surrounded by reddish, clingy dirt that you can get into your hair and diaper really easily.
   We also drove down the Pacific coast on a winding road that offered many spectacular views that I couldn’t look at for fear I would plunge the car into the ocean. Fortunately, my wife took many pictures, and I intend to look at them once we save up enough money to have them developed.
   We planned to end our vacation in Los Angeles, but we never actually located it. We’d get on a large road and follow the signs that said “Los Angeles,” but we’d always wind up in some place whose name ended in the letter a, such as Pomona and Ventura, filled with stores selling waterbeds. I’m sure Los Angeles was around there somewhere, because you’d need a city with a large population to support a waterbed industry that big.
   We did find Disneyland. Disneyland is basically an enormous amusement park, except that, thanks to the vision and creative genius of the immortal Walt Disney, it has clean rest rooms. There are lots of simulated things to do in Disneyland. We went on a simulated paddle-wheel riverboat ride through a simulated wild frontier. On the simulated riverbanks, we saw a scene in which simulated evil Indians had shot a simulated arrow through the chest of a simulated white settler. Farther on, we saw some more simulated Indians; the riverboat announcer identified these as good Indians. I strongly suspect they had been installed after the evil Indians, when the Disneyland executives decided they ought to present a more balanced picture. We never saw any evil white settlers.
   The most exciting part of Disneyland for Robert was whenhe he met Mickey Mouse. Robert had seen mice, but they were small and naked, so when he was suddenly confronted with this mouse who was wearing a suit and whose head was the size of a refrigerator carton, he was very concerned. He still talks about it. “That big mouse,” he says. He’ll probably carry the memory for the rest of his life. Someday he may even sue.
   Finally, it was time to leave sunny California, so we got on another plane that did not leave at the time shown on our tickets. But it also didn’t stop in St. Louis, so we were pleased. We plan to go again sometime, when Robert has reached a more appropriate age, such as forty.

The Plane Truth

   There are many things you can do during a long airplane flight to take your mind off the fact that you are several miles up in the air in a heavy object built and operated by people you don’t even know, people who could well be insane careless suicidal drug addicts. For one thing, you can listen to the Safety Lecture given by the flight attendants (who were known as “stewardesses” before some of them became males) just before the plane takes off. The flight attendants demonstrate the safety features of the plane, the main one being little plastic bags that pop out of the ceiling when the plane starts to crash. You’re supposed to put a bag over your mouth and breathe from it; this ensures that you will have an adequate supply of oxygen until the plane hits the ground at three or four hundred miles an hour. Another safety feature is that the seats float, so the airline can retrieve them if the plane Crashes into the ocean.
   When you get right down to it, the Safety Lecture is a silly idea.
   I mean, if the passengers really thought the plane was going to crash, they wouldn’t get on it in the first place, let alone learn how to get an adequate oxygen supply on the way down. As a result, most passengers pay no attention whatsoever to the safety lecture. The flight attendants know this, and, out of sheer boredom, they long ago stopped reading the Official Safety Lecture Script. Next time you’re on a plane, listen closely to what they actually say:
   “Hi, I’m Debbie, the chief flight attendant, and on behalf of the entire crew I’d like to welcome you aboard Flight 302 to Bermuda. Much of our flight will be over water, so I’d like to remind you that if we do crash, there is an excellent chance that those of us who survive will be eaten by sharks. Please note that various windows are designated as emergency exits, the kind that have been known to pop open for no good reason at extremely high altitudes. Now if you will look at the front of the cabin, one of the flight attendants will demonstrate how to seal Tupperware containers. Thank you and we hope you enjoy the flight.”
   After the Safety Lecture comes the takeoff, which is terrifying until you realize that the pilot has probably taken off thousands of times without a mishap, which means that the odds of a mishap occurring get better every time. Once you’re in the air, you get the Pilot’s Message:
   “Good afternoon, this is Pilot Horvel Grist speaking. My copilot and I are up here with a whole batch of dials and gauges and controls of every kind, but everything seems to be pretty much the way they described it in Pilot School. We’ll be cruising along at an altitude of thirty-eight thousand knots, and we should reach our destination just about on schedule, after which we’ll circle it for five or six hours. That large object we’re passing over right now is Pittsburgh. Or the Grand Canyon. We’ll let you know once we pin it down.”
   Sometimes the pilot lets you listen in on his conversations with Air Traffic Control. Pilots are always talking to Air Traffic Control to make sure they go in the right directions and don’t whack into anything in midair. These conversations are conducted in crisp, professional language:
   PILOT: Come in, Air Traffic Control. This is a great big jet up in the sky.
   AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: A great big what?
   PILOT: Jet.
   AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER: Oh, jet. I thought you said pet. I was picturing this huge Russian wolfhound whizzing around up there.
   PILOT (panicking): Did you say there’s a huge Russian missile in the air?
   AIR TRAFFIC CONTROLLER (Screaming): My God! There’s a huge Russian missile in the air! Somebody notify the Strategic Air Command!
   PILOT: I’m going to try to land on the Interstate.
   Another fun thing to do during long plane trips is read the paperback books they sell in airports. There are three kinds:
   Spy thrillers, in which evil people, usually Nazis left over from world War II, nearly blow up the world or kill the President or the Pope. If airport books are any indication, there are at least 450,000 evil Nazi World War II geniuses still at large, many of them with atomic laser cannons. Look for a large swastika on the cover; this is the publishing industry’s way of letting you know it’s a fun book.
   Supernatural thrillers, in which the devil possesses people. Possession by the devil used to be fairly rare—I remember when it was just that little girl in The Exorcist—but these days it’s as common as strep throat. Before long, we’ll have special schools for possessed people, and the government will start requiring large corporations to hire them.
   Dirty books, in which you can turn to any page at random and start reading, because you already know what’s going to happen, so the only question is how many times. Dirty-book characters live lives that differ substantially from yours and mine. For example, if you walk into a restaurant, you will sit down, order dinner, eat, pay and leave. Here’s what happens to a dirty-book character in a restaurant:
   John glanced up from the menu and suddenly realized, as six statuesque waitresses and two slim Siamese busboys sidled up to him, that he was the lone customer in the restaurant. “We have a special tonight,” said one of the waitresses, gesturing toward the steam table.
   The only other way to pass the time on long plane flights is to get hijacked by armed fanatic terrorists. If you have no armed fanatic terrorists on your flight, you can liven things up yourself by making clever hijacking jokes. For example, when the flight attendants serve dinner, you can stand up and wave your chicken pie aloft, announcing in a loud voice that it is actually an explosive device that you plan to detonate unless the plane goes to Zaire. The airplane crew will find this a very amusing diversion from the boring routine, and will give you lots of extra attention. Another benefit is that you won’t have to eat the chicken pie, which probably tastes like an explosive device anyway.

Destination: Maybe

   I fly a lot, because of the nature of my job. I’m a gnat.
   Ha ha. Just a little humor there to introduce today’s topic, which is air travel. As a business person, I have to travel by air a lot because modern corporations have many far-flung plants. The plants are flung as far as possible so modern corporation presidents will have an excuse to fly around the country in corporate jets drinking martinis at
   550 miles an hour. The rest of us have to fly via commercial airliner, which is less pleasant because federal law requires commercial airliners to carry infants trained to squall at altitudes above two hundred feet. This keeps the passengers calm, because they’re all thinking, “I wish somebody would stuff a towel into that infant’s mouth,” which prevents them from thinking, “I am thirty-five thousand feet up in the air riding in an extremely sophisticated and complex piece of machinery controlled by a person with a Southern accent.”
   Actually, there’s nothing to worry about, except the possibility that all the engines will fail at once and the plane will drop like a rock. And even if this happens, airplanes have all kinds of backup safety devices, by which I mean little masks that pop out of the ceiling. You’re supposed to put one of these over your mouth so the pilot won’t hear you screaming while he radios for instructions on how to get the engines started again, assuming the radio still works. So you’re actually much safer flying in an airplane than riding in a car, although needless to say this ceases to be true once the airplane hits the ground. But as long as the plane is in the air and the engines are going, the only bad thing that can happen is that it will fly into another plane, which is why we have air traffic controllers.
   In the old days, air traffic controllers sat and stared at little radar screens so long that they eventually went crazy, so Ronald Reagan, who is firmly opposed to having crazy federal employees below the Cabinet level, fired them all and got a new batch. Needless to say the new controllers don’t want to make the same mistake as their predecessors, so they’ve learned how to relax on the job. Their motto is “Tomorrow is another day,” and their approach is low-key:
   PILOT: This is Flight 274, requesting landing instructions.
   CONTROLLER: Well, if it was me, I would put the wheels down first, but don’t quote me on that.
   PILOT: No, I already know how to land I was hoping you could tell me which runway I should land on.
   CONTROLLER: Ah. Let me just turn on the little screen here, and ... There we are. Say, is that you about to plow into the mountain?
   PILOT: No.
   CONTROLLER: Oh. That must be one of Bob’s. (Yelling to another controller.) Bob, could you turn your screen on for a second? One of your planes is about to ... Wait, forget it.
   PILOT: Um, look, we’re running out of fuel here, so I’d really appreciate it if you could possibly ...
   CONTROLLER: Hey, lighten up, will you? Do you want to make me tense and crazy so Reagan can fire me? (Yelling to other controllers.) Hey, guys! I think I got a Republican here! (Laughter in background, shouts of “Steer him into the mountain!”)
   PILOT: Look, please
   CONTROLLER: Hey, no sweat. We’re just having some fun. I’ll get back to you with a runway right after my break.
   PILOT: But
   CONTROLLER: (Click.)
   Here are some tips for making your trip more enjoyable:
   Never believe anything airline employees say about when a plane will land or take off. No matter how badly the schedule is screwed up, they will claim everything is fine, because otherwise you might realize it would be faster to walk to your destination. Let’s say you’re waiting for Flight 206, which is an hour late, and you ask an agent at the ticket counter when it’s due in. He’ll punch a few buttons on his computer, which will give him this message: “FLIGHT 206 HAS CRASH-LANDED ON A REMOTE CORAL REEF IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC AND ALL THE TIRES ARE FLAT AND THE ENGINES ARE BROKEN AND THE PASSENGERS AND CREW ARE BEING HELD AT GUNPOINT BY PALESTINIAN HIJACKERS ARMED WITH NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND THERE IS A VERY HEAVY FOG.” The agent will look you cheerfully in the eye and say: “It should be here any minute now.”
   Never let anybody take your luggage. Airline employees will continually try to snatch it from you; you must ward them off with a stiff forearm and flee on foot. If they corner you, toss your luggage out the window, or set it on fire—anything to prevent it from falling into their hands, because God alone knows what will happen to it then. Never pull out a machine gun and fire thirty thousand rounds into the leech-like cult members who approach you in airports and try to get you to give them money. Some stray bullets could conceivably hit innocent bystanders, and then you would feel terrible.

The Sporting Life

Unsportsmanlike Conduct

   I first got involved in organized sports in fifth grade, when, because of federal law, I had to join the Little League. In Little League we played a game that is something like baseball, except in baseball you are supposed to catch, throw and hit a ball, whereas most of us Little Leaguers could do none of these things.
   Oh, there were a few exceptions, fast-developing boys with huge quantities of adolescent hormones raging through their bodies, causing them to have rudimentary mustaches and giving them the ability to throw a ball at upwards of six hundred miles an hour, but with no idea whatsoever where it would go. These boys always got to pitch, which presented a real problem for the rest of us, because in Little League the pitcher stands eight feet from home plate. The catcher got to wear many protective garments, and the umpire got to wear protective garments and hide behind the catcher. But all we batters got to wear was plastic helmets that fell off if we moved our heads.
   I hated to bat. I used to pray that the kids ahead of me would strike out, or that I would get appendicitis, or that a volcano would erupt in center field before my turn came. I was very close to God when
   I was in Little League. But sometimes He would let me down, and I’d have to bat. In the background, the coach would yell idiot advice, such as
   “Keep your eye on the ball.” This was easy for him to say: he always stood over by the bench, well out of harm’s way.
   I made no effort to keep my eye on the ball. I concentrated exclusively on avoiding death. I would stand there, trying to hold my head perfectly still so my helmet wouldn’t fall off, and when the prematurely large kid who was pitching let go of the ball, I would swing the bat violently, in hopes of striking out or deflecting the ball before it could smash into my body. Usually I struck out, which was good, because then I could go back to the safety of the bench and help the coach encourage some other terrified kid to keep his eye on the ball. I much preferred to play in the field, especially the outfield. If a batter got a hit, you could run like a maniac, and the odds were that you’d be several hundred feet away from the ball by the time it landed.
   I understand that Little League was supposed to teach me the rules of sportsmanship. The main rule of sportsmanship I learned was: Never participate in a sport where the coach urges you to do insane and dangerous things that he himself does not do. Football is another good example. If you watch a football game, you’ll notice that the coaches constantly urge the players to run into each other at high speeds, but the coaches themselves tend to remain on the sidelines.
   So after I fulfilled my legal commitment to Little League, I avoided organized sports and got my exercise in the form of minor vandalism. But when I got to high school, I discovered that I had to go out for an organized sport so I could be called up to the auditorium stage during the annual athletic awards assembly to receive a varsity letter.
   I cannot overemphasize the importance the kids in my high school attached to varsity letters. You could be a bozo of astonishing magnitude, but if you had a varsity letter, you were bound to succeed socially. Oh, the school administrators tried to make academic achievements seem important, too. They’d have academic assemblies, where they’d call all the studious kids up onto the stage. But the rest of the kids were unimpressed. They’d sit there, wearing their varsity sweaters, and hoot and snicker while some poor kid with a slide rule dangling from his belt got the Math Achievement Award. No, to make it in my high school you had to have a varsity letter, which meant you had to go out for a sport.
   So in my sophomore year I went out for track, because track was the sport where you were least likely to have something thrown at you or have somebody run into you at high speed. The event I chose was the long jump, because all you had to do was run maybe fifty feet, after which you leaped into a soft pit. That was it. The long jump was far superior to the other events, in which you were required to run as much as a mile without stopping.
   Anyway, I spent a happy spring, leaping into the pit and dreaming about going up on the stage to get my varsity letter. Then one day we all piled into buses and rode, laughing and gesturing at motorists, to a rival school for a track meet. This proved to be my downfall, because it turned out that at track meets they measured how far we long jumpers jumped, and only the three longest jumpers got points, which you needed to get your varsity letter. I was not one of the three longest jumpers.
   I was not one of the ten longest jumpers. In fact, they could have pulled people out of the crowd, old people with arthritis, and they probably would have jumped farther than I did.
   So that was the end of my involvement with organized sports. Fortunately, there was one other avenue to popularity in my high school, which was to drink several quarts of beer, go to a dance, and behave in such an extremely antisocial manner that you got thrown out by the assistant principal in full view of hundreds of admiring kids. So in the end I achieved social acceptance.
   After I got out of high school, varsity letters seemed less important, and academic achievement started to seem more important. I mean, if you go to a cocktail party and subtly contrive to flash your varsity letter, people will think you are a jerk; whereas if you subtly contrive to flash your Phi Beta Kappa key, people will still think you are a jerk, but an educated jerk.
   I often wonder what my former classmates do with their varsity letters, now that they’re out of high school. Maybe they wear them in the privacy of their homes. Why not? I still drink beer.

Football Deflated

   Once again it is time for Americans of all races and religions to set aside their petty differences and spend half a day drinking beer and watching large persons injure each other’s knees. You guessed it: it’s Super Bowl time.
   The Super Bowl is an American tradition, like heart disease. You need not know anything about football to enjoy it. I know very little about football, and I intend to write a whole column about it and get paid for it.
   First, let’s talk about the word “football.” In most nations, when people say “football,” they mean “soccer,” which is a completely different game in which smallish persons whiz about on a field while the spectators beat each other up and eventually overthrow the government. I don’t know why the other nations call soccer “football,” but I suspect it has something to do with the metric system and I say the hell with it.
   Modern American football was invented by college students. This should surprise nobody. There are no depths of idiocy to which college students will not sink. You’re always reading about them in the newspapers:
   FORT STUCCO, TEXAS—Members of Beta Beta Zoot Fraternity here at Dunderson State Cultural Astronomical and Aeronautical Technical College are attempting to raise money for charity and get their names in the Guinness Book of World Records by setting a record for squatting around in the dirt drinking beer. They have been at it for eight days now, or possibly longer; a spokesbrother for the group said the Beta Betas spend a fair amount of time squatting in the dirt drinking beer anyway, so nobody knows for sure when they started doing it for charity. “We just thought, you know, we do something, you know, to make the world a better place and whatnot,” he said. “We’re gonna give the money to charity if we get any money and can find a charity or something to give the money to, if we get any money.” The spokesbrother said the rest of the student body has supported the effort by not driving cars over any of the brothers.
   Anyway, the first modern intercollegiate American football game was played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, two schools which are located in New Jersey, which should also surprise nobody. Rutgers won that game, and Princeton won the rematch a week later, but both schools were barred from postseason bowl competition because of recruiting violations.
   Over the next hundred years or so football saw a great many major innovations and refinements that are too boring to even think about. Along the way professional football came into being so the largest and most violent college players would have a way to earn money other than simply demanding it from innocent civilians.
   Today the National Football League has several dozen teams, which play games starting in about August and running right through to January. This presents many scheduling problems, because some of the teams are in warm places where everybody wants to play, and some are in cold places where nobody wants to play. Along about December you’ll have four or five teams showing up to play the Miami Dolphins and none showing up to play the Minnesota Vikings. So what happens is Dolphins end up fielding eleven men who get the stuffing knocked out of them by fifty-five opponents, while the Vikings win by scores of 12,324 to nothing. This is called the “home field advantage.”
   At the end of the season, the teams with the fewest major injuries meet in the Super Bowl. By this time, of course, the players can barely walk, let alone run around and knock each other down, so the Super Bowl is usually pretty awful. To get people to watch, league officials try to turn it in to a Major Spectacle, along the lines of the fall of the Roman Empire. I remember one year, during the Nixon administration, when they had Air Force jet fighters fly over the stadium during the national anthem. I believe that was also the year that George Allen, one of the coaches, actually had his players run a play suggested by Nixon. In Nixon’s play, the quarterback gets the ball, then, when the other team’s linemen are about to jump on him, claims that he doesn’t have the ball, in fact has never had the ball, and implies that several of his teammates may have the ball, but because of National Security they can’t talk about it.
   But back to the jets. The trouble with having jets fly over the stadium during the national anthem is that next year people expect something even more spectacular, like having the jets shoot down the Goodyear Blimp. I am not endorsing this idea, you understand. I’m just explaining football.