Chapter 9. Six Months To A Year

Development during the Second Six Months

   During the second six months, your baby will begin to start crawling around looking for hazards. It will start to become aware of the mysteries of language, perhaps even learning to understand simple phrases such as “No!” and “Spit that out!”
   Physically, you’ll find your baby is getting hardier and more portable now, so that you can more easily take it to restaurants, although you still can’t go inside. By now baby should have gotten over early medical problems such as the colic; if not, you should see your pediatrician and get something you can use to kill yourself.
   So all in all, you can look forward in the next six months to a period of change and growth, with a 60 percent chance of afternoon or evening thundershowers.

Baby’s First Solid Food

   We’re using the term “food” loosely here. What we’re talking about are those nine zillion little jars on the supermarket shelf with the smiling baby on the label and names like “Prunes with Mixed Leeks.” Babies hate this stuff. Who wouldn’t? It looks like frog waste.
   Babies are people, too; they want to eat what you want to eat. They want cheeseburgers and beer. If we simply fed them normal diets, they’d eat like crazy. They’d weigh 150 pounds at the end of the first year. This is exactly why we don’t feed them normal diets: The last thing we need is a lot of 150-pound people with no control over their bowel movements. We have enough trouble with the Congress.

How to Feed Solid Food to a Baby

   The key thing is that you should not place the food in the baby’s mouth. At this stage, babies use their mouths exclusively for chewing horrible things that they find on the floor. The way they eat food is by absorbing it directly into their bloodstreams through their faces. So the most efficient way to feed a baby is to smear the food on its chin.
   Unfortunately, many inexperienced parents insist on putting food into the baby’s mouth. They put in spoonful after spoonful of, say, beets, sincerely believing they are doing something constructive, when in fact the beets are merely going around the Baby Food-Return Loop which all humans are equipped with until the age of 18 months. After the parents finish “feeding” the baby, they remove the bib and clean up the area, at which point the baby starts to spew beets from its mouth under high pressure, like a miniature beet volcano, until its face is covered with beets, which it can then absorb.

What to Do When a Baby Puts a Horrible Thing in Its Mouth

   The trick is to distract the baby with something even worse than what’s in its mouth. Next time you’re in a bus station rest room, scour the floor for something really disgusting that might appeal to a baby. Stick it in your freezer, so you can quickly defrost it in a microwave oven (allow about 40 seconds) and wave it enticingly in front of the baby until the baby spits out its horrible thing and lunges for yours.
   Of course, as your baby catches on to your tricks, you’ll need new and different things to entice it with, which means you’ll have to spend a great deal of time on your hands and knees in bus station rest rooms. This is a perfectly normal part of being a responsible parent. Remember to say that when the police come.

Traveling with Baby

   By now you’re probably thinking how nice it would be to take a trip somewhere and stay in a place where there isn’t a hardened yellowish glaze consisting of bananas mixed with baby spit smeared on every surface below a height of two feet. Great idea! My wife and I took many trips with our son, Robert, when he was less than a year old, and we found them all to be surprisingly carefree experiences right up until approximately four hours after we left home, which is when his temperature would reach 106 degrees Fahrenheit. Often we didn’t even have to take his temperature, because we could see that his pacifier was melting.
   Almost all babies contain a virus that activates itself automatically when the baby is 200 miles or more from its pediatrician. The first time this happened to Robert, we wound up in a pediatric clinic where the doctor got his degree from the University of Kuala Lumpur Medical School and Textile College. He said, “Baby very hot! Bad hot! Could have seezhah!” And we said, “Oh no! My God! Not seezhah!” Then we said, “What the hell is ‘seezhah’?” We were afraid it was some kind of horrible Asian disease. Then the doctor rolled his eyes back in his head and went, “Aaaarrgh,” and we said, “Oh! Seizure!”
   The lesson to be learned from this is that when you travel with a baby, you must be prepared for emergencies. Let’s say you’re planning a trip to the seashore. Besides baby’s usual food, formula, bottles, sterilizer, medicine, clothing, diapers, reams of moist towelettes, ointments, lotions, powders, pacifier, toys, portable crib, blankets, rectal thermometer, car seat, stroller, backpack, playpen, and walker, don’t forget to take:
   * One of those things that look like miniature turkey basters that you use to clear out babies’ noses, for when your baby develops a major travel cold and sounds like a little cauldron of mucus gurgling away in the motel room six feet away from you all night long.
   * A potent infant-formula anti-cholera drug, for when you’re lying on the beach and look up to discover that baby has become intimately involved with an enormous buried dog dropping.
   * Something to read while you’re sitting in the emergency ward waiting room.
   * Plenty of film, so you can record these and the many other hilarious adventures you’re bound to have traveling with a baby. You might also take a camera.

Taking a Baby on an Airplane

   First, you should notify the airline in advance that you will be traveling with an infant, so they can use their computers to assign you a seat where your baby will be in a position to knock a Bloody Mary into the lap of a corporate executive on his way to make an important speech. Also, you should be aware that your baby will insist on standing up in your lap all the way through the flight, no matter how long it is. If you plan to fly with a baby to Japan, all I can say is you’d better have thighs of steel.
   Some people try to get their babies to sit down on flights, by giving them sedatives. On our doctor’s suggestion, we tried this on a cross-country flight, and all it did was make Robert cranky. The only thing that cheered him up was to grab the hair of the man sitting in front of us, who tried to be nice about it, but if you have a nine-month-old child with a melted Hershey bar all over his pudgy little fingers grabbing your hair all the way from sea to shining sea, you’d start to get a little cranky yourself. So I think it might be a good idea if, on flights featuring babies, the airline distributed sedatives to all the adults, except maybe the pilot.

Teething

   Teething usually begins on March 11 at 3:25 P.M., although some babies are off by as much as 20 minutes. The major symptom of teething is that your baby becomes irritable and cries a lot. Of course, this is also the major symptom of everything else, so you might try the old teething test, which is to stick your finger in baby’s mouth and see whether baby bites all the way through to your bone, indicating the presence of teeth.
   Most teething babies want to chew on something, so it’s a good idea to keep a plastic teething ring in the freezer, taking care not to confuse it with the frozen horrible things from bus station rest rooms (see above).
   The first teeth to appear will be the central divisors, followed by the bovines, the colons, the insights, and the Four Tops, for a total of 30 or 40
   in all. Your pediatrician will advise you to brush and floss your baby’s teeth daily, but he’s just kidding.

Quick-Reference Baby Medical-Emergency Chart

   SYMPTOM CAUSE TREATMENT Baby is chewing contentedly Baby has found something horrible on floor Follow enticement procedure described on page 61
   Baby is crying It could be teething, colic, snake bite, some kind of awful rare disease or something Don’t worry: most likely it’s nothing Baby has strange dark lines all over face and body Baby has gotten hold of laundry marking pen Wait for baby to grow new skin Baby’s voice sounds muffled Baby’s two-year-old sibling, jealous of all the attention the New Arrival is getting, has covered the New Arrival with dirt Vacuum baby quickly; explain to sibling that you love him or her just as much as baby, but you will kill him or her if he or she ever does that again

Chapter 10. The Second Year

Major Developments during the Second Year

   Your baby will learn to walk and talk, but that’s nothing. The major development is that your baby will learn how to scream for no good reason in shopping malls.

What to Do when a One-Year-Old Starts Screaming in a Shopping Mall, and the Reason Is That You Won’t Let It Eat the Pizza Crust That Somebody, Who Was Probably Diseased, Left in the Public Ashtray amid the Sand and the Saliva-Soaked Cigar Butts, but the Other Shoppers Are Staring at You as if to Suggest That You Must Be Some Kind of Heartless Child-Abusing Nazi Scum

   First of all, forget about reason. You can’t reason with a one-year-old. In fact, reasoning with children of any age has been greatly overrated. There is no documented case of any child being successfully reasoned with before the second year of graduate school.
   Also you can’t hit a one-year-old. It will just cry harder, and women the age of your mother will walk right up and whap you with their handbags. So what do you do when your child decides to scream in public? Here are several practical, time-tested techniques:
   Explain your side to the other shoppers. As they go by, pull them aside, show them the pizza crust, and talk it over with them, adult to adult (“Look! The little cretin wants to eat this! Ha ha! Isn’t that CRAZY?”).
   Threaten to take your child to see Santa Claus if it doesn’t shut up. All children are born with an instinctive terror of Santa Claus.
   Let your child have the damn pizza crust. I mean, there’s always a chance the previous owner wasn’t diseased. It could have been a clergyman or something.

Walking

   Most babies learn to walk at about 12 months, although nobody has ever figured out why they bother, because for the next 12 months all they do is stagger off in random directions until they trip over dust molecules and fall on their butts. You cannot catch them before they fall. They fall so quickly that the naked adult eye cannot even see them. This is why diapers are made so thick.
   During this phase, your job, as parent, is to trail along behind your child everywhere, holding your arms out in the Standard Toddler-Following Posture made popular by Boris Karloff in the excellent parent-education film The Mummy, only with a degree of hunch approaching that of Neanderthal Man, so you’ll be able to pick your child up quickly after it falls, because the longer it stays on the ground the more likely it is to find something to put in its mouth.

Talking

   There are two distinct phases in the baby’s language development. The second phase is when the baby actually starts talking, which is at about 18
   months. The first phase is when the parents imagine that the baby is talking, which is somewhere around 12 months, or even earlier if it’s their first baby.
   What happens is that one day the baby is holding a little plastic car, trying to get it all the way into his mouth, and he makes some typical random baby sound such as “gawanoo,” and the parents, their brains softened from inhaling Johnson’s Baby Oil fumes, say to each other: “Did you hear that? Teddy said ‘car’!!!!!” If you’ve ever been around young parents going through this kind of self-delusion, you know how deranged they can get:
   YOU: So! How’s little Jason?
   PARENT: Talking up a storm! Listen!
   JASON: Poomwah arrrr grah.
   PARENT: Isn’t that incredible!
   YOU: Ah. Yes. Hmmm.
   PARENT: I mean, 13 months old, and already he’s concerned about restrictions on imported steel!
   YOU: Ah.
   JASON: Brrrrroooooooooooooooooper.
   PARENT: No, Jason, I believe that was during the Kennedy administration.
   Eventually, your child will start to learn some real words, which means you’ll finally find out what he’s thinking. Not much, as it turns out. The first words our son, Robert, said were “dog” and “hot,” and after that he didn’t seem the least bit interested in learning any more. For the longest time, our conversations went like this:
   ME: Look, Robert. See the birds?
   ROBERT: Dog.
   ME: No, Robert. Those are birds.
   ROBERT: Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.
   ME: Those are birds, Robert. Can you say “bird?”
   ROBERT (emphatically): Dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog dog.
   ME (giving up): Okay. Those are dogs.
   ROBERT: Hot.
   Sometimes we’d think we were making real progress on the language front. I remember once my wife called me into the living room, all excited. “Watch this,” she said. “Robert, where’s your head?” And by God, Robert pointed to his head. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe what a genius we had on our hands. Then my wife, bursting with pride, said, “Now watch this. Robert, where’s your foot?” Robert flashed us a brilliant smile of comprehension, pointed to his head, and said, “dog.”

Books for One-Year-Olds

   The trouble with books for small children is that they all have titles like, Ted the Raccoon Visits a Condiments Factory and are so boring that you doze off after two or three pages and run the risk that your child will slide off your lap and sustain a head injury. So what you want to do is get a book that has more appeal for adults, such as, Passionate Teenage Periodontal Assistants, then cut out the pages and paste them over the words in your child’s book. This way you can maintain your interest while the child looks at the pictures:
   YOU (pretending to read out loud): “My, my,” said Ted the Raccoon. “These pickles taste good!” Just look at all those pickles, Johnny! (While Johnny looks at the pickles, you read: “Brad looked up from U.S. News and World Report as a blond, full-breasted periodontal assistant swayed into the waiting room on shapely, nylon-sheathed legs. ‘My name is Desiree,’she breathed through luscious, pouting lips, ‘and if you’ll follow me, I’ll show you how to operate the Water Pik oral hygiene appliance.’”)

Teaching Small Children to Read

   Children are capable of learning to read much earlier than we give them credit for. Why, Mozart was only two years old when he wrote Moby Dick!
   When our son was about 18 months old, my wife, who has purchased every baby-improvement book ever published, got one called How to Teach Your Baby to Read. The chapter headings started out with “Can Babies Learn to Read?” and worked up to “Babies Definitely Can Learn to Read” and finally got around to “If You Don’t Teach Your Baby to Read Right Now, You Are Vermin.”
   Me, I was dubious. I thought it was better to teach our child not to pull boogers out of his nose and hand them to us as if they were party favors. But my wife gave it the old college try. She did what the book said, which was to write words like DOG in big letters on pieces of cardboard, then show them to Robert and say the words out loud as if she were having a peck of fun. She did this conscientiously for a couple of weeks, three times a day, and then she realized that Robert was paying no attention whatsoever, and her I.Q. was starting to drop, so she stopped.
   My theory is that there is a finite amount of intelligence in a family, and you’re supposed to gradually transfer it to your children over a period of many years. This is why your parents started to get so stupid just at the time in your life when you were getting really smart.

How to Put a One-Year-Old to Bed

   Children at this age move around a lot while they sleep. If we didn’t keep them in cribs, they’d be hundreds of miles away by dawn. So the trick is to put the blankets as far as possible from the child, on the theory that eventually the child will crawl under them.

Bedtime Songs

   I advise against “Rock-a-Bye Baby,” because it’s really sick, what with the baby getting blown out of the tree and crashing down with the cradle. Some of those cradles weigh over 50 pounds. A much better song is “Go to Sleep”:
   Go to sleep
   Go to sleep
   Go right straight to sleep
   And stay asleep until at least 6:30 A.M.

Potty Training

   Child psychologists all agree that bodily functions are a source of great anxiety for children, so we can safely assume this isn’t true. It certainly wasn’t true for our son. He was never happier than when he had a full diaper. We once took him to a department store photographer for baby pictures, and just before we went into the studio, when it was too late to change his diaper, he eliminated an immense quantity of waste, far more than could be explained by any of the known laws of physics. The photographer kept remarking on what a happy baby we had, which was easy for him to say, because he was standing 15 feet away. The pictures all came out swell. In every one, Robert is grinning the insanely happy grin of a baby emitting an aroma that would stun a buffalo. So much for the child’s anxiety.
   I’ll tell you who gets anxious: the parents, that’s who. Young parents spend much of their time thinking and talking about their children’s bodily functions. You can take an educated, sophisticated couple who, before their child was born, talked about great literature and the true meaning of life, and for the first two years after they become parents, their conversations will center on the consistency of their child’s stool, to the point where nobody invites them over for dinner.
   Around the child’s second birthday, the parents get tired of waiting for the child to become anxious about his bodily functions, and they decide to give him some anxiety in the form of potty training. This is probably a good thing. A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation’s state legislators.

The Traditional Potty Training Technique

   The traditional potty training technique is to buy a book written by somebody who was out getting graduate school degrees when his own children were actually being potty trained. My wife bought a book that claimed we could potty train our child in one day, using a special potty that (I swear this is true) played “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” when the child went in it. She also got a little book for our son that explained potty training in terms that a small child could understand, such as “poo-poo.
   Now there may well be some parents, somewhere, who managed to potty train their child in one day, but I am willing to bet they used a cattle prod. My wife read that book all the way through, and she did exactly what it said, which was that you should feed your child a lot of salty snacks so that it would drink a lot of liquids and consequently would have to pee about every 20
   minutes, which would give it lots of opportunities to practice going in the musical potty, so that it would have the whole procedure nailed down solid by the end of the day. That was the theory.
   When I left home that morning, my wife was reading the poo-poo book to Robert. She had a cheerful, determined look on her face. When I got home that evening, more than ten hours later, there were cracker crumbs everywhere, and piles of soiled child’s underpants, seemingly hundreds of them, as if the entire junior class of St. Swithan’s School for Incontinent Children had been there on a field trip. My wife was still in her nightgown. I don’t think she had even brushed her teeth. It is extremely fortunate for the man who wrote the potty training book that he did not walk in the door with me, because the police would have found his lifeless body lying in the bushes with an enormous bulge in his throat playing “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”
   We did, in the end, get Robert potty trained. We did it the same way everybody does, the same way you will, by a lot of nagging and false alarms and about 30,000 accidents and endless wildly extravagant praise for bowel movements (“Honey! Come and see what Robert did!” “Oh Robert, that’s wonderful!” etc.).
   The big drawback to potty training is that, for a while, children assume that all adults are as fascinated with it as their parents seem to be. Robert would walk up to strangers in restaurants and announce, “I went pee-pee.” And the strangers would say, “Ah.” And Robert would say, “I didn’t do poop.” And the strangers would say, “No?” And Robert would say, “I’m gonna do poop later.” And so on.

Nutrition

   By the middle of the second year, your baby’s Food-Return Loop has disappeared, so its mouth is connected directly to its stomach. At this point, you want to adjust its diet to see that each day it gets food from all three Basic Baby Food Nutrition Groups (see chart). You also should encourage your baby to feed itself, so that you won’t have to be in the room.

The Basic Baby Food Nutrition Groups

   FOODS THAT BABIES HURL AT THE CEILING
   * Anything from jars with babies on the labels
   * Anything the baby ate the day before, so you went out and bought $30 worth of it
   FOODS THAT BABIES HURL AT THE DOG
   * Anything in a weighty container
   * Taffy
   * Zwieback (NOTE: Zwieback has sharp edges, so the dog should wear protective clothing)
   FOODS THAT BABIES EAT
   * Anything from vending machines
   * Caulking
   * Anything with dead ants on it
   * Sand

Chapter 11. The Third Year

   This period is often referred to as the “terrible twos,” not so much because children this age start behaving any worse than before, but because they reach the size where if they swing at you, they’ll hit you square in the crotch.
   The important thing to remember here is that your child is only trying to establish its independence. This is a necessary part of its development: It must learn to make its own decisions, to interact with the world directly rather than through the protective mediation of its parents. Your child must also learn that when it hits a bigger person in the crotch, it should pretend to be very, very sorry.

How to Discipline a Two-Year-Old

   Discipline during this phase consists of choosing the appropriate Escalating Futile Parental Disciplinary Threat. A handy reference chart is printed here for your use.
   Remember that when your two-year-old “misbehaves,” it’s usually because of his natural curiosity. It is not cruelty that causes him to thrust a Bic pen deep into the dog’s nostril; it is a genuine desire to find out how you will react.
   The time-tested way to react is to work your way up the ladder of Traditional Escalating Futile Parental Disciplinary Threats.

The Traditional Escalating Futile Parental Disciplinary Threats

   1. “You’re going to poke somebody’s eye out.”
   2. “You’re going to make me very angry.”
   3. “You’re going straight to your room.”
   4. “I’m going to tell your father.”
   5. “I’m going to tell Santa Claus.”
   6. “I’m not going to give you any dessert.”
   7. “I’m not going to buy you any more Hot Wheels.”
   8. “I’m very angry now.”
   9. “I’m going to give you a good smack.”
   10. “I mean it.”
   11. “I really mean it.”
   12. “I’m not kidding.”
   13. (SMACK).
   NOTE: If there’s a real discipline emergency, such as your child has somehow gotten hold of an acetylene torch, you may have to start right in at Threat Number 8. But many two-year-olds also develop seemingly irrational fears. They get these from Mister Rogers. He tries to reassure his young viewers about standard childhood fears, but the children would never have thought of them if Mister Rogers hadn’t brought them up. My son and I once watched Mister Rogers sing this song in which he said over and over, in the most cheerful voice imaginable, that “You can never go down the drain.” By the time he finished, we were both very concerned about going down the drain. And this came at a time when I had just gotten over the fear of being stabbed to death in the shower, which I got from Psycho.
   Recently, my son became convinced that a horse was coming into his bedroom at night to get him. The way to cope with this kind of fear is to allow the child to confront it openly. We took Robert to visit some real horses, so he could see for himself that they are nothing more than huge creatures with weird eyeballs and long teeth and hard feet that could stomp him to the consistency of grits in seconds. Aided by this kind of understanding and support from us, Robert eventually stopped imagining his horse, which was good because it was ruining the carpet.
   So unless you want your child to develop a set of irrational fears, I advise you not to let him watch Mister Rogers. A far better alternative is the Saturday morning cartoon shows, which instill the healthy and rational fear that evil beings with sophisticated weapons are trying to destroy the planet.

Fears Your Mother Teaches You during Childhood

   You needed these fears to become a responsible adult, and now it’s time to start passing them on to your child.
   * The fear that if you cross your eyes, they’ll get stuck that way.
   * The fear that if you go in the water less than an hour after eating, you will get a cramp and sink to the bottom, helpless, and possibly catch cold.
   * The fear that public toilet seats have germs capable of leaping more than 20
   feet.
   * The fear that if you wear old underwear, a plane will crash on you and rip your clothes off and your underwear will be broadcast nationally on the evening news. (“The victim shown here wearing the underwear with all the holes and stains has been identified as...”)
   * The fear that if you get in trouble at school, it will go on your Permanent Record and follow you for the rest of your life. (“Your qualifications are excellent, Mr. Barry, but I see here in your Permanent Record that in the eighth grade you and Joseph DiGiacinto flushed a lit cherry bomb down the boys’ room toilet at Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School. Frankly, Mr. Barry, we’re looking for people with more respect for plumbing than that.”)

Toys for Two-Year-Olds

   Pay no attention to the little statements on the boxes that say things like “For Ages 1 to 3.” If you heed these statements, all you’ll buy for the first few years are little plastic shapes that the child is supposed to put in corresponding little holes, which is so exceedingly boring that after five minutes the child will develop an ear infection just for a change of pace. The best toys for a child aged 0 to 3 is a toy that says “For Ages 10 to 14.” The best toy for a child aged 10 to 14 is cash, or its own apartment.
   You should also buy Fisher-Price toys. Not for your child. For your own protection. Every Fisher-Price toy has been approved by a panel consisting of dozens of child psychologists and pediatricians and Ralph Nader and Mister Rogers, and in most states failure to own at least a half dozen of these toys is considered legal proof of child abuse.
   Another reason why you should buy Fisher-Price toys is that they are built better than any other products you can buy, even in Japan. They’re made out of some plastic-like substance that Fisher-Price imports from another planet, and nothing can harm it. If Fisher-Price had any marketing sense, it would make its cars much bigger and put real engines in them and change the seats so that real people could sit in them. Right now, the seats are designed for little toy ball-headed Fisher-Price people, which have no arms or legs (the Fisher-Price factory employees whack off the arms and legs with little machetes just before shipment). Consumers would snork these cars up like hotcakes. We’d forget all about Toyota.

How to Hold a Birthday Party for Two-Year-Olds

   Not in your house. Outdoors, I don’t care if you live in Juneau, Alaska, and it’s January. You want to hold it outdoors, and you want the fire department to stand by to hose the area down immediately after you put the ice cream in front of them. And you want all the adults inside the house where they can drink in relative safety.

A Word about Smurfs, Snoopy, Strawberry Shortcake, and All the Other Nauseating Little Characters That You Swear You Will Never Allow in Your Home

   Forget it. These toys are creatures of the multi-billion-dollar Cuteness Industry, which is extremely powerful and has influence everywhere. The Voyager II space probe found traces of a Snoopy toothbrush on Mars. If you fail to buy Smurfs, agents of the Smurf Corporation will mail them to you, or smuggle them into your house baked inside loaves of bread, until you reach the national average of 24 Smurfs per child under eight.
   So you have to live with them. The only defense you have is to encourage your child to play hostile games with them, such as “Smurf War Tribunal” and “Mr. Smurf Visits the Toaster Oven.”

Questions

   Starting at around age two, your child will start asking you a great many questions. This can be annoying, but you must remember that if children couldn’t ask questions, they would have no way to irritate you when they’re strapped in the car seat.
   The most popular question for small children is “Why?” They can use it anywhere, and it’s usually impossible to answer:
   CHILD: What’s that?
   YOU: That’s a goat.
   CHILD: Why?
   Our son would lie awake at night thinking of questions that nobody could answer:
   ROBERT: Which is bigger, five or six?
   ME (confidently): Six.
   ROBERT: What if it’s a great big five made out of stone?
   ME: Um.
   ROBERT: And a little six made out of wood.
   Once I hauled out my guitar to sing traditional folk songs to Robert. It was going to be togetherness. It was going to be meaningful. It was going to be just like on “The Waltons.” Here is a verbatim transcript:
   ME (singing): “Puff, the Magic Dragon, lived by the sea ...”
   ROBERT: What’s a dragon?
   ME: It’s a great big animal that has fire coming out of its nose. (Singing)
   “Little Jackie Paper, loved that rascal ...”
   ROBERT: Did Jackie Paper have fire coming out of his nose?
   ME: No, he was a little boy, like you. Do you have fire coming out of your nose?
   ROBERT (thoughtfully): No. Boogies.
   ME: Um. Right. (Singing) “Little Jackie Paper, loved that ...”
   ROBERT: Did Jackie Paper have boogies coming out of his nose?
   The point here is that your child will never ask you where babies come from, or why the sky is blue, or any other question that has a real answer. Your child is going to want to know whether Jackie Paper had boogies coming out of his nose, and whether you answer “yes” or “no,” your child will want to know why.

Preschool Programs

   Near the end of the second year, most parents start thinking about putting their child in a preschool program, which is a place that has all these little tables and chairs where your child makes these pathetic drawings that you put on your refrigerator. Also they eat snacks and take naps. That’s the core of the curriculum.
   You must choose your child’s preschool program carefully, because it determines how well the child does in kindergarten, which affects how well the child does in grade school, which is an important factor in how well the child does in junior high school, which forms the basis for how well the child does in high school, which of course determines which college the child gets into.
   On the other hand, all the child will do in college is listen to loud music and get ready for dates, so you don’t have to be all that careful about choosing the preschool program. Just kick the little chairs a few times to make sure they’re sturdy, and say a few words to the staff to let them know you’re a Concerned Parent (“Anything happens to my kid, I come in here and break some thumbs. Got it?”).
   Also, make sure the preschool doesn’t have any guinea pigs. I don’t know why, but somewhere along the line, preschool educators picked up the insane notion that guinea pigs are educational, when in fact all they do is poop these little pellets that look exactly like the pellets you give them to eat. You don’t want your child exposed to that.

The Little Boy and the Toad (A Child-Participation Bedtime Story)

   It’s good to encourage your child to participate in making up stories. Here’s a bedtime story I used to tell Robert, with his help:
   ME: Once upon a time, there was a little boy named John.
   ROBERT: No. Lee.
   ME: Okay. There was a little boy named Lee, and one day he was walking along, and he ...
   ROBERT: No. He was driving.
   ME: Okay, he was driving along, and he saw ...
   ROBERT: In a Jeep.
   ME: He was driving along in a Jeep, and he saw a little toad.
   ROBERT: No. He saw a dump truck.
   ME: And they all lived happily ever after. Now go to sleep.
   ROBERT: Why?

Epilogue: Should You Have Another?

   Well! So here we are! We’ve taken your baby from a little gourd-like object with virtually no marketable skills to a real little human being, capable of putting the cat in the dryer and turning it on all by himself or herself.
   Sure, it’s been a lot of work for you. Sure, you would have liked to have had a few more quiet evenings alone, just the two of you sipping wine and talking instead of sitting in the hospital X-ray department, waiting to find out whether your child had, in fact, swallowed the bullets that it snatched out of the belt of the policeman who was writing a traffic ticket because you smashed into the furniture store when your child threw your glasses out the car window. But take a minute to look at the positive side of parenthood.
   (Pause)
   Give it time. You’ll come up with something. And when you do, think about how much fun it would be to do the whole thing over again. Not with the same child, of course; there is no way you could get it back into the uterus. I’m talking about a completely new baby, only this time around you’ll have a chance to avoid the mistakes you made last time, such as labor. I understand from reading the publications sold at supermarket checkout counters that you can now have a baby in a test tube! I don’t know the details, but it sounds much less painful than the usual route, although you’d have to balance that against the fact that the baby would be extremely small and cylindrical. It would look like those little Fisher-Price people.
   But whether you have another child or not, the important thing is that you’ve experienced the fulfillment that comes with being a parent. You may feel your efforts will never be rewarded, but believe me, you have sown the seeds of love and trust, and I guarantee you that there will come a time, years from now, when your child—now an adult with children of his or her own—will come to you, and, in a voice quaking with emotion, ask for a loan for a down payment on a house much nicer than yours.

Bad Habits

Dave Barry

Dedication
Introduction
Household Perils
It’s In The Genes
Barbecuing Is The Pits
A Solution To Housework
Three-Pronged Attack
They’ve Got Our Number
Okay, Now Try The Engine
Problems that cause your car to make loud noises.
Problems that cause your car to stop.
The Problem With Pets
Fish and Green Cheese
Governmental Follies
Fungus On The Economy
Give Wall Street Credit
Outbungling The Commies
It’s Drafty In Here
Mx Is The Way To Go. Bye
Mx Service Warranty
Birthday Celebration
Why Not A Postal Service?
The Leak Detectors
States For Sale, Cheap
There Auto Be A Law
You’ll Look Radiant
Caution: Government At Work
Taxation Without Reservation
A Taxing Proposal
Our Patriotic Booty
Taxpayer’s Blues
The Media Is The Mess-Up
Perking Up The News
Junkyard Journalism
Bring Back Captain Video
In Depth, But Shallowly
Radio’s Air Heads
What To Ban On Video
Subtract Those Ads
Commercials For Men’s Hair Darkeners
Commercials For Headache Remedies
Commercials For Smoker’s Tooth Polish
Commercials For Stove-Top Stuffing
Commercials For Wisk
Low Finance
A Matter Of Life And Debt
Full-Service Bankruptcy
The Net May Be Gross
Anti-Insurance Policy
Build Your Own Mess
God Needs The Money
Health Habits
Exercising Your Rights
Programs For The Unfit
Jogging For President
A Cold Cure? Who Nose?
Male Delivery Room
Tale Of The Tapeworm
Injurious To Your Wealth
Psychiatrist For Rent
Oaf Of Hippocrates
“Great Baby! Delicious!”
Oklahoma Baby Chicken Hat
Wild Teenage Babies from Outer Space
Attack of the Baby-Eaters
B–Sts And Baby Care
Suet Won’t Do It
Important Health Note:
Dentistry Self-Drilled
Culture Staggers On
Art Cuts Really Sphinx
Some Art, Some Art Not
The History Of Art
How To Appreciate Art
Music To Get Rich By
How To Read Music
Prurient Interest Rate
Compressed Classics
A Little Learning
Basic Frog Glop
Schools Not So Smart
Why We Don’t Read
What Is And Ain’t Grammatical
It Takes A Lot Of Gaul
How To Trap A Zoid
College Admissions
Scientific Stuff
Barry’s Key To Life
Basic As Atom And Eve
Boredom On The Wing
What’s Alien You?
The Computer: Is It Terminal?
The First Computer
The Second Computer
Modern Computers
Computers Taking Over The World
Bring Back Carl’s Plaque
Socket To Them
Cloudy With A Chance Of ...
Eat, Drink, And Be Wary
The Art Of Wine Snobbery
Beer Is The Solution
The Story Of Beer
How To Make Your Own Beer
Hold The Bean Sprouts
Rooting For Rutabagas
Traveling Light
Vacation Reservations
Trip To Balmy California
The Plane Truth
Destination: Maybe
The Sporting Life
Unsportsmanlike Conduct
Football Deflated
Gunning For Safety
Something Fishy Here
Tips From The Bottom
Serf Wanted
Wedding Etiquette
Getting Engaged
Announcing the Engagement
Choosing a Church
The Invitation
What the Wedding Party Should Wear
The Order of the Wedding Procession
Who Pays for the Wedding
“Look! I Got You A Gift!”
About Lawn Order
The Law Vs. Justice
Into The Round File

Dave Barry.
Bad Habits: A 100% Fact-Free Book

Dedication

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

Introduction

   When people come to my home for the first time, they often ask me, “Dave, where’s the bathroom?” To which I always answer, “Down the hall there, on the left.” And from that point on we are usually close friends.
   I bring this up because people often wonder what I’m really like. “Dave,” they often ask, when they get out of the bathroom, “are you really as witty, insightful, articulate, and handsome as your writing suggests?” I would have to say that yes, I am, although I am not as tall as you might think. I’m maybe five nine. But then a lot of truly great writers were of average height or less. William Shakespeare was only fifteen inches tall!
   Which leads us to accuracy. When Doubleday & Company decided, after days of heavy drinking, to publish this book, they hired a panel of extremely brilliant nuclear physicists, who combed through these essays and marked, with a red pencil, every sentence that might conceivably be accurate, and these sentences were all removed with pruning shears. So I freely admit, right up front, that there are no facts left in this book, and I don’t want you Little League coaches out there to send me a lot of cretin letters informing me that a ten-year-old can’t really throw a baseball six hundred miles an hour. Okay?
   So there you have it, except for my philosophy of life. My mother used to say to me: “Son, it’s better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick.” I think that still makes a heck of a lot of sense, even in these troubled times.

Household Perils

It’s In The Genes

   My wife and I were both born without whatever brain part it is that enables people to decorate their homes. If we had lived in the Neanderthal era, ours would be the only cave without little drawings of elk on the walls.
   When we moved into our house eight years ago, there was this lighting fixture in the dining room that obviously had been installed by vandals. Simply removing this fixture would be too good for it; this is the kind of fixture that needs to be taken out in the backyard and shot. When people came over to visit, back when we first moved in, we’d gesture toward the fixture derisively and say “Of course that’s got to go.”
   Of course we still have it. We have no way of deciding what to replace it with. What we have done is get an electrician to come in and move the fixture to another part of the dining room, because, after years of thinking about it with our defective brains, we thought this might be a good decorative idea. To move the fixture, the electrician had to punch holes, some of them big enough to put your fist through, in the wall and ceiling. I have taped plastic sandwich bags over these holes, to keep the air from rushing in and out.
   So now, after eight years, we have the original vandal fixture, plus we have holes with plastic bags over them. We eat in the kitchen. We will always eat in the kitchen, and our dining room will always look like the South Bronx. We have learned that anything we try to do to improve it will just make it worse, because of these missing brain parts.
   We do a lot of work with plastic bags. We made curtains for several rooms by taping up dark plastic garbage bags. My wife feels guilty about this, because she believes women are supposed to have this Betty Crocker gland somewhere that secretes a hormone that enables them to sew curtains. God knows she has tried. She reads articles, she takes measurements, she even goes to the fabric store, but because of what she perceives to be a deficiency of her Betty Crocker gland, she never actually produces any curtains. Which is fine, because I have a deficiency of my Mr. Goodwrench gland and would never put them up.
   So we use plastic garbage bags. They work fine, but I have noticed that most of our friends, now that we’re all grown-ups, have switched over to actual cloth curtains. Also they have tasteful Danish furniture. They just went out and got it somehow, as if it were no big deal, and now everything matches, like those photographs in snotty interior design magazines featuring homes owned by wealthy people who eat out and keep their children in Switzerland. We have this green armchair we got at an auction for twenty-five cents. This is not one of those chairs that are sold for a song but turn out to be tasteful antiques worth thousands of dollars. This chair, at twenty-five cents, was clearly overpriced. It looks, from a distance, like a wad of mucus, and it could not possibly match any other furniture because any furniture that looked like it would have been burned years ago.
   Accompanying this chair is a sofa that some people we know tried to throw away six years ago, which we have covered with a blanket to prevent guests from looking directly at it and being blinded or driven insane. Such is the tastelessness of this sofa. And these are two of our better pieces. The only really nice furniture we own is manufactured by the Fisher-Price toy company for my son’s little Fisher-Price people, although I certainly don’t begrudge them that, inasmuch as they have no arms or legs.
   I imagine you’re going to suggest that we go out and buy a nice piece of furniture, and then, when we can afford it, another one, and so on until we have a regular grown-up neat and tasteful home. This would never work. If we were to put a nice piece of furniture in our living room, all the other furniture would wait until we’d gone to bed, then ridicule and deride the new furniture, and emit all kinds of shabbiness germs into the living room atmosphere, and by morning the new furniture would be old and stained and hideous. I also firmly believe that if we were to leave our chair in one of our friends’ tasteful living rooms for several days, it would become sleek and Danish.
   This interior decorating problem extends to cars. None of my friends, for example, have plaster models of their teeth in their cars. I have two in my car. My dentist gives them to me from time to time, sort of like a treat, and I’m afraid to throw them away for fear he’ll get angry and make me come in for an appointment. I keep them in my car because God knows the house is already bad enough, but I know they are not tasteful. I can’t put them under the seat, because my car, like all the cars we’ve ever owned, has developed Car Leprosy, which causes all the nonessential parts such as window cranks to gradually fall off and collect under the seat and merge with French fries from the drive-thru window at the Burger King. I’m not about to put my teeth down there. So they sit in plain view, grinning at me as I drive and snickering at my lack of taste.
   My wife and I are learning to accept all this. We realize that if the present trends continue, we will not be able to admit people into our house without blindfolds. I can live with that. What I worry about is that we will get in trouble with the bank or the government or something. One day there will be a violent pounding on the door, and we will be subjected to a surprise inspection by the Committee of Normal Grown-ups, headed by my wife’s home economics teacher and my shop teacher. They’ll take one look at our curtains, and they’ll take away our house and cars and put us in a special institution where the inmates are roused at 4:30 A.M., chained together, and forced to install wallpaper all day. Nancy Reagan would be the warden.

Barbecuing Is The Pits

   What could be more fun than an outdoor barbecue? I can think of several things offhand, such as watching the secretary of state fall into a vat of untreated sewage. But that would probably cause us to go to war in Nicaragua or somewhere, so I guess we’ll have to settle for a barbecue.
   The barbecue was invented more than eighty million years ago by Cro-Magnon Man, who was the son of Stephanie Cro and Eric Magnon, a primitive but liberated couple. Cro-Magnon Man used to eat dinosaur meat raw, and it tasted awful, worse than yogurt. One day, while Cro-Magnon Man was eating, lightning set a nearby log on fire. Cro-Magnon Man was so surprised that he dropped his dinosaur meat onto the fire, where it ignited and gave off a disgusting odor that drove off all the insects, which in those days were the size of mature eggplants and extremely vicious. “This is terrific,” said Cro-Magnon Man, only nobody understood him because English hadn’t been invented yet.
   Burning dinosaurs quickly became a major form of insect control. At large Cro-Magnon lawn parties, the hosts would put whole brontosauruses on the fire, and they would sizzle into the night, keeping the insects away and giving off a stench that lingers to this very day at the northern end of the New Jersey Turnpike.
   Eventually, of course, they used up all the dinosaurs, which led to the discovery that if you put cows and pigs on your fire, you could not only drive away insects but in a pinch you could also eat the cows and pigs. This led to the invention of hamburgers and hot dogs, which are cows and pigs that have been ground up in Chicago and formed into little portable units that can be easily thrown on a fire. Today people rarely put entire cows on fires except in Texas, where lifting animals is a major cultural activity, second only to wearing big hats.
   To hold your outdoor barbecue, you’ll need several dozen units of cow or pig and a portable grill, or hibachi. (“Hibachi” is a Japanese word meaning extremely flimsy grills that break at the slightest touch but Americans buy them anyway.”) You’ll also need fuel. At one time, people used wood, but then the Consumer Product Safety Commission discovered that wood is flammable and banned it. So today you are required to use charcoal, a mineral that forms in torn paper bags in supermarkets. The problem, of course, is that charcoal, being a mineral, does not burn. Neither does charcoal lighter fluid. Firemen routinely use charcoal lighter fluid to extinguish major refinery fires. So what actually heats your barbecue food is matches, hundreds and hundreds of matches that you heap onto your charcoal until they form a blaze.
   While you’re waiting for your matches to get going, you should prepare a tangy barbecue sauce.
   TANGY BARBECUE SAUCE RECIPE
   1 cup broached onions 2 liters vanilla abstract 1/2 pound neat’s-foot oil 2 table-spoons butter or oregano 1 fresh poltroon, diced
   To Prepare
   With floured hands, on a floured surface, standing on a floured floor, and just generally surrounded by mounds and mounds of flour, combine the ingredients in a greased 5518’ by 16318’ pan, then pour the mixture carefully into an ungreased 4318’ by 18718’ pan and heat it until a 1318’ blister forms when you stick your hand into it.
   Now place your meat units on the grill. They should burst into flames immediately. Let them burn until they’re cooked the way you like them:
   RARE (5-10 minutes): The outside is burnt and welded to the grill; the inside is pink and swirling with cow and pig disease germs.
   MEDIUM (5-10 minutes): The outside and part of the inside are burnt; many of the disease germs, particularly the elderly and pregnant ones, are dying slow, painful deaths.
   WELL DONE (5-10 minutes): Both the outside and the inside are completely burnt; almost all the disease germs are dead, and the few remaining ones are making elaborate plans for revenge.
   When your meat is done, extinguish it with the barbecue sauce or charcoal lighter, detach it from the grill with a spatula or sharp chisel, and serve it with something that people can eat, such as Fritos or turkey sandwiches. You should eat quickly, because the insects will monitor you from a safe distance and attack the instant the smoke clears.

A Solution To Housework

   Almost all housework is hard and dangerous, involving the insides of ovens and toilets and the cracks between bathroom tiles, where plague germs fester. The only housework that is easy and satisfying is the kind where you spray chemicals on wooden furniture and smear them around until the wood looks shiny. This is the kind of housework they show on television commercials: A professional actress, posing as the Cheerful Housewife (IQ 43), dances around her house, smearing and shining, smearing and shining, until before she knows it her housework is done and she is free to spend the rest of the afternoon reading the bust-development ads in Cosmopolitan magazine. She never cleans her toilets. When they get dirty, she just gets another house. Lord knows they pay her enough.
   Most of us would rather smear and shine than actually clean anything. For example, our house has a semifinished basement, which means it looks too much like a finished room to store old tires in, but too much like a basement to actually live in. Our semifinished basement has a semibathroom, and one time, several years ago, a small woodland creature crept into the house in the middle of the night and died in the shower stall. This is common behavior in the animal world: many animals, when in danger, are driven by instinct to seek refuge in shower stalls.
   Since we hardly ever go down to our semifinished basement, we didn’t discover the dead woodland creature until several weeks after it crept in, at which time it was getting fairly ripe. Now obviously, the correct thing to do was clean it up, but this is the hard kind of housework. So instead we stayed upstairs and went into an absolute frenzy of smearing and shining, until you could not walk into our living room without wearing sunglasses, for fear of being blinded by the glare off the woodwork. Eventually, we managed to block the woodland creature out of our minds.
   Several months later, our friend Rob, who is a doctor, came to visit. He stayed in our semifinished basement, but we noticed that he came upstairs to take showers. One of the first things they teach you in medical school is never to take a shower with a dead woodland creature. We were so embarrassed that we went down and cleaned up the shower stall, with a shovel and acid. But I doubt we’d have done it if Rob hadn’t been there.
   Our behavior is not unique. People have been avoiding housework for millions of years. Primitive man would stay in one cave until the floor was littered with stegosaurus bones and the walls were covered with primitive drawings, which were drawn by primitive children when their parents went out to dinner, and then the family would move to a new cave, to avoid cleaning the old one. That’s how primitive man eventually got to North America.
   In North America, primitive man started running out of clean caves, and he realized that somebody was going to have to start doing housework. He thought about it long and hard, and finally settled on primitive woman. But he needed an excuse to get himself out of doing the housework, so he invented civilization. Primitive woman would say: “How about staying in the cave and helping with the housework today?” And primitive man would say: “I can’t, dear: I have to invent fire.” Or: “I’d love to, dear, but I think it’s more important that I devise some form of written language.” And off he’d go, leaving the woman with the real work.
   Over the years, men came up with thousands of excuses for not doing housework—wars, religion, pyramids, the United States Senate—until finally they hit on the ultimate excuse: business. They built thousands of offices and factories, and every day, all over the country, they’d get up, eat breakfast, and announce: “Well, I’m off to my office or factory now.” Then they’d just leave, and they wouldn’t return until the house was all cleaned up and dinner was ready.
   But then men made a stupid mistake. They started to believe that “business” really was hard work, and they started talking about it when they came home. They’d come in the door looking exhausted, and they’d say things like “Boy, I sure had a tough meeting today.”
   You can imagine how a woman who had spent the day doing housework would react to this kind of statement. She’d say to herself. “Meeting? He had a tough meeting? I’ve been on my hands and knees all day cleaning toilets and scraping congealed spider eggs off the underside of the refrigerator, and he tells me he had a tough meeting?”
   That was the beginning of the end. Women began to look into “business,” and they discovered that all you do is go to an office and answer the phone and do various things with pieces of paper and have meetings. So women began going to work, and now nobody does housework, other than smearing and shining, and before long there’s going to be so much crud and bacteria under the nation’s refrigerators that we’re all going to get diseases and die.
   The obvious and fair solution to this problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they’d never clean anything. So men are out.
   But there is a solution; there is a way to get people to willingly do housework. I discovered this by watching household-cleanser commercials on television. What I discovered is that many people who seem otherwise normal will do virtually any idiot thing if they think they will be featured in a commercial. They figure if they get on a commercial, they’ll make a lot of money, like the Cheerful Housewife, and they’ll be able to buy cleaner houses. So they’ll do anything.
   For example, if I walked up to you in the middle of a supermarket and asked you to get down and scrub the floor with two different cleansers, just so I could see which one worked better, you would punch me in the mouth. But if I had guys with cameras and microphones with me, and I asked you to do the same thing, you’d probably do it. Not only that, but you’d make lots of serious, earnest comments about the cleansers. You’d say: “I frankly believe that New Miracle Swipe, with its combination of grease fighters and wax shiners, is a more effective cleanser, I honestly do. Really. I mean it.” You’d say this in the same solemn tone of voice you might use to discuss the question of whether the United States should deploy Cruise missiles in Western Europe. You’d have no shame at all.
   So here’s my plan: I’m going to get some old cameras and microphones and position them around my house. I figure that before long I’ll have dozens of people just dying to do housework in front of my cameras. Sure,most of them will eventually figure out that they’re not going to be in a commercial, but new ones will come along to replace them. Meanwhile, I’ll be at work.

Three-Pronged Attack

   I have two major complaints about electricity.
   First, I cannot understand my electricity bills. I never even read them anymore: I just pay whatever random amount the electric company puts after “PAY THIS AMOUNT.”
   Frankly, I suspect the electric company doesn’t have the vaguest notion how much electricity I use. I have an electric meter, but it is on the side of the house where a large contingent of killer wasps has lived since 1977, and nobody, not even my dog, ever goes there. I suspect that whoever is supposed to read my meter is lying out in the bushes somewhere, covered with stings.
   So I think the electric company is just making my bill up out of thin air. Oh, they’re very clever about it: They make the bill so elaborate that I won’t suspect anything. It looks like this:
   Adjusted basic flat usage charge rate: $34.70
   Charge for usage of ajusted basic flat: $22.67
   Flatly basic adjustable usage rate: $17.31
   Maladjustment of usable, chargeable flat rate: $4.12
   Ferrous Mineral Tax: $5.12
   Tax to Pa $0
   The Spanish-American War Debt: $2.89
   Gratuity: $1.68
   As I said, I always pay these bills. I’m afraid that if I don’t pay, the electric company will send huge jolts of electricity through the wire: one minute I’d be carving poultry with the electric carving knife, and the next minute I’d be a shriveled lump of carbon lying on the kitchen floor. So I pay, but I don’t like it.
   My other major electrical complaint concerns appliance plugs. You may have noticed that something very sinister has happened to appliance plugs since you were a child. I grew up during the Eisenhower administration in a normal, God-fearing home with a normal, God-fearing electrical system. All the outlets had two holes, and all the appliance plugs had two prongs, and everything worked just fine. Also the inflation rate was very low.
   Now, suddenly, the appliance manufacturers are putting three prongs on their plugs, and you can’t plug them in. What is going on? Has there been some huge mistake in the shipping department, so we’re all getting appliances that were supposed to go to Yugoslavia? Has the government decided that appliances are so dangerous that consumers shouldn’t be allowed to plug them in? Maybe it has something to do with the metric system. Whatever it is, it’s a problem.
   The simplest solution is to get a hacksaw and saw off the third prong. Unfortunately, this is a violation of federal law. It’s like removing those little pillow tags that say “DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW.” If you are convicted, agents of the Consumer Product Safety Commission will come to your house and lock you in a room filled with government safety publications and not let you out until you can pass an eight-hour written safety test.
   So most people use those little plug adapters. This seems to work fine, but if you read the appliance instructions carefully, you’ll note that plug adapters are Not Recommended:
   WARNING: IF YOU USE ONE OF THOSE LITTLE PLUG ADAPTERS TO PLUG THIS APPLIANCE IN, ALL THE WARRANTIES AND GUARANTEES AND PROMISES THE SALESMAN MADE ARE NULL AND VOID AND YOU MAY BE UNABLE TO HAVE CHILDREN.
   The most radical solution to the three-pronged plug problem is to build a new house with three-hole outlets, or rewire your old house (which costs about the same). But this is really no solution at all, because as soon as everybody has three-hole outlets, the appliance manufacturers will come out with four-pronged plugs, and it will just keep escalating until your average plug contains so much metal that you will need the help of three or four strong men just to lift it.
   So there is no good way you can solve the three-pronged plug problem. I think you should write your congressman and tell him to get off his butt and do something about it. Tell him you want the Defense Department to have a few large army tanks cruise up to the appliance manufacturers’ factories and suggest that they start producing two-pronged plugs again pronto. And while you’re at it, tell your congressman to straighten out the electric-bill mess, and maybe do something about my wasps.

They’ve Got Our Number

   What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the middle of the night. These people have been abducted by large publishing companies and placed in barbed-wire enclosures surrounded by armed men with attack dogs, and unless they sell 350 magazine subscriptions per day, they will not be fed. These people are desperate. They will say anything to get you to subscribe, and you cannot stop them merely by being rude:
   CALLER: Hello, Mr. Barry?
   ME: No, this is Adolf Hitler.
   CALLER: Of course. My mistake. The reason I’m calling you at eleven-thirty at night, Mr. Hitler, is that I’m conducting a marketing survey, and ...
   ME: Are you selling magazine subscriptions?
   CALLER: Magazine subscriptions?
   ME: Selling them? Ha ha. No. Certainly not. Not at all. No, this is just a plain old marketing survey. (Sound of dogs barking in the background.) If you’ll just answer a few questions, we’ll send you a million dollars.
   ME: Well, what do you want to know?
   CALLER: Well, I just want to ask you some questions about your household, such as how many people live there, and what their ages are, and what their incomes are, and whether any of them might be interested in subscribing to Redbook?
   ME: I don’t want to subscribe to anything, you lying piece of slime.
   CALLER: How about Time? Sports Illustrated? American Beet Farmer?
   ME: I’m going to hang up.
   CALLER: No! (The dogs get louder.) Please! You can have my daughter!
   ME: (Click.)
   The first telephone was invented in 1876, when Alexander Graham Bell attached a battery to a crude electrical device and spoke into it. Everybody thought he was an idiot. He would have died in poverty if Thomas Edison hadn’t invented the second telephone several years later.
   The first telephone systems were primitive “party lines,” where everybody could hear what everybody else was talking about. This was very confusing:
   BERTHA: Emma? I’m calling to tell you I seen your boy Norbert shootin’ his musket at our goat again, and if you don’t—
   CLEM: This ain’t Emma. This is Clem Johnson, and I got to reach Doc Henderson, because my wife Nell is all rigid and foaming at the mouth, and if she don’t snap out of it soon the roast is going to burn.
   EMMA: Norbert don’t even own a musket. All he got is a bow and arrow, and he couldn’t hit a steam locomotive from six feet, what with his bad hand, which he got when your boy Percy bit it, and which is festerin’ pretty bad.
   DOC HENDERSON: You better let me take a look at it.
   BERTHA: The goat? Oh, he ain’t hurt that bad, Doc. He’s mostly just skittery on account of the musket fire.
   CLEM: Now she’s startin’ to roll her eyes around. Looks like two hard-boiled eggs.
   EMMA: What kind of roast is it?
   DOC HENDERSON: If it’S just skittery, you should stroke it a bit and keep it in a dark place.
   EMMA: Well, I ain’t no doctor, but I ain’t never heard of stroking a roast.
   CLEM: Only dark place we got is the barn, and I’d be afraid to put Nell in there on account of she’d scare the chickens.
   BERTHA: Chickens ain’t a roast, Clem; chickens is poultry. Take ‘em out of the oven when you can wiggle the drumstick.
   EMMA: I told you already, Norbert don’t even own a musket.
   CALLER: Hi. I’m conducting a marketing survey. Is Mr. Hitler at home?
   CLEM: No, but I’ll take a year’s worth of American Beet Farmer if you got it.
   The party-line system led to a lot of unnecessary confusion and death, so the phone company devised a system whereby you can talk to only one person at a time, although not necessarily the person you want. In fact, if you call any large company, you will never get to talk to the person you’re calling. Large companies employ people who are paid, on a commission basis, solely to put calls on hold. The only exception is department stores, where all calls are immediately routed to whichever clerk has the most people waiting in line for service.
   But we should never complain about our telephone system. It is the most sophisticated system in the world, yet it is the easiest to use. For example, my twenty-month-old son, who cannot perform a simple act like eating a banana without getting much of it in his hair, is perfectly capable of direct-dialing Okinawa, and probably already has. In another year, he’ll be able to order his own magazine subscriptions.

Okay, Now Try The Engine

   You should do your own car repairs. It’s an easy way to save money and possibly maim yourself for life.
   You’re probably afraid to repair your car because you think cars are complicated. This is nonsense. Many teenage boys understand cars, and on any scale of intellectual achievement teenage boys rank right down there with newts. At least they did when I was one of them.
   When I was in high school, we boys would stand out on the corner at lunchtime and smoke unfiltered cigarettes and spit frequently and guys would pull up in genuinely hideous-looking cars with the front ends jacked way up. They’d open the hoods and we’d stare inside and have conversations like this:
   LOOKERS: Three eighty-nine?
   DRIVER: Four twenty-seven.
   LOOKERS: Fuel injected?
   DRIVER: Headers.
   LOOKERS: Dual?
   DRIVER: Quad.
   LOOKERS: Boss.
   Then we’d all spit approvingly. Sometimes the conversation would turn ugly, particularly if some participants favored Fords and some favored Chevrolets. The Ford-Chevrolet conflict was a major issue, considerably more important to us than, say, the fate of the Free World. Those who favored Fords would yell “Fo Mo Co,” which is short for “Ford Motor Company.” Those who favored Chevrolets would yell “Fo No Go,” which is short for “Ford No Go.” This was considered a very witty insult. Sometimes fights would break out.
   What I’m getting at is that we had the intellectual depth of lima beans, and we still managed to understand cars. So you can, too.
   The trouble with most do-it-yourself car articles is they tell you how to do things you don’t really need to do, like change the oil. Most Such articles rave on for pages about changing the oil, as if it were some kind of sacred ritual, never once telling you how degrading and pointless it is. I have been driving for eighteen years, and I have never once had a car problem I could have solved by changing the oil. If the Good Lord had wanted us to change the oil, He would have put different oil in the car in the first place.
   But if you believe the do-it-yourself articles, you traipse along, changing your oil regularly, and one day your car ceases to run, and you try changing the oil a couple more times, and it still doesn’t run, and you end up taking it to an auto mechanic, and you have this conversation:
   You: What’s wrong?
   MECHANIC: It seems to be either the transmission or the engine. (Translation: I’m not sure, so I plan to replace every part in the car.)
   YOU: How long will it take to fix?
   MECHANIC: We should have a pretty good idea by Friday. (“One hundred and sixty-two years.”)
   YOU: How much will it cost?
   MECHANIC: Well, I have to Check on some of the parts and labor, but figure about $130. (“Eight billion skillion dollars.”)
   So what you need to know is how to do major car repairs, the kind most do-it-yourself articles don’t talk about. There are two major kinds of car problems, which we in the automotive community refer to as The Two Major Kinds of Car Problems:

Problems that cause your car to make loud noises.

   What you do here is turn up the radio. If your car doesn’t have a radio, you can sing loudly as you drive. Some people try to deal with noise problems by messing around with the muffler, but I advise against this. Mufflers are filthy, disgusting objects covered with parts of every dead animal you have ever run over. I would no more touch a muffler than I would change my oil.

Problems that cause your car to stop.

   Generally these problems involve the engine, which is a large object you’ll find under your hood, unless you live in a high-crime area. Open the hood and poke around among the wires with a screwdriver, or, if you have no screwdriver, the tip of an umbrella. Have somebody sit in the car. As you poke, yell “Try it now” or “Okay, try it now.” This is how most professional mechanics solve engine problems. Before long you’ll be fixing cars as well as they do, by which I mean about 30 percent of the time.

The Problem With Pets

   Everybody should have a pet. Pets give you all the love and devotion of close relatives, but you can lock them in the basement for hours at a time if they get loud or boring. The pets, I mean.
   Have you ever wondered why people have pets? Neither have I. I suspect it’s because pets are easy to talk to. I spend hours talking to my dog, explaining my views on world affairs. She always listens very attentively, although I’m not sure she understands me. If I could hear what she’s thinking, it would probably go like this:
   ME: The situation in the Middle East certainly looks serious.
   MY DOG: I wonder if he’s going to give me some food.
   ME: It is unfortunate that an area so vital to the economic well-being of the world is so politically unstable.
   MY DOG: Maybe he’ll give me some food now.
   ME: The Russians certainly are making it difficult for our government to achieve a lasting Mideast peace.
   MY DOG: Any minute now he might go into the kitchen and get me some food.
   My first pet was a group of ants in one of those educational ant farms with clear plastic sides. My mother gave it to me for Christmas when I was about ten. She had to send away to Chicago to buy the ants. The ironic thing is that our house was already overrun with local ants, which came out during the summer in hordes. I mean, it was like one of those science fiction movies in which insects take over the Earth. Every summer we had huge, brazen ants striding around the kitchen demanding food and running up long distance telephone charges. My mother spent much of her time whapping at them with brooms and spraying them with deadly chemicals. Nothing worked. The ants used to lie on their backs, laughing at the brooms and the chemicals and calling for more.
   What I’m getting at is that my mother hated ants, but she sent good money all the way to Chicago so I could have ants for Christmas. Christmas does horrible things to people’s values.
   Anyway, I got the ants and put them into their ant farm and fed them sugar and water. The idea was that they would build a lot of ant tunnels and stuff and I would learn about Nature. Instead, they died. My mother was astounded. I mean, here she spends whole summers trying to kill local ants that she got for free, and these Chicago ants, ants that she paid money for, ants that had their own little farm and their own little food, just die. If we had been smart, we would have put our local ants into the ant farm and fed them sugar and water; that probably would have polished them off.
   The lesson to be learned here is that insects make lousy pets. Even the best-trained, most intelligent, and most loyal insect pets tend to look and behave very much like ordinary common-criminal insects. Also you can’t explain your views on world affairs to an insect, unless you drink a lot.

Fish and Green Cheese

   Tropical fish are not much better. My wife and I went through a fish period, during which we spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on tanks and pumps and filters and chemicals and special plants and special rocks and special food. We had enough tropical-fish technology to land a tropical fish on the moon. What we could not do was keep any given tropical fish alive for longer than a week. Just as soon as we’d pop one in the tank, it would develop Fin Rot. Medical science has developed no cure for Fin Rot, so our fish would languish around among the fish technology, rotting. We were constantly buying replacement fish. Whenever one of us would leave the house, the other would say: “Don’t forget to pick up several tropical fish.” I have no actual proof, but I strongly suspect that these fish were manufactured in Chicago.
   The most popular pets are dogs and cats. Now when I say “dogs,” I’m talking about dogs, which are large, bounding, salivating animals, usually with bad breath. I am not talking about those little squeaky things you can hold on your lap and carry around. Zoologically speaking, these are not dogs at all; they are members of the pillow family.
   Anyway, dogs make good pets because they are very loyal (NOTE: When I say “loyal,” I mean “stupid.”) I once wrote a column in which I said dogs are stupid, and I got a lot of nasty mail from people who insisted, often with misspelled words, that dogs are intelligent. Perhaps from their point of view dogs are intelligent, but I don’t want to get into that here. I’ll just stick with “loyal.”)
   Yes indeed, dogs are loyal. Here is an example of how loyal dogs are: When two dogs meet, they will spend the better part of a day sniffing each other’s private parts and going to the bathroom on any object more than one inch high. Talk about loyalty.
   Cats are less loyal than dogs, but more independent. (This is code. It means: “Cats are smarter than dogs, but they hate people.”) Many people love cats. From time to time, newspapers print stories about some elderly widow who died and left her entire estate, valued at $320,000, to her cat, Fluffikins. Cats read these stories, too, and are always plotting to get named as beneficiaries in their owners’ wills. Did you ever wonder where your cat goes when it wanders off for several hours? It meets with other cats in estate-planning seminars. I just thought you should know.

Governmental Follies

Fungus On The Economy

   I don’t know about you, but I was ever so grateful when President Reagan and several other top leaders got together recently and straightened out the world economy. I had been meaning to do something about it myself, but I never found the time on account of we’ve had a lot of rain lately, which has caused these fungal growths to sprout all over the lawn.
   I am not talking here about toadstools. I am talking about organisms reminiscent of the one that nearly ate the diner in the Ingmar Bergman film The Blob before Steve McQueen subdued it with a fire extinguisher. Of course Steve had to deal with just the one lone, isolated growth, whereas I have several dozen, and I couldn’t possibly extinguish them all if they attacked in unison. Eventually they’re going to figure this out. I mean, they may be fungal growths, but they’re not stupid.
   Anyway, with all this on my mind I’ve had very little time to spend on the world economy, which is why I was so glad to hear that the leaders of the economic bloc known to economists as the Big Rich Western Nations with Indoor Plumbing and Places That Sell Cheeseburgers met in Williamsburg to straighten things out. Williamsburg is an authentic colonial restored place in Virginia where people in authentic uncomfortable clothing demonstrate how horrible it was to live in historical colonial times. Back then, if you wanted one crummy bar of soap, you had to spend the better part of a week melting beeswax and rending pigs and all the other degrading things people did before the invention of the supermarket. This is how people still live in a lot of wretched little Third World nations with names like Koala Paroondi, whose leaders were not invited to Williamsburg because the Western leaders were afraid they’d eat all the food.
   The economic summit cost something like eight million dollars, which sounds like a lot of money until you realize it lasted almost four days. The reason it took the leaders so long to straighten out the world economy is that they had to wrestle with some very complex issues. For example, I read in Newsweek that French President Mitterand does not like white sauces, and West German Chancellor Kohl does not like seafood, and so on. These high-level food differences often resulted in Frank Exchanges of Views during the summit meals:
   FRENCH PRESIDENT MITTERAND: Please pass the tiny lobsters dish.
   BRITISH PRIME MINISTER THATCHER: Those are not “tiny lobsters.” Those are crayfish.
   MITTERAND: Fish? Do not make me laugh. I represent the greatest food snots in the world, and I know what is the fish and what is not the fish, and this is not the fish. Regard: it has the claws. Does this fish of the cray have the claws?
   THATCHER: Yes, you twit. It’s a crustacean.
   MITTERAND: Perhaps I am a twit, but at least I am not wearing the tweedy British clothings of such monumental dowdiness that a dog would be reluctant to relieve itself upon them.
   Another problem was interest rates. Interest rates are very high, and the leaders spent a lot of time during their high-level meals trying to come up with a solution. Finally—and this just goes to show you why these people are world leaders and you are a mere taxpayer—they decided that interest rates ought to come down. It’s a radical plan, but it just might work.
   From the United States’ point of view, the big issue at Williamsburg was unfair foreign competition, which means any competition that involves foreigners. At one time, the foreigners competed fairly: they made chocolates and little carved-wood figurines, and we made everything else. Then, without warning, foreigners began making reasonably priced, well-made, technologically advanced cars, television sets, shoes, mushrooms, etc., and they forced Americans to buy these things at gunpoint. President Reagan discussed this problem at Williamsburg with Japanese Prime Minister Nakasone, and they hammered out an agreement under which the Japanese will continue to send us cars, but they’ll start putting defects in them. We’re going to give them technical assistance: we’re going to send people over there to train Japanese factory workers to be hostile and alienated and put the transmission in wrong and stuff like that.
   At the end of the summit, the leaders issued a major economic-policy statement that nobody read except the editors of the New York Times, and everybody went home. The world economy began to improve almost immediately. Even as you read these words, the yen is rising vs. the franc. Or else it’s failing. You may rest assured that the yen is doing whatever it does vs. the franc when things are improving. Also the other day my son ran his tricycle over one of the growths, and the growth let him off with only a sharp reprimand. So things are really looking up.

Give Wall Street Credit

   I think I’ll just quickly bring us all up to date on President Reagan’s plan to save the economy, so we can get back to whatever we were doing.
   The big problem is Wall Street, which is a street in New York City where people go every day to work themselves into a lather. To understand how Wall Street works, all you have to do is recall those television commercials for a major Wall Street brokerage firm, the ones that feature cattle. It is not mere chance that the firm chose cattle as its symbol. If you spend much time with cattle, you know they spend their time making cattle mess and panicking. The scene is pretty much the same on Wall Street, except the herd members carry briefcases. They are very skittery, and for good reason: They are in the world’s silliest business. Here’s how it works:
   Say a company wants some money. It prints up a batch of pieces of paper (“stocks”), goes down to Wall Street, and looks around for some herd members to sell the paper to. “Hey there,” the company says to the herd members. “How would you like to own a piece of paper? Look at these features: It has an attractive border, three different colors of ink, and many financial words such as ‘accrual’ and ‘debenture’ printed right on it.” The herd members snuffle around for a while, then one of them bolts up and buys a piece of paper. Then, suddenly, they’re trampling all over each other to buy pieces of paper.
   The company now has a large sum of money, and it departs hurriedly, chuckling, to buy factories or executive washrooms or whatever. Gradually, the herd members realize that all they have is paper, which is utterly worthless unless they can get other herd members to buy it. So they all end up simply trading paper back and forth, day after day, year after year. Deep in their souls, they realize they are participating in an enormous hoax that could collapse at any moment, so any event, no matter how trivial, causes them to panic. You can pick up the newspaper financial section any day and read stories like this:
   NEW YORK—Stock prices plunged sharply today as investors reacted to the discovery that Saturn actually has six moons, rather than five as was believed previously.
   So the stock market is always skittering up and down. When Ronald Reagan was elected, it skittered up for a while, because Ron promised he would reduce government spending. Wall Street fears the government because the government is Wall Street’s major competitor in the worthless pieces-of-paper business.
   But it turned out that what Ron really meant was he was going to reduce one kind of government spending, so he could spend more money on the MX Missile, the B-1 Bomber, the Cruise Missile, the Atomic Dirigible, the Secret Decoder Ring, and the Deadly Outer Space Death Ray. So he ended up with a budget that actually increases government spending, for the 206th year in a row.
   Once Wall Street realized what Ron had done, it worked itself into an even bigger panic than usual. Ron has been trying to calm it down, but the herd members are too busy barging around, wild-eyed, waving their pieces of paper. Ron may have to go to Wall Street personally and deliver a soothing speech. “There, there,” he would tell the herd. “There, there.”
   Ron’s other big problem is the Federal Reserve Board. Nobody knows much about the Federal Reserve Board: it is a secret society whose members periodically emerge from their mountain hideout, raise the interest rates, then scurry off into the darkness. This forces the banks to raise the prime rate, which is the rate they charge customers who do not want or need money.
   One result of all this interest-rate-raising is that financial institutions have cooked up all kinds of bizarre schemes to get you to give them money. You can’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the television these days without seeing advertisements for these schemes:
   “Attention savers: If you invest in our new All Savers Money Market Fund Treasury Bond Certificates of Deposit, you can earn 23.6 percent interest, which, compounded hourly and during neap tides, will yield an actualized semiannual net deductible pretax liquid return of 41.7 percent, although of course your mileage may vary. If you are found guilty of premature withdrawal, the federal government requires us to send people around to break your legs, so be sure to thumb through the prospectus.”
   I have a lot of trouble understanding these schemes, so for the time being I am investing my money in groceries and consumer objects that I can charge on my Sears credit card.