The D-Word

   There’s this sensitive issue that we in the news media are very reluctant to bring up.
   No. It isn’t condoms—We are totally comfortable, these days, doing lengthy stories about condoms: (“PASTELS OUT, EARTH TONES IN, FOR FALL CONDOM”). You will soon see condom commercials on television. Fortunately we can assume, based on television’s track record with this kind of thing, that these commercials will be tasteful and informative:
   FIRST MAN: What’s the matter, Ted?
   SECOND MAN: I think I have a horrible sexually transmitted disease!
   FIRST MAN: Here. Try some of my condoms.
   SECOND MAN: Thanks.
   (The Next Day:)
   FIRST MAN: Feeling better, Ted?
   SECOND MAN: You bet! Thanks to condoms! And I got that big promotion!
   No, the issue we are reluctant to talk about is even more sensitive (ha ha!) than condoms. The issue—and I will try to be tasteful here—is that sometimes it seems like maybe the president of the United States is kind of db. If you get what I mean. What I mean is, I am not totally confident that the president would get what I mean, unless several aides explained it to him. And even then, he might forget.
   This is unsettling, although I don’t know why it should be. For the past 25 years, the presidency had been a remarkable parade of hanky-panky, comical incompetence, and outright weirdness, and the country has done OK. In fact, once you got into the spirit of it, it was kind of fun. I don’t know about you, but I loved it when jimmy Carter reported that he’d been attacked by a giant swimming rabbit. I loved it when Richard Nixon made speeches wherein he looked as though a large and disorganized committee of alien beings had taken over his body and were just learning how to operate it: (“OK. Let’s try to wave. Who’s operating the arms?” “Me!” “No, me!” “NO ...” etc.).
   So I don’t mind the president being bizarre, but that’s not the same as accepting that he might be kind of db. Yet it’s getting harder and harder to think of any other explanation, not with this Iran-Contra scandal. I realize you out there in Readerland are sick to death of this scandal, but it’s still causing multiple orgasms here in the news media, because of all these shocking revelations, the most amazing one being that the president apparently viewed foreign policy as a sort of family station wagon, which he, in the role of Ozzie Nelson, would cheerfully lend to his teen-age son, Ricky, played by Oliver North.
   RICKY: Hey Dad, can I take the foreign policy down to the Malt Shoppe and deal with Iranians?
   OZZIE: The Iranians?
   RICKY: Don’t worry, Dad. They’re moderates.
   OZZIE: Well in that case, OK. just don’t trade arms for hostages!
   The president, apparently, was so totally unaware of where his foreign policy was that he had to appoint a distinguished commission to help him locate it, and when the commissioners called him in to testify, he told them, essentially, that he couldn’t remember what it looked like. Now, if Richard Nixon had claimed something like that you would at least have had the comfort of knowing he was lying. You could trust Nixon that way. But with this president, you have this nagging feeling that he’s telling the truth.
   This bothers us media people, which is why we have developed this euphemistic way of describing the president’s behavior, namely, we say he has a “hands-off management style.” As in: “How many people with a hands-off management style does it take to change a light bulb?”
   Of course the president’s aides, in an effort to show that he is a Take-Charge Guy, have arranged to have him star in a number of Photo Opportunities: The President Shakes Hands with People Wearing Suits; the President Sits Down with People Wearing Suits; the President, Wearing a Suit, Signs His Own Name; etc. I think this is good, as far as it goes. My concern is that it should not go any further. My concern is that we could have a sudden eruption of “hands-on” management, for example in the nuclear-arms talks, and we’ll end up with Soviet Troops in Des Moines.

Catching Hell

   Call me a regular American guy if you want, but baseball season is kind of special to me. For one thing, it means ice hockey season will be over in just a few short months. But it also brings back a lot of memories, because I, like so many other regular American guys, was once a Little Leaguer. I was on a team called the “Indians,” although I was puny of chest, so if you saw me in my uniform you’d have thought my team was called the “NDIAN,” because the end letters got wrinkled up in my armpits. I had a “Herb Score” model glove, named for a player who went on to get hit in the eye by a baseball.
   I remember particularly this one game: I was in deep right field, of course, and there were two out in the bottom of the last inning with the tying run on base, and Gerry Sinnott, who had a much larger chest, who already had to shave, was at bat. As I stood there waiting for the pitch, I dreamed a dream that millions of other kids had dreamed: that someday I would grow up, and I wouldn’t have to be in Little League anymore. In the interim, my feelings could best be summarized by the statement: “Oh please please PLEASE God don’t let Gerry Sinnott hit the ball to me.”
   And so of course God, who as you know has a terrific sense of humor, had Gerry Sinnott hit the ball to me. Here is what happened in the next few seconds: Outside of my body, hundreds of spectators, thousands of spectators, arrived at the ball field at that very instant via chartered buses from distant cities to see if I would catch the ball. Inside my body, my brain cells hastily met and came up with a Plan of Action, which they announced to the rest of the body parts. “Listen up, everybody!” they shouted. “We’re going to MISS THE BALL! Let’s get cracking!!”
   Instantly my entire body sprang into action, like a complex, sophisticated machine being operated by earthworms. The command flashed down from Motor Control to my legs: “GET READY TO RUN!” And soon the excited reply flashed back: “WHICH LEG FIRST?!” Before Motor Control could issue a ruling, an urgent message came in from Vision Central, reporting that the ball had already gone by, in fact was now a good 30 to 40 yards behind my body, rolling into the infield of the adjacent game. Motor Control, reacting quickly to this surprising new input, handled the pressure coolly and decisively, snapping out the command: “OK! We’re going to FALL DOWN!!” And my body lunged violently sideways, in the direction opposite the side where the ball had passed a full two seconds earlier, flopping onto the ground like some pathetic spawning salmon whose central nervous system had been destroyed by toxic waste, as Gerry Sinnott cruised toward home.
   Those boyhood memories! I have them often, although I can control them pretty well with medication.
   Actually, when I got older I continued to play organized baseball in the form of “league softball,” a game in which after work you put on a comical outfit and go to a public park to argue with strangers. For the first several years the team I was on had a nice, relaxed attitude, by which I mean we were fairly lenient if a player made a mental error. For example, if the ball was hit to the shortstop, and he threw it to first base, but the first baseman wasn’t there because he was rooting through the ice cooler looking for a non-”light” beer, we’d say to the person who brought the beer: “Hey! NEVER make the mental error of bringing ‘light’ beer to a softball game! It can cost a fielder valuable seconds!” But we wouldn’t fine him or anything.
   In later years, however, we got more and more young guys on the team who really wanted to win; guys who wore cleats and batting gloves and held practices where they were always shrieking about the importance of “hitting” somebody called the “cutoff man”; guys who hated to let women play, apparently for fear that one of them might, during a crucial late-inning rally, go into labor; guys who (this was the last straw) drank Gatorade during the game. I had to quit.
   But I’m getting back into it. I have a son of my own now, and, being an American guy, I’ve been teaching him the basics of the game. One recent bright sunny day I took him out in the yard with a Whiffle ball, and I gave him a few pointers. “Robert,” I said, “did you know that if we use a magnifying glass to focus sunlight on the Whiffle ball, we can actually cause it to melt?” So we did this, and soon we had advanced to complex experiments involving candy wrappers, Popsicle sticks, and those little stinging ants. Although I drew the line at toads. You have to teach sportsmanship, too.

Mrs. Beasley Froze For Our Sins

   One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the “mounting” deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches. The point we try to get across in these columns is: “You readers may be out driving fast boats and having your fun, but we columnists are sitting in front of our word processors, worried half to death about the nation’s financial future.” Then we move on to South Africa.
   So anyway, I have decided to fret briefly about the deficit, which according to recent reports continues to mount. A while back I proposed a very workable solution to the whole deficit problem, namely that the government should raise money by selling national assets we don’t really need: metric road signs, all the presidential libraries, the Snail Darter, the House of Representatives, North Dakota, etc. Unfortunately, the only concrete result of this proposal was that I got an angry letter from everybody in North Dakota, for a total of six letters, arguing that if we’re going to sell anything, we should sell New York City.
   This probably wouldn’t work. There would be major cultural adjustment problems. Suppose, for example, that we sold New York to Switzerland. Now Switzerland is a very tidy, conservative nation, and the first thing it would do is pass a lot of laws designed to make New York more orderly, such as no public muttering, no lunging into the subway car as though it were the last helicopter out of Saigon, no driving taxis over handicapped pedestrians while they are in the crosswalk, no sharing loud confidences regarding intestinal matters to strangers attempting to eat breakfast. These laws would be very difficult for New Yorkers to adjust to. Switzerland would have to send in soldiers to enforce them, and this would inevitably lead to tragic headlines in the New York Times:
   ENTIRE SWISS ARMY FOUND STABBED TO DEATH WITH OWN LITTLE FOLDING KNIVES Pedestrians Step Right over Rotting Corpses
   So I’m afraid that, appealing as the idea may be, we can’t reduce the deficit by selling New York.
   What the government desperately needs is an innovative new concept for getting money from people, and we can all be grateful that such a concept appears to be oozing over the fiscal horizon at this very moment: a national lottery game. A number of congresspersons have already proposed that we start one. It would be similar to the lotteries currently operating in the really advanced states. Here’s how they work:
   1. First you pass strict laws that say it is totally illegal for private citizens to operate lotteries, because they encourage the poor and the stupid to gamble away their money against ludicrously bad odds. If you find private citizens operating such lotteries, you call them “numbers racketeers” and you throw them in prison.
   2. Next you set up an official state lottery with even more ludicrous odds. You give it a perky name like the “Extremely Lucky Digits Game,” and you run cheerful upbeat ads right on television strongly suggesting that the poor and the stupid could make no wiser investment than to spend their insulin money on lottery tickets. A nice touch is to say you’re using the lottery proceeds to fund a popular program that the state would have to pay for anyway, such as senior citizens or baby deer. In Pennsylvania, for example, they drag an actual senior citizen in front of the camera to perform the ritual televised Daily Number drawing. The senior citizen usually looks kind of frightened, like a hostage being displayed by the Red Brigades. The clear implication is that if the viewers don’t purchase Daily Number tickets, Pennsylvania will have to throw old Mrs. Beasley out into the snow headfirst.
   The news media help out by regularly running heartwarming front-page stories about how a man who was broke and starving won $800 million in his state lottery and suddenly could afford nice teeth and many new friends.
   So anyway, the plan now is to run something like this on a nationwide scale, which I think would be great, especially if it keeps the federal government from doing something really desperate to raise money, such as selling drugs or making snuff movies. The only potential problem with a national lottery, as some states have pointed out, is that it might siphon off a lot of poor and stupid from the state lotteries. But if this happens, we could have a bailout system, where the federal government would step in and purchase so many million dollars worth of lottery tickets from the troubled state. I mean, hey, why do we have governments in the first place, if not to help each other out?

The Columnist’s Caper

   I figured out why I’m not getting seriously rich. I write newspaper columns. Nobody ever makes newspaper columns into Major Motion Pictures starring Tom Cruise. The best you can hope for, with a newspaper column, is that people will like it enough to attach it to their refrigerators with magnets shaped like fruit.
   So I have written a suspense novel. It has everything. Sex. Violence. Sex. Death. Russians. Dead Russians. Here’s what the newspaper critics are saying:
   “A very short novel.”-the Waco, Texas, Chronic Vegetable “This is it? This is the entire novel?”-the Arkansas Dependent-Statesperson “Not enough sex.”-the Evening Gonad
   No doubt you motion-picture producers out there would like to see the novel these critics are raving about, so you can send me lucrative film offers. Here it is:

Chapter One

   Carter Crater strode into the Oval Office. He looked like Tom Cruise, or, if he is available, Al Pacino.
   Behind the desk sat the president of the United States. To his left, in the corner, stood the secretary of state. Crater sensed that something was wrong.
   “Unless we act quickly,” the president said, “within the next few hours the world will be blown to pieces the size of Smith Brothers cough lozenges.”
   Crater frowned. “We had better act quickly,” he said.
   The president looked thoughtful. “That just might work,” he said. “Use whatever means you consider necessary, including frequent casual sex.”

Chapter Two

   In the Kremlin, General Rasputin Smirnov frowned at Colonel joyce Brothers Karamazov Popov.
   “It is absolutely essential that the Americans do not suspect anything,” Smirnov said.
   “Yes, agreed Popov.
   Smirnov frowned.
   “Shouldn’t we be speaking Russian?” he asked.
   Popov looked thoughtful.
   “We should at least have accents,” he said.

Chapt1er Three

   Suddenly, it struck Crater: The Oval Office doesn’t have corners.

Chapter Four

   Some 2,347 miles away in East Berlin, a man and a woman walked briskly eastward on Volkswagen-kindergarten-pumpernikel-strasse. Talking intently, they did not notice the sleek black Mercedes sedan, its windows tinted almost black, as it turned off Hamburgerfrankfurterwienerschn itzelstrasse and came toward them from behind, picking up speed until, traveling at 130 kilometers per microgram, it roared into a parked garbage truck.
   “Too much window tint,” the woman said.

Chapter Five

   Some 452.5 miles away, Crater had sex.

Chapter Six

   “Ach,” said General Smirnov. “Zees American agent, ve must keel heem.”
   “Dat’s de troof,” agreed Popov. “Les’n we do, he gon’ mess up de plan to blow up de worl’.”

Chapter Seven

   Crater handed the microfilm to crack intelligence expert Lieutenant Ensign Sergeant Commander Monica Melon.
   She studied it carefully for about 15 minutes. Finally she spoke.
   “There’s something written on here,” she said, frowning, “but it’s really teensy.”

Chapter Eight

   Smirnov frowned at Popov.
   “Blimey,” he said.

Chapter Nine

   In the darkened room, Crater could see the shadowy figure who threatened to destroy the world, who had led Crater on this desperate chase across nine continents, a race filled with terror and death and women whose thighs could have been the basis for a major world religion, and all leading to this moment, Crater and the shadowy figure, alone in the gloom. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Crater reached for the light switch. He flicked it on. The shadowy figure turned, slowly, slowly. At last, Crater could see the figure’s face.
   It was a big surprise.

Chapter Ten

   “Good job of saving the entire world, Crater,” the president said. “But I have one question: How did you know Miss Prendergast never heard the cathedral bell?”
   “Easy, sir,” answered Crater. “You see, Lord Copperbottom is left-handed, so the gardener couldn’t possibly have taken the key from the night stand.”
   “I never thought of that,” said the president. He frowned at the names coming up out of the floor and drifting toward the ceiling so the audience would know who had played what parts.
   “Hey,” the president said. “These names are backwards.”

A Rash Proposal

   Lately I have been thinking a lot about the defense of Western Europe. It keeps my mind off this rash in my right armpit. When I think about it, I reach the point where all I want to do is quit my job and move to an isolated cave so I can devote full time to scratching myself. Eventually it reached the point where I threw caution to the winds and went to an actual skin doctor. I was hoping he’d give me one of those hand-held garden implements with the three sharp prongs. I forget what you call them, and say: “Dave, I want you to rake this implement across your rash every 10 seconds or as needed.” But no, he gave me some wimpy little white pills and came up with a bizarre treatment program under which—this is the truth—I was supposed to try to grow a new rash. Really. He thinks my rash is caused by a rash-causing chemical that large corporations put in deodorants, apparently out of sheer hatred for the consumer, and to test this theory he wants me to rub some of this very same chemical onto my arm and see if I develop a new rash. I’m not going to do it, of course, because (a) I don’t even want the rash I brought him in the first place, let alone a new one, and (b) if he thinks I’m stupid enough to deliberately rub rash-causing chemicals on myself, his next move will b to ask me to rub them on my family and friends.
   Sometimes you have to wonder what’s happening to the medical profession. A recent edition of the Weekly World News, which I feel is probably the best newspaper your money can buy in a supermarket, carried a story headlined “HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANT.” The story concerns an operation performed by doctors in Communist China who got hold of this unfortunate man with a large brain tumor, and they treated him by amputating his head and replacing it with one they got from a person who had lost his body in a factory accident and consequently died. I would very much like to know how the doctors explained this operation to the patient (“The only possible side effect we can foresee, Loo Ping, will be some neck stiffness, plus the fact that you will have the head of a dead factory worker.”)
   Of course you have an entirely different set of problems to confront when you talk about defending Western Europe. The main one is that it is filled with Western Europeans, who are not in the least bit interested in defending themselves. They have discovered, over the past thousand years or so, that every time they get military, they wind up having a lengthy and extremely complicated war in which the various countries have tremendous trouble remembering whose side they’re on:
   BRITISH SOLDIER: Taste my sword, French person!
   FRENCH SOLDIER: No! Wait! We are allies! This is World War I!
   BRITISH SOLDIER: I’m terribly sorry! I thought it was the Hundred Years War! Does this mean I can kill Italians?
   FRENCH SOLDIER: (Consulting manual): No, I’m afraid not. Not until World War II.
   So eventually the Western Europeans stopped forming armies altogether and decided to become third-rate powers, which means we have to defend them from the Russians. We’re available to defend foreign continents because we have no urgent need to defend our own. I mean, the Mexicans certainly aren’t going to attack us, seeing as how most of them already work here. I suppose the Canadians could attack us, but the entire population of Canada is maybe the size of the audience on “Donahue,” only quieter, so even if they did attack, nobody would know, especially if it was during rush hour.
   So we’re over there defending Western Europe, which is very, very expensive. For one thing, we have to get up an army, which means we have to pay for all those commercials wherein we suggest to young people that the whole point of the army is to teach them valuable electronics skills, with no mention whatsoever of getting shot at or getting cretin haircuts and being ordered to do pushups by a person who has never read anything longer than a Dr Pepper bottle. For another thing, to defend Western Europe we have to let the Pentagon buy all these tanks and guns and things, and the Pentagon is unable to buy any object that costs less than a condominium in Vail. If the Pentagon needs, say, fruit, it will argue that it must have fruit that can withstand the rigors of combat conditions, and it will wind up purchasing the FX-700
   Seedless Tactical Field Grape, which will cost $160,000 per bunch, and which will have an 83 percent failure rate.
   So I have come up with this plan for defending Western Europe much more economically, which is to pull our armed forces out of there altogether. They could come home and fix our videocassette recorders. In their place we would send over all our state highway departments and tell them we want them to repair the roads between Western Europe to Russia. Think about it: First they’d have their Cone Placement Division strew millions of traffic cones randomly all over the roads, then they’d have their Sign Erection Department put up signs explaining that all the lanes would be really messed up for the next 17 years to Help Serve You Better, then the Traffic Direction Division would get all kinds of lowlife derelicts out there waving flags and directing motorists right into oncoming trucks, and within a few months it would be absolutely impossible for any vehicle, including Communist tanks, to get from Russia to Western Europe.
   So that’s my plan. What do you think? I think those wimpy little pills are starting to kick in.

He Knows Not What He Writes

   The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes. So I am going to be very sensitive, here, which is not easy, because the thing about religion is that everybody else’s always appears stupid.
   For example, if you read about some religious sect in India that believes God wants people to drink their own urine, you don’t say to yourself, “Isn’t that amazing, the diversity of belief systems Man has developed in his neverending quest to understand and cope with the intricate moral dilemmas posed by a complex and uncertain world?” No, what you say to yourself ;s, “These people have the brains of trout.”
   Meanwhile, over in India, the sect members are getting a major chuckle over the fact that some American basketball players cross themselves before they take foul shots. “As if God cares about foul shots,” the sect members howl, tears streaming down their faces. “Say, is this my urine or yours?”
   That’s the basic problem, of course: figuring out what God wants us to do. I will admit right up front here that I don’t have the vaguest idea. All my religious training was in Sunday school maybe 25 years ago, and the main thing I remember was that God was always smiting the Pharisees. At least I think it was the Pharisees. It seemed that hardly a day went by when they didn’t get the tar smitten out of them, which is probably why you see so few of them around any more.
   My wife, who has bales of religious training, tells me that this was the Old Testament God, who was very strict, whereas the New Testament God is a genuinely mellow deity, the kind of deity who would never smite anybody or order you to smear goat’s blood on your first-born son, which is the kind of thing the Old Testament God was always doing.
   NOTE: The preceding paragraph is in no way intended to suggest that there is anything wrong with smearing goat’s blood on your first-born son. As far as I’m concerned, this is an excellent ritual, and I would do it myself if not for the fact that my son might tell the school authorities. Please put away your machetes. Thank you.
   It used to be much worse. Back in ancient Greece and Rome they had gods all over the place, and it was no fun at all being a mortal, as you know if you ever read any myths:
   “One day two young lovers, Vector and Prolix, were walking in a garden. This angered Bruno, the god of gardens, so he turned Vector into a toad. Saddened, Prolix picked up her lover and squeezed him to her bosom, which caused him to secrete a toad secretion upon her garment. This angered Vito, the god of fabric, who turned Prolix into an exceedingly unattractive insect. Saddened, Vector hopped to his lover, which angered Denise, who was the goddess of municipal water supply and just happened to be in the neighborhood, so she hit them both with a rock.”
   And so on. So things are better now. Today most of us believe in just the one God, and He never turns people into toads or anything, unless you count Spiro Agnew. All He wants us to do is what He wants us to do, which is clearly revealed in the Bible.
   (Sound of the machetes being unsheathed.)
   And the Talmud and the Koran and the Book of Mormon and the works of L. Ron Hubbard. These holy writings tell us what God wants us to do, often in the form of revealing anecdotes:
   “And Bezel saideth unto Sham: ‘Sham,’ he saideth, ‘Thou shalt goest unto the town of Begorrah, and there shalt thou fetcheth unto thine bosom 35
   talents and also shalt thou fetcheth a like number of cubits, provideth that they are nice and fresh.”
   The problem is that many of us don’t have the vaguest idea what these anecdotes reveal. This is why we have broadcast preachers, who can take a religious anecdote and explain it over the course of a half-hour in such a manner that if you listened all the way through you would have no questions at all:
   BROADCAST PREACHER: And so we can see that it was BEZEL who told SHAM to go to Begorrah. It was not SHAM who told BEZEL: It was BEZEL who told SHAM. Now people ask me, they say, “Brother Ray Bob Tom, what do you mean, it was Bezel who told Sham?” And I say, “What I mean is that when we’re talking about who told who to go to Begorrah, we must understand that it was BEZEL who told ...”
   And so on. It can take upwards of a week to get through an entire sentence, which is why you often have to send in a Love Offering to get cassettes so you’ll remember what it is that God wants you to do. This sometimes seems too complicated, so a lot of people have switched over to the more relaxed style of the Merv Griffin-type of broadcast preachers, who have bands and potted plants and sofas and everything. (“Our next guest is not only one of the top Christians in the business, but also a close personal friend of mine.”)
   So we have a number of ways of finding out what God wants us to do, and each of us must decide what the answer is in this wonderful country where we are free to believe as we choose, and where there are strict laws against assaulting people just because we don’t like something they wrote.

Man Bites Dog

   Today we begin a popular feature wherein we will address the major ethical questions of the day, starting with: Is it OK to eat your dog?
   ANSWER: No. Not here in America. Oh, sure, most of us have heard the story about an American who cooked her dog in a microwave oven, but this was not for the purpose of eating it. What happened (according to the story) was this American had one of those little rodent-size dogs whose main purpose in the Great Chain of Life is to pee on people’s ankles, and it got wet in the rain, so the American quite naturally did what any normal person would do if he or she had one lone kernel of candy corn for a brain, namely stick the dog in the microwave oven to dry out, but apparently the oven was on the wrong setting (it should have been set on “Dog”), so the dog ended up getting dried out to the point of Well Done. The story always stops right there, so we don’t know what happened next. We don’t know whether the spouse came home from a hard day at the office and went, “Mmmmmmm! Something smells deeeelicious! I’ll just look inside the microwave here and GAAAACCCCKKKK!!!!”
   Of course, this needless tragedy could easily have been prevented via legislation requiring that microwave ovens carry a stern federal message such as
   WARNING: THE SURGEON GENERAL HAS DETERMINED THAT YOU SHOULD NOT PUT A DOG IN THIS OVEN AND TURN IT ON.
   On the other hand, this could be one of those stories that everybody tells even though it’s not true, like the one about the teen-aged couple who is parking on a lonely country road and hears on the radio that a homicidal maniac who has a hook instead of a right hand has escaped from the mental institution, so the boy real quick starts the engine and drives right over Reggie Jackson, who was walking his Doberman because it was choking on an alligator from the New York City sewer system. This probably never happened. But it is a fact that my editor, Gene Weingarten, once ate a dog. This was at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, New York (which incidentally is how alligators got into the sewers), and Gene was at the pavilion of some Third World nation and he ordered a dish with an unusual name, and when he asked the waiter (who spoke little English) what it was, the waiter, in Gene’s words, “made it clear by gestures and going ‘woof woof,’ that it was a dog.” Gene said it wasn’t bad. Not that this is any excuse. I want to stress that I personally have never eaten a dog, and I want to remind those of you who have already stopped reading this column to write violent letters to the editor that it was Gene Weingarten, c/o TroPic magazine, Miami Herald, Miami FL 33101, who ate the dog.
   But it is an interesting ethical question, why we get so upset about this. I mean, most of us don’t think twice about eating cows, which are genetically almost exactly the same as dogs in the sense of having four legs and being pretty stupid. Yet if somebody tried to dry a cow out in a microwave oven, we’d all laugh like the dickens—and it would get on “Celebrity Biceps and Boners.” So this is a real puzzle, all right, which is why I am very grateful to Diane Eicher, an alert reader who sent me an article from Nutrition Health Review headlined: “Usefulness Keeps Pets Out of Oven.” I am not making this article up. It concerns Marvin Harris, a University of Florida anthropologist who, according to the article, “studies and tries to make sense of human culture.” (Ha ha!)
   Harris is quoted in the article as saying that the reason we didn’t eat dogs, cats, and horses is—get ready—”These animals are just too darned useful for us to eat.”
   Now I don’t wish to be critical here, but a statement like that makes you wonder if Professor Harris has not accidentally been studying the culture on the planet Zoog, because the last word I would use to describe household pets here on Earth is “useful.” I have owned a number of household pets, mostly dogs, and the only useful thing I can recall any of them ever doing was the time Germaine tried to bite the Amway representative. Other than that it has been basically a long series of indelible rug stains. And I defy anybody to point to a single instance of, for example, a tropical fish doing anything useful, as in:
   ALERT FISH RESCUES WOMAN FROM TRASH COMPACTOR
   Yet we don’t eat the tropical fish, do we? No! Not unless we have a very good reason, such as we have been sitting in our doctors’ waiting room for the better part of the day without food or water. Then we might snack on a couple of guppies, but that is as far as it would go. And I don’t even want to talk about cats.
   Nevertheless Professor Harris feels pets have many useful functions:
   “Modern day household pets can’t match the entertainment value of lions attacking elephants or people in the Roman circus,” he said, “but cats chasing imaginary mice, or dogs retrieving bouncing balls are at least as amusing as the late night movie.”
   I think we can all agree that pets are not as entertaining as watching lions attack humans, but I have to wonder how many of you couples out there in our listening audience have ever said to each other: “The heck with Casablanca, let’s watch Beaner retrieve a bouncing ball.” So we indeed have a very complex ethical issue here, but unfortunately we no longer really care.

“Adventure Dog”

   I have this idea for a new television series. It would be a realistic action show, patterned after the true-life experiences of my dog, Earnest. The name of the show would be “Adventure Dog.”
   The theme song would go: Adventure dog, Adventure doooooooggg, Kinda big, kinda strong, Stupid as a log.
   Each episode would be about an exciting true adventure that happened to Earnest. For example, here’s the script for an episode entitled: “Adventure Dog Wakes Up and Goes Outside”:
   It’s 6:17 A.M. Adventure Dog is sleeping in the hall. Suddenly she hears a sound. Her head snaps up. Somebody is up! Time to swing into action! Adventure Dog races down the hall and, skidding on all four paws, turns into the bathroom, where, to her total shock, she finds: The Master! Whom she has not seen since LAST NIGHT! YAYYYYYY!!
   ADVENTURE DOG: Bark!
   MASTER: DOWN, dammit!
   Now Adventure Dog bounds to the front door, in case the Master is going to take her outside. It is a slim chance. He has only taken her outside for the past 2,637 consecutive mornings. But just in case, Adventure Dog is ready.
   ADVENTURE DOG: Bark!
   Can it be? Yes! This is unbelievable! The Master is coming to the door! Looks like Adventure Dog is going outside! YAAAYYY!
   MASTER: DOWN, dammit!
   Now the Master has opened the door approximately one inch. Adventure Dog realizes that, at this rate, it may take the Master a full three-tenths of a second to open the door all the way. This is bad. He needs help. Adventure Dog alertly puts her nose in the crack and applies 600,000 pounds force to the door.
   MASTER: HEY! DOOR: WHAM!
   And now Adventure Dog is through the door, looking left, looking right, her finely honed senses absorbing every detail of the environment, every nuance and subtlety, looking for ... Holy Smoke! There it is! The YARD! Right in the exact same place it was yesterday! This is turning out to be an UNBELIEVABLE adventure!
   ADVENTURE DOG: Bark!
   Adventure Dog is vaguely troubled. Some primitive version of a thought is rattling around inside her tiny cranium, like a BB in a tunafish can. For she senses that there is some reason why the Master has let her outside. There is something he wants Adventure Dog to do. But what on Earth could it be? Before Adventure Dog can think Of an answer, she detects ... is this possible? Yes! It’s a SMELL! Yikes! Full Red Alert!
   ADVENTURE DOG: Sniff sniff sniff.
   MASTER: Come on, Earnest.
   ADVENTURE DOG: Sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff.
   No question about it. The evidence is clear. This is a smell, all right. And what’s more, it’s the smell of—this is so incredible—DOG WEE WEE! Right here in the yard!
   MASTER: EARNEST!
   ADVENTURE DOG: Sniff sniff sniff sniff sniff.
   Adventure Dog is getting the germ of an idea. At first it seems farfetched, but the more she thinks about it, the more she thinks, hey, why not! The idea is—get ready—Adventure Dog is going to MAKE WEE-WEE! Right now! Outside! It’s crazy, but it just might work!
   MASTER: Good GIRL.
   What was that? It was a sound! Definitely. A sound coming from over there. Yes! No question about it. This is unbelievable! It’s the MASTER out here in the yard! YAAAYY!
   MASTER: DOWN, dammit!
   THEME SONG SINGER: Adventure Dog, Adventure Dooooooggg ...
   ADVENTURE DOG: BARK!
   MASTER: DOWN!
   Bear in mind that this is only one episode. There are many other possibilities: “Adventure Dog Gets Fed,” “Adventure Dog Goes for a Ride in the Car and Sees Another Dog and Barks Real Loud for the Next 116 Miles,” etc. it would be the kind of family-oriented show your kids could watch, because there would be extremely little sex, thanks to an earlier episode, “Adventure Dog Has an Operation.”

Slow Down And Die

   I think it’s getting worse. I’m talking about this habit people have of driving on interstate highways in the left, or “passing” lane, despite the fact that they aren’t passing anybody. You used to see this mainly in a few abnormal areas, particularly Miami, where it is customary for everyone to drive according to the laws of his or her own country of origin. But now you see it everywhere: drivers who are not passing, who have clearly never passed anybody in their entire lives, squatting in the left lane, little globules of fat clogging up the transportation arteries of our very nation. For some reason, a high percentage of them wear hats.
   What I do, when I come up behind these people, is the same thing you do, namely pass them on the right and glare at them. Unfortunately, this tactic doesn’t appear to be working. So I’m proposing that we go to the next logical step: nuclear weapons. Specifically I’m thinking of atomic land torpedoes, which would be mounted on the front bumpers of cars operated by drivers who have demonstrated that they have the maturity and judgment necessary to handle tactical nuclear weapons in a traffic environment. I would be one of these drivers.
   Here’s how I would handle a standard left-lane blockage problem: I would get behind the problem driver and flash my lights. If that failed, I’d honk my horn until the driver looked in his rear-view mirror and saw me making helpful, suggestive hand motions indicating that he is in the passing lane, and if he wants to drive at 55, he should do it in a more appropriate place, such as the waiting room of a dental office. If that failed, I’d sound the warning siren, which would go, and I quote, “WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP.” Only if all these measures failed would I proceed to the final step, total vaporization of the car (unless of course there was a BABY ON BOARD!).
   Too violent, you say? Shut up or I’ll break your legs. No, wait, forgive me. I’m a little tense, is all, from driving behind these people. But something has to be done, and I figure if word got around among members of the left-lane slow-driver community, wherever they get together—hat stores would be my guess—that they had a choice of either moving to the right or turning into clouds of charged particles, many would choose the former.
   It is not entirely their fault. Part of the problem is all those signs on the interstates that say SPEED LIMIT 55. I am no psychologist, but I believe those signs may create the impression among poorly informed drivers that the speed limit is 55. Which of course it is not. We Americans pretend 55 is the speed limit, similar to the way we’re always pretending we want people to have a nice day, but it clearly isn’t the real speed limit, since nobody, including the police, actually drives that slowly, except people wearing hats in the left lane.
   So the question is, how fast are you really allowed to drive? And the answer is: Nobody will tell you. I’m serious. The United States is the only major industrialized democracy where the speed limit is a secret. I called up a guy I know who happens to be a high-ranking police officer, and I asked him to tell me the real speed limit, and he did, but only after—this is the absolute truth—he made me promise I wouldn’t reveal his name, or his state, or above all the speed limit itself. Do you believe that? Here in the United States of America, home of the recently refurbished Statue of Liberty, we have an officer of the law who is afraid he could lose his job for revealing the speed limit.
   When things get this bizarre, we must be dealing with federal policy. Specifically we are dealing with the U.S. Transportation Secretary, who is in charge of enforcing our National Pretend Speed Limit. The Transportation Secretary has learned—you talk about digging out the hard facts!—that motorists in a number of states are driving faster than 55 miles per hour, and she threatened to cut off these states’ federal highway funds. So, to keep the Transportation Secretary happy, the police have to pretend they’re enforcing the 55 limit, when in fact they think it’s stupid and won’t give you a ticket unless you exceed the real speed limit, which varies from state to state, and even from day to day, and which the police don’t dare talk about in public for fear of further upsetting the Transportation Secretary.
   I told my friend, the high-ranking police officer, that this system creates a lot of anxiety in us civilian motorists, never knowing how fast we’re allowed to go, and he said the police like it, because they can make the speed limit whatever the hell they want it to be, depending on how they feel. “It used to be,” he said, “that the only fun you had in police work was police brutality. Now the real fun is to keep screwing with people’s heads about what the speed limit is.”
   Ha ha! He was just kidding, I am sure. Nevertheless, I think we need a better system, and fortunately I have thought one up. Here it is: The state should say the hell with the federal highway funds. They could make a lot more money if they set up little roadside stands where you could stop your car and pay $5, and a state employee would whisper the speed limit for that day in your ear. What do you think? I think it makes more sense than the system we have now. Of course, the Transportation Secretary wouldn’t like it, but I don’t see why we should care, seeing as how the Transportation Secretary probably gets chauffeured around in an official federal limousine that is, of course, totally immune from traffic laws. Although I imagine it would be vulnerable to atomic land torpedoes.

Sacking The Season

   It’s football season again, and I know I speak for everybody in North America when I make the following statement: rah. Because, to me, football is more than just a game. It is a potential opportunity to see a live person lying on the ground with a bone sticking out of his leg, while the fans, to show their appreciation, perform “the wave.”
   And football breeds character. They are constantly scrubbing the locker rooms because of all the character that breeds in there. This results in men the caliber of famed Notre Dame player George Gipp, played by Ronald Reagan, who, in a famous anecdote, looked up from his deathbed and told Pat O’Brien, played by Knute Rockne, that if things ever really got bad for the Fighting Irish, he (O’Brien) should tell “the boys” to win one for the Gipper. Which O’Brien did, and the boys said: “What for? He’s dead.” Ha ha! This is just one reason I am so excited about the upcoming season.
   Before I unveil my Pigskin Preview, however, I must say a few serious words here about a problem that, regrettably, has reached epidemic proportions in the world of sports fans. I’m talking about male cheerleaders. I don’t know where you grew up, but where I grew up, there were certain things a guy absolutely did not do, and cheerleading is about six of them. A guy who led cheers where I grew up would have been driven around for a few hours inside somebody’s engine compartment. Most likely Steve Stormack’s.
   So you may call me insecure if you wish, but I am deeply troubled when I see young men on TV bouncing up and down on their tiptoes and clapping like sea lions, and the fact that they get to hug the female cheerleaders and sometimes pick them up by their personal regions is not, in my view, an adequate excuse. I am calling on you sports fans to write letters to U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese urging him to appoint a federal commission to issue a concerned and bulky report about this issue, so that we sports writers can put it behind us once and for all and get back to writing stories about what should be the topic of interest on the sports pages: drugs.
   Drug testing is very big in football. This is because football players are Role Models for young people. All you young people out there want to grow up and have enormous necks and get knee operations as often as haircuts. That’s why the people in charge of football don’t want you to associate their sport in any way with drugs. They want you to associate it with alcohol. During televised games, you’ll see announcements wherein famous athletes urge you not to take drugs alternating with announcements wherein famous ex-athletes urge you to drink beer. Good luck, young people!
   Now let’s take a look at what kind of action we can expect to see this season on the actual “grid-iron” per se. As in previous years, football will be divided into two major sectors, “college” and “professional,” the difference being that professional players receive money, whereas college players also receive complimentary automobiles, although many teams will be hard-hit by strict new academic regulations requiring that a player cannot compete unless he can read most of the numbers on his gearshift knob. Nevertheless, I look for an action-packed college season in which major teams featuring linemen named Dwight who have the size and vocabulary skills of cement trucks trash a series of amateur schools by scores ranging as high as 175-0, which will earn them the right to play in such New Year’s Day classics as the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, and the Liquid You Drain Out of a Can of Artichoke Hearts Bowl, although unfortunately not against each other.
   In professional football, I look for a very exciting and competitive season until about a third of the way through the first game, when Injuries will become a Factor. These injuries will of course all be caused by artificial turf, which is easily the most dangerous substance in the universe. If we really wanted to protect Europe, we would simply cover the border regions with artificial turf, and the Russians would all be writhing on the ground clutching their knees within seconds after they invaded. And then the Europeans could perform “the wave.”
   Here are some other predictions: I look for the TV networks to provide helpful expert analysis by ex-players who utilize technological wizardry such as the “electronic chalkboard” to make simple running plays seem like brain surgery. I look for 19,000 third-down situations, all of them Crucial. In any group of five players, I look for four of them to be Probably the Most Underrated in the League. I look for Second Effort, Good Hang Time, and a Quick Release. I look for yet another Classic Super Bowl Match-up like the one we had last year between two teams whose names escape me at the moment.
   I look for a video rental store that’s open all weekend.

Why Sports Is A Drag

   Mankind’s yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history, dating back to the time, millions of years ago, when the first primitive man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire. What inner force drove this first athlete? Your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably, because you haven’t had four beers. All I know is, whatever the reason, Mankind is still nuts about sports. As Howard Cosell, who may not be the most likable person in the world but is certainly one of the most obnoxious, put it: “In terms of Mankind and sports, blah blah blah blah the 1954 Brooklyn Dodgers.”
   Notice that Howard and I both use the term “Mankind.” Womankind really isn’t into sports in the same way. I realize things have changed since my high-school days, when sports were considered unfeminine and your average girls’ gym class consisted of six girls in those gym outfits colored Digestive Enzyme Green running around waving field-hockey sticks and squealing, and 127
   girls on the sidelines in civilian clothing, claiming it was That Time of the Month. I realize that today you have a number of top female athletes such as Martina Navratilova who can run like deer and bench-press Chevrolet pickup trucks. But to be brutally frank, women as a group have a long way to go before they reach the level of intensity and dedication to sports that enables men to be such incredible jerks about it.
   If you don’t believe me, go to your local racquetball club and observe the difference between the way men and women play. Where I play, the women tend to gather on the court in groups of random sizes—sometimes three, sometimes five, as if it were a Jane Fonda workout—and the way they play is, one of them will hit the ball at the wall and the rest of them will admire the shot and compliment her quite sincerely, and then they all sort of relax, as if they’re thinking, well, thank goodness that’s over with, and they always seem very surprised when the ball comes back. If one of them has the presence of mind to take another swing, and if she actually hits the ball, everybody is very complimentary. If she misses it, the others all tell her what a good try she made, really, then they all laugh and act very relieved because they know they have some time to talk before the ball comes bouncing off that darned wall again.
   Meanwhile, over in the next court, you will have two males wearing various knee braces and wrist bands and special leatheroid racquetball gloves, hurling themselves into the walls like musk oxen on Dexedrine, and after every single point one or both of them will yell “S-!” in the self-reproving tone of voice you might use if you had just accidentally shot your grandmother. American men tend to take their sports seriously, much more seriously than they take family matters or Asia.
   This is why it’s usually a mistake for men and women to play on teams together. I sometimes play in a coed slow-pitch softball league, where the rules say you have to have two women on the field. The teams always have one of the women play catcher, because in slow-pitch softball the batters hit just about every pitch, so it wouldn’t really hurt you much if you had a deceased person at catcher. Our team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am anyway, but there’s no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal with it. She’s been on the team for three seasons now, but the males still don’t trust her. They know that if she had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant’s life, deep in her soul, she would probably elect to save the infant’s life, without even considering whether there were men on base.
   This difference in attitude between men and women carries over to the area of talking about sports, especially sporting events that took place long ago. Take the 1960 World Series. If we were to look at it objectively, we would have to agree that the outcome of the 1960 World Series no longer matters. You could make a fairly strong case that it didn’t really matter in 1960. Women know this, which is why you almost never hear them mention the 1960 World Series, whereas you take virtually any male over age 35 and even if he can’t remember which of his children has diabetes, he can remember exactly how Pirates shortstop Bill Mazeroski hit the ninth-inning home run that beat the Yankees, and he will take every available opportunity to discuss it at length with other males.
   See that? Out there in Readerland, you females just read right through that last sentence, nodding in agreement, but you males leaped from your chairs and shouted: “Mazeroski wasn’t a SHORTSTOP! Mazeroski played SECOND BASE!” Every male in America has millions of perfectly good brain cells devoted to information like this. We can’t help it. We have no perspective. I have a friend named Buzz, a SUCcessful businessman and the most rational person you ever want to meet, and the high point of his entire life is the time he got Stan Albeck, the coach of the New jersey Nets, to look directly at him during a professional basketball game and make a very personal remark rhyming with “duck shoe.” I should explain that Buzz and I have season tickets to the Philadelphia 76ers, so naturally we hate the Nets a great deal. It was a great honor when Albeck singled Buzz out of the crowd for recognition. The rest of us males congratulated Buzz as if he’d won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
   It’s silly, really, this male lack of perspective, and it can lead to unnecessary tragedy, such as soccer-riot deaths and the University of Texas. What is even more tragic is that women are losing perspective, too. Even as you read these words, women are writing vicious letters to the editor, expressing great fury at me for suggesting they don’t take their racquetball seriously. Soon they will be droning on about the importance of relief pitching.

Batting Clean-Up And Striking Out

   The primary difference between men and women is that women can see extremely small quantities of dirt. Not when they’re babies, of course. Babies of both sexes have a very low awareness of dirt, other than to think it tastes better than food.
   But somewhere during the growth process, a hormonal secretion takes place in women that enables them to see dirt that men cannot see, dirt, at the level of molecules, whereas men don’t generally notice it until it forms clumps large enough to support agriculture. This can lead to tragedy, as it did in the ill-fated ancient city of Pompeii, where the residents all got killed when the local volcano erupted and covered them with a layer of ash 20 feet deep. Modern people often ask, “How come, when the ashes started falling, the Pompeii people didn’t just leave?” The answer is that in Pompeii, it was the custom for the men to do the housework. They never even noticed the ash until it had for the most part covered the children. “Hey!” the men said (in Latin). “It’s mighty quiet around here!” This is one major historical reason why, to this very day, men tend to do extremely little in the way of useful housework.
   What often happens in my specific family unit is that my wife will say to me: “Could you clean Robert’s bathroom? it’s filthy.” So I’ll gather up the Standard Male Cleaning Implements, namely a spray bottle of Windex and a wad of paper towels, and I’ll go into Robert’s bathroom, and it always looks perfectly fine. I mean, when I hear the word “filthy” used to describe a bathroom, I think about this bar where I used to hang out called Joe’s Sportsman’s Lounge, where the men’s room had bacteria you could enter in a rodeo.
   Nevertheless, because I am a sensitive and caring kind of guy, I “clean” the bathroom, spraying Windex all over everything including the 600 action figures each sold separately that God forbid Robert should ever take a bath without, and then I wipe it back off with the paper towels, and I go back to whatever activity I had been engaged in, such as doing an important project on the Etch-a-Sketch, and a little while later my wife will say: “I hate to rush you, but could you do Robert’s bathroom? It’s really filthy.” She is in there looking at the very walls I just Windexed, and she is seeing dirt! Everywhere! And if I tell her I already cleaned the bathroom, she gives me this look that she has perfected, the same look she used on me the time I selected Robert’s outfit for school and part of it turned out to be pajamas.
   The opposite side of the dirt coin, of course, is sports. This is an area where men tend to feel very sensitive and women tend to be extremely callous. I have written about this before and I always get irate letters from women who say they are the heavyweight racquetball champion of some place like Iowa and are sensitive to sports to the point where they could crush my skull like a ripe grape, but I feel these women are the exception.
   A more representative woman is my friend Maddy, who once invited some people, including my wife and me, over to her house for an evening of stimulating conversation and jovial companionship, which sounds fine except that this particular evening occurred during a World Series game. If you can imagine such a social gaffe.
   We sat around the living room and Maddy tried to stimulate a conversation, but we males could not focus our attention on the various suggested topics because we could actually feel the World Series television and radio broadcast rays zinging through the air, penetrating right into our bodies, causing our dental fillings to vibrate, and all the while the women were behaving as though nothing were wrong. it was exactly like that story by Edgar Allan Poe where the murderer can hear the victim’s heart beating louder and louder even though he (the murder victim) is dead, until finally he (the murderer) can’t stand it anymore, and he just has to watch the World Series on television. That was how we felt.
   Maddy’s husband made the first move, coming up with an absolutely brilliant means of escape: He used their baby. He picked up Justine, their seven-months-old daughter, who was fussing a little, and announced: “What this child needs is to have her bottle and watch the World Series.” And just like that he was off to the family room, moving very quickly for a big man holding a baby. A second male escaped by pretending to clear the dessert plates. Soon all four of us were in there, watching the Annual Fall Classic, while the women prattled away about human relationships or something. it turned out to be an extremely pivotal game.

Snots At Sea

   Like most Americans, I was thrilled to death last February when our wealthy yachting snots won the coveted America’s Cup back from Australia’s wealthy yachting snots.
   It was not an easy victory. Our boys spent years experimenting with different designs for their boat before they came up with the innovative idea of having a submerged nuclear submarine tow it. “That was the real breakthrough,” explained Captain Dennis Conner. “We could hit nearly 50 miles per hour without even putting up our sails. Plus we had torpedoes.” It was American ingenuity at its best, and I think that, as a nation, we should be inspired to take up sailing as a popular mania, similar to the way, in previous years, we have taken up Bruce Springsteen and being Re publican.
   I have done some sailing myself, and let me tell you: There’s nothing quite like getting out on the open sea, where you can forget about the hassles and worries of life on land, and concentrate on the hassles and worries of life on the sea, such as death by squid. My son, Robert, has this book entitled Giants of Land, Sea, and Air, Past and Present, which I like to read to him at bedtime to insure that he won’t fall asleep until just after dawn. Here’s what this book says regarding squid: “The giant squid may reach a length of 55 feet, including its 35-foot tentacles.”
   My point is that while you should of course enjoy your sailing experience, you should take the routine marine precaution of being constantly aware that a creature the size of Yonkers, New York, could be oozing and sliming along just beneath the surface, watching you with humongous eyes. Another one of Robert’s books, The Big Book of Animal Records, states that the eye of a giant squid can get to be—this is an Amazing True Nature Fact, coming up here—16 inches across. Think about that. Think about the size of the whole eyeball. Think of the pranks you could play if you got hold of an eyeball like that.
   DELIVERY ROOM DOCTOR: Well, Mr. and Mrs. Foonster, here’s your newborn child!
   NEW PARENTS: AIIIIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.
   But this is not the time for lighthearted humor. This is a time to learn Safe Boating Practices, so that your sailing experience will not be ruined in the event of a squid attack. Here is the procedure recommended by boating safety experts:
   1. Do not panic. Remember that the squid does not necessarily want to eat you. Oh, sure, it wants to eat somebody, but this does not have to be you.
   2. Shout: “Here! Eat Ralph!”
   Boating safety experts recommend that you always keep a supply of unpopular guests on hand to push overboard as emergency marine sacrifices. They do not, however, have to be named Ralph. You can just claim they are named Ralph, because you are dealing with a squid.
   OK, that takes care of boating safety. Now let’s talk about the kind of boat you should select. There are many different kinds, the main ones being yachts, swoops, tankers, frigates, drawls, skeeters, fuggits, kvetches, and pantaloons. These are all basically the same. The only important factor to bear in mind, when selecting a boat, is that it should be “seaworthy,” meaning that if for some reason you accidentally drive it into another boat, or a reef, or a Howard Johnson’s Motor Lodge, you will not be held financially responsible.
   This means the type of boat you want is what veteran mariners refer to as a “stolen” boat, or, if this is not practical, a “rented” boat.
   I rented a boat once, in the Virgin Islands. My wife and I did this with another couple, and we agreed that I should be the captain, because I had the most sailing experience, in the form of sitting on various people’s sailboats drinking beer and remarking upon the weather. Fortunately the boat we rented had a motor in it. You will definitely want this feature on your sailboat too, because if you put up the sails, the boat tips way over, and you could spill your beer. This was a constant problem for Magellan. I put the motor on whenever we wanted to actually get somewhere, or if we came within two miles of something we might run into, such as another boat or a Virgin Island. On those rare occasions when I did attempt to sail, I was hampered by the fact that the only nautical commands my crew understood were:
   1. “Pull on that thing.”
   2. “No, the OTHER thing.”
   3. “No, the thing over THERE, dammit.”
   4. “Never mind.”
   Our navigational policy was always to steer the boat in the direction of restaurants and hotels that had real bathrooms. Our boat allegedly had a bathroom (or as we say aboard ship, a “bathroom”), but it was about the size of those styrofoam containers you get Egg McMuffins in, and it was mostly filled with the marine toilet, a complex and punitive device that at any moment you expected to see a tentacle come snaking out of. Which is why the No. 1 rule of the sea is: If you absolutely have to use the marine toilet, you want to send Ralph in there first.

Sic, Sic, Sic

   I would have to say that the greatest single achievement of the American medical establishment is nasal spray. Oh, I realize it can be overdone. A friend of mine named Tatnall claims he knew a woman who was so addicted to nasal spray that she carried some down the aisle on her wedding day. Her hand would go darting under her veil, and a snort would resound through the church. Tatnall swears this is true. So I fully agree that nasal-spray abuse is a serious problem and we certainly need some kind of enormous federal program to combat it.
   But aside from that, I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I’m saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.
   This is especially true when it comes to figuring out what is wrong with sick people. My experience has been that doctors will give you a clear-cut, understandable diagnosis only if you wander in with, say, an ice pick protruding from your skull. And even then, you have to pretend that you don’t know what’s wrong. If you say, “I have an ice pick in my skull,” the doctor will become irritated, because he spent all those years in medical school and he’s damned if he’s going to accept opinions from an untrained layperson such as yourself. “It conceivably could be an ice pick,” he’ll say, in a tone of voice that suggests he’s talking to a very stupid sheep, “but just in case I’m going to arrange for a test in which we remove a little snippet of your liver every week for eight weeks.” So your best bet is to keep your mouth shut and let the doctor diagnose the ice pick, which he will call by its Latin name.
   If you have a subtler problem, however, you may never find out what’s wrong. For example, a few months back, one side of my tongue swelled up. I tried everything—aspirin, beer, nasal spray—but my tongue was still swollen. So I went to a doctor. His receptionist began my treatment by having me sit in the waiting room where I read a therapeutic article in a 1981 issue of National Geographic. That took me maybe an hour, during which I learned a great deal about this ancient tribe of people who managed to build a gigantic and photogenic temple in a jungle several thousand years ago despite the fact that they were extremely primitive at the time.
   Step Two in the therapy was when a nurse put me in a little examination room with a paper-covered table, which evidently was emitting some kind of invisible healing rays because they had me sit there alone with it for 43 minutes by my watch. It wasn’t as boring as it sounds because there was a scale in there, so I could weigh myself for amusement.
   To culminate the treatment, the actual doctor took a few moments out from his busy schedule of renewing his subscription to National Geographic and renting additional space for people to wait in and came right into the room with me and actually looked at my tongue. He was in the room with me for 2 minutes and 30 seconds by my watch, at the end of which he told me that my problem was two Latin words, which I later figured out meant swollen tongue. He said I should come back in a week. I considered suggesting that, seeing how I had already been there for almost two hours, maybe I should just spend the week in the examination room, but I was afraid this would anger him and he would send me to the hospital for tests. I didn’t want to go to the hospital, because at the hospital as soon as they find out what your Blue Cross number is they pounce on you with needles the size of turkey basters. Those are the two most popular doctor options: to tell you to come back in a week, or to send you to the hospital for tests. Another option would be to say, “it sure beats the heck out of me why your tongue is swollen,” but that could be a violation of the Hippocratic Oath.
   What I finally did was talk to a woman I know who used to be a nurse but had to quit because she kept wanting to punch doctors in the mouth, and she suggested that I gargle with salt water. I did, and the swelling went right away. Although of course this could also have been because of the paper-covered table.
   I really envy my dog. When she gets sick or broken, we take her to the veterinarian, and he fixes her right up. No Latin words, no big deal. It’s a very satisfying experience, except of course for my dog, who routinely tries to launch herself out of the examining room through closed windows. I find myself thinking: why can’t I get medical care like this? How much more complicated can people be than dogs? I’m kind of hoping my dog’s tongue will swell up, because I’m dying to see how the veterinarian treats her. If he has her gargle with salt water, I’m going to start taking my problems to him.

The Light Side Of Smoking

   As you are aware, each year the U.S. Surgeon General emerges from relative obscurity into the limelight of public attention and if he sees his shadow, we have six more weeks of winter. No, all kidding aside, what he does is issue his annual report, where he tells you that smoking is bad for you. In fact, for a while, previous surgeons general got so lazy that they were turning in the same report, over and over, until finally one year Richard Nixon got ketchup stains on it.
   Anyway, the result of all this reporting is that the general public at large has gotten very strict about smoking. Hardly a day goes by when you don’t read a newspaper story like this:
   “SAN FRANCIsco-The city commissioners here yesterday approved a tough new anti-smoking ordinance under which if you see a person light a cigarette in a public place, you can spit in this person’s face.”
   I agree with this new strictness. And I’m not one of those holier-than-thou types who go around condemning smoking, drinking and senseless murder without ever having even tried them. I used to smoke cigarettes, plenty of them, sometimes two and three at a time when I had Creative Block and was hoping to accidentally set my office on fire so I could write a column about it.
   And then one morning, four years ago, something happened that I will never forget. I woke up, and I looked at myself in the mirror, because I happened to wake up in the bathroom, and I said to myself: “Dave, you have a wonderful wife, you have a newborn son, you have a good job, you have friends who care about you, you have a lawnmower that starts on the second or third pull—you have everything a man could possibly want, and a whole lifetime ahead of you to enjoy it in. Why not smoke a cigarette right now?” And so I did. I didn’t quit until two years later, at Hannah Gardner’s annual extravaganza eggnog party, when I was overcome by a giant weepy guilt attack while under the influence of Hannah’s annual eggnog, the recipe for which we should all hope to God never falls into the hands of the Russians.
   Not that it was easy to quit. Not at all. A few months back, I read a newspaper article that said the government, after much research, had decided that nicotine is an addictive drug, even worse than heroin, and I just had to laugh the bitter kind of laugh that Clark Gable laughs in Gone With the Wind when he realizes that the South has been reduced to a lump of carbon. I mean, surely the government has better things to spend its money on. Surely the government could have used these research funds to buy a military toilet seat, and just asked us former smokers about nicotine vs. heroin addiction. We could have simply pointed out that, when a commercial airliner takes off, the instant the wheels leave the ground, the pilot, who you would think would be busy steering or something, tells the smokers that they may light up. He does not tell the heroin addicts that they may stick their needles into themselves, does he? No, he doesn’t, because heroin addicts have enough self-control to survive a couple of heroin-free hours. But the pilot knows that if he doesn’t let the cigarette smokers get some nicotine into themselves immediately, they will sneak off to smoke in the bathroom, possibly setting it on fire, or, if already occupied by other smokers, they will try to get out on the wing.
   So we are talking about a powerful addiction here, and I frankly feel the government’s efforts to combat it are pathetic. The big tactic so far has been warnings on cigarette packages. The government seems to feel that smokers—these are people who, if they run out of cigarettes late at night in a hotel and have no change for the machine, will smoke used cigarettes from the sand-filled ashtrays next to the elevators, cigarettes whose previous owners could easily have diseases such as we associate with public toilet seats—the government believes that these same smokers will read their cigarette packages, as if they needed instructions on how to operate a cigarette, and then they’ll remark, with great surprise: “Look here! It says that cigarette smoking is Hazardous to Your Health!! How very fortunate that I read this package and obtained this consumer information! I shall throw these away right now!”
   No, we need something stronger than warnings. We need cigarette loads. For those of you who were never obnoxious 12-year-old boys, I should explain that a “load” is an old reliable practical joke device, a small, chemically treated sliver of wood that you secretly insert into a cigarette, and when the cigarette burns down far enough, the load explodes, and everybody laughs like a fiend except, of course, the smoker, who is busy wondering if his or her heart is going to start beating again. I think Congress ought to require the cigarette manufacturers to put loads in, say, one out of every 250 cigarettes. This would be a real deterrent to smokers thinking about lighting up, especially after intimate moments:
   MAN: Was it good for you? (inhales) WOMAN: It was wonderful. (inhales) Was it good for you? MAN: Yes. (inhales) I have an idea: Why don’t we BLAM!!
   What do you think? I think it would be very effective, and if it doesn’t work, we could have the Air Force spray something toxic on North and South Carolina.

Ear Wax In The Fog

   When you talk about the postderegulation airline industry, the three issues that inevitably arise are smoking, fog, and earwax. We’ll take them individually.
   Follow me closely here. You know those little earphones they give you on airplanes so you can listen to old Bill Cosby routines? OK, let’s assume that 20 million people have flown on earphone flights in the past 15 years. Let’s further assume that each person leaves one-sixteenth of an ounce of earwax on these phones (this is an average, of course; Nancy Reagan leaves much less). This means that in the last 15 years alone, the airlines have collected nearly 600 tons. Do you have any idea how large a blob that makes? Neither do I, so I called the folks at the Miami Public Library, who did a little research and informed me that it was the most disgusting question they had ever been asked.
   My question is this: Why do the airlines—why does any nonmilitary organization—need a blob of earwax that large? My personal theory is that they’re going to drop it on the radar apparatus at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, just so they can see the looks on the faces of passengers all over America when the ticket-counter agents say: “I’m afraid your flight has been cancelled due to earwax on the radar at O’Hare.” Any problem at O’Hare, even a minor plumbing malfunction, inevitably paralyzes air travel all over the free world. Nobody really knows why this is, but if you ask the ticket agent, he’ll come up with something just to drive you away: “Your flight is supposed to use the plane from flight 407, which is due in from Houston, only it couldn’t take off because the crew was supposed to arrive on flight 395 from O’Hare, but that plane never got to O’Hare because the captain, the handsome, brooding Mark Crandall, had seen Nikki and Paul leave the party together arm in arm and in a rage of jealousy, had decided to seduce Paul’s former lover Brenda, unaware that she had just found out about Steven’s fatal liver disease. So we’re looking at a delay of at least two hours.”
   But the airlines won’t use the earwax just yet. No, that’s their trump card, and they won’t play it until more people wise up about the fog. I figured it out several years ago. See, I live in an area that is never blanketed by fog. People often remark on this at parties. “Say what you will,” they remark, “but this area is never blanketed by fog, ha ha!” Except when I am trying to get back home from a distant airport, at which time it is always pea soup. “I’m afraid your destination is completely fogged in, Mr. Barry,” the ticket agent says, in the tone of voice you use when somebody else’s destination is fogged in and you’re going home in a half-hour to have a drink and watch Johnny Carson.
   Here’s how they do it: They have an agent permanently assigned to lurk in the bushes outside my home, and when he sees me walk out the door carrying a suitcase, he gets on the walkie-talkie. “Looks like he’s going to try to make a round trip via airplane again!” he whispers. This alerts his superiors back at airline headquarters that they should stop drilling holes into the heads of small furry woolen creatures and arrange to have a dense fog blanket transferred down from Canada via weather satellite.
   Ask yourself this question: If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today’s airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog? Are they concerned about passenger safety? Then why not let the passengers decide? Why not get on the public-address system and say: “Attention passengers. Your destination is very foggy. We think you’ll make it, but there’s always a chance you’ll crash on a remote mountaintop and be eaten by wolves. Your other option is to stay here in the airport for God knows how long, sitting in these plastic seats and eating $3.50 cheese sandwiches manufactured during the Truman administration. What do you say?” The gate agents would have to leap up on the counter to avoid being trampled by the hordes barging onto the plane.
   Which leads us to the question of whether smoking should be allowed on airplanes. The Founding Fathers, who had bales of foresight, specified in the U.S. Constitution that people could smoke on airplanes, but they had to sit near the toilets. Now, however, there’s a move afoot to ban smoking altogether on flights that last less than two hours. The cigarette industry is against this ban, their argument being that there is no Hard Evidence that cigarettes are anything short of wonderful, according to the highly skilled research scientists that the cigarette industry keeps in small darkened cages somewhere. Another strong anti-ban argument was raised by Congresssman Charlie Rose of North Carolina, who warned the Civil Aeronautics Board recently that people would sneak into the washrooms to smoke and might start fires. “There’s a significant problem if they were to go into washrooms for a smoke and forget where the used paper towels are stored,” observed Congressman Rose, who evidently feels that many smokers have extremely small brains.
   But I think he has a point. I think that if the CAB decides to ban smoking, it should require the airlines to install smoke detectors in the washrooms, so that if a person sets one off, it will activate an unusually powerful toilet mechanism that will flush the smoker right out of the plane. Of course, if I know the airlines, they’ll rig it so he lands on the radar apparatus at O’Hare.

1987: Look Back In Horror

January

   2—In College Bowl action, the University of Miami loses the national championship to Penn State when Vinny Testaverde, after selecting the
   “History” category, identifies World War II as “a kind of fish.”
   3—Oral Roberts tells his followers that unless they send him $4.5 million by the end of the month, God will turn him into a hypocritical money-grubbing slime bag.
   5—In response to growing pressure from the United States, the government of Colombia vows to track down its major drug dealers and, if necessary, remove them from the Cabinet.
   8—The Federal Aviation Administration announces that, in response to a routine questionnaire, 63 percent of the nation’s air traffic controllers stated that their primary career goals was “to defeat the forces of the Planet Wambeeno.”
   10—In the ongoing war against the federal deficit, the Reagan administration submits the first-ever $1 trillion budget.
   14—In New York City, officials of the justice Department’s Organized Crime Task Force announce that Anthony “Grain Embargo” DiPonderoso and Jimmy “Those Little Pins They Put in New Shirts” Zooroni have agreed to enter the Federal Nickname Exchange Program.
   16—In his first press conference since 1952, President Reagan, asked by reporters to comment on persistent allegations that he is “out of touch,” responds: “Thanks, but I just had breakfast.”
   18—The People’s Republic of China announces that “Deng Xiaoping” means “Big Stud Artichoke.”
   21—The Audi Corporation is forced to recall 250,000 cars after repeated incidents wherein parked Audis, apparently acting on their own, used their mobile phones to purchase stocks on margin.
   26—President Reagan tells Iran-contra scandal investigators that he “might have” approved the sale of arms to Iran.
   28—In the Middle East, Syria has its name legally changed to “Jordan.” A welcome calm settles over Beirut as the six remaining civilians are taken hostage.
   30—In Washington, the Internal Revenue Service unveils the new, improved W-4
   form, which is such a big hit that the experts who thought it up are immediately put to work on developing a policy for the Persian Gulf.

February

   1—A new policy requiring random drug testing of all airline pilots runs into a snag when nearly half of the Delta pilots are unable to hit the specimen bottle.
   2—Miami City Commissioner Rosario Kennedy, responding to a Herald report that taxpayers spent $111,549 to decorate her office says—we are not making this quotation up—”there’s not one item that really stands out. It’s not the Taj Mahal.” Donations of clothing and canned goods pour in from concerned taxpayers.
   3—In the ongoing war against the federal budget deficit, Congress gives itself a pay raise.
   4—The United States yacht Stars and Stripes recaptures the coveted America’s Cup when the Australian entry, Kookaburra, is sunk by a Chinese-made
   “Silkworm” missile. The U.S. Sixth Fleet steams toward the troubled region with orders “to form humongous targets.” Liberace goes to the Big Candelabra in the Sky.
   6—In a White House ceremony marking his 76th birthday, President Reagan attempts to blow out the hot line.
   7—Famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward reveals that, in a secret hospital interview, dying entertainer Liberace revealed that Woodward’s upcoming book, Veil, would be “a real page-turner.”
   8—True item: Senator Lloyd Bentsen, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, sends out a letter telling lobbyists that for $10,000 each, they can attend monthly breakfasts with him.
   9—Representative Arnold LaTreece announces that for $15,000 each, lobbyists can kiss him on the lips.
   10—George Bush announces that he is available for $12.50.
   11—President Reagan tells Iran-contra scandal investigators that he did not approve of the arms sale to Iran.
   15—George Bush reduces his price to $3.99, including the souvenir beverage mug.
   17—In Colombia, police arrest Carlos Lehder for jaywalking and discover, during a routine search, that his pockets contain 1,265,000 pounds of cocaine. Lehder claims to have “no idea” how it got there.
   19—Mario Cuomo announces that he doesn’t want to be president and immediately becomes the Democratic front-runner.
   22—George Bush announces that he doesn’t want to be president, either.
   22—Andy Warhol goes to the Big Soup Can in the Sky.
   23—Panic grips the nation as a terrorist group seizes 150,000 new, improved
   W-4 forms and threatens to send them to randomly selected Americans through the mail.
   23—Famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward reveals that, in a secret hospital interview, dying artist Andy Warhol revealed that Woodward’s forthcoming book, Veil, would be “available in bookstores everywhere.”
   24—President Reagan announces that he cannot remember whether he approved the sale of arms to Iran. In a quotation that we are not making up, the president tells White House reporters: “Everybody that can remember what they were doing on August 8, 1985, raise your hand.”
   25—White House reporters examine their diaries and discover, to their shock, that on August 8, 1985, they approved the sale of arms to Iran. They are immediately arrested.

March

   2—The Miami Grand Prix is won by Mrs. Rose Gridhorn, 83, of Hackensack, New jersey, driving a 1976 Chrysler New Yorker with the left blinker on.
   3—Comedian Danny Kaye dies moments after granting an interview to Bob Woodward.
   7—In the widening scandal on Wall Street, the heads of three major investment firms rob a liquor store.
   9—In Tallahassee, state legislators agree on a plan to tax professionals who perform services. A few hours later, they decide it also should apply to lawyers.
   11—Florida Governor “Bob” Martinez, who ran for office on a platform of opposing taxes, announces that he will support the new tax on services, until it is passed, then he will call for a referendum so voters can vote against the tax, although he will campaign for the tax, but then he will change his mind and announce that he is calling a special session of the Legislature to repeal the tax. Everybody naturally assumes that the governor is joking.
   13—Noncandidate Mario Cuomo, carrying out his normal duties as governor of New York state, meets with the heads of state of England, France, Norway, Sweden, and Germany.
   15—A barge loaded with garbage sets out into the Atlantic under the command of explorer/author Thor Heyerdahl, who is seeking to prove his theory that South America could have been discovered by ancient mariners sailing from Islip, Long Island, in crude garbage barges.
   18—The Southern Methodist University football team is suspended from intercollegiate athletics when National Collegiate Athletic Association investigators, after taking urine samples, determine that the school’s leading rusher, majoring in communications, is a horse. 2
   1—The IRS releases an even newer, simpler W-4 form in response to complaints from a number of taxpayers, all of whom will be audited for the rest of their lives.
   23—The Southern Methodist University horse is drafted by the Kansas City Chiefs.
   24—A place called Chad defeats Libya in some kind of war. This really happened.
   27—In what is hailed as a major arms race breakthrough, United States and Soviet arms negotiators in Geneva agree to wear matching outfits.
   30—In an illegal industrial waste dump somewhere in Louisiana, lightning strikes two adjacent putrid pools of festering corrosive toxic slime, setting off a bizarre chain of chemical reactions that cause the pools first to bubble, then slowly, horrifyingly, to solidify and pulsate upward, gradually forming themselves into shapes that, in the ghastly light of the flickering electrical storm, appear almost human. “Hi!” they shriek cheerfully into the swampland emptiness. “We’re Jim and Tammy Faye!”

April

   1—Speaking in unison, an estimated three dozen congressmen, all of them age
   43, all of them blond, and all of them named Dick, announce that they are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
   3—In the Persian Gulf, Iranians attack the Islip garbage barge, but are driven off by courageous flies.
   6—Noncandidate Mario Cuomo, in the pursuit of his normal gubernatorial duties, reaches a tentative pact with Soviet arms negotiators.
   12—At an art auction, Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers fetches the highest price ever paid for a painting, $39.8 million, paid by grateful Miami taxpayers wishing to hang it in the office of City Commissioner Rosario Kennedy.
   13—True Anecdote: In National League baseball action, the Atlanta Braves’ Dion James hits a ball that would have been caught easily, except that in midair it strikes and kills a dove.
   14—In Colorado, Gary Hart declares his candidacy for the presidential nomination, making the announcement while standing in front of a dramatic backdrop of soaring mountains, towering pine trees and four Miami Herald reporters disguised as rhododendrons.
   15—The lifeless body of Atlanta Braves player Dion James is found under an enormous mound of dove droppings.
   16—President and Mrs. Reagan release their tax returns.
   19—The IRS sends back the Reagans’ tax returns, gently pointing out that you’re supposed to fill them out.
   22—Crack U.S. counterintelligence agents in Moscow begin to suspect that the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow, constructed by Soviet labor, might be bugged, when one of them sneezes in the ambassador’s office and six chairs say,
   “Gesundheit.”
   23—The National Basketball Association grants Miami a franchise. The new team will be named The Enormous Bloodsucking Insects.
   26—jack Kemp announces that he is running for president, pledging that, if elected, he will deepen his voice.
   30—Following a lengthy and dramatic trial, a confused New Jersey jury awards custody of a 3-year-old boy to a 6week-old girl.

May

   2—Late at night on a Washington street, four Miami Herald reporters on routine patrol notice that Gary Hart appears to be spending the weekend with an attractive woman who is not his wife. The reporters confront Hart, who explains that there is no woman, and he hardly knows her, and she is actually his uncle, and the voters don’t care about candidates’ private lives anyway. Satisfied, the reporters decide to write a story about Hart’s monetary policy.
   3—Like a raging unquenchable forest fire, the Gary Hart story sweeps across the nation, as voters are consumed by a burning need to know more about the candidate’s monetary views.
   4—The Hart story becomes so hot that issue-oriented Phil Donahue devotes a show to it, preempting the sexchange lesbian surrogate-mother nude-dancer ex-priests.
   5—The presidential campaign of Gary Hart experiences another “close call” when a Miami Herald reporter receives a tip that Hart spent a night in Bimini aboard a boat named Monkey Business with an attractive woman who is not his wife. Fortunately, Hart is able to explain that he has never been on a boat and there is no such place as “Bimini” and the person who went there with the woman was actually a being from the Planet Buppo who is able to take the form of leading presidential candidates. Satisfied, the reporter writes a lengthy analysis of Hart’s views on the NATO alliance.
   6—An angry Gary Hart is forced to withdraw from the race after word leaks out that the Washington Post has obtained documented evidence that he once proposed tying the prime rate to the Index of Leading Economic Indicators.
   7—Citing alleged “bisexual activity,” officials of the Assemblies of God Church vote to have Jim Bakker defrocked. Then they hastily vote to have him frocked again.
   16—Rita Hayworth dies moments after confiding to Bob Woodward that his forthcoming book, Veil, would be out “just in time for Christmas gift giving.”
   29—Nineteen-year-old Mathias Rust, a German, flying a single-engine Cessna airplane, manages to cross 400 miles of Soviet airspace to reach Red Square in Moscow, where he narrowly avoids colliding with a Delta Air Lines flight en route from Pittsburgh to Cleveland.
   30—Caspar Weinberger orders 5,000 single-engine Cessna airplanes.

June

   1—The public responds with massive displays of sympathy to reports that a number of totally unsuspecting Dade County politicians were cruelly tricked into believing that a private duplex where a man allegedly sold stolen suits was in fact a major department store. “It was a mistake that anyone could have made,” said a police spokesman, “provided that he had the IQ of Cheez Whiz.”
   2—True Item: In the ongoing Iran-contra hearings the committee learns that a country named Brunei contributed $10 million to help the contras, except Fawn Hall or somebody typed a wrong number, so the money ended up in the Swiss bank account of a total stranger. This helps explain why, despite all the elaborate assistance efforts with secret codes and passwords and everything, the only actual aid ever received by the contras was a six-month trial subscription to Guns and Ammo.
   5—Another True Item: In Venice for the European Economic Summit, President Reagan, unaware that his words are being broadcast over an open microphone, tells a joke wherein God gradually reduces a gondolier’s intelligence until the gondolier switches from singing “O Sole Mio” to
   “When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”
   7—Brunei receives 314,334 urgent personal mail solicitations from TV evangelists.
   8—In the most dramatic Iran-contra testimony to date, Fawn Hall, played by Farrah Fawcett, testifies that, as justice Department investigators closed in, she and Oliver North stayed late in their White House basement office and “colorized” a number of classic black-and-white films.
   13—After a highly controversial trial in New York, “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz is acquitted in connection with a subway shooting incident wherein he claims he was attacked by a gang of prominent Wall Street investors.
   18—A survey of Florida residents reveals that their No. 1 concern about the state is that “not enough people are walking around with guns.” Alarmed, the state Legislature passes a law under which all citizens who are not actually on Death Row will be required to carry revolvers.
   22—Fred Astaire dies in the arms of Bob Woodward.
   24—In a ground-breaking experiment, medical researchers reduce a gondolier’s intelligence to the bare minimum required to sustain life, and the gondolier says: “Everybody that can remember what they were doing on August 8, 1985, raise your hand.”
   29—In Wimbledon action, John McEnroe kills a line judge and is given a stern warning.

July

   1—In a contest sponsored by a pesticides company, a Broward County insect is declared the largest cockroach in the country, narrowly edging out Phyllis Schlafly.
   4—The Hormel Company marks the 50th anniversary of Spam in festivities featuring a full-size, fully functioning suspension bridge constructed entirely out of the popular luncheon substance.
   7—The central figure in the Iran-contra hearings, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, becomes an instant national folk hero when, with his eyes glistening and his voice cracking with emotion, he courageously admits, before a worldwide television audience, that he is very patriotic.
   9—Oral Roberts reveals that he can raise the dead. He is rushed to the White House.
   11—The Iran-contra hearings reach their dramatic peak when Lieutenant Colonel North, his eyes glistening and his voice cracking with emotion, makes a sweeping patriotic hand gesture and knocks over his bottle of Revlon Eye Glistener.
   15—The giant Citicorp bank announces that it has agreed to forgive Mexico’s
   $56.3 billion debt in exchange for 357.9 gazillion chickens.
   18—In Hollywood, plans are formulated for a major motion picture, based on the Oliver North story, starring Sylvester Stallone as North, Fawn Hall as herself and Helen Keller as the president.
   21—The discovery of “superconductors”—materials that offer no resistance to electricity even at relatively high temperatures—creates a worldwide stir of excitement among the kind of dweebs who always had their Science Fair projects done early.
   24—In the ongoing Iran-contra hearings, the committee hears two days of dramatic testimony from Mario Cuomo, who explains that he has decided to stay out of the presidential race so he can fulfill his obligations as governor of New York.
   27—Officials at the National Zoo in Washington are saddened by the death of the tiny infant cub of rare giant pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, who are described as “distraught” by their close friend, Bob Woodward. Edwin Meese is linked to the Lincoln assassination.
   30—In Moscow, the Embassy spy scandal deepens when it is learned that for the past six years, the “wife” of the U.S. ambassador has in fact been four male KGB agents wearing what State Department officials describe as “a very clever disguise.”

August

   2—South Florida’s dreams of a first-class sports facility come true at last with the opening of Joe Robbie Stadium, featuring comfortable seating, excellent visibility, plenty of bathrooms, and nearly five parking spaces.
   3—Political activist Donna Rice, in her continuing effort to avoid publicity, sells her story to ABC television.
   6—As “Ollie-mania” continues to sweep the country, one of the most popular video-arcade games in the country is a new one called—this is true—”Contra.” The way it works is, there are two soldiers on the screen, and when you put in a quarter, it never gets to them.
   10—The U.S. space probe Meanderer II, after a journey of six years and many millions of miles, passes within 400 miles of the surface of Neptune, sending back dramatic color photographs of a Delta Air Lines jet.
   16—On the 10th anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death, tens of thousands of fans gather in Memphis to hear Bob Woodward discuss his final moments with the bulging superstar. At the same time, thousands of other people gifted with “New Age” consciousness celebrate the Harmonic Convergence by picking at their straitjacket straps with their teeth.
   20—In Miami, alert Metro-rail police arrest a woman for permitting her child to eat a Vienna sausage. Bystanders applaud this courageous law-enforcement action by firing their revolvers into the air.
   22—Rumors circulate that Gary Hart will re-enter the presidential race. Johnny Carson places his writers on Full Red Alert.
   25—In what is hailed as a landmark ruling, the Supreme Court decides, by a 7
   to 2 vote, that you cannot count three oranges as one item in the express checkout lane “unless they are all in the same package.”
   27—Georgia Senator Sam Nunn announces that he doesn’t want to be president. Cuomo challenges him to a debate.
   28—In the Persian Gulf, tensions MOunt as a U.S. gunboat engages in a scuffle with actor Sean Penn.

September

   1—The FAA, responding to consumer complaints, issues tough new rules under which airlines are required to notify passengers “within a reasonable period of time” if their plane has crashed.
   2—In Washington, reporters notice that at some point—possibly during a speech by Senator Inouye, when everybody was asleep—the ongoing Iran-contra hearings turned into the ongoing confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork.
   7—As the arrival of Pope John Paul II approaches, the South Florida news media begin mass-producing special helpful news supplements advising the public on how to avoid the massive crowds and traffic and heat.
   8—Researcher Shere Hite releases her scientific new book, Men Are Scum. The South Florida news media continue to generate massive quantities of helpful hurricane-style news alerts concerning the upcoming papal visit and what the public should do to avoid massive crowds and traffic and heat and crime.
   9—In Washington, D.C., ground is broken for the $25.4 million Presidential Polyp Museum. South Florida experiences an epidemic of hernias suffered by residents attempting to pick up newspapers filled with helpful papal supplements informing them how to cope with massive crowds and traffic and heat and crime and disease and death.
   10—IT is a glorious moment for South Florida as Pope John Paul II is greeted by an estimated crowd of 3,000 soldiers garbed in festive camouflage outfits, frowning warily at 1,500 news media personnel crouching on the ground to confirm that the manhole covers are, in fact, welded shut.
   12—In the ongoing hearings, Senator Joseph Biden pledges to consider the Bork nomination “with total objectivity,” adding, “You have that on my honor not only as a senator, but also as the Prince of Wales.”
   17—The market-savvy McDonald’s Corporation, capitalizing on the popularity of the movie Fatal Attraction, introduces a new menu item, Boiled McRabbits. 2
   1—Professional football players go on strike, demanding the right to “have normal necks.” Negotiations begin under the guidance of mediator Mario Cuomo.
   28—Tensions ease in the Persian Gulf as a Delta Air Lines flight, en route from Boston to Newark, successfully lands on the U.S. carrier Avocado.

October

   1—Senator Joseph Biden is forced to withdraw from the Democratic presidential race when it is learned that he is in fact an elderly Norwegian woman. On the Republican side, the spectacular Reverend Pat Robertson announces his candidacy for president, buoyed by strong popularity among humor columnists.
   8—Three hundred prominent law professors sign a petition stating that Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork has a “weenie beard.”
   12—Hurricane Floyd, packing a wind estimated at 14 miles per hour, lashes South Florida, wreaking more than $67.50 worth of havoc. Governor “Bob” Martinez, after touring the devastated area via golf cart, pledges that he will request federal disaster relief, then campaign against it.
   15—In an effort to establish that she is not a bimbo, Jessica Hahn appears nude in Playboy magazine. We are pretty sure we must have made this item up.
   19—In Norman, Okla., a renegade automatic bank teller known to its followers only as “The Leader” sends a message out on a special data-transmission line to New York. Within seconds, Wall Street is gripped by the worst computer riot in history.
   20—The Wall Street computers continue to rage out of control, threatening that if any attempt is made to subdue them, they will start electrocuting investment bankers. Tragically, it turns out that they are only bluffing.
   22—As the stock market is brought under control, major brokerage firms run expensive prime-time TV commercials reassuring the public that this is a good time to get back into the market, prompting the public to wonder how come these firms didn’t spend a few bucks last week to warn everybody to get the hell out.
   23—The Senate rejects Bork. President Reagan, informed of this by his aides, angrily responds: “Who?”
   25—The Senate Transportation committee recommends the federal speed limit be raised on highways going through boring or ugly areas, so drivers can get through them quicker. “In Indiana, for instance,” the committee says,
   “it should be 135 miles per hour.”
   29—The Minnesota Twins win the World Series. President Reagan, as is the custom, calls up manager Tom Kelly and nominates him to the Supreme Court.

November

   1—In the ongoing heroic effort to trim the federal budget deficit, House and Senate conferees agree not to order appetizers.
   7—Totally true item: The Herald refuses to publish an episode of the comic strip “Bloom County” because it contains the quotation, “Reagan sucks.” To explain this decision, the Herald runs a story containing the quotation, “Reagan sucks.” Several days later, in response to a letter from an irate “Bloom County” fan, the Herald prints an explanatory note containing the quotation, “Reagan sucks.”
   8—Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, large chunks of his scalp falling off, angrily demands the United States do something about “acid rain.”
   10—Don Johnson announces he is leaving Miami, dealing a severe blow to the area’s hopes to repeat as winner of the Biggest Cockroach Contest.
   12—In continuing media coverage of the “character issue,” presidential candidates named Bruce “Dick” Babbitt and Albert “Dick” Gore, Jr., state that they have tried marijuana, but no longer use it. “Now we just drink gin till we throw up,” they state.
   13—George Bush reveals that he tried to smoke marijuana, but nobody would give him any.
   15—In their continuing heroic deficit-reduction efforts, House and Senate conferees agree to continue working right through their 2:30 racquetball appointment.
   17—In Geneva the final obstacle to a superpower summit is removed as U.S. negotiators agree not to notice the mark on Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s forehead.
   22—In ceremonies marking his retirement as secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger is presented with a pen-and-pencil set, manufactured by the General Dynamics Corporation for $352.4 million.
   24—The city of Cleveland, Ohio, announces that it has developed tactical nuclear weapons, and does not wish to hear any more jokes.
   29—The world financial community’s faith in the U.S. economy is restored as heroic House and Senate conferees hammer out a breakthrough compromise deficit-reduction measure under which $417.65 will be slashed from the
   $13.2 billion pastry budget of the Federal Bureau of Putting Up Road Signs with Kilometers on Them.
   30—In a pre-summit public relations gambit designed to show that he is a normal human, Mikhail Gorbachev is interviewed by Tom Brokaw, who, clearly nervous, addresses the Soviet leader as “Premier Forehead Mark.”

December

   1—For the first time, all 257 presidential candidates appear in a televised debate, which is beamed via satellite to a nationwide live audience consisting of Mrs. Brendaline Warblette of Elkhart, Indiana, who tells the press that, after viewing the debate, she leans toward “What’s his name, Cuomo.”
   2—In a widely hailed legal decision, the judge in the bitter divorce dispute between Joan Collins and Peter Holm orders them both shot. Mikhail Gorbachev appears on jeopardy.
   5—In a cost-cutting move, financially troubled Eastern Airlines announces that its domestic flights will operate without engines. “Most of them never take off anyway,” explains a spokesman.
   8—In Washington, the long-awaited U.S.-Soviet summit meeting gets off to an uncertain start as President Reagan attempts to nominate Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to the Supreme Court.
   9—The summit concludes on a triumphant note as, in the culmination of 10
   years of negotiations between the superpowers, Gorbachev and New York Governor Mario Cuomo sign a historic agreement under which both sides will move all of their mid—and short-range long-term strategic tactical nuclear weapons 150 feet to the left.
   12—Michael Jackson, angered over persistent media reports that he has had extensive plastic surgery, strikes a People magazine reporter with one of his antenna stalks.
   15—Under intense pressure from the United States to reduce the trade deficit, Japanese auto manufacturers agree to give their cars really ugly names.
   18—Playboy magazine offers Tammy Faye Bakker a record $1.5 million if she will promise never, ever to pose nude.
   23—Motor Trend magazine names, as its Car of the Year, the new Nissan Rat Vomit.
   27—Oscar C. Klaxton, an employee of the U.S. Department for Making Everybody Nervous, wins a $10,000 prize for dreaming up the concept of a deadly invisible “hole” in the ozone layer.”
   28—Cleveland declares war on “Chad.”
   31—The year ends on a tragic note as an Iowa farmer backs up his tractor without looking and accidentally kills an estimated 14 blond 43-year-old Democratic presidential contenders named Dick. Knowledgeable observers suggest, however, that this will have little impact on anything.

Air Bags For Wind Bags

   Every now and then I like to suggest surefire concepts by which you readers can make millions of dollars without doing any honest work. Before I tell you about the newest concept, I’d like to apologize to those of you who were stupid enough to attempt the previous one, which, as you may recall, involved opening up Electronic Device Destruction Centers.
   The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic devices, such as televisions and VCRS, in to the destruction centers, where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers. With their devices thus permanently destroyed, consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones repaired at so-called factory service centers, which in fact consist of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic devices with cheap cigars and going, “Lookit all them wires in there!”
   I thought the Electronic Device Destruction Center was a sure-fire concept, but apparently I was wrong, to judge from the unusually large amount of explosives I received in the mail from those of you who lost your life savings and, in some cases, key organs. This made me feel so bad that I have been sitting here for well over five minutes wracking my brains, trying to think of an even more sure-fire moneymaking concept for you.
   One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let’s say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would inflate—FWWAAAAAAPPPP—thus rendering him too large to fit through the plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law. (“Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAAPPPP.” This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently support a law requiring air bags on congressmen. The problem is that your potential market is very small: There are only around 500 members of Congress, and some of them are already too large to fit on normal aircraft.
   But fortunately for you, I have come up with an even better money-making concept: The “Mister Mediocre” fastfood restaurant franchise. I have studied American eating preferences for years, and believe me, this is what people want. They don’t want to go into an unfamiliar restaurant, because they don’t know whether the food will be very bad, or very good, or what. They want to go into a restaurant that advertises on national television, where they know the food will be mediocre. This is the heart of the Mister Mediocre concept.
   The basic menu item, in fact the only menu item, would be a food unit called the “patty,” consisting of—this would be guaranteed in writing—”100
   percent animal matter of some kind.” All patties would be heated up and then cooled back down in electronic devices immediately before serving. The Breakfast Patty would be a patty on a bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, pretend-bacon bits, Cheez Whiz, a Special Sauce made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle, and a little slip of paper stating: “Inspected by Number 12.” The Lunch or Dinner Patty would be any Breakfast Patties that didn’t get sold in the morning. The Seafood Lover’s Patty would be any patties that were starting to emit a serious aroma. Patties that were too rank even to be Seafood Lover’s Patties would be compressed into wads and sold as “Nuggets.”
   Mister Mediocre restaurants would have a “salad bar” offering lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, pretend-bacon bits, Cheez Whiz and a Special House Dressing made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle, tended by an employee chosen on the basis of listlessness, whose job would be to make sure that all of these ingredients had been slopped over into each other’s compartments.
   Mister Mediocre restaurants would offer a special “Children’s Fun Pak” consisting of a patty containing an indelible felt-tipped marker that youngsters could use to write on their skin.
   Also, there would be a big sign on the door that said:
   DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH REGULATIONS!
   ALL EMPLOYEES MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING THIS RESTAURANT!
   If you’re a Smart Investor who would like to get a hold of a Mister Mediocre restaurant franchise before the federal authorities get wind of this, all you need to do is send me a fairly large amount of money. In return, I’ll send you a complete Startup Package consisting of an unsigned letter giving you permission to use the Mister Mediocre concept. You will also of course be entitled to free legal advice at any time. Like, for example, if you have a situation where your Drivethru customers are taking one bite from their patties and then having seizures that cause them to drive over pedestrians in a fatal manner, you just call me up. “Hey,” I’ll advise you, for free. “Soufids like you need a lawyer!”

Iowa’s Safe But You’ll Be Sorry

   Here are some helpful summer vacation Travel Tips, designed to help you make sure that your “dream vacation” will be just as fun and smooth and fatality-free as it can possibly be.
   This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly, because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under which it sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has “deregulated” the airline industry. What this means for you, the consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any rules whatsoever. They can show snuff movies. They can charge for oxygen. They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill Person School. They can conserve fuel by ejecting husky passengers over water. They can ram competing planes in midair. These innovations have resulted in tremendous cost savings, which have been passed along to you, the consumer, in the form of flights with amazingly low fares, such as $29. Of course certain restrictions do apply, the main one being that all these flights take you to Newark, New jersey, and you must pay thousands of dollars if you want to fly back out.
   And now, for those of you who are planning to take your vacations abroad this summer, we have these words of reassurance from the travel industry, which by the way will be wanting all the tour money up front this year: Relax!
   There is no need to be worried about the fact that most foreign countries are crawling with violent anti-American terrorists with no regard for human life! Experts do advise, however, that you take the simple common-sense precaution of renouncing your U.S. citizenship and wearing a turban. Also, while in public places abroad, you want to make a point of making loud remarks such as: “Say! I speak English surprisingly well, considering I am not a U.S. citizen!” and “Unlike a U.S. citizen, I’m wearing a turban!”
   Most Americans, however, plan to “play it safe” this year and vacation near the exact geographical center of the United States, as far as possible from the Libyan navy. Come July, we could have millions of people clotted together in Iowa, looking for public toilets. So I thought it might be a good idea to find out what Iowa has in store for us, attractionwise. I called up their tourism bureau and spoke to a nice woman named Skip Strittmatter, who told me that they have a whole list of 25 Top Tourist Attractions in Iowa, including Des Moines, the Mississippi River, ethnic festivals (“We’re one of the top states in ethnic festivals,” says Skip Strittmatter), and late in July a big bicycle ride across Iowa on a bicycle. “It’s quite famous,” says Skip Strittmatter, who also notes that you can bet on dog races in both Council Bluffs and Dubuque.
   Another major reason to be attracted to Iowa is the annual Riceville Mosquito Shootout. This is still the truth. Riceville is a small town on the Wapsipinicon (Indian for “white potato”) River, the result being that the town has mosquitoes,a fact which it has turned into a Tourist Attraction by having an annual event wherein they distribute roughly 400 cans of Raid, generously donated by the manufacturer, Johnson Wax, to the townspeople. Then, at a prearranged time, they sound the tornado siren and everybody rushes outside and blows the hell out of the local mosquito population, which doesn’t return for sometimes up to a week and a half, depending on rain. The Shootout is preceded by a picnic where they give away mosquito-related prizes, including one year a working telephone shaped like an insect, generously donated by Johnson Wax. The dial was on the bottom.
   I got all this information straight from the man who conceived the whole Mosquito Shootout concept, M. E. Messersmith, editor and publisher of the Riceville Recorder. He tells me that more and more non-Riceville people are showing up at the Shootout every year, and I think you should definitely make it the cornerstone of your vacation plans, if they decide to have it again, which they probably will, only they haven’t set a definite date. I asked Messersmith if there were any other attractions in the Riceville area that people might want to visit after they experience the Shootout, and he quickly reeled off a lengthy list including beautiful farmland, a lake with fish in it, farms, a nine-hole golf course, crops of different kinds, a bowling alley, and agriculture. Plus, Messersmith noted, Riceville is Just 40 minutes away from the world-famous Mayo Clinic,” which I suppose would be mighty handy if your touring party got trapped for any length of time in a giant cloud of Raid.
   I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that Iowa is the only safe and fun place to go this summer. I’m certain Kansas has also cooked up plenty of attractions. My recommendation is: Take an extra day, and see both. And let’s not forget some of the other fine natural attractions we have here in the U.S.A., such as Theme Land, Theme World, Theme-Park World, ThemeLand Park, ThemeLandWorld Park, and Six Flags over Adventure Park Land Theme World. All of these fine attractions offer Fun for the Whole Family, such as food, rides, food, and Comical Whimsy in the form of college students wearing costumes with enormous heads. These would make ideal disguises for terrorists.