Chapter 13. Car Repair

   The three keys to trouble-free motoring: animal traps, a wading pool, and this fact-crammed chapter
   Most common car problems are caused by pets. The best way to avoid these problems is preventive maintenance, by which I mean always checking your car for pets before you start it. You should also change your oil all the time. This is what your top race car drivers recommend. Of course, your top race car drivers also routinely drive into walls at speeds upwards of 180 miles an hour, so I don’t know that we should accept their opinions as gospel.

Handy Car Maintenance Checklist

   ENGINE. The engine is the large, filthy object under your hood, unless you live in a really bad neighborhood. To understand the importance of proper maintenance, let’s take a look at what goes on inside your engine when you turn the ignition key. This will require you to cut the engine open with a blowtorch, but I think you’ll be glad you did.
   When you turn the key, gasoline comes rushing out of the gas tank and electricity comes rushing out of the battery, and they meet in the engine, where they explode with a force that could easily reduce the engine to hundreds of pieces of red-hot shrapnel traveling at high speeds and capable of destroying every living thing within 50 feet. But this will probably not occur if every one of the 63,000 parts that make up the engine is working perfectly, which is why you should maintain your engine. Every six or seven thousand meters, open up the hood and inspect the engine closely. It should have many random tubes and wires running off toward other areas of the car. Newer engines should also have oriental writing.

How To Change Your Oil

   1. Start your car and allow it to warm up.
   2. Lie on your back and inch along under the car until you locate a little boltlike object that you cannot remove without a wrench, then inch back out and locate a wrench.
   3. Inch back under and rotate the boltlike object counterclockwise until oil starts gushing out, just like in those old movies where John Wayne and his sidekick discover oil and dance around, except whereas they are dancing vertically in glee, you will be dancing horizontally in pain, inasmuch as the oil has been heated to roughly 6,000 degrees by the engine.
   4. Speaking of the engine, I forgot to tell you to turn it off. That should have been Step 2. I’ll try to remember to correct that before this book goes to the printer, so as to avoid a lot of unnecessary engine damage and death.
   5. Get some oil and pour it into an orifice in the engine until you see little rivulets of oil running across the driveway because you forgot to put the little bolt back in the engine, which I suppose I should have told you to do back in Step 3, which will be Step 4 once I move the current Step 4 to Step 2, where it belongs, but frankly, I’m tired of having to think of every tiny little detail for you.
   TRANSMISSION. The truth is, there is nothing you can do about your transmission. Nobody knows how transmissions work, or even where they come from. They just arrive at car factories in unmarked crates, and the workers put them into the cars. Many people believe transmissions are created by beings from other solar systems. There is evidence to support this theory, namely transmission manuals, which contain bizarre diagrams and deranged alien commands such as: “Using a 6.57 reductionended canister wrench, rotate the debenture nut 6 degrees centigrade, taking care not to disenfranchise the gesticulation valve.” So if something goes wrong with your transmission, your best bet is to just give your car to the poor and claim a tax deduction.
   TIRES. Tires are extremely important, for without them the tire industry, as we now know it, would cease to exist. You should inspect your tires frequently for signs of tread and obscure little letters and numbers on the sides, which represent significant events in the lives of the tire factory employees. For example, A78-13 means “All 78 of us tire factory employees went out and got really drunk last night, so maybe 13 of the tires we make today will be any good.”
   EXTERIOR. Your car’s exterior takes a real beating, especially during the summer. Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, the sun beats down on your car with harmful rays that can fade the paint and kill you if you spend any time outside trying to do anything about it. So the hell with the exterior.
   EXHAUST SYSTEM. This is located under the car, smeared with road kills. From time to time you should hose it down or drive briskly through a wading pool.

Chapter 14. Redecorate Your House In A Day: And Stick “Aesthetics” Back Where It Belongs, In The Dictionary

   The cheapest way to redecorate your home is to cover every horizontal surface in it with home decorating magazines filled with tasteful pictures of the interiors of homes belonging to people who spend more money on end tables in one month than you will spend on food in your entire life.
   A much more expensive approach is to hire an interior decorator. Interior decorators are people who have spent years studying the principles of color, shape, and texture, until they have reached the point where they would rather die than agree with an ordinary person such as yourself on a matter of taste. So what you have to do is trick your interior decorator into believing you want the opposite of what you really want. If you want a warm, cozy, intimate look, show the decorator a picture of a General Motors brake-assembly plant. If you want a rustic look, show the decorator a picture of the Sistine Chapel. You’ll get what you want, and the decorator will think you didn’t, so everybody will be happy.

Redecorating Your Kitchen In Five Easy-For-Me-To-Say Steps

   1. To get some inspiration, read a batch of home decorating magazine articles about people who completely remodeled their kitchens even though they’re incompetent jerks. These articles always begin with a black-and-white photograph of a horrible, dingy, 1950s style kitchen, with unclean plates strewn all over and rats lounging around and waving at the camera. Then you see a glossy color photograph of a spectacularly modern kitchen that is clean enough for neurosurgery and is at least six times as large as the kitchen in the other photograph. It is obviously a completely different kitchen, probably in another state.
   2. Once you have been inspired, take a hard look at your own kitchen. What don’t you like about it? Is it the layer of grease and scum that has gradually built up on all the surfaces over the years, to the point where the insects have trouble getting enough traction to climb up to the counters? Or is it the color scheme? Are you among the millions of unfortunate American families whose appliances are Harvest Gold or (God help you) Avocado? Have you ever wondered why, of all the colors they had to choose from, major appliance manufacturers for many years insisted on making everything Harvest Gold or Avocado, two of the ugliest colors ever devised by the mind of man, colors more appropriate for stomach secretions than home decorating? Were they Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite colors or something?
   Whatever the reason, people finally came to their senses, and you can no longer find appliances in Harvest Gold or Avocado except in stores that have special sections catering to people with bad taste. Appliances now come in many attractive colors, all of which you should ignore, because appliances should be white. So should toilets. It is nature’s way. It is the American way. I am sure that the only reason the U.S. Constitution does not specifically require that appliances and toilets be white is that the Founding Fathers never dreamed anybody would be stupid enough to use any other color.
   3. Once you’ve decided on your color scheme (white), you should get a large sum of money somehow and go buy the actual appliances. The big issue here is whether you should get a regular oven or a microwave oven. A regular oven is hot inside, so when you put a tuna casserole inside, it gets hot. Is everybody with me so far? A microwave oven, on the other hand, is not hot inside. Instead, it has these tiny little rays (hundreds of them could easily fit into a woman’s purse) that are manufactured in Japan. These rays travel right through the casserole dish at speeds approaching 250 miles an hour and slam into the tuna, causing it to get hot. The advantage of microwave ovens is that since only the contents get hot, you can pick the dish up with your bare hands. The disadvantage is that as soon as you open the lid, the microwaves come whizzing out in random directions, and could strike your eyeballs or furniture.
   4. Once you’ve bought your appliances, you should get some graph paper and draw up a floor plan of your new kitchen, showing where the new appliances will go. To make this project as difficult as possible, try to put each new appliance at least 11 feet from the one it’s replacing. The only exception is the refrigerator. You must not move it, because all the jelly and ketchup you spilled under there over the years and never bothered to clean up has festered and evolved into a grotesque and durable life form that, if exposed to direct sunlight, could awaken and decide to take over the world. The responsible course is to put the new refrigerator on top of the old one.
   5. Your new kitchen is almost done! All that remains is for you to take out the old appliances and put in the new ones according to your plan! And put in a new floor! And cabinets! And change the wiring and plumbing all around! Let me know how it goes.

Chapter 15. Build Your Own House: On Second Thought, Don’t

   Here’s a project for the really ambitious do-it-yourselfer with no grasp of reality: building an entire house. Not only will you save scads of money, but you’ll be continuing a tradition that dates back to pioneer days, when our hardy forefathers used to whack down trees personally and form them into crude log cabins, which they would live in for maybe two days, after which they would migrate westward, because nothing in the world is worse than living in a crude log cabin. I mean, there’s only one room, so you’re all lying there at night listening to each other’s bodily noises and smelling the aroma of congealing muskrat, or whatever pioneer dish you ate, and you hardly ever get any sleep. That’s why everybody has such vacant stares in those old pioneer photographs.
   So in the interest of continuing this fine old pioneer tradition, you should build your own house, following the easy, step-by-step series of steps below.
   Step #1: Draw a plan
   You should never start to build without some idea of what the house ought to look like when it’s finished, so get yourself a piece of paper and a nice, sharp pencil, and draw yourself a house plan. The plan should consist of two parts: an outside view showing what the completed house would look like if it had smoke curling out of its chimney, and an inside view showing the location of windows, appliances, rooms, etc.
   Step #2: Borrow an enormous sum of money from a bank
   This is the trickiest part of home building, because you’ll have to convince the banker that you know a lot about building, which is, of course, a lie. The best approach is to sprinkle your conversation with all kinds of technical building jargon.
   BANKER: So, Mr. Jones, just how much money were you thinking of borrowing?
   YOU (showing your plan to the banker): Well, as you can see from this plan, to insure that the lateral stability of the main structural cross-members is adequate for the stress on the head jamb likely to be created by the rotational torque of the upper sash top rail, I’ll need to use a vapor degreasing system with at least 64 kilobytes of random access memory.
   BANKER (extremely impressed): Here. Take $600,000.
   Step #3: Get some land
   Most local building codes require that houses be built on some kind of land. One excellent source of land is Iowa, which has scads of land that nobody ever uses for anything except growing corn, which is fed to pigs anyway, so I’m sure nobody would mind if you just took a smallish plot and built your house on it. The worst that could happen is that an Iowa farmer would tell you to move your house, and I doubt this would happen because every Iowan I’ve ever met has been extremely nice. Another advantage of Iowa is that it is located conveniently close to Kansas.
   However, if you’d prefer not to locate your house in Iowa, don’t despair, because there’s lots of spare land around in other places, such as along the sides of interstate highways. Some of this land even has little picnic tables and people who come along from time to time to mow the grass, so if I were you I’d snap it up before someone else does, or the Iowans start growing pig corn on it.
   Another land source is estates belonging to the rich. Many of these estates are enormous, so the odds are the rich will never even notice you, especially if they are famous rock stars who travel most of the time and even when they’re home they’re not all that observant on account of they spend most of their leisure time trying on clothes and ingesting narcotic substances.
   Step #4: Buy a large quantity of house parts
   The main thing is studs. Studs are these boards that are sometimes called “two-by-fours” because they are not two anythings by four anythings (see Chapter 2, “Wood”). Most houses contain billions of them. You’ll also need nails, a roof, and one toilet for each bathroom shown in your plan.
   You can buy your house parts at a lumberyard, but as I pointed out back in Chapter 2 (see Chapter 2), the people who work in lumberyards are hostile and suspicious and they will probably try to trick you. You’ll ask for studs, and they’ll send you home with industrial sewage piping. So I recommend you get your house parts at a home center. The advantage of going to a home center is they give you little baskets and carts to put your house in, and you’ll always know how much you’re paying because there will be at least six price stickers on every stud. The only drawback is that most of the time the home center will be out of whatever you need, so you’ll have to make upwards of 600 trips (see Chapter 2 again; in fact, you might just as well stay in Chapter 2, for all the good this chapter is doing you).
   Step #5: Standing on your land, attach the house parts together so they form a house shaped like the one in your plan.
   Building an entire house may look difficult, but all it really takes is a little common sense and a willingness to accept the fact that you will never finish no matter how long you live. At the beginning, when you’re nailing large boards together, you’ll think you’ll be done in a matter of days, but pretty soon you’ll realize that the only materials you have left are skillions of little pieces of molding and pipes and wires and doorknobs representing 600,000 man-hours of extremely tedious work, and you’ll reach the point where all you do is sit on the floor and drink beer and fantasize that you live in a motel and you don’t even have to fold your own towels. I know a couple who live in a semicomplete house that they once tried to build, and after a couple of years they stopped even noticing that they have a pile of lumber in their living room. They just dust it off and put cheese and crackers on it when company comes. So good luck! I admire your spunk. Really.