Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit

by Andy Rooney

  —People who don’t remember when you had to choke a car to get it started are lucky.

  —When you come up to the checkout counter in the supermarket with a shopping cart full of groceries, the cashier always says, “Will that be all?” or “Is that it?” Does she think you’re just leaving the stuff with her while you go get more?

  —There is a definite difference between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Cola and one is clearly better than the other. I can’t even drink the other.

  —They say squid and octopus are catching on in American kitchens but not in ours.

  —Most kids in school like their teachers.

  —Not many Americans could fill in a blank map with names of the United States even if it had the outline of the states on it.

  —Stores with the cheapest merchandise use cheap bags that often break through at the bottom before you get to the car.

  —If it wasn’t so annoying, it would be amusing to hear politicians speak less than the truth most of the time.

  —I’m fed up with stories every year about whether this is going to be a good or a bad Christmas for stores. There’s just so much economic news I want at Christmas. What I want to know is, is it going to be a good year for us?

  —It’s hard to get used to your age no matter what age you are. The trouble is, you’re that age for such a short time. Just when you begin to get used to it, you get older.

  —When I hear a promotional ad on television for news shows and they tell me about a story they’re going to have on tomorrow, I don’t watch it. If they knew what the story was yesterday, it’s not news, it’s history.

  —It’s easy to start hating someone on a television news broadcast. If the newscaster’s mannerisms annoy you, man or woman, you start paying more attention to them than to the news and it ruins the show for you. It accounts for why you hear people say, “I can’t stand Peter Jennings. I hate Dan Rather. Tom Brokaw is terrible.” Not to mention Andy Rooney, of course.

  —Less than half the fresh fruit you buy is any good, but you keep buying it anyway. You’re always hoping for that perfect tangerine, that perfect melon, that perfect peach or pear. Most fruit-store fruit rots before it ripens. Melons are the most expensive disappointment. Only one out of ten is any good. Unfortunately, that can be great.

  —On vacation I sleep less. I hate to waste it.

  —When you pump your own gas at a self-service place, it’s hard not to end up with a little gas on your hands. There might be a market for a machine that dispenses little packets containing a piece of wet cloth or paper that you could clean your hands with. I’d pay a nickel but not a quarter. Maybe that’s the business we’ll go into.

  —It’s difficult to stop the gas pump on an even amount of money.

  —You still see someone paddling a canoe on a lake or river once in a while, but I haven’t seen anyone rowing a boat in years. The basic flaw in a rowboat has always been that you can’t see where you’re getting to.

  —There’s too much glass in a car on a hot, sunny day. We don’t need all that windshield to see out.

  —There are a lot of things around the house that aren’t any good that I don’t throw out.

  —I’ve passed a lot of Christian Science reading rooms in cities around the country, but I’ve never seen anyone reading in one. I’m not sure whether they’re for Christian Scientists or whether they’re to attract people from other religions to Christian Science.

  —People don’t know much about any religion but their own—and a lot of times, they don’t know much about that one, either.

  —It’s hard not to drop at least one sock or a piece of underwear when you’re emptying the clothes dryer.

  —The weather is almost always something other than normal.

  —Hollywood movies are the best art America produces.

  —I can’t help wondering where all the Russians are today who bugged the hotel rooms of American visitors and spied on everyone who came there just a few years ago.

  —The pencil that comes with an expensive pen and pencil set is never satisfactory. You have to be able to sharpen a pencil.

  —If the mailman knew what I was going to throw out without opening, he could save both of us a lot of trouble by throwing it away before he delivered it. I’d like to give our mailman power of attorney over the mail.

  —The best thing that’s bad for you is butter.

  —I can name everyone who lived on our block on Partridge Street fifty years ago. Most people don’t know the names of all their neighbors today.

  —Tying a shoelace is a small but satisfying thing to do.

  —The lives of people who plan carefully don’t go according to plan any more often than the lives of people who don’t plan them at all.

  —There are a lot of magazines with one or two articles in them that I want to read but the magazines are too expensive to buy for one or two articles. The time should come when we can each make up our own magazine from a computer index in our home and have every article we want to read from a lot of different magazines.

  —Automobile tires are better than they used to be. Paper handkerchiefs like Kleenex are not.

  —If a bottle of wine is really good, you can’t afford it.

  —There aren’t nearly as many shoe repair shops as there used to be because people don’t wear out the soles and heels of shoes by walking on them much anymore.

  —Learning how to type should be mandatory in grade school.

  —When I was in high school, the final score of a basketball game was 38 to 29 or, at the very most, 47 to 36.

  —There are some good things on television except when you want to watch. If there are two good things on the same night, they’re opposite each other. There are usually some good things on the night you have to go out, too.

  —It is comforting for people with illegible handwriting to know that a lot of brilliant people have terrible handwriting.

  On the other hand, of course, a lot of dumb people don’t write so you can read it, either.

  —New clothes always look good in the mirror at the store, but I end up not wearing about half of all the clothes I buy.

  —Stores have got to make a greater effort to have prices come out even so we don’t get left with so many useless pennies.

  —It would be good if there were some way to feed information to the brain intravenously.

  —If I could start over, I’d be a much better person.

  The Following Things are True about Sports

  —There’s more talk about money on the sports pages than in the business pages of the newspaper.

  —Of all the balls we use to play games, the football is the most interesting. It was a crazy idea to play a game with a ball that isn’t round, but it’s worked out fine. As a matter of fact, the football is a work of genius. You can kick it or throw it as well or maybe even better than a round ball, and its bounce is just unpredictable enough to add an interesting element to the game.

  —When I hear about a golf tournament, I still expect Arnold Palmer to win it.

  —I saw Muhammad Ali referred to as “the best-known fistic gladiator the world has ever known.”

  Not by me, he isn’t. I’d put two boxers ahead of Ali, both for wellknownness and fighting ability. They are Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey.

  Sports heroes from one generation who never compete against each other are hard to compare. Some athletes remain well-known long after their playing days are over and sometimes after anyone is left alive who saw them play. The name Babe Ruth has probably survived the years better than any other sports figure. It’s amazing, when you consider that he played before television, that Babe Ruth is still the best-known American sports figure of all time.

  —What talent major league baseball managers have escapes me. Football coaches sound like Phi Beta Kappas by comparison. Baseball managers may have some brains, but I’ve never heard one with an education.

  —I’m not clear why the man running a baseball team is
called a manager while the one running a football team is called a coach.

  —Another difference is in the way they dress. A baseball manager wears a baseball uniform to work. A football coach doesn’t wear a football uniform on the sidelines, even though it wouldn’t look any sillier.

  —The game of baseball may be in trouble in the near future and it won’t be simply because of the multimillion-dollar salaries of so many of its players. The biggest problem for baseball’s future is kids aren’t playing it as much as they once did. In big cities, they’re playing basketball instead.

  There aren’t any empty lots left, so the city kids are all over at the blacktop behind the school shooting baskets.

  A sign of the problem shows in the makeup of major league baseball teams. Fewer than 18 percent of major league baseball players are black. In pro basketball, 72 percent of the players are black.

  —When we were kids, we used to cut the cover off old golf balls and unwind the rubber string underneath. Someone spoiled our fun by saying a golf ball might explode if you cut into it, so we stopped playing with them.

  —I don’t resent the players’ salaries being so high. What I resent is the price of a hot dog or a beer at the stadium.

  —I’d rather play tennis indoors on a rainy day than outdoors on a sunny day.

  —It’s a mystery to me why there are no black jockeys.

  —I love to watch a football game on television, but it’s nowhere near as good as being there. If you’re at the game, you watch what you want

  In full Giants regalia, after a 60 Minutes spot on his favorite team

  to watch. At home in front of the TV screen, you watch what someone else chooses to show you.

  —Players for the home team ought not be allowed to encourage the crowd to drown out the opposing quarterback’s voice when he’s trying to call signals.

  —It’s surprising that so many cities and towns have enough open land left for golf courses. I should think members of most golf clubs would have voted to sell the land to developers. That’s what I think of golf club members.

  —I was thinking of taking steroids but I wouldn’t know what to do with a lot of muscles if I had them.

  —Sometimes when I’m watching a game, I hope a team wins so much that you’d think it really mattered.

  —Sports announcers usually work in pairs and none of them seem to be clear in their own minds about whether they’re talking to each other or to us.

  —Some games are better on television than others. It makes a big difference how interesting the waiting time is between the action. There’s a lot of time when nothing’s going on in both football and baseball, but serious fans enjoy anticipating what their team’s going to do next. The waiting time isn’t dull.

  Hockey is the worst sport on television and there’s no waiting time.

  That’s partly true of basketball too, but there’s so much scoring you can enjoy thinking about whether your team can catch up.

  If you think hockey is a bad sport for television, try listening to it on radio sometime.

  —A lot of men turn to the sports pages of their paper first, but that doesn’t mean they think sports are the most important thing in the paper.

  “Happy Holiday” Doesn’t Do It

  The following things are true about Christmas:

  —Sometimes it’s joyous and merry but it’s never easy.

  —Old weather records do not substantiate the suggestion, given by

  today’s Christmas cards, showing scenes from old-fashioned Christmases, that it used to snow more than it does now. Horses did not dash through the snow pulling sleighs on the way to grandmother’s house any more a hundred years ago than cars do now. It almost never snows on Christmas even in northern parts of the country and if it does, the

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  snow is wet and slushy and not conducive to horses pulling sleighs through it.

  —It’s a sign of the new sensitivity to political correctness that, more and more, the greeting “Happy Holidays” is replacing “Merry Christmas.” Most Jews I know accept “Merry Christmas” in the spirit in which it was intended without adding any heavy religious baggage to it. Most atheists or agnostics I know use “Merry Christmas.”

  —I never get over feeling bad about tearing open a beautifully wrapped present. It takes ten seconds to destroy a work of art that took someone ten minutes to accomplish.

  —Someone in the family is always better at wrapping than anyone else. My sister stays up in the back bedroom in our house and we all deliver presents to her to be wrapped as if she was the package room behind the scenes in a department store.

  —Of course it’s true that some presents are better to get than others but some are better to give, too.

  —Some people are easy to give to, others are hard and there’s always one who’s impossible. Usually it isn’t that the person has everything, it’s that he or she is not enthusiastic about gifts.

  —The knowledge that the sales will start the day after Christmas doesn’t deter many people from buying presents before Christmas.

  —When you buy a piece of clothing for someone, it’s more apt to be too small than too big. Clothes look bigger on the rack than they do on someone.

  —The store clerk who asks, “May I help you with something?” can hardly ever help.

  —You read and hear a lot of advice about how to keep your Christmas tree to keep from getting dry so the needles don’t fall off but most Christmas trees are cut in November and nothing anyone does can keep them from drying out and dropping their needles all over your livingroom floor.

  — It’s interesting how good orange and black seem for Halloween and how wrong they’d be as Christmas colors.

  —In spite of the old sayings to the contrary, the best presents come in large packages.

  —A quarter of the Christmas cards we get are from some commercial establishment. There ought to be a law against a company or anyone with whom you have a business arrangement sending you a Christmas card. “Happy Holidays from all of us at the First National Bank” doesn’t make me feel warm all over toward the bank. I don’t want cards from any real estate brokers, dentists, insurance salesmen or car dealers, either. I don’t want a Christmas card from anyone I don’t know personally.

  I’d include in this group the President of the United States. When Bill Clinton was President, we used to get two cards from Bill and Hillary, one at home and one at the office.

  The Clintons wished us “a beautiful holiday season.” I was flattered and touched until I came to the note in small print on the back of the card that read “PAID FOR BY THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE.” That’s not in the Christmas spirit.

  Apparently the Clintons didn’t leave their Christmas card list with the Bushes. We haven’t received one from them.

  The More You Eat

  What follows is a list of the ten best tastes.

  No. 1: SUGAR. This sweetener is at the top of the taste list even though too much of it is cloying and unpleasant. It’s the most important ingredient in many things we eat—even things we don’t consider sweet. When I make bread with six cups of flour I put a full tablespoon of sugar in the flour because of what sugar does for the yeast.

  No. 2: SALT. Without salt, anything is tasteless. I like a little too much salt; a tablespoon in the bread.

  (Too much sugar or too much salt is bad for us, but one of the things we all recognize is the direct relationship between how good something

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  tastes and how bad it is for us. The better it tastes, the worse it is for us. There is some eternal equation.)

  No. 3: BUTTER. Nothing improves the taste of anything as much as butter. Fake butter was an unfortunate invention and it isn’t much cheaper or any better for you than the real thing.

  No. 4: BREAD. It is with some hesitation that I put bread on the list because commercial bread in the United States is terrible. How it ever ha
ppened that the French eat such great bread every day and Americans eat such bad bread is a mystery.

  A great breadmaker in the Bronx named Terranova makes a round loaf so hard you can drum on it with your fingers. When I asked him what he put in his bread to make it so good, he said, “It’s what I don’t put in it that makes it good.”

  In spite of the waxed-paper-wrapped mush in the supermarkets, almost every city or town has a good bakery where you can get real bread. You can tell a good restaurant before you eat your meal by the bread it serves.

  No. 5: CHOCOLATE. Clearly one of the ten best tastes, chocolate is another thing Europeans make better than we do. A chocolate bar from Belgium, Germany, Switzerland or even England is better than one made here. Vanilla is a good taste but not as important as chocolate. Chocolate is important.

  No. 6: CHICKEN. Chicken not only tastes good but it’s also cheap and can be cooked in a thousand different ways. It can be baked, fried, deep-fried, stewed or broiled. It’s the best leftover you can have in your refrigerator.

  No. 7: STEAK: I’m embarrassed to have it on the list but can’t leave it off.

  No. 8: POTATO. The taste of potato isn’t good or bad until you do something with it. You can bake potatoes, mash them, boil them, fry or deep-fry them. You can scallop them and if you’re good in the kitchen, soufflé them.

  No. 9: PASTA. If you have a variety of pastas in the cupboard, you never have to worry about dinner. You can find something in the refrigerator or in the pantry to go with whatever pasta you have on hand. Just don’t overcook it.

  No. 10: RICE. Rice is on my personal ten best foods list. Basmati rice is best.

  No. 11: ONION and GARLIC. I know I said ten, but I can’t leave either of these out.

  Maybe this was a bad idea. I’m up to eleven and I haven’t mentioned the tastes of orange, lemon, tomato, strawberry, peanut or egg. I haven’t even mentioned two of the world’s great tastes: vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce or a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich—without chocolate sauce.

  Life as I See It: Rooney’s Witticisms

  —At about age forty, each of us should resolve to throw out or give away one book for each new book we acquire.