by Dave Barry
USEFUL HOME-CLEANING HINTS
If your child draws pictures of cows on your woodwork with a felt-tipped marker, you can scrub them with a mixture of one part baking soda, one part lemon juice, and one part ammonia, but they won’t come off.
The best way to clean a frying pan that has burned food cemented to the bottom is to let it soak in soapy water for several days and then, when nobody is looking, throw it in the garbage.
If you ever find the person who invented “Slime,” call me and I will come over and plug up all the orifices in his head with a mixture of one part Tabasco sauce and one part Play-Doh.
Many smart homemakers such as Cher and Queen Elizabeth have found that the best way to “stay ahead” of those pesky household “chores” is to have a “staff.”
Ever wonder how come the males in your household pee everywhere except into the actual toilet bowl? It’s because they are jerks.
9
Practical Home Weapons Systems
One of our major responsibilities, as homeowners, is to become needlessly alarmed about home security. And with good reason. All we have to do is look at the front page of our newspaper, and we will see frightening headlines such as the following:
BOY RAISED BY CHICKENS
ET SPACE ALIEN CURED MY ACNE
GIRL, 2, GIVES BIRTH WHILE
SKYDIVING
Okay, perhaps we should be reading a better class of newspaper. But the point is, there are grave threats all around us, and we need to be ready.
HOME SECURITY
I happen to be an expert in the area of home security, because I live in South Florida, home of Miami Vice, where guns are extremely easy to obtain. Down here they give you a free revolver when you buy a Big Gulp at the 7-Eleven. So you have a lot of people walking around armed, the result being that a lot of homeowners feel that they, too, need to arm themselves in self-defense. Of course your bleeding-heart-liberal-secular-humanist left-wing communists will tell you that it’s a bad thing to own a gun, but as any knowledgeable gun nut will tell you, there are countless factual anecdotes concerning alert gun-toting homeowners who have thwarted the forces of evil.
For example, we recently had a case here where a homeowner woke up at 2:30 a.m. because he thought he had heard a noise in the family room. Grabbing his revolver, he slowly opened his bedroom door and crept stealthily into the darkened hallway, where he stepped barefooted onto a cockroach—down here we get cockroaches large enough to derail trains—causing him (the homeowner) to leap straight into the air and shoot his gun, the bullet from which went through the wall and into the garage, where it hit the circuit breaker box and cut off the electrical power to the house, thus shutting down the videocassette recorder in the family room, where the homeowner’s eleven-year-old son had been watching Debbie Does Dallas. So don’t try to tell me that guns have no place in the home. Don’t try to tell it to the Founding Fathers of this nation, either. For one thing, they are dead. For another thing, they specifically considered the question of guns when they wrote the Constitution, and after much debate, they agreed on the following unequivocal wording regarding the right of the people to keep and bear arms:
ARTICLE XMZXMZBX: If guns were outlaws, then outlaws would be guns.
So you can play it any way you want it, but this is one homeowner whose motto is: “You can have my gun when you threaten to pry one of my fingers off the trigger.”
Of course, if you do get a gun, you need to follow certain basic safety procedures, such as:
Don’t keep it loaded.
Don’t even have the proper caliber of bullet for it.
Keep it someplace safe, such as a safe-deposit box in Switzerland.
What other steps can you take to protect yourself? One approach that combines the advantage of costing a lot of money with the advantage of really ticking off your neighbors is …
THE ELECTRONIC BURGLAR ALARM SYSTEM
Essentially, this is a complex system of modern, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, fully computerized components, costing no more than several semesters at Stanford University graduate school, yet giving you the sense of security and well-being that comes from knowing that everyone in your neighborhood will be instantly alerted by a horrible ear-splitting noise whenever lightning strikes anywhere within 137 miles of your home. Invariably this will happen at night when you’re out of town, so that your neighbors will get to lie in bed, listening to the piercing sound, which is only fair because it makes up for all the nights when you had to listen to their burglar alarm systems.
I do not mean to suggest that burglar alarm systems go off only when lightning strikes. No, they also go off when the electric company has problems, or when homeowners forget to turn them off upon returning. Sometimes birds set them off. “Let’s go set off some burglar alarms!” is a cry frequently heard among adolescent finches. Even air molecules, which are plentiful in the suburbs, can set off burglar alarm systems. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t set them off, as far as we can tell, is burglars. Nobody can explain this phenomenon, but police rely on it when they go on their patrols. They’ll drive through a neighborhood at 4 a.m., listening to three or four home security systems electronically whooping and shrieking into the night, and they’ll say to each other, using hand signals so they can be understood over the din: “Everything’s fine here!”
Of course these systems are not perfect. Even the most well-designed electronic device cannot be relied upon to go off without any reason one hundred percent of the time. Thus most security experts also recommend that you have a backup system consisting of …
A LARGE, STUPID DOG
I realize that in the chapter on housecleaning I specifically said you should never have a dog, on the grounds that they are filthy, but my feeling, as a professional author, is that if I go through life worrying about what I may have said in previous chapters, I will never get anything done. So in this chapter, I am strongly in favor of dogs as security devices, but I stress that they must be large. You don’t want one of those repulsive little yapping “lap”-style dogs that look like fur-covered insects, because the burglar will simply stuff it down the garbage disposal. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do you any good, home-security wise. What you want is a major hunk of canine muscle, the kind that is always on Full Red Alert, the kind that will race to the front door, barking violently, when it hears any sound, including its own parasites.
We are blessed with such a dog, Earnest, and she is a source of great comfort to us, for we know that as long as we have her, our home is totally protected from Zachary Liebman, age five. This is the little boy who lives next door and comes over to play with our son. Earnest absolutely hates him. When we moved in, Earnest received signals from whatever distant planet it is that dogs get their instructions from, and these signals told her that Zachary Liebman is the most dangerous creature in the galaxy, and there is nothing we can do to change her mind. Zachary has come over to our house almost daily for two years now, and still she follows him around, emitting a constant low growl to let him know that she is ready in case he suddenly pulls out a concealed machine gun. And so of course we have to follow her around, going “NO! Earnest, NO!!” although this has no effect, because in matters of home security, Earnest takes orders only from the Dog Planet. So we form a colorful and loud procession—Zachary, oblivious; Earnest, furious; and my wife or me, slowly going hoarse—parading around the house, sometimes for hours. You can’t put a price on this kind of piece of mind.
ONE FINAL WORD ABOUT HOME SECURITY
None of the security methods we have discussed here will foil the truly determined burglar, the veteran professional who has already broken into hundreds of homes just like yours and has been convicted seventeen times and is currently out of jail on his own recognizance. The best you can hope for, with any security method, is that you will make your home look slightly less attractive to the burglar, so that he’ll pass you and burglarize somebody else’s house. In fact, you m
ight leave a little note on your door, letting the burglar know that your particular house is probably less attractive to him than several other homes in your neighborhood where you know for a fact that the owners are away on vacation. Sure, this means extra work for you, but society has no chance against the Criminal Element if people like yourself aren’t willing to “get involved.”
CRIMESTOPPER TIPS
If you go away for any length of time, be sure to leave a radio on in your house tuned to a station that plays “rap” music, so that if a burglar does get in, most of his brain cells will be killed instantly and he won’t be able to remember how to get back out.
Also, you should ask a neighbor to come around and collect your mail and your newspapers, put out your garbage, and while he’s at it, maybe mow your lawn and paint your house and build a deck out back. Hey, it’s worth a shot.
10
A Lawn Is a Terrible Thing
to Waste
Up to this point we have been concentrating on the inside of your house, because that’s where you actually live, unless you are even dumber than we thought. But the outside of your house—the grounds and how they are landscaped—is also important, especially in terms of property values. To illustrate this point, let’s consider two homeowners, whom we’ll call “Smith” and “Jones.” (These are not their real names. Their real names are “Smith” and “Brown.”) Let’s say these two people bought identical homes in the same neighborhood on the same day for the same price, fifty-thousand dollars.
“Smith,” a very hard worker, takes excellent care of his yard. Every weekend he’s out there mowing his lawn, pruning his shrubs, and crouching in the dirt working on his flower beds. Meanwhile “Jones” is a lazy lout who never does anything to his property except occasionally empty his car ashtray on it on his way to the convenience store to buy more beer.
Now, let’s say that at the end of five years, both properties are placed on the market. “Jones,” who failed to maintain his yard, gets $72,500 for his property. This price, when adjusted for inflation, works out to be a profit of just 7.2 percent for our lazy homeowner. But “Smith,” the hard worker, would have received $86,300 for his property, if he had not been attacked by fire ants one afternoon while he was weeding the pachysandra patch and stung an estimated five-hundred-thousand times before his body was found by the water softener man, who later married “Smith’s” widow, who was able to use the life insurance money to buy them a luxury condominium where the closest they ever come to yard work is sometimes they fling the ice from their gin and tonic off their balcony onto the golf course. So there should be no question in your mind about the value of properly maintaining your property.
The key area, of course, is the lawn. This is the centerpiece of the yard, and it has been for hundreds of years, ever since the invention of …
THE VERY FIRST LAWN
Like so many other good ideas, such as eating snails, the lawn was invented by a French person, Jean-Harold Discotheque, in 1732. He called his invention “L’awn” (French for “the awn”). His prototype lawn was very primitive, consisting of only one humongous blade of grass about 30 feet in diameter and 120 feet high; so, as you can imagine, it was not ideal for such purposes as croquet, plus it was hell to mow. But in the following years there were a number of spectacular technical breakthroughs—the two-blades-of-grass lawn; the six-blades-of-grass lawn; etc.—until finally we reached the modern lawn consisting of many millions of tiny blades, each one of them diseased. This is where we stand today.
THE FUTURE: LAWNS IN SPACE
Currently there are no lawns in space, although the U.S. Defense Department Office of Massive Stupid Wasteful Projects has a crash program to put one there before the Russians do. As you can imagine, this is an exceedingly difficult task, for space is a very hostile environment almost totally devoid of mulch.
LAWN CARE IN AMERICA
We Americans can make the proud boast that no other nation cares for its lawns as much as we do. Lawn care has made America what it is today, as can be shown by this chart:
As a patriotic noncommunist homeowner, you are responsible for maintaining the American tradition of lawn care and learning as much as you can about this important subject from books other than this one. You definitely won’t find anything useful here. I care for my lawn about as well as Godzilla cared for Tokyo. When I die, I will go to Lawn Hell, where homeowners like myself are forced to lie outside with no food or water and have dogs pee on them while their lawns relax inside on Barcaloungers, eating barbecue chips and watching football on TV.
Nevertheless, I have, over the years, learned a few basic facts about lawn care, the two major ones being:
If you fail to feed, fertilize, and water your lawn, it will die.
If you feed, fertilize, and water your lawn, it will die.
Fortunately this is not a problem, because you can always get a new lawn, in the form of “sod.” The way sod works is, you pay a large sum of money, and sweaty men arrive at your house driving a filthy truck, on the back of which is stacked an actual living, breathing, feeling lawn, Some Assembly Required. God only knows where the sweaty men get this lawn. My theory is that they simply go and steal somebody else’s lawn, so that over the course of several decades, the same lawn could make its way, house by house, through an entire subdivision.
PROPER LAWNMOWER CARE
It’s important to take good care of your lawnmower, because as the old yard care saying goes: “A lawnmower that is running right is a lawnmower that is capable of slicing through your foot like a machete through Wonder bread.” This is why manufacturers recommend that you perform the following routine maintenance procedure on your lawnmower every two weeks or ten-thousand miles, whichever comes first.
Lubricate the linkage connecting the abatement disk to the invective moderator, taking care not to masticate the tropism extractor.
Remove the parameter valve from the heliotrope converter and examine the reversion unit for signs of fatigue or drowsiness.
Let’s not kid ourselves. You’re not really going to follow this maintenance procedure, right? I bet you never engage in any of the Goody-Two-Shoes consumer activities that manufacturers are always recommending. Me either. Like, whenever I buy an electronic product, the first thing I do is remove the safety information sheet that says, “URGENT EMERGENCY ALERT: BEFORE YOU ATTEMPT TO USE THIS PRODUCT, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FOR GOD’S SAKE IF YOU VALUE YOUR LIFE READ THIS SAFETY INFORMATION SHEET,” and I toss that baby right into the trash compactor. I would no more perform routine maintenance procedures on my lawnmower than I would clean my barbecue grill, or inspect my air conditioner filter, or save my original appliance cartons, or wipe my telephone answering machine with a damp cloth, or any of the other 1,536,862 idiotic things that various manufacturers, in an effort to turn me into a mindless consumer geek, have recommended that I do. Because this is America. This is the land of rugged, independent, self-reliant freedom fighters like Davy Crockett, who stood tall at the Alamo and fought on bravely even though he and his small band of men were badly outnumbered by thousands of manufacturers, coming over the walls in waves, armed to the teeth with Limited Warranties. And I am proud to say that the same spirit still exists today, that people like yourself and myself deal with lawnmower maintenance the way Americans have dealt with it since the Revolutionary War, namely: We leave our lawnmowers unattended in the garage all winter, and then we drag them out, brush off the spiders and yank fruitlessly on the cord until we are about two yanks shy of cardiac arrest; then we remove the spark plug and peer into the little hole, hoping that maybe the Spark Plug Fairy will appear in there and wave her tiny wand and make everything okay, but of course she doesn’t, so we hurl the lawnmower into our car and drive down to the lawnmower repair place, where they tell us that it will be two to three months before they can even give us an estimate, because of the large backlog caused by other rugged and self-reliant homeowners like ourselves.
SHRUBS
Shrubs are pathetic little mutant trees that you purchase to replace the nice big trees that were probably on your property before the developer came in and knocked them over with bulldozers. The way you plant a shrub is, you and your spouse lug it around your yard, setting it here and there and then standing back to see how it looks, until you settle on a spot directly over the largest buried boulder on your property, which is where you start digging. Shrub-lugging homeowners are so effective at locating buried objects that they are now routinely employed by archaeological expeditions. The archaeologist will get a couple from, say, Milwaukee, take them over to Egypt, hand them a juniper bush, and ask them where they think it should be planted. Then, using a helicopter, he’ll follow them as they wander around the endless, undifferentiated desert for days, plopping their shrub here and there, looking at it, shaking their heads, and moving on. When, finally, they’re satisfied that they’ve found the right spot, the archaeologist will swoop down, stick his shovel into the sand, and—CLUNK—there will be the sound of metal striking an ancient tomb that has lain undisturbed for four-thousand years. It saves a lot of time.
GARDENING