by Dave Barry
Head to Head
As an American, I am feeling pretty darned proud of my country (America). I will tell you why: my new toilet.
I wound up with this toilet as a result of a column I wrote last year, in which I complained bitterly about the new toilets that we Americans had been saddled with as a result of an act of Congress (official motto: “100 Senators; 435 Representatives; No Clues”). This was the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1992, which decreed that all new toilets had to use 1.6 gallons of water per flush—less than half the amount of water that the old toilets used. This was supposed to save water.
Unfortunately, the new toilets have a problem. They work fine for one type of bodily function, which, in the interest of decency, I will refer to here only by the euphemistic term “No. 1.” But many of the new toilets do a very poor job of handling “acts of Congress,” if you get my drift. They often must be flushed two or three times, and even more if it is an unusually large act of Congress, such as might be produced by a congressperson who recently attended a fund-raising dinner sponsored by the Consolidated Bulk Food Manufacturers. The result is that these new toilets were not only annoying, but in some cases seemed to be using MORE water than the old ones.
So I wrote a column complaining about this, and expressing support for a bill, introduced by Representative Joe Knollenberg of Michigan, that would allow us to go back to toilets that have the kind of flushing power that made America the most respected nation on Earth.
You know how cynics claim that Americans are just a bunch of TV-sedated zombie slugs who don’t care about the issues? Well, I wish those cynics had been standing under my mail slot after my toilet column was published, because they would have been crushed like baby spiders under a freight locomotive. I got a huge quantity of letters—some of them far more detailed than I would have liked—from Americans who care deeply about the issue of their toilets, and the vast majority of them HATE the new ones.
Granted, I got a few letters supporting the new toilets, but these were mostly from ecology nuts who, because of their organic granola diets, probably don’t even NEED toilets, just whisk brooms. There was also a somewhat snippy editorial about my column in The Washington Post (motto: “Even Our Weather Forecast Comes From Anonymous Sources”). But the vast majority of the people who responded agreed strongly with me and were ready to revolt over this issue, just as, in 1773, the courageous Boston Tea Party patriots revolted against British tyranny by throwing 1.6-gallon toilets into the harbor.
Then, about five months after my column appeared, I got a letter from Charles Avoles of Contractors 2000, an association of independent plumbing contractors. He said that a New York City company, Varsity Plumbing, in an effort to find a 1.6-gallon toilet that actually works, built a testing laboratory with room for six toilets side by side. Avoles said that Varsity duplicated all the standard toilet tests, but then, in its quest for the ultimate small toilet—the Tara Lipinski of toilets—Varsity “pushed the criteria even further, straining each model to its limits.” It must have been exciting: six toilets, pushing the envelope, going head to head! I don’t even want to think about it.
Anyway, according to Avoles, Varsity “found one particular 1.6-gallon toilet that actually works,” and the company president, Bobby Bellini, made a one-hour presentation on this discovery at the Contractors 2000 annual meeting (as Avoles put it: “Picture 500 people in a hotel ballroom watching videos of toilets flushing”). Contractors 2000 offered to install one of these toilets in my personal home, and I agreed, on the condition that I would pay full price for it, so that I could write a column about it and claim it as an income-tax deduction.
And so in March a Contractors 2000 member, Anthony Fleming, and his wife, Michele, came to my home and installed a new toilet. I cannot speak highly enough of this toilet. It is an inspiring example of American ingenuity and engineering “know-how.” It has become like a member of the family; I have affectionately named it “Maurice.” The bottom line is this: If there is an act of Congress that Maurice cannot handle in one flush, I have no personal knowledge of it.
I can’t use this column for advertising, so I won’t specify the brand of the toilet, but you can write to Contractors 2000, 2179 Fourth Street, St. Paul, Minnesota, 55110. By the time you read this, there will probably be other brands of 1.6-gallon toilets that can get the job done; you can ask your plumbing contractor. Of course, by the time you read this, Congress may have passed a new law, requiring that toilets must flush with a maximum of four teaspoons of water, AND be equipped with air bags. Congress is just full of acts.
Gone to the Dogs
Recently it was my great honor to serve as a judge in the Key West Kritter Patrol Dog Show, which is considered one of the most prestigious dog shows held in the entire Key West area on that particular weekend.
This is not one of those dog shows in which serious, highly competitive dog snobs enter professional dogs that can trace their lineage back 153 generations and basically spend their entire lives sitting around being groomed and fed, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. The Key West show—it benefits the Kritter Patrol, a local group that finds people to adopt stray dogs and cats—reflects the relaxed attitude of Key West, where the term “business attire” means “wearing some kind of clothing.” This is a show for regular civilian dogs, most of whom, if you had to identify them, technically, by breed, would fall under the category of: “probably some kind of dog.”
These are not pampered show animals, but hard-working, highly productive dogs that spend their days industriously carrying out the vital ongoing dog mission of sniffing every object in the world, and then, depending on how it smells, either (a) barking at it; (b) eating it; (c) attempting to mate with it; (d) making weewee on it; or, in the case of small, excitable dogs, (e) all of the above.
When I arrived at the show, the last-minute preparations were proceeding with the smooth efficiency of a soccer riot. There were dozens of dogs on hand, ranging in size from what appeared to be cotton swabs with eyeballs all the way up to Hound of the Baskervilles. Naturally every single one of these dogs, in accordance with the strict rules of dog etiquette, was dragging its owner around by the leash, trying to get a whiff of every other dog’s personal region. This process was complicated by the fact that many of the dogs were wearing costumes, so they could compete in the Dog and Owner Look-Alike category. (There are a number of categories in this show, and most of the dogs compete in most of them.) Many owners were also wearing costumes, including one man with an extremely old, totally motionless, sleeping Chihuahua; the man had very elaborately dressed both the dog and himself as (Why not?) butterflies. The man wore a sequined pantsuit, antennae, and a huge pair of wings.
“Look at that!” I said to the other judges, pointing to the butterfly man.
“Oh, that’s Frank,” several judges answered, as if this explained everything.
Perhaps you are concerned that I, a humor columnist with no formal training or expertise in the field of dogs, was on the judging panel. You will be relieved to know that there were also two professional cartoonists, Mike (“Mother Goose & Grimm”) Peters and Jeff (“Shoe”) MacNelly, both of whom have drawn many expert cartoons involving dogs. Another judge, named Edith, actually did seem to know a few things about dogs, but I believe she was not totally 100 percent objective, inasmuch as her own dog, Peggy, was entered in most of the events. Edith consistently gave Peggy very high ratings despite the fact that Peggy is—and I say this with great affection and respect—the ugliest dog in world history. I think she might actually be some kind of highly experimental sheep. Nevertheless, thanks in part to Edith’s high marks, Peggy did very well in several categories, and actually won the Trick Dog category, even though her trick consisted of—I swear this was the whole trick—trying to kick off her underpants.
Actually, that was a pretty good trick, considering the competition. The majority of the dogs entered in the Trick Dog event did not actually perform a trick per se. Generally, the
owner would bring the dog up onto the stage and wave a dog biscuit at it, or play a harmonica, or gesture, or babble (“C’mon, Ralph! C’mon boy! Sing! C’mon! Woooee! C’mon! Wooooooeeee! C’mon!”) in an increasingly frantic but generally futile effort to get the dog to do whatever trick it was supposed to do, while the dog either looked on with mild interest, or attempted to get off the stage and mate with the next contestant. My personal favorite in the Trick Dog category went to a very small, very excited poodle named Bunny whose trick, as far as I could tell, consisted entirely of jumping up and down and making weewee on a towel.
As you can imagine, it was not easy serving as a judge with so many strong contestants, both on the stage and hiding under the judges’ table. Nevertheless, when it was all over, approximately 43 hours after it started, we had to pick one dog as Best in Show. It was a big decision, and although there was a strong and objective push for Peggy, we decided, after agonizing for close to three-tenths of a second, to give the top prize to Sam, the old, totally motionless, sleeping Chihuahua dressed as a butterfly to match his owner, Frank. Frank got quite emotional when he accepted the trophy, and we judges were touched, although we did ask Frank to make Sam move his paw so we could see that he was, in fact, sleeping, and not actually deceased. Because you have to have standards.
The Nose Knows
Of all the human senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and the feeling that a huge man with a barbecue fork is lurking in the closet—perhaps the least appreciated, yet most important, is our sense of smell.
How does our sense of smell work? The simplest way to explain it without doing any research is as follows: Every living thing—animals, plants, cheese, magazine advertisements, etc.—is constantly giving off tiny invisible pieces of itself, which scientists call “smell particles.” Suppose that you have just entered a room that contains a fudge brownie. As you approach the brownie, your nose snorks up smell particles from it and passes them along into the Olfactory Canal, which was completed in 1825 and goes to Albany, New York.
No, sorry, wrong canal. The Olfactory Canal takes the particles to your brain, which is actually a fabulously complex computer, which means that on January 1, 2000, it will stop working and your body will flop around like a recently caught perch. But until then, your brain is able to detect the presence of the brownie particles, and, after analyzing them via a subtle electrochemical process involving billions of tiny neural circuits performing highly sophisticated, lightning-fast calculations, produce the following thought: “Yum!”
Your brain then transmits a signal to your hand, telling it to go ahead and put the brownie into your mouth; almost instantaneously, your hand responds with the signal informing your brain that you ate the brownie several minutes earlier, because your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.
Thus we see that our sense of smell is not as important as it seemed to be back at the start of this article. In fact, our sense of smell can actually be dangerous, because it stands to reason that if our nose inhales too many particles into our brains, eventually a dense particle wad will form inside us, and our heads will explode, sending compressed brownie chunks hurling outward fast enough to pass through a brick wall. Fortunately, according to a recent study by the American Medical Association, the chances that this will ever happen to you are “less than one in four” provided that “you do not breathe too much.”
But the question remains: Why do we have a sense of smell in the first place? The answer is that smell once played a vital role in the survival of the human race, back when we were primitive beings who ran around naked. No, I am not talking about the ’60s; I am talking about prehistoric times, when primitive men had to hunt for food to feed their families. They’d creep along naked through the underbrush, and every few minutes they would pause to sniff the air for the scent of prey. Of course, since this was nearly a million years before the invention of soap, all they could smell was their own armpits; the animals could easily detect them at a range of 35 miles. As a result, the hunters never captured any animal that had not already died of natural causes, although when the hunters brought this animal back to the primitive village, they’d make up a story to impress the women with their bravery and prowess.
“Whew!” they would say. “You should have seen the ferocious fight this wild animal put up!”
“That wild animal is a rotting squirrel,” the women would respond, “and you get it out of this primitive village RIGHT NOW.”
Men and women are still divided on the issue of smell. Most women are very sensitive to odors, whereas men, largely as a result of smelling their own selves over the eons, have reached the point where they tend not to detect any aroma below the level of a municipal dump. That’s certainly the way it is in my household. At least five times per week, my wife and I have the same conversation. Michelle says: “What’s that smell?” And I say, “What smell?” And she looks at me as though I am demented and says: “You can’t SMELL that?”
The truth is, there could be a stack of truck tires burning in the living room, and I wouldn’t necessarily smell it. Whereas Michelle can detect a lone spoiled grape two houses away. When she takes food out of the refrigerator, she always sniffs it, and she immediately discards it if it smells remotely suspicious. I, on the other hand, will cheerfully eat a cold cut that was manufactured during the Aztec empire.
This Male Smelling Deficiency Syndrome, or MSDS, explains why women generally smell pretty good, whereas some men, particularly men who sit next to you on airplanes, smell like the Football Team Laundry Bag From Hell. Perhaps you know somebody who tends to emit B.O. rays, and you have been wondering what is the best way to tell him. The answer is: sensitively.
For example, in 1964, when I was a student at Pleasantville High School, I had a class with a teacher who had a major odor problem, to the point where, when he’d stroll past the rows of desks, which he did often, students would keel over in his wake. Being teenagers, we might have handled this situation in a cruel manner. But instead, one day, as the teacher walked past, a student in the front row, whose name I will not reveal here, sensitively whipped out a can of Right Guard brand deodorant, fired off a brief blast, then quickly hid the can before the teacher turned around. This gesture was so sensitive that many of us thought we would rupture key internal organs from vibrating so hard.
There are many, many more exciting facts I could tell you about the fascinating topic of smell, but unfortunately I have no idea what they are. So I will conclude this discussion with this thought: Keep sniffing! But don’t inhale.
Missing in Action
I think I might know where the missile launcher is. I’m referring here to the $1 million missile launcher that our armed forces have apparently misplaced, according to the recent audit of the U.S. government (motto: “We Do Have a Motto, But We Don’t Know Where It Is”).
You might have missed the news stories about this audit, which didn’t get a whole lot of media attention because—as difficult as this is to believe—it had nothing to do with Paula Jones. The background is, back in 1994 Congress decided that there should be a complete audit of the entire federal government. This seemed like a good idea, since the U.S. government—which is the fourth-largest financial entity in the world behind Bill Gates, the Spice Girls, and your electrician—had not been audited for (this is the truth) more than 200 years. The reason Congress did not get around to ordering an audit any sooner is that it has been extremely busy with its primary functions, which are (1) spending money; (2) declaring National Cottage Cheese Appreciation Week, and (3) authorizing the IRS to hammer taxpayers for inadequate record-keeping.
As you can imagine, the federal audit was a huge job. The auditors spent thousands and thousands of hours at the U.S. Government Records Facility, which is a 1,400-foot-long shoe box containing an estimated 139 billion receipts and what are believed to be George Washington’s original teeth. When the auditors were
finally finished, they released a report that contained a number of alarming findings, including these:
—It turns out that both “Lewis” and “Clark” were actually the same person, and he never got farther west than New Jersey.
—Although according to the U.S. Constitution there are supposed to be nine members of the Supreme Court, a detailed search of the premises, including under all the desks, turned up only five.
—In one three-month period, the Task Force on Reinventing the Government, headed by Vice President Gore, spent, without any formal authorization or supporting documentation, $141 million on party hats.
—North Dakota is missing. “We think Canada took it,” stated the auditors, “but every time we called up there to ask about it, they just laughed and hung up the phone.”
Now I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is, I made up the preceding audit findings. The bad news is, the real audit findings are worse. I am NOT referring to the finding that the government has no idea what happened to billions and billions of dollars. That is totally understandable. When you are sucking in and spewing out money as fast as the federal government, you have to expect that here and there a billion dollars is going to fall between the cracks. I bet if federal employees took just a few minutes out of their work schedules to look around, they’d quickly find a lot of this so-called “lost” money.