The Taming Of The Screw

by Dave Barry

  What to do when a pipe breaks

  1. Go down to the dankest corner of the basement and locate the valve that turns off all the water in the house. This will be the valve that is covered with slime and a spiderweb containing a spider and the festering bodies of dead insects.

  2. Using a 3/4-inch drive socket wrench or a tire iron, prod the spider firmly until it scuttles off to some other area of the basement, muttering angrily.

  3. Turn the valve handle clockwise until it breaks off in your hand like a damp pretzel, which is the signal that the water is off.

  4. Locate the broken pipe and replace it with a new pipe in such a manner that it will not leak even when it has water going through it.

  5. Have a plumber turn the water back on. This job is best left to a professional, since (a) the handle is broken off and (b) the spider has returned with thousands of poisonous friends and relatives to defend the valve. Be sure to select a plumber who has a good reputation and life insurance and a flamethrower.

  The history of the toilet

  The toilet was invented several hundred years ago by Sir Robert Toilet, an Englishman who was trying to put an end to war. At the time, everybody went to the bathroom outdoors, which, as you can imagine, was fairly disgusting. So countries were always trying to go to the bathroom in other countries. Thousands of, say, Frenchmen would suddenly appear in Germany, relieve themselves, and stride back to France, snickering; the next day even greater numbers of Germans would retaliate. Eventually the dispute would escalate into a war, which was even worse, because of the horses. Then, thankfully, Sir Robert had his idea: Instead of going to the bathroom on the ground in other countries, why not go to the bathroom in a toilet? This would put an end to needless wars and give everybody a chance to read magazines. The idea caught on, and today very few wars are caused by the French and the Germans going to the bathroom on each other’s land, which is not to say that they don’t want to.

  Three Useful Tips for Unclogging a Clogged Toilet

  Before you attempt to unclog the toilet, make sure that it is a toilet that you are responsible for. If it is in a public restroom, or someone else’s home, don’t give it another thought. Just sidle out of the room as if nothing has happened.

  If the clog is caused by something soft, such as a corsage, you can dislodge it simply by firing a .22-caliber pistol into the toilet.

  For tougher clogs, such as turtles or jewelry, you’ll need to flush a lit cherry bomb, which you can obtain from any reliable teenager.

  Chapter 5. Walls: Paneling, And Other Common Mistakes

  Walls are an important part of any home, because they keep the roof from falling down and damaging your television set. But walls are more than just structural; they are also large objects that you have to cover with something. The three major wall coverings, in ascending order of unattractiveness, are paint, wallpaper, and paneling.

  How To Paint A Room

  1. To determine how much paint you’ll need, stand with your back against an end wall of the room you plan to paint, then take little mincing steps across the room until you mince into the opposite wall. Now repeat the procedure, only start with your back against a side wall. Now multiply the number of steps by the length of your foot in inches, making sure you subtract for windows. This will tell you the number of square inches your floor would be if it had windows in it.

  2. Go to a paint store and buy six gallons of paint. Oil-based paint is tough and adheres extremely well to any surface, especially human skin. Your best bet is latex paint, which comes in a wide variety of colors, all of them white. Well, almost white. Paint manufacturers have tried for years to make plain white paint, but unfortunately their factories are old and unsanitary, and the paint batches always end up getting contaminated with rodent droppings. So all the paint comes out off-white, and they have to give it classy names like Oyster White or Antique White, on the grounds that nobody would buy it if they called it Rodent Dropping White.

  3. Now it’s time to paint. Read the directions on the paint can, which will contain some snotty statement such as “CAUTION: SURFACE MUST BE FREE OF

  DIRT, GREASE, AND PEELING OR FLAKING PAINT.” This is utter nonsense, of course. If the surface were free of dirt, grease, and peeling or flaking paint, why on earth would you want to paint it? So don’t waste any time preparing the surface. Go ahead and paint the damn surface, dirt and all. If you see any insects, paint over them, too, unless they are major tropical insects, in which case you should first smash them flat with a

  23-ounce rubbertipped mallet, such as your professional painters use.

  Wallpaper

  Wallpaper dates back to colonial times, when people had much smaller brains. It would have died out years ago if not for the fact that women get pregnant. Pregnancy causes women to secrete a hormone that compels them to want to install wallpaper with jungle animals on it in the baby’s room. My wife and I installed jungle-animal wallpaper on a hot August day when she was about 17 months pregnant, and she was a driven woman. She was determined to make the head of the rhinoceros on one sheet of wallpaper line up with the rhinoceros body on the adjacent sheet. Proper rhinoceros alignment is very important to your child’s development. Children who grow up looking at rhinoceros heads springing out of, say, clown bodies, are likely to grow up to become drug addict ax murderers or members of the state legislature.

  The easy way to wallpaper a room

  Don’t be an idiot. There is no easy way to wallpaper a room. The finest scientific minds in the nation have been working on this problem for decades, and they have failed miserably.

  Oh, sure, the salesman at the wallpaper store will tell you it’s easy to install wallpaper, but you’ll notice his store walls aren’t wallpapered. They’re painted Rodent Dropping White.

  Paneling

  Paneling is a surprisingly easy way to make any room less attractive. A panel is simply a four-by-eight-foot piece of compressed industrial waste that has been finished in such a way that it looks nothing whatsoever like wood, then given an absurd name such as Heritage Oak. If you were to show a typical piece of paneling to 100 people chosen at random, and ask them what it was, they would all answer, “I don’t know, but it’s not wood.”

  Many homeowners panel their basements, because basement walls are usually cold, dank concrete with earthworms oozing through the cracks. The idea is that if you put paneling up, you’ll transform your basement into a warm, friendly recreation room where the family can play bumper pool and have several hours of meaningful family togetherness until the earthworms start oozing through the cracks between the panels.

  Paneling Tips

  The shiny, plasticlike side of the paneling should always face the inside of the room, unless you think the unfinished industrial-waste side is more attractive.

  The easiest way to install paneling is to simply lean it up against the walls all around the room. This way, you can remove it quickly and hide it in the garage when tasteful visitors come to call.

  If you decide to attach the panels permanently, you may have to adjust them slightly to allow for doors and windows, assuming you intend to continue to use the doors and windows.

  Chapter 6. Heating And Cooling

  New-age, chic alternatives to tacky fossil fuels

  There was a time, during the Eisenhower administration, when most homes were heated via thermostats. Just one of these wondrous little devices, no larger than a snuff box, could automatically heat an entire house. This left everybody with lots of free time to worry about international communism or watch “Leave It to Beaver.”

  You may be fortunate enough to have a 1950s-style home that is still heated by a thermostat. If-so, you should count your blessings, because many, many homes in the past decade were built by deranged granolaoriented ecology nuts who are opposed to convenience in any form, and who therefore tried to heat their homes with wood.

  Wood heat: inefficient, but dangerous

  Wood heat is highly ecological, sin
ce trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down that tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back.

  To heat your house with wood, you’ll need a good wood source. The best wood sources are woodpiles, which can be found in most suburban backyards in early fall. You should gather your wood very early in the morning, wearing dark clothing and a loaded sidearm. You should try to gather hardwoods, such as veneer, because these extinguish themselves automatically seconds after you light them, which makes them very safe. You should avoid the softwoods, such as cork, because these burn far too easily. You can cause a piece of softwood to explode into flame merely by dropping it on the ground.

  The principle behind wood heat is that wood contains a certain number of British Thermal Units, or Btu’s. Btu’s are these little thermal units invented by the British to tell you how much heat you have in your wood, and like everything else invented by the British, they don’t work. Let’s say you have a log made of oak. Now a British person would claim that you’re going to get maybe 10,000 Btu’s of heat when you burn your log, but in fact you’re going to get 6 Btu’s of heat and 9,994 Btu’s of smoke. This is why virtually everyone in England wears sweaters all the time.

  Now you’ll need someplace to burn your wood. You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that’s what scientists believe. In fact, many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist’s house on a sultry August day, you’ll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.

  Instead of a fireplace, you should heat your house with a woodstove, preferably one that is airtight. To test for airtightness, leave a smallish animal that your children have not grown fond of, such as a chicken, inside the stove for several days. You can use the chicken later to clean your chimney.

  Wood-burning stoves are large, squat, black objects that range widely in price from $500 to $525 and come in a variety of attractive styles designed to enhance the appearance of any room whose appearance would be enhanced by the presence of a large, squat, black object. Your stove must be installed safely, so this is something you should leave in the hands of somebody who will charge you a great deal of money. But once it’s installed, your stove will give you hours of comfort and enjoyment, unless you burn wood in it, in which case it will give you hours of smoke and fear caused by the fact that you have an insanely hot metal object in your living room.

  What to Do about a Cold, Drafty Room

  No matter what kind of heating system you have, you’ll probably find that one room always feels cold and drafty. The commonest cause of this problem is demonic possession. Demons are always taking over rooms and making them colder. This is annoying, but it’s a heck of a lot better than when they take over bodies and turn their heads around backwards or make them speak dead languages, the way they did to that little girl in The Exorcist.

  If you want to get rid of the demons, you’ll need a caulking gun and some caulking. Clear out a space in the middle of the floor of the possessed room, and squeeze the caulking onto the floor in a mystical, demon-repelling pattern. The good news is that this will cause the demon to stop possessing the room. The bad news is that it will be looking for something else to possess, so be alert if you find your head is rotating like a bar stool.

  Heating your home with solar energy

  Solar heat comes from the sun, which is really nothing more than a nearby star, which means it could explode at any minute. In the meantime, though, the sun is giving off scads of energy in the form of rays, which slam into the Earth at nearly the speed of light and bounce back into outer space, where they illuminate the moon, form comets, etc. But you can also use these rays to form heat. If you were to capture just one-billionth of the rays that hit your house every day, all your appliances would melt.

  The easiest way to heat your house with solar energy is to move it to Central America, which is located directly under the sun. You’ll start feeling much, much warmer in a matter of minutes, and you’ll never complain about high fuel bills again. You’ll be too busy fending off tarantulas the size of briefcases.

  Air conditioners

  All air conditioners work essentially the same way: They take warm air and make it cooler somehow. If your air conditioner fails to operate properly, the chances are that one or more parts is broken. To repair it, you should take it to the basement and hit it (see Chapter 3, “Electricity”).

  Heat pumps

  Heat pumps are a new wrinkle on the heating and cooling scene: in the summer, they cool your home, and in the winter, they heat it! How is this possible? Heat pump manufacturers tell us the secret is that even on the coldest day, there is some heat in the outside air, and the heat pump extracts this heat. This is a lie, of course. There is no heat in the air on cold days. That’s why we call them “cold days.” If there’s so much heat out there on cold days, how come you never see heat pump manufacturers frolicking outside in bathing suits, huh? Answer me that.

  The truth is that heat pumps work via theft. Even on the coldest days, there is heat in your neighbors’ houses. The heat pump sucks up this heat, like some kind of gigantic electrical leech, and uses it to keep you warm. On a really cold day, your heat pump may have to range for miles to keep you warm; it will steal heat from churches, old peoples’ homes, or phanages, hospitals, etc. It will even suck the heat out of newly born puppies. This is definitely the high-tech heat source of the future. You should get one before your neighbor does.

  Chapter 7. Insulation And Weather Proofing

  Kicking the crutches out from under Old Man Winter

  During the winter, heated air is constantly escaping from your home. During the summer, cooled air is constantly escaping from your home. If you had a brain in your head, you’d get the hell out of your home before you die of oxygen deprivation. Your other option is insulation.

  Even though insulation is one of the most important and boring issues of the day, many people don’t know how it works. I certainly don’t. I have read dozens of articles about how to insulate and weather-strip my home, and they’re all full of terms I don’t understand, like this: “When caulking your windows, be sure to put a 1/8-inch bead of polyvinyl-butylacetate caulking between the jamb and the main soffit adjacent to the eave cornice, taking care not to dislodge the newels.”

  Now I have looked at my windows, and I cannot for the life of me locate any of these things. All I have in my windows are pieces of wood and poisonous spiders. I don’t have the vaguest idea where to put the caulking. This is a problem because, as you have probably noticed, caulking guns are designed so that as soon as you pick them up, the caulking starts oozing out, and it keeps on oozing out until there is none left. This is a clever ploy of the caulking manufacturers to keep themselves in business.

  So anyway, I end up standing outside my window, looking for the eave cornice, with caulking oozing onto my pants, until finally I give up and smear some caulking on the spiders and go inside.

  So I thought, as a public service, I would explain home insulation in layman’s terms. I will do it in the handy question-and-answer format in which I make up questions and then answer them, which is a heck of a lot easier than answering real questions.

  Eight common stupid questions about insulation

  Q: Where should I put insulation?

  A: Wherever you can work comfortably. The worst place is the attic, because attics are hot, dangerous places, full of filthy objects and rabid bats. Oh, I know do-it-yourself home insulation articles always have pictures showing a cheerful homeowner cheerfully insulating his attic, but these pi
ctures are frauds. I mean, look at the attic they show: It always looks clean, well lit, and safe, unlike any other attic in the known world. What those articles don’t tell you is that when the pictures were taken, dozens of highly trained men were standing just out of camera range, holding the bats at bay with semiautomatic rifles. So stay out of your attic. Put your insulation someplace safe and convenient, such as in your den or along your driveway.

  Q: What kind of insulation should I buy?

  A: You should definitely not buy synthetic insulation, which comes in grotesque colors and is harsh and scratchy and leaves you covered with prickly little things that will never come off as long as you live. I suggest you buy insulation that is naturally soft and washable and can be dyed to match your den decor. Cotton is a good choice.

  Q: How much insulation do I need?

  A: Four thousand dollars’ worth.

  Q: What about blown-in insulation?

  A: Blown-in insulation is fine, if you don’t mind a fuzzy tongue and wads of spit-covered insulation all over the place.