Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  Next the pioneers built farms, and soon the country was covered with amber fields of grain. As a result, everybody almost starved to death, because what the hell are you going to do with grain? Eat it? You’d be better off with bison. Fortunately, the farmers were able to sell their grain to the Russians, who will eat anything. In exchange, the Russians gave the farmers money, which the farmers used to buy food. So now we have tons of food, only nobody does any actual work except the farmers. Everybody else sits around offices and eats, which is why today most Americans are overweight, some of them to the point where they tend to stall escalators.

  To figure out whether you are overweight, determine your sex and locate your correct scientific weight on this table:

  SEX CORRECT WEIGHT

  Male 155 pounds

  Female 115 pounds

  Child 60 pounds

  If you weigh more than you should, you can attempt to disguise it, but this rarely works. For example, I once worked in an office with an overweight woman. I can’t remember her name, but it was an overweight name, like Bertha, so I’ll call her that. Most of Bertha’s overweight was concentrated in her behind. She looked like a perfectly normal person who for some reason was carrying an ottoman under her dress. Bertha had read in some beauty magazine that if you have a big behind, you should stand in such a way that one arm dangles in front of it, blocking the view. So Bertha made it a point to always have one arm dangling down, even when she was carrying heavy financial ledgers. She looked like she had some kind of nerve disorder. People were always saying “What’s wrong with your arm, Bertha?” until finally it became blatantly obvious that she was trying to obscure her behind, which her arm was too small to do anyway unless she put on a catcher’s mitt.

  Another popular way to disguise excess weight is to wear clothing with vertical stripes. The idea is that vertical stripes create an optical illusion that makes you look thinner, but the truth is that they create an optical illusion that makes you look as though you were wearing a cafe awning. Also, every schoolchild knows that the only reason people wear vertical stripes is to disguise excess weight. You might just as well wear a big sign that says “FAT.” What I’m driving at is that you can’t really hide your weight problem, which means that sooner or later you have to go on a diet.

  Important Health Note:

  Before you go on any diet, you should consult your doctor, or at least send him some money.

  The principle behind diets is that you cut down on the amount of calories you eat. A “calorie” is a unit of measurement that tells you how good food tastes. Really good food, like steak or fudge, has a very high calorie content; really awful food, like grapefruit halves, has almost no calories. (Now before I get a lot of outraged letters from citrus growers, let me point out that I am not opposed to grapefruit halves, except as food. I think grapefruit halves can serve many useful purposes around the home, such as extinguishing small fires.)

  To understand how diets work, you have to understand how your body digests food. The process starts in your mouth, which tastes the food and covers it with spit, then sends it down to your stomach to be broken down for use as bodily parts. This is done by color. Red foods, such as rare steak, beets and Hawaiian Punch, are used to form red body parts, such as the heart; green foods, such as beans and lime jello, are used to form green body parts, such as the kidney; beer is used to form urine; and so on. The problem is that if, on a given day, your body doesn’t need any further parts, it turns the food into fat. Your body fully intends to go back to the fat someday and turn it into something useful, but it never gets a chance because you’re always sliding more spit-covered food down your throat. So your fat just sits there, useless, until gradually it loses self-esteem and, desperate for attention, starts interfering with the other organs. This is why you have to go on a diet.

  Another principle behind diets is that you eat things that are so disgusting that your stomach rejects them and goes looking for fat to use as body parts. This is the big problem with diets. You spend a lot of time eating things like Melba toast. Melba toast was developed by the British, and it is not really food at all. You could airlift a thousand tons of Melba toast to some wretched, starving Asian village, and the starving Asians would use it to build homes, or as bookmarks, but it would never occur to them to eat it. This is why diets don’t work. You spend a couple of days eating Melba toast, then you lunge for the Twinkies, and you end up fatter than ever.

  The only other way to lose weight is to go on a scientific weight-loss program. These are widely advertised in those newspapers they sell at supermarket check-out lines, the ones with headlines like: BURT REYNOLDS FINDS CANCER CURE IN UFO RIDE WITH PRINCESS DIANA.

  You should buy one of these magazines and flip through the pages until you see a full-page advertisement with a headline that says “WOMAN LOSES 240 POUNDS IN 30 SECONDS.” Under the headline are two pictures of a woman’s head: in the first picture the head is on top of what appears to be an industrial boiler wearing a 1952 bathing suit; in the second picture, the head is on top of Bo Derek. Under the picture it says: “Mrs. Earl Clamp of Wastewater, Tex., reports that the Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program saved her marriage and prevented serious damage to her home. Let Mrs. Clamp tell you about it in her own words: ‘Well, in my own words, I realized I had a serious weight problem one day when my husband, Earl, wanted to take me to the Recreational Vehicle and Rare Gem Show at the mall, and I couldn’t get out the front door, so I decided to go out through the cellar doors, only I knocked over the water heater and the pipes broke and we had water all over Earl’s pelt collection.

  SO I said: “Earl, I’m going to try the Amazing New Brand New Amazing Scientific 30-Second Weight-Loss Program.” I didn’t think I could do it, but this program is so scientific that I lost 240 pounds in 30 seconds, right there in the basement. Now Earl is proud to show nude pictures of me to his friends.’”

  I’m sure these weight-loss programs work, because they have pictorial proof, and, besides, the supermarket check-out newspapers have a reputation for thoroughly checking everything for accuracy before they print it. Which is a lot more than you can say for this publication.

  Dentistry Self-Drilled

  I bet you rarely stop to think how important your teeth are. This is good. America is in enough trouble as it is, what with inflation and all; we just can’t afford to have people stopping to think how important their teeth are, especially on major highways.

  Nevertheless, you owe a lot to your teeth. They are your best friends. Think about it: while you’re out here, playing tennis and reading novels, they’re sitting patiently in your mouth, a foul-smelling, disgusting place almost devoid of recreational facilities, dealing with Slim Jims and Cheez-its and the other crap you give them to chew.

  You ought to apologize to your teeth for the way you treat them. You ought to go up to a mirror, right now, and bare your teeth and look them straight in their eyes and say: “I’m sorry.” You may want to practice a bit so you can say this clearly with your teeth bared. Don’t let the children see you.

  Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “I don’t have to apologize to my teeth. I take good care of my teeth.”

  That’s what you think. That’s what I thought, too, until I started going to the dentist again recently after a brief absence of about twelve years. I stopped going because I didn’t trust him. For one thing, he wore an outfit that buttoned on the side, the kind the spaceship crews wear in low-budget science fiction movies. For another thing, he and his cohorts always left the room when they X-rayed me. They’d make up flimsy excuses, like “I have to go put my socks in the dryer,” or “I think the cat is throwing up.” Then they’d flip the X-ray switch and race out of the room, probably to a lead-lined concrete bunker.

  When he came back, the dentist would jab me in the gums sixty or seventy times until my mouth was full of blood and I had to spit in what appeared to be a miniature toilet. Th
en he’d show me what he claimed was an X ray of my mouth, knowing full well I would not be able to distinguish an X ray of my mouth from a color slide of the Parthenon, and he’d tell me I had a cavity and he was going to fill it. I would tell him I hadn’t noticed any so-called cavity, and that it was, after all, my mouth. And he would give me this long routine about how if he didn’t fill it all my teeth would fall out and I’d lose my job and end up drooling on myself in a gutter, which is what they taught him to say in dental school. Then he would spend several hours drilling a hole in my tooth.

  Answer me this: A cavity is a hole in your teeth, right? So if the dentist is so upset about this hole in your teeth, why does he spend so much time making it bigger? Huh? Does he need more money so he can buy more space-uniform shirts?

  Finally I decided I could save some money if I stopped going to the dentist, got a sharp implement and, in the privacy of my own home, jabbed myself in the gums a couple of times a year. I figured I could ward off cavities by brushing after every meal with an effective decay-preventive dentifrice. I mean, that’s what they told us for years, right? “Brush your teeth after every meal,” they said. Parents said it. Teachers said it. Bucky Beaver said it.

  Never trust a talking beaver. I found this out the hard way when, after twelve years of brushing like a madman, I returned to the dentist. The Dental Hygienist looked at my mouth the way you would look at a full spittoon. “You haven’t been flossing,” she said.

  It seems that while I was home jabbing myself in the gums, the Dental Community was losing its enthusiasm for brushing and getting into flossing. These days the Dental Community regards anybody who merely brushes as a real bozo. This is blatantly unfair. In all those years of going to school and watching Bucky Beaver and Mister Tooth Decay, I never heard one word about flossing.

  Flossing does not come naturally to human beings. If the Good Lord had wanted us to floss our teeth, He would have given us less self-respect. But the Dental Community says we have to do it, because otherwise we’ll get gum disease.

  Pretty slick, isn’t it? If we can’t even see cavities, how the hell are we going to dispute them when they tell us we have gum disease?

  I was about to point all this out to my dentist when he gave me this gas, nitrous oxide I believe, and all of a sudden I felt great. I began to really appreciate the Dental Community for coming up with flossing and all the other fine things it has done for me over the years. I even began to soften toward Bucky Beaver.

  I think this was part of the plan.

  Culture Staggers On

  Art Cuts Really Sphinx

  If you are a member of the private sector, you are going to have to start supporting the arts.

  For the benefit of those of you who do not know what sector you belong to, here is a simple way to figure it out: If you get Presidents’ Day, election day, Arbor Day, Columbus Day, your birthday, Groundhog Day, and Flag Day off, you belong to the government sector. Otherwise, you belong to the private sector, and, as I said, you will have to start supporting the arts, because the government sector is cutting back.

  The government sector took over the arts a few years back because the private sector had dropped the ball. The problem was that the private sector consisted largely of common people who spent most of their time working and, as a result, never became cultured. Their concept of “art” involved flamingo-shaped lawn ornaments, or pictures of dogs with actual working clocks in their stomachs. The only time that common people ever watched ballet was when it was on the Ed Sullivan show, and even then they watched it only because they knew it would last no more than three minutes and would be followed shortly by an act featuring monkeys wearing dresses.

  This widespread lack of culture created a major problem for the few people who were interested in poetry, classical music, opera, ballet, sculpture, painting—in short, the real, serious, cultural, art-type activities that most people find fairly boring. The problem was that the common people would not voluntarily pay for these activities, so the only places where culture was available were:

  Junior high schools, where, under state law, children are required to do cultural things, such as screech away on rented violins, and parents are required to watch them, and New York City, where there are so many people that you can get a paying crowd for virtually anything, including opera and live nude dog wrestling.

  But other than that, art was pretty scarce. Then some cultured person came up with a brilliant plan: If common people wouldn’t support art voluntarily, why not force them to support it? Now when I say “force,” I’m not talking about just walking up to some common person and ordering him, at gunpoint, to attend an opera. What I’M talking about is getting the government to tax COMMON people, then use their money to put on an opera.

  Actually, this is an old, tried-and-true way to support the arts, dating back to the ancient Egyptians. How do you think the Egyptians built the Sphinx? Surely, you don’t think that a bunch of common Egyptians just got together one day and said: “Hey, why don’t we build a Sphinx?” Of course not. Left to their own devices, the common Egyptians would have spent their time growing food. To get some real culture, to get the Sphinx, the Egyptians needed a government authority, someone with vision, someone with taste, someone with whips and spears.

  Our government’s approach to the arts is essentially the same, but less messy. Unlike the ancient Egyptians, we common people are not forced to attend cultural activities: we are merely forced to pay for them. This works out much better. You see, under the Egyptian method, you always had a bunch of sweating or dead Egyptians around your Sphinx; under our method, cultured people can have an opera in the Kennedy Center in Washington, safe in the knowledge that few, if any, of the common people who paid for it will show up to watch. After all, a lot of the common people live thousands of miles away; they couldn’t attend even if they wanted to.

  For a while there, our government was in the art business whole hog, forking over hundreds of millions of dollars for art. But now the program is in trouble. Jimmy Carter wanted to spend about $300 million on art this year, but Ronald Reagan thinks it should spend only about half that, so he’ll have more money to spend on exploding objects. Needless to say, the art officials are extremely upset. Their position is extremely logical: they argue that if the government is going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on things designed to kill people, it should spend at least $300 million for art that people don’t want to see.

  But it looks as though the art officials are going to lose, and that means that, unless somebody does something, art will fall back into the hands of the lawn-flamingo owners. So it’s UP tO us public-spirited, private-sector people to pick up the ball. We’ve got to develop some way to make sure people attend operas and ballets, look at paintings, read poetry, and so on. Maybe we should set up a system patterned after volunteer fire departments: whenever anybody discovered a cultural activity, he could sound an alarm, and the public-spirited citizens in the area would go and watch it. If we all work together, we might be able to keep art alive, even without the government. Maybe we could even build a sphinx.

  Some Art, Some Art Not

  I am extremely fond of art. Whenever I have a few spare moments, there’s nothing I enjoy more than hauling out a batch of art and looking at it. This is probably because I was exposed to so much art when I was in grade school. At least once a year, the teachers would herd us kids into a bus and take us to a museum and expose us to thousands of square yards of old paintings. We were very impressed, particularly because many of these paintings featured enormous naked women, women with thighs the size of fully inflated life rafts, lounging around and eating fruit.

  The reason that this theme is so common in old paintings is that years ago Europe was terrorized by packs of enormous naked women. They would stride into a town, munching on pears, and threaten to knock down the cathedral if their portraits weren’t painted immediately. Eventually they were driven off by a particularly harsh winter, but
their paintings are still popular today because they offer such a good value in terms of square yards of painting per dollar.

  Which brings us to money. Money is very important to the art world, because without it we would have no way to know how good a particular piece of art is. For example, let’s say that we want to decide which painting is better: the “Mona Lisa” by Leonardo da Vinci, or “Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer” by Rembrandt (whose first name was Boauregard, which is why he never used it). Now let’s say that the list price on the “Mona Lisa” is $36 million, whereas the price on “Aristotle etc.” is $12 million. This would tell your experienced art critic that the “Mona Lisa” is three times as good, artwise, as “Aristotle etc.” and nearly six million times as good as those paintings they sell in shopping malls, the ones that feature children with enormous brown eyes who are supposed to look helpless and appealing but actually look like some sort of bizarre species of insect.