by Dave Barry
“LOS ANGELES—A team of physicists at UCLA announced yesterday that they have made a major scientific breakthrough with the discovery of an important new subatomic particle. This was the team’s eighth major particle this month, giving them a three-particle lead over MIT.
‘These particles are very difficult to detect, even with the aid of enormous federal grants,’ said Head Physicist Dr. Ernest Viewfinder. ‘But we definitely saw an important new one. At least I saw it, and Dr. Hubbleman here thinks he did, too.’ Dr. Viewfinder said he could not show this particle to newsmen because it was ‘resting.’”
I’m starting to wonder whether the physicists are pulling some kind of elaborate scam here. I’m starting to wonder if they don’t sit around their $23 million atomic accelerators all day, drinking frozen daiquiris, and shrieking “There goes one now!” and then laughing themselves sick. Maybe it’s time we laypersons asked some hard questions about this idea that all matter consists of tiny invisible particles whizzing around. I’m willing to believe that uranium does, because physicists have demonstrated that they can use it to vaporize cities. But I’d like to see them do this with some kind of matter that the layperson is more familiar with, such as cheese. I have examined cheese very closely, and as far as I can tell it consists of cheese. I have obtained similar results with celery.
Then you have your biologists, always getting into Newsweek by claiming they’ve isolated an important new virus. By way of “proof,” they show you this blurred photograph that looks like, yes, it could be an important new virus, but it also could be an extreme close-up of Peru or Anthony Quinn. The biologists always promise that just as soon as they get a few million more dollars they’re going to give us a cure for the common cold, but we veteran laypersons tend to hang on to our nasal spray, because we know that all they’re really going to give us is more photographs of Anthony Quinn.
Another invisible thing biologists love to talk about is DNA, which is of course the Key to Unlocking the Secret of Life Itself. Biologists have learned that the public, particularly the journalist public, will take anything they do seriously, as long as they claim it has something to do with DNA. Not long ago biologists managed to get two rats on national TV news by claiming they had the same DNA molecules inside them, or something like that. Of course you didn’t see any DNA molecules; you saw these rats, being broadcast to the nation as if they were the joint Chiefs of Staff.
I have here in front of me a recent front-page newspaper story about a biologist who claims that he isolated the genes of an animal called a “quagga,” which used to live in South Africa before it became extinct. The story says the biologist got the genes from the skin of a stuffed quagga in St. Louis, and that there are 25,000 different gene fragments, each of which is being reproduced in a separate culture of bacteria. So what we have here is a biologist telling reporters, with a straight face, that he has 25,000
dishes containing pieces of genes that they cannot see, which belong to an animal that they never heard of, which exists only in stuffed form in St. Louis. And instead of spitting into the dishes and striding disdainfully from the room, the reporters take notes and actually put the story in the newspaper.
And don’t get me started on astronomers, with their $57 million atomic laser telescopes, and their breakthrough photographs of “new galaxies” that look remarkably like important viruses, and their “black holes,” which are of course invisible to the layperson because they suck up all the light around them. Of course. In fact this very phenomenon probably contributed to the extinction of the quagga.
I say it’s time the government stopped giving money to the particle-and-virus crowd, and started giving it to scientists who will do experiments that the public can understand and appreciate. Mister Wizard comes to mind. Think of what he could do with several million federal dollars:
“NEW YORK—Mister Wizard announced that he has successfully demonstrated the existence of gravity by dropping a mobile home onto Long Island from a height of 60,000 feet. ‘To my knowledge,’ Mister Wizard told reporters, ‘this is the first time this has been done, and we intend to look at slow-motion videotapes over and over in hopes of furthering our understanding of what happens when gravity causes a mobile home to strike Long Island at a high rate of speed.’ He added that ‘in the very near future’ he will attempt to determine ‘what happens when you pump 300 gallons of grape juice into a cow.’”
Heat? No Sweat
The best way I know of to deal with heat is to wait until the middle of a major jungle-style heat wave, when if you lie still for more than 20 minutes patches of fungus form on your skin, when birds are bursting into flames in midair and nuns are cursing openly on the street, then go down to Sears and try to buy an air conditioner. Or, if you already have an air conditioner, you can try to get somebody to fix it.
But as of the last heat wave, we didn’t have one, and after about the fourth or fifth day my wife was getting that look where, later on, the neighbors tell the homicide detective: “We knew she was feeling emotional strain, but we had no idea she owned a scythe.” So I went down to Sears and joined the crowd of people thrusting credit cards at the appliance salesperson, who was of course being extra surly and slow. Who could blame him? Throughout spring, he had stood alone in Major Appliances, an outcast, wearing a suit whose fabric originated outside the immediate solar system, drumming his fingers on a washer until he had drummed little finger holes right through the lid, and we had all strode right past him. And now we were clustered around him like Titanic passengers hoping to obtain lifeboat seating.
CUSTOMER: Please please PLEASE can I buy an air conditioner?
SALESPERSON: That depends. Will you be wanting the service warranty?
CUSTOMER: Yes of course.
SALESPERSON: JUST one?
CUSTOMER: No, no, of course not. Several service warranties. Eight service warranties.
SALESPERSON: Well, I don’t know ...
CUSTOMER: And these two dishwashers.
Wise consumer that I am, I bought the air conditioner with the maximum number of “BTUs,” an electronic measurement of how heavy an air conditioner is. To get it into the house, my wife and I used the standard husband-and-wife team lifting system whereby the wife hovers and frets and asks “Can I help?” and the husband, sensing from deep within his manhood that if he lets a woman help him, all the males he feared in tenth grade gym class, the ones who shaved because they actually had to, will suddenly barge into the house and snap him with towels, says “No, I’m fine,” when in fact he also senses deep within his manhood that he is on the verge of experiencing a horrible medical development that would require him to wear a lifetime helpful groin device.
To install my air conditioner, all I had to do was get a hammer and whack out a large permanent metal part of our window that was not shown in the official Sears instruction diagram, then plug it in, using of course a plug adaptor, which you need to void any potential warranty. This particular air conditioner is one of those new “energy-efficient” models, which means that rather than draw electricity from the power company, which would cost money, it operates by sucking power out of all the other appliances in the house. You can actually see them get smaller and writhe in pain, when it kicks in. More than once we have been awakened in the dead of night by the pitiful shrieks of the toaster, which has been with us for many years and does not understand what is happening.
Sometimes my wife expresses concern about “overloading the circuit,” a term I suspect she read in one of her magazines. In the past decade or so, the women’s magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that men know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is look at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home. So I looke
d at our air conditioner, which appeared, in what feeble brownish light the lamp was able to give off, to be getting larger and chuckling softly, and I gave my wife a reassuring home-handyman speech featuring the term “ampere,” which I believe is a BTU that has broken loose from the air conditioner and lodged in the wiring.
If you cannot install air conditioning, I suggest you perspire. Perspiring is Mother Nature’s own natural cooling system. When you’re in a situation involving great warmth or stress, such as summer or an audience with the queen, your sweat glands, located in your armpits, rouse themselves and start pumping out perspiration, which makes your garments smell like a dead rodent, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling you she wants you to take them off and get naked. Of course the average person cannot always get naked, let alone the queen, so many people put antiperspirant chemicals on their armpits; this forces Mother Nature to reroute the perspiration to the mouth, where it forms bad breath, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling you she is basically a vicious irresponsible slut.
One final note: Do not be tempted to beat the heat by drinking alcoholic beverages. A far better route is to inject them straight into your veins. No, ha ha, seriously, the experts tell us that alcohol actually makes us warmer! Of course, these are the same experts who tell us, during cold weather, that alcohol actually makes us colder, so we have to ask ourselves exactly how stupid these experts think we are. My common-sense advice to you is: If you must drink alcoholic beverages, fine, but for your own sake as well as the sake of others, take sensible precautions to insure you don’t spill them on your clothing, which is already disgusting enough.
Blowing The Big Game
A recent consumer near-tragedy has demonstrated once again, as if we needed any more demonstrations, why the federal government must act immediately to prohibit the sale and possession of plaid carpeting. I feel especially strong about this issue, because the near-tragedy in question involved an eight-year-old girl named Natalie who happens to be the daughter of two friends of mine, Debbie and Bill. They have agreed to let me tell their story in exchange for a promise that I would not reveal that their last name is Ordine (pronounced “Ore-dean”).
Our story begins a few months ago, when Bill bought Natalie two birthday presents, one of which was a gumball machine. Natalie of course immediately got a major wad of gum stuck in her hair and chose to correct the problem personally, without any discussion with a parent or guardian, by getting some scissors and whacking off a large segment of the right side of her hair, but that is not the near-tragedy in question. I mention it only so you’ll grasp that when it comes to buying birthday presents for an eight-year-old, Bill has no more sense than a cinder block. This is why, as the other present, he bought Natalie a popular children’s dexterity game called Operation, in which you attempt to put little humorous simulated organs into a humorous simulated person without setting off a buzzer.
Ordinarily, there would be nothing wrong with this, but it happens that Bill and Debbie have a carpet with large plaid squares on it. So as most of you have no doubt already guessed, on the afternoon of her class Christmas play, Natalie invented a game whereby she would put the little plastic heart of the Operation game into her nose to see how many squares of carpeting she could blow it across. Which is fine, provided it is done in the context of an organized league with uniforms, coaches, etc., but Natalie was doing this all on her own, and the result is that she got the heart stuck up her nose. You hate to have this kind of thing happen, because it’s not the kind of problem that will just go away by itself, like, say, a broken leg. No, if you want to deal with a heart stuck up your nose, you pretty much have to expose yourself to an assault by Modern Medicine.
So Debbie called the Emergency Room, which has of course heard of every conceivable thing being stuck in every conceivable orifice and consequently told Debbie that this was nothing to worry about, plus they were busy with some real emergencies, so Natalie should go ahead and be in her class play and come in later that evening. So Natalie performed with the heart in her nose—she was one of the Rough Kids Who Wouldn’t Go to Sleep on Christmas Eve—and then went to the hospital, where the doctor tried to get the heart out with forceps, but of course couldn’t reach it. So he decided to keep Natalie overnight and operate the next day, which he did, and of course he couldn’t find the heart.
“What do you mean, you can’t find the (bad swear word) heart?” is the parental concern Bill recalls voicing to the doctor before he (Bill) stomped off in search of a small helpless furry animal to kick in the ribs. Meanwhile, the doctor ordered a CAT scan, which is the medical procedure that evidently requires the destruction of rare porcelain figurines because it costs $810, and which of course showed no trace of the heart. So the doctor concluded that the heart must have gotten into Natalie’s digestive system, and everything would be fine and nobody should worry about it.
The bill for this medical treatment was of course $3,200.
Bill and Debbie, when they are not whimpering softly like the radiation victims in The Day After, admit they find the whole episode somewhat ironic, seeing as how it began with a game that has a medical theme. But as Bill points out, the difference is that “in real life, the doctor gets the bucks no matter what happens. In the game, you actually have to do it right.”
I should point out that the heart was, in fact, in Natalie’s digestive system. We know this because Debbie conducted a Stool Search, which I will not discuss in detail here except to say that if anybody should have been paid $3,200, it is Debbie. Also, here’s a useful tip from Debbie for those of you consumers who for some reason might wish to conduct your own stool searches at home: Make use of your freezer.
Natalie, the victim, is fine now, and will never ever ever ever put a heart of any kind in her nose again for at least several months. Bill says she took the heart to school in a Ziplock bag so she could tell her classmates the whole story. “She really spread the word about the dangers of putting pieces of games in your nose,” said Bill. “She became real evangelistic, sort of like a reformed alcoholic, or Chuck Colson.”
None of this would have happened, of course, if Bill and Debbie, who are not bad parents, really, did not have plaid carpeting. And who knows how many other unsuspecting parents have exactly the same consumer menace lurking in their family rooms? How do we know that some child is not at this very moment inserting a pretend organ into his or her nose to see how far he or she can shoot it? This child might bear in mind that the current record, held by eight-year-old Natalie Ordine, who got her name in the newspaper and everything, is only two big squares, which should be easy to beat.
The Swamp Man Cometh
Summer is almost here, boys and girls, and do you know what that means? It means it’s time to go to ... SUMMER CAMP! Neat-o, right boys and girls?! Let’s hear it for summer camp!! Hip-Hip ...”
(Long silent pause)
Listen up, boys and girls. When Uncle Dave says “Hip-Hip,” you say “Hooray!” in loud cheerful voices, OK? Because summer camp is going to be A LOT OF FUN, and if you don’t SHOW SOME ENTHUSIASM, Uncle Dave might just decide to take you on a NATURE HIKE where we IDENTIFY EVERY SINGLE TREE IN THE FOREST.
I happen to know a lot about summer camp, because, back when I was 18, I was a counselor at a camp named “Camp Sharparoon.” There is some kind of rule that says summer camps have to have comical-sounding Indian names and hold big “pow-wows” where everybody wears feathers and goes whooooo. Actual Indians, on the other hand, give their summer camps names like “Camp Stirling Hotchkiss IV” and hold dinner dances.
Camp Sharparoon was a camp for youths from inner-city New York who were popularly known at the time as “disadvantaged,” which meant they knew a LOT more about sex than I did. I was in charge of a group of 12—and 13-year-old boys, and when they’d get to talking about sex, I, the counselor, the Voice of Maturity, the Father Figure for these Troubled Children, would listen intently, occasionally contributing helpful words of guidance such as
: “Really?” And: “Gosh!” There were times I would have given my right arm to be a disadvantaged youth.
Talking about sex was one of our major activities when we went camping out overnight in the woods. We counselors mostly hated camping out, but we felt obligated to do it because these kids had come from the dirty, filthy streets of the urban environment, and it seemed that they should have the opportunity to experience the untamed forest wilderness. Of course, the untamed forest wilderness contained infinitely more dirt and filth than the urban environment, not to mention a great deal of nature in the form of insects. This is why we built the urban environment in the first place.
Nevertheless, we’d set off into the woods, carrying our bedrolls, which we took along so the campers would have a safe place to go to the bathroom. Bed-wetting was a problem on camping trips, because the campers would never go out to the latrine at night. They were concerned that they might be attacked by the Swamp Man, who, according to the traditional fun campfire story we wise mature helpful counselors always told at bedtime to put the camper in the proper emotional state for sleep, was this man with slime in his hair and roots growing out of his nose who would grab you and suck your brains out through your eye sockets. So we generally woke up with at least one bedroll dampened by more than the dew, if you get my drift.
Fortunately, the campers always handled this potentially embarrassing situation with enormous sensitivity and tact. “VICTOR PEED IN HIS BED!!” they would shriek, their happy voices shattering the stillness of the forest morn, alerting the tiny woodland creatures that it was time to flee unless they wished to become the subjects of primitive biological experiments involving sharp sticks and rocks. Heaven help the toad that wandered into our campsite. One minute it would be a normal toad, maybe two inches high, and the next minute, having become the subject in the Two Heavy Flat Rocks Experiment, it would be a completely different style of toad, no thicker than a wedding invitation but with much larger total square footage.