Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus

by Dave Barry

  “If there’s ever a crime committed on a toilet,” Gerba said, “I can tell you who did it.”

  (Asked if this technique could be a factor in the O.J. Simpson trial, Gerba replied, “Not unless he washed his hands in the toilet.”)

  Toilet Fact No. 5—When you flush, a process called “aerosolization” takes place, in which the toilet shoots out an invisible cloud of tiny, germ-infested water droplets that get all over everything. In Reader’s Digest, author Roach quotes Gerba as saying that if you keep your toothbrush within six feet of a commode, “you’re basically brushing your teeth with toilet water.”

  So we see that a toilet is really nothing more than—to use a scientific parlance—a Yuck Bomb. The question is, what can you do about it? Is there any way to get a toilet really clean? This brings us to the truly fascinating part of Roach’s article, wherein Gerba and his family, demonstrating the only way to kill all the bacteria, put laboratory alcohol on their commode bowl and—this is right on page 64 of Reader’s Digest, if you don’t believe me—set it on fire.

  Let me stress right here that Gerba is a recognized toilet expert, and he had a fire extinguisher ready, and toilet-torching is VERY dangerous. You, the layperson, would be an irresponsible idiot to try it.

  Fortunately, I am not a layperson; I am a trained humor columnist, and if there’s one thing I enjoy, it’s a clean toilet. So I tried Gerba’s technique, and I have to say that, in a darkened room, a flaming toilet has a strange kind of beauty that can only be described as “a strange kind of beauty.”

  I’m tempted to speculate here on whether it might be possible to use this same technique to kill bacteria on other surfaces, such as the bodies of Tobacco Institute scientists, but I think I’m already in enough trouble as it is. So let me leave you with these important Toilet Health Reminders: (1) Avoid those middle stalls; (2) Move that toothbrush; and above all, (3) Don’t sit down until the bowl has completely cooled.

  THE PILGRIMS

  WERE TURKEYS

  Thanksgiving is a time of traditions, and there is no tradition more meaningful than the annual U.S. Department of Agriculture warning about fatal food-dwelling bacteria.

  This year, I’m pleased to report, the department has outdone itself: For the first time ever, the department has officially advised Americans not to stuff their turkeys. Many alert readers sent in an Associated Press item in which the acting director of the Agriculture Department’s Meat and Poultry Hot Line—whose name is (I am not making any of this up) Bessie Berry—is quoted as saying: “Improperly cooked stuffing can cause serious illness or even death.”

  I am frankly wondering if stuffing should be regulated, like assault rifles, to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands.

  Bank Teller: May I help you?

  Robber: Hand over the money!

  Second Bank Teller: Do as he says! He’s holding improperly cooked stuffing!

  But the looming specter of a painful death should in no way dampen the festivity of your Thanksgiving dinner. Just make sure the food is prepared in accordance with federal guidelines (“STEP ONE: Lighting the Blowtorch”). And before you eat, don’t forget to bow your head for the traditional prayer of thanks (“We thank Thee for this bountiful meal and ask Thine forgiveness for the fact that we hath ordered pizza”).

  Another traditional thing you should do is teach your kids the true meaning of Thanksgiving. I suggest you have them put on the following historical play, The Very First Thanksgiving, which I wrote myself after several backbreaking minutes of research in the encyclopedia.

  The Very First Thanksgiving

  (SCENE ONE: Some Pilgrims are standing on the deck of the Mayflower.)

  First Pilgrim: Well, here it is, the year 1620.

  Second Pilgrim: Yes, and we have been on this tiny ship, the Mayflower, for many weeks, fleeing persecution in England because of our religious views.

  Fourth Pilgrim: Also, we wear hats that look like traffic cones.

  First Pilgrim: What happened to the Third Pilgrim?

  Second Pilgrim: He’s throwing up.

  Fourth Pilgrim: Hey, look! There’s Plymouth Rock! Pull over, captain!

  Long John Silver: Arrr.

  (SCENE TWO: The Pilgrims are standing on the shore.)

  First Pilgrim: Well, this looks like a barren area with poor soil and harsh winters, offering little chance for our survival.

  Other Pilgrims: Perfect!

  Robber: Hand over the money!

  First Pilgrim: Hey! You already did your scene in this column!

  Robber: Whoops.

  Second Pilgrim: Look! A Native American!

  Native American: Fortunately, I speak English. My name is Squanto.

  Fourth Pilgrim: “Squanto”? What kind of name is “Squanto”?

  Second Pilgrim:It sounds nasty! It sounds like, “Mom! The dog made Squanto on the linoleum!”

  First Pilgrim: What’s “linoleum”?

  Second Pilgrim: I have no idea.

  Squanto: I’m going to show you how to plant maize and beans using alewives, shad, or menhaden as fertilizer.

  Fourth Pilgrim: “Alewives”?

  Squanto: That’s what it says in the encyclopedia.

  (SCENE THREE: One year later.)

  First Pilgrim: Well, here it is, one year later.

  Second Pilgrim: That was a pretty harsh winter.

  Fourth Pilgrim: That was definitely the last winter I plan to spend in a small confined space with people eating a diet of maize and beans.

  First Pilgrim: Also, as you will recall, we had a lot of starvation and disease, the result being that half of us are dead.

  Second Pilgrim: Time for a celebration!

  (SCENE FOUR: The Pilgrims and Squanto are seated at a banquet table.)

  First Pilgrim: So here we are, at the (burp) first Thanksgiving.

  Second Pilgrim: I definitely want the recipe for this ale-wife dip.

  Fourth Pilgrim: Hey, Squanto, what are those drums saying?

  Squanto (after listening for a moment): Lions 14, Bears 7.

  First Pilgrim: You know, Squanto, without your help, we never would have survived this winter. So we’ve decided to take over all of North America and pretty much obliterate your culture.

  Squanto: Sure.

  First Pilgrim: Really? You don’t mind?

  Squanto: No, not at all.

  First Pilgrim: Great!

  Squanto: Try this stuffing.

  HOW TO CURE THE

  DRUG PROBLEM

  Recently I had a simple, foolproof idea for eliminating the drug problem in this country. It came to me while I was making spaghetti sauce.

  I use an ancient Italian spaghetti-sauce recipe that has been handed down through many generations of ancient Italians, as follows:

  Buy some spaghetti sauce.

  Heat it up.

  Sometimes I add some seasoning to the sauce, to give it a dash of what the Italians call “joie de vivre” (literally, “ingredients”). I had purchased, from the supermarket spice section, a small plastic container labeled “Italian Seasoning.” My plan was to open this container and sprinkle some seasoning into the sauce.

  Already I can hear you veteran consumers out there chortling in good-natured amusement.

  “You complete moron,” you are chortling. “You actually thought you could gain access to a product protected by MODERN PACKAGING??”

  Yes, I did, and I certainly learned MY lesson. Because it turns out that Italian Seasoning has joined the growing number of products that, For Your Protection, are packaged in containers that you cannot open unless you own a home laser cannon.

  This trend started with aspirin. Years ago—ask your grandparents—aspirin was sold in bottles that had removable caps. That system was changed when consumer-safety authorities discovered that certain consumers were taking advantage of this loophole by opening up the bottles and—it only takes a few “bad apples” to spoil things for everybody—ingesting aspirin tablets.

>   So now aspirin bottles behave very much like stinging insects in nature movies, defending themselves against consumer access via a multilevel security system:

  (1) There is a plastic wrapper to keep you from getting at the cap.

  (2) The cap, which is patented by the Rubik’s Cube company, cannot be removed unless you line an invisible arrow up with an invisible dot while rotating the cap counterclockwise and simultaneously pushing down and pulling up.

  (3) In the unlikely event that you get the cap off, the top of the bottle is blocked by a taut piece of extremely feisty foil made from the same impenetrable material used to protect the Space Shuttle during atmospheric reentry.

  (4) Underneath the foil is a virtually unremovable wad of cotton the size of a small sheep.

  (5) As a final precaution, there is no actual aspirin underneath the cotton. There is only a piece of paper listing dangerous side effects, underneath which is …

  (6)… a second piece of paper warning you that the first piece of paper could give you a paper cut.

  Even this may not be enough security for the aspirin of tomorrow. At this very moment, packaging scientists are working on an even more secure system, in which the entire aspirin container would be located inside a live sea urchin.

  With aspirin leading the way, more and more products are coming out in fiercely protective packaging designed to prevent consumers from consuming them. My Italian Seasoning container featured a foil seal AND a fiendish plastic thing that I could not remove with my bare hands, which meant of course that I had to use my teeth. These days you have to open almost every consumer item by gnawing on the packaging. Go to any typical consumer household and you’ll note most of the products—food, medicine, compact discs, appliances, furniture—are covered with bite marks, as though the house is infested with crazed beavers. The floor will be gritty with little chips of consumer teeth. Many consumers are also getting good results by stabbing their products with knives. I would estimate that 58 percent of all serious household accidents result from consumers assaulting packaging designed to improve consumer safety.

  Anyway, I finally gnawed my seasoning container open, no doubt activating a tiny transmitter that triggered an alarm in some Spice Security Command Post (WHEEP! WHEEP! WHEEP! INTRUDER GAINING ACCESS TO ITALIAN SEASONING IN SECTOR 19!). While I was stirring my spaghetti sauce, it occurred to me that if we want to eliminate the drug problem in this country, all we have to do is:

  Make all drugs completely legal and allow them to be sold in supermarkets (“Crack? Aisle 6, next to the Sweet’n Low”).

  Require that the drugs be sold in standard consumer packaging.

  My reasoning is that if physically fit, clear-headed consumers can’t get into these packages, there’s no way that strung-out junkies can. Eventually they’ll give up trying to get at their drugs and become useful members of society, or at least attorneys.

  I realize that some of you may have questions about this plan. Your most likely concern is: “If dangerous and highly addictive narcotics are sold freely in supermarkets, will the packages be required to have Nutritional Facts labels, like the ones that now helpfully inform consumers of the protein, carbohydrate, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron content of products such as Cool Whip Lite?”

  Of course they will. Even though, if my plan works as expected, an addict would be unable to consume his heroin purchase, he still has a vital right to know, as an American consumer, that if he DID consume it, he’d be getting only a small percentage of his Daily Requirement of dietary fiber. This is just one of the many benefits we enjoy as residents of this Consumer Paradise. My head aches with pride.

  DON’T KNOW

  MUCH ABOUT

  HISTORY

  Well, you young people have gone and done it again. I’m talking about the recent study showing that high school students, to quote the Associated Press, “do not know basic facts about American history.”

  I hate to be a nag, but this is something like the 46,000th consecutive study showing that you young people are not cutting the academic mustard. Do you know how that makes us older people feel? It makes us feel great. We go around saying to ourselves: “We may be fat and slow and achy and unhip and have hair sprouting from our noses like June asparagus, but at least we know the basic facts about American history.”

  According to the Associated Press, “more than half of America’s high school seniors do not know the intent of the Monroe Doctrine or the chief goal of United States foreign policy after World War II.”

  Is that shocking, or what? Of course, to be fair, we have to admit that, for most of the past fifty years, almost nobody knew what our foreign policy was. It was a secret. For a while there, in the early 1970s, the only person who knew anything about our foreign policy was Henry Kissinger, who kept it hidden in a secret compartment in his underwear, refusing even to show it to President Nixon, although he did occasionally bring it out to impress actresses he was dating.

  In fact, we now know, thanks to recent news reports, that none of our postwar presidents really knew what our foreign policy was, because the Central Intelligence Agency (motto: “Proudly Overthrowing Fidel Castro Since 1962”) was passing along false information about the Russians. (There is an excellent reason why the CIA did this, but if I told you what it is, I would have to kill you.)

  Basically, the CIA led the presidents to believe that the Russians were this well-disciplined, super-advanced military power with all kinds of high-tech atomic laser death rays; whereas in fact the Russians, if they had actually fought us, would have had to rely primarily on the tactic of throwing turnips. So we spent billions of dollars on items such as the Stealth bomber, which by the way we are still building, in case we ever need to sneak an airplane over there to drop bombs on, say, a Burger King.

  But my point is that most of us had no idea what the U.S. foreign policy was until the election of Bill Clinton, who, to his credit, has established a clear and consistent foreign policy, which is as follows: Whenever the president of the United States gets anywhere near any foreign head of state, living or dead, he gives that leader a big old hug. This has proven to be an effective way to get foreign leaders to do what we want: Many heads of state are willing to sign any random document that President Clinton thrusts in front of them, without reading it, just so he will stop embracing them. This is how the prime minister of Sweden, in a recent visit to the White House, wound up purchasing nearly $4,000 worth of Amway products.

  But getting back to the issue at hand, which is the intent of the Monroe Doctrine: I am shocked that more than half of today’s high-school seniors do not know what it is. This kind of ignorance was NOT tolerated when I was a student at Pleasantville (New York) High School, where I studied history under a teacher named—I am not making this up—Oscar Fossum. No sir, we learned our history back then, and we learned it the hard way: By being subjected to surprise quizzes in which we had to write 200-word essay-style answers to questions on topics we knew virtually nothing about, such as:

  The Intent of the Monroe Doctrine

  “The Monroe Doctrine is, without a doubt, one of the most important and famous historical doctrines ever to be set forth in doctrine form. And yet, by the same token, we must ask ourselves: Why? What is the quality that sets this particular doctrine—the Monroe Doctrine—apart from all the others? There can be no question that the answer to this question is: the intent. For when we truly understand the intent of a doctrine such as the Monroe Doctrine, or for that matter any other doctrine, only then can we truly know exactly what that doctrine was intended to accomplish as far as doctrinal intention is concerned. This has been an issue of great significance to historians and human beings alike throughout the distinguished history of this great country that we call, simply, ‘the United States of America,’ a country that has produced more than its share of famous doctrines and great heroes and, yes, educators of the caliber of Mr. Fossum, doing such a superb job of preparing the young people of tomorrow for
the day when we, as a society and yet by the same token also as a nation, finally reach 200 words.”

  See what I mean, young people? Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information, which is how I got a good job in journalism. So I urge you to work hard in school and learn your history, because—who knows?—one of you could be the next Abraham Lincoln, inventor of the steam engine.

  THIS POET

  DON’T

  KNOW IT

  Recently I got a very nice computer-generated letter from an outfit called the National Library of Poetry.

  “Dear Dave,” the letter begins. “Over the past year or so we have been reviewing the thousands of poems submitted to us, as well as examining the poetic accomplishments of people whose poetry has been featured in various anthologies released by other poetry publishers. After an exhaustive examination of this poetic artistry, The National Library of Poetry has decided to publish a collection of new poems written by THE BEST POETS we have encountered.

  “I am pleased to tell you, Dave, that you have been selected to appear in this special edition: Best Poems of 1995 … The poem which you will submit for this edition has been accepted for publication sight unseen on the basis of your previous poetic accomplishments.”

  You talk about feeling honored. It’s not every day that a person who does not, technically, write poetry is selected as one of the top poets for a year that has not, technically, occurred yet.

  Oh, I know what some of you are thinking. You’re thinking, “Dave, you wienerhead, they don’t really think you’re a leading poet. They got your name from some mailing list, and they’ll publish any drivel you send in, because what they REALLY want to do is throw a book together and then sell it to a bunch of pathetic loser wannabe ‘poets’ for some absurdly inflated price like $50.”