by Dave Barry
“Humps,” I said. A hump indicates to the shrewd bettor that the horse is actually a camel, which means it will run slower than the horses. Or possibly faster; I can never remember which.
At this point Rob decided—and this is exactly the problem with young people today; they don’t want to learn anything—that he was going to ignore my system and pick his own horses by (Get this!) studying the racing form. I told him this was a waste of time, because the so-called “racing form” in fact has nothing to do with racing: It’s a means by which espionage agents send each other messages in secret code. Here’s an actual quote from the form that Rob was studying:
“Magic Way has the highest Beyer in the field, which is a nice starting point at the maiden level.”
Right! And the Presbyterian mollusk wears linen jodhpurs!
While Rob was frittering away his time trying to decipher gibberish, I implemented another proven wagering system, known as the “bet on most of the horses in the race system.” Perhaps you think that it is impossible to bet on six horses in an eight-horse race and still not win any money. Perhaps you are an idiot.
I will not beat around the bush. When the day was over, I had picked no winning horses, no placing horses, and no showing horses. I had picked horses that, if you were to cut them open—and don’t let me stand in your way—would have turned out to be powered by pairs of seriously obese men walking backward. Rob had picked three winning horses and ended up making money. He thinks this could be a good career path. He does seem to have a knack for it. I just hope, if he becomes wealthy, that he remembers who showed him the ropes.
My Son’s College Apartment Has a Pleasant Pepperoni Motif
So I visited my son at college on Parents Weekend, which is a nice event that colleges hold so that parents will have a chance to feel old.
I started feeling old the moment I got to my son’s housing unit and saw a sign on the door that said: END WORLD HUNGER TODAY. This reminded me that there was a time in my life, decades ago, when I was so full of energy that I was going to not only END WORLD HUNGER, but also STOP WAR and ELIMINATE RACISM. Whereas today my life goals, to judge from the notes I leave myself, tend to be along the lines of BUY DETERGENT.
I felt even older when I entered my son’s apartment, which he shares with three roommates and approximately 200 used pizza boxes. When I was a college student, we also accumulated used pizza boxes, but we threw them away after a reasonable period of time (six weeks). Whereas my son and his roommates apparently plan to keep theirs forever. Maybe they believe that a wealthy used-box collector will come to the door and say, “If you can produce a box used to deliver pizza on the night of September 12, 1999, I’ll pay you thousands of dollars for it!” Because they WILL have that box on file.
They keep their pizza boxes in the kitchenette, which is also where they keep their food supply, which is an open jar containing a wad of peanut butter as hard as a bowling ball. You may be wondering: “What happens if a burglar breaks into the kitchenette and steals their pizza boxes?” Do not worry. They keep a reserve supply of pizza boxes in the living room, and if a burglar tried to get those, he’d trip over the cord that stretches across the room from the TV to the video-game controller held by a young man who is permanently installed on the sofa. This young man is not one of my son’s roommates; for all I know, he’s not even a student. But he is stationed in the living room 24 hours a day, focused on the video game, although he always gives you a polite “Hi” when you walk through the room and step over his cord. I’m not familiar with the game he’s playing, but I noticed, as I stepped over the cord, that the screen said: “YOU HAVE BEEN AWARDED EIGHT THUNDERS.” Maybe this has something to do with world hunger.
After passing through the living room, I stuck my head into my son’s bedroom. I was reluctant to enter, because then I’d have been walking on my son’s clothes. He keeps them on the floor, right next to the bureau. (I don’t know what he keeps in the bureau. My guess is: pizza boxes.) My son assured me that, even though his garments appear to be one big intertwined pile, he knows which are clean and which are dirty.
“Like, this one is clean,” he said, picking a garment off the floor, “and this one is clean, and this one is . . . never mind.”
There were no sheets on my son’s bed. Asked about this, he explained (this was the entire explanation): “They came off a couple of weeks ago.”
I’m not complaining about my son’s housekeeping. He is Martha Stewart compared with the student who occupied his bedroom last year. According to true campus legend, when this student moved out, his laundry was so far beyond human control that he simply abandoned it. As a kind of tribute, his roommates took a pair of his briefs outside, climbed a lamppost, and stretched the briefs over the lamp. They remain there today, a monument to the courage and dedication it takes to put underpants on a lamppost. I was gazing up at them in admiration when a student said to me: “That’s the cleanest they’ve ever been.”
Not all student rooms look like my son’s. Some are occupied by females. If you stand outside the building, you notice that those rooms have curtains and pictures on the walls; whereas the males’ rooms have all been painstakingly decorated with: nothing. The only designer touches are lines of bottles, and the occasional tendril of laundry peeking coyly over a windowsill. We stood outside my son’s building one evening, noting this difference; my son, looking at a tasteful, female-occupied room, said, with genuine wonder in his voice: “I think they vacuum and stuff.”
Speaking of which: During Parents Weekend, I took my son shopping, and we bought, among other things, a small vacuum cleaner. When we got back to his room, one of his roommates opened the box and held up the vacuum cleaner. We all looked at it, and then at the room. Then we enjoyed a hearty laugh. Then the roommate set the vacuum cleaner down on the floor, where it will be swallowed by laundry and never seen again. This is fine. These kids are not in college to do housework: They are there to learn. Because they are our Hope for the Future. And that future is going to smell like socks.
The Gulf Between Father and Son Is Called “Quantum Physics”
Recently I received a phone call from my son, Rob. It was a phone call that every parent dreads.
That’s right: My son told me that the universe does not exist. Or at least it does not in any way resemble my concept of it. According to Rob, I understand the universe about as well as a barnacle understands a nuclear aircraft carrier.
I blame college. That’s where Rob is getting these ideas, which have to do with the Theory of Relativity and something called “quantum physics.” Rob and his roommate, Hal, stay up all night discussing Deep Questions and figuring out the universe, and when they have it nailed down—The Rob and Hal Theory of Everything—Rob calls me up, all excited, and starts talking about time travel, the Fifth Dimension, the Big Bang, etc. I try to follow him, but I am hampered by a brain that for decades has firmly believed that the Fifth Dimension is the musical group that sang “Up, Up and Away.” So I quickly become confused and testy, and Rob gets frustrated and says, “Don’t you understand? THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS TIME!” And I’ll say, “YES THERE IS, AND RIGHT NOW IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING!”
(At one point—I swear this is true—we got into a bitter argument about whether people in Minneapolis age at the same rate as people in Miami.)
When I was in college, during the ’60s, there was no such thing as “quantum physics.” Or, if there was, nobody told ME about it. Back then, when we stayed up all night, we were not trying to figure out the universe: We were trying to figure out how to operate the phone, so we could order pizza. (Note to young people: Phones were MUCH more complicated in the ’60s.)
I was an English major, and when we English majors thought about physics, we were trying to solve problems like: “You are required to turn in a 15-page paper on The Brothers Karamazov. You have written a grand total of 311 words on this topic. How big do you have to make your margins to make these words stretch ove
r 15 pages? Do you think the professor will notice that your ‘paper’ is a little anorexic worm of type running between margins wide enough to land an airplane on? Do you think that anybody in history has ever actually read all the way to the end of The Brothers Karamazov? Why?”
This is not to say that I know nothing about physics. I studied physics for an ENTIRE YEAR in Pleasantville High School under the legendary Mr. Heideman. We learned that there are five simple machines: the lever, the pulley, the doorbell, the hammer, and the toaster. We learned that the most powerful force in the universe is static electricity, which Mr. Heideman demonstrated by getting a volunteer to place his or her hand on a generator, which caused the volunteer’s hair to stand on end, unless the volunteer was a girl with the popular early ’60s “beehive” hairstyle held rigidly in place by the other most powerful force in the universe, hair spray. Presumably, if Mr. Heideman had cranked the power up enough, the static electricity buildup would have caused the volunteer’s head to explode, and we would finally have found out if—as widely rumored—many “beehive” hairstyles contained nests of baby spiders.
Thanks to my high-school training, I believed I had a solid grasp of physics. So when Rob was growing up, I was able to answer his questions about the universe, such as “What is a star?” (Answer: a big ball of static electricity that has caught on fire because of friction with comets) or “What is gravity?” (Answer: a powerful type of static electricity that sucks you toward the ground, especially after you eat Italian food).
These answers satisfied my son until he started reaching that snotty, know-it-all age when kids start losing all respect for authority (18 months). And now he’s calling me from college and telling me that the universe is NOTHING like my concept of it. The stuff he talks about is pretty complex, but I will try to summarize the main points, as I understand them:
Point One: Whatever you think about anything is wrong.
Point Two: There is no such thing as Point One. You THINK there is a Point One, but that just shows what a physics moron you are.
Point Three: If there are identical twins, and one of them gets on a spacecraft going at nearly the speed of light, then one of them will grow old much faster than the other, and that one will retire to Miami.
Point Three: There is an infinite number of possible Point Threes, and they are all equally true, and you will never understand ANY of them.
OK? Is that clear to everybody? Good! To prove you really understand, I want you all to write me a 15-page paper on how the universe works and send it backward through time to me in 1964, c/o Mr. Heideman’s class. OK, I got it. Thanks.
“Day Trading for Dummies,” Including Nap Times, Bankruptcy Laws
How would you like to make BIG MONEY while sitting at home in your bathrobe eating cake frosting straight from the can whenever you felt like it?
If this sounds like the ideal career to you, then you should get into “online trading,” which means getting rich by buying and selling stocks on the Internet, a worldwide network of computers operated by magic.
I assume you are on the Internet. If you are not, then pardon my French, but vous êtes un big loser. Today EVERYBODY is on the Internet, including the primitive Mud People of the Amazon rain forest. In the old days, when the Mud People needed food, they had to manually throw spears at wild boars; whereas today they simply get on the Internet, go to www.spear-a-boar.com and click their mouse a few times (the Mud People use actual mice). Within three business days, a large box is delivered to them by a UPS driver, whom they eat.
So you, too, need to get online, and it could not be easier! Signing up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) takes only a few minutes, after which you will immediately start enjoying all the benefits of having a fee charged to your credit card every month until the end of time. If you wish to cancel your account for any reason, such as your death, all you have to do is contact your ISP, fill out a simple form, then climb into a big tank and fight Rex, the Customer Service Death Squid.
But you won’t have to worry about monthly fees once you’re making “big money” as an online trader! Of course financial experts recommend that, before you make any investment decision, you should carefully read a “Q&A”-type column written by a trained English major. Here it is:
Q.
Are there any risks associated with online stock trading?
A.
Yes. People do get hurt. To cite just one example: A man whom I will call Webster P. Horngasket II of 2038 Open Wound Lane, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who was unemployed and had a wife and five hungry children to support, took his last $17.40, which was supposed to be for little Jessica’s insulin, and decided to “play the market” with it, despite having no previous experience. Two days later, his lifeless body was found crushed under an enormous pile of thousand-dollar bills that he had failed to stack properly.
Q.
What a chilling cautionary tale.
A.
His family had to go to Disney World without him.
Q.
How should I choose an online brokerage?
A.
You’ll be trusting your brokerage with your financial future, so you should make absolutely sure that you pick one with a good TV commercial.
Q.
What about the brokerage whose commercial for some reason consists entirely of people square-dancing?
A.
That is an excellent firm, although every now and then the staff has to run out and assist in the birth of a heifer.
Q.
OK, I’ve chosen an online brokerage! Now what do I do?
A.
Step one in your investment program, according to the American Society of Financial Planners, is to quit your job. “The best way,” notes the Society, “is to write a businesslike letter of resignation and staple it firmly to your immediate supervisor’s forehead.” Now you’re ready to get rich by trading stocks!
Q.
What, exactly, ARE stocks?
A.
They are pieces of paper stating that you, personally, own a piece of a company. This means that if you own stock in, say, General Motors, any time you want, you may walk into a Chevrolet dealership and take a piece of a car.
Q.
What if I own stock in NBC?
A.
You may touch Jennifer Aniston’s thighs.
Q.
What is the best strategy for buying stocks?
A.
Consider the story of two neighbors, “Bob” and “Ted,” who each have $5,000 to invest. “Bob” invests in a diversified portfolio of solid stocks with prospects for steady long-term growth; while “Ted” gambles it all on a single high-risk stock. After six months, during which the Dow Jones Industrial Average has risen by 14.3 percent, “Bob” falls to his death while attempting to unclog his gutters, and “Ted” suddenly realizes that he does not have to return “Bob’s” riding mower.
Q.
So it’s better to just let the gutters stay clogged?
A.
That has always been our philosophy.
Q.
What causes the Stock Market to go up and down?
A.
A man named Alan Greenspan. If he’s in a good mood, the market goes up; if he’s in a bad mood, the market goes down.
Q.
So you’re saying I should put uppers in his Metamucil?
A.
That is how Martha Stewart did it.
Q.
Can you give me the name of a “sleeper” stock that you know, from “inside” information, is about to go through the roof?
A.
Yes, and here it is, unless the newspaper editors decide to keep it to themselves.
Stay Tuned to FearPlex, for More Panic All Day, Every Day
NEWS ANNOUNCER: Good evening. Our top story tonight is Tropical Depression Vinny, which is shaping up to be the most deadly potential natural disaster ever to strike this nation since last week when Tropical Depression Urs
ula came within just 1,745 miles of American soil before veering off and inflicting an estimated $143 worth of damage on the Azores. For more on Vinny, let’s go straight to the FearPlex WeatherCenter, where meteorologist Dirk Doppler, in anticipation of a long night of escalating tension, has already applied 75 cubic feet of Rave Extra Hold hair spray.
METEOROLOGIST: Thank you, Bill. As we can see from this satellite photograph taken from space, right now Vinny is located at a latitude of 36.8 degrees centigrade and is projected to follow a path that, according to our computer model, could potentially take it directly to any of the 13 original colonies as well as Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, Canada, and western Europe. We are urging everybody within the potentially affected area to become extremely nervous, because this thing potentially has the potential to become a Category Seven storm, which means a storm capable of yanking the udder right off a standing cow.
ANNOUNCER: What is your best guess at this point, Dirk?
METEOROLOGIST: Without creating undue alarm, Bill, I would say there is no hope for human survival on this planet.
ANNOUNCER: Thank you, Dirk. We go now to reporter Crystal Baroque, who has been standing by at the Homeowner Hell megastore. Crystal?
REPORTER: Bill, as usual with storms of this potential, there are long lines of people waiting to buy plywood. Sir, how long have you been here?
CUSTOMER: I’ve been waiting 17 hours, but it’s worth it, to get plywood. Whenever there’s a storm, I hear these voices telling me, “Irving! Go get plywood!” And I don’t even have a home! I just have a big pile of plywood.
