Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  Carl will pick up a golf ball, and he’ll say, “To most of you, this golf ball is a mere golf ball, but it actually contains a billion billion billion billion tiny particles. If each of these particles were the size of a grapefruit, my hand would have to be a billion billion billion billion billion times the size of the Houston Astrodome to hold them all. This should give you a rough idea of the kind of heavy thinking I’m doing all day while you’re trying to decide whether to have spaghetti or tuna surprise. Billion billion billion. Good night.”

  People listen to Carl prattling on this way, and they naturally conclude he’s some kind of major genius. That’s what got us into this space-probe trouble that’s going to get us all killed.

  See, when they decided to send Pioneer 10 up, Carl sold the government on the idea that we should attach a plaque to it, so that if alien beings found it they’d be able to locate the Earth. This is easily the stupidest idea a scientific genius ever sold to the government, surpassing even the time a bunch of scientists convinced Gerald Ford we were going to have the legendary swine flu epidemic, which eventually had to be canceled due to a lack of actual germs.

  What I’m saying is that the last thing we need is alien beings. I don’t know about you, but in the vast majority of the movies I’ve seen, the alien beings have turned out to be disgusting. A whole lot of them have tentacles, and those are the good-looking ones. Some of them are just blobs of slime. Almost all of them are toxic.

  So it’s all well and good for Carl Sagan to talk about how neat it would be to get in touch with the aliens, but I bet he’d change his mind pronto if they actually started oozing under his front door. I bet he’d be whapping at them with his golf clubs just like the rest of us.

  But the really bad part is what they put on the plaque. I mean, if we’re going to have a plaque, it ought to at least show the aliens what we’re really like, right? Maybe a picture of people eating cheeseburgers and watching “The Dukes of Hazzard.” Then if aliens found it, they’d say, “Ah. Just plain folks.”

  But no. Carl came up with this incredible science-fair-wimp plaque that features drawings of—you are not going to believe this—a hydrogen atom and naked people. To represent the entire Earth! This is crazy! Walk the streets of any town on this planet, and the two things you will almost never see are hydrogen atoms and naked people. On top of that, the man on the plaque is clearly deranged. He’s cheerfully waving his arm, as if to say, “Hi! Look at me! I’m naked as a jaybird!” The woman is not waving, because she’s obviously embarrassed. She wishes she’d never let the man talk her into posing naked for this plaque.

  So that’s it, gang. That’s the plaque that’s supposed to tell the aliens what you’re like. Now if Pioneer 10 is picked up, I figure it will be picked up by some kind of Intergalactic Police, the alien equivalent of rural police officers. They’ll look at it, and they’ll say, “Looks to me like what we got here is we got a race of hydrogen-obsessed pervert science wimps who force the women to go around naked and probably say ‘billion’ a lot. I say we vaporize their planet and then ooze over to the diner for something to eat.”

  And that will be that, unless we send Carl out to retract the plaque, or at least explain that it represents only him and a few close friends. We can do it. A nation that can land a man on the moon can remove Carl Sagan from the solar system. I’ve given this a lot of thought. Billion billion billion.

  Socket To Them

  TODAY’S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION IS, What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

  Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach your hand into a friend’s mouth and touch one of his dental fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical lesson.

  It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When you scuffed your feet, you picked up a batch of “electrons,” which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your friend’s filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.

  AMAZING ELECTRONIC FACT: If you scuffed your feet long enough without touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to worry about, unless you have carpeting.

  Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin’s brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as “A penny saved is a penny earned.” Eventually, he had to be given a job running the post office.

  After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi Gaivani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current developed and the frog’s leg kicked, even though it was no longer actually attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Gaivani’s discovery led to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that it sinks like a stone.

  But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison’s first major invention, in

  1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically just sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison’s greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison’s design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.

  This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few consumers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact, the last year in which any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely reselling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.

  Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs like Gaivani’s, we receive almost unlimited benefits from electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists developed the laser, an electronic appliance that emits a beam of light so powerful that it can vaporize a bulldozer two thousand yards away, yet so precise that doctors can use it to perform delicate operations on the human eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from “VAPORIZE BULLDOZER” to “DELICATE.”

  Cloudy With A Chance Of ...

  TODAY’S SCIENTIFIC QUESTION: What causes weather? And who cares?

  ANSWER: Primitive man believed that weather was caused by

  “high-pressure systems” and “low-pressure systems,” which were basically large, invisible spirits who lived in the sky. Today, however, we know that weather is caused by Canada, a large, invisible country near Michigan. Canada’s principal activity is exporting cold Canadian air masses t
o Chicago, which converts them to weather and distributes them to the rest of the country. Lately, however, Canada’s dominance in the air-mass-exporting field has been challenged by Japan, which produces warm Pacific air masses and sells them to California, which uses them to produce smog and mudslides. Some countries, such as Russia and China, try to produce their own air masses, but they usually end up importing used weather from the United States. England imports most of its weather, but it can afford only rain. Many underdeveloped nations have no weather at all.

  To keep track of the weather, the United States Weather Bureau has observers in remote outposts all over the world. Once every hour, these observers go outside, scan the horizon for air masses, then go back inside and drink. By about midafternoon, most of them can see air masses and God knows what else on the horizon. The ones who can still operate their radios transmit their sightings to the Weather Bureau, which wants to know what the air masses are doing because when two air masses collide they produce thunder, which can frighten livestock. Sometimes they collide so hard that they produce lightning. There are many silly superstitions about lightning, and as a result many people-maybe even you-are terrified of it. You shouldn’t worry. Thanks to modern science, we now know that lightning is nothing more than huge chunks of electricity that can come out of the sky, any time, anywhere, and kill you.

  Lightning is especially attracted to people on golf courses, but if it cannot find a golf course, it will attack anyone wearing loud clothing. Your best bet is to dress conservatively and spend the rainy season (September through July) in bars. If you are struck by lightning, do not panic, because there is always a chance you are not dead. Many people who get struck by lightning go on to lead happy, productive, somewhat hairless lives.

  The Weather Bureau also sends up satellites that take photographs of the Earth from several hundred miles up. These photographs provide vital information. For example, if a photograph shows that there are clouds over Boston, an experienced meteorologist can determine that the weather in Boston is cloudy. He can then alert the Boston area to be ready to do whatever it does in the event of cloudiness.

  The only other users of satellite weather photographs are television weathermen, who use them to stand in front of when they give their reports:

  ANCHORMAN: And now, to fill up five minutes of valuable television time with information that any moron could get by merely looking out the window, here is our Channel 14 Insight News Team Weatherman. I understand you have good news for us, Fred.

  WEATHERMAN: Indeed I do, Bob. That low-pressure system that was threatening to bring rain to the Channel 14 viewing area this weekend has instead turned into a hurricane and veered westward, destroying much of Guatemala, so I’m predicting fair skies for the Channel 14 viewing area.

  ANCHORMAN: Hey, terrific.

  WEATHERMAN: Now let’s take a look at our satellite weather photograph. As you can see, we have clouds over some areas, but we have no clouds over other areas, which would indicate that our Channel 14

  viewers either do or do not have clouds over their areas, depending on what areas they are in.

  ANCHORMAN: Speaking of the satellite weather photograph, Fred, we have a letter here from eleven-year-old Gregory Sumpster of Port Weasel. Gregory wants to know why you show the same photograph night after night, and why it is identical to a photograph taken over the Philippines in 1972 that appears on page 113 of Gregory’s earth science textbook, except that the one you show has a crude map of the Channel 14 viewing area superimposed on top of it.

  WEATHERMAN: Ha ha. Good question, Gregory Sumpster of Port Weasel. I’m always pleased to know that my viewers are interested in the science of meteorology, even when those viewers turn out to be picky little snots such as yourself. I’ll see if I can come up with an answer to your very interesting question and wrap it around a rock and throw it through your bedroom window late some night.

  Eat, Drink, And Be Wary

  The Art Of Wine Snobbery

  If you want to become a rich, pretentious snot—and who doesn’t?—you should learn about wine. Alternatively, you can buy polo ponies, but the wine approach is better because you won’t have to spend your weekends shoveling huge quantities of polo-pony waste out of the rec room. Also, you can be pretentious about wine almost anywhere, whereas your finer restaurants and opera houses generally do not admit polo ponies.

  The study of wine is called “oenology,” which sounds like an unnatural sex act.

  POLICE OFFICER: Your honor, we caught this person committing oenology with a parking meter.

  JUDGE: Lock him up.

  Some people believe wine is still made by peasants who crush the grapes with their bare feet, leaving toenails and other disgusting, disease-ridden peasant-foot debris in the wine. This is, of course, nonsense. Today’s winemakers crush the grapes with modern, hygienic machines, and add the disease-ridden peasant-foot debris later. The end product is a delicate and complex collection of subtly interacting chemicals that, if bottled properly, aged just right and decanted carefully, rarely tastes as good as cream soda.

  Which leads us to two critical facts:

  Few people are really all that fond of wine. Almost nobody can tell the difference between good wine and melted Popsicles without reading the label.

  These facts make it much less expensive for you to become a pretentious wine-oriented snot, because they mean you don’t really need to buy good wine: all you need is good wine bottles. You can get these in any of the finer garbage cans. Fill them with cheap wine, the kind that comes in three-gallon containers with screw-on caps and names like Zambini Brothers Fruit Wine and Dessert Topping. Some people make a big fuss about which foods go with white wine and which with red, so buy a wine that could be taken for either.

  When company comes for dinner, grab a bottle at random and make an elaborate, French-sounding fuss about how you chose it to complement your menu. Say: “I chose the Escargot ‘63 rather than the Gareon ‘72 because the bonjour of the sil vous platt would bring out the plume de ma tante of the Cheez Whiz without being too strident for the chili dogs.” This brings up a third critical fact: You can use any sort of blather to describe wine.

  Another good time to be pretentious about wine is when you dine out, but the trick is to do it without spending much money. Use this technique: Glance scornfully at the wine list, then ask the waiter for a wine you know does not exist. Say “We’ll start with the Frere Jacques

  ‘68, preferably from the north side of the vineyard.” When he says they don’t have it, look at him as though he had asked permission to put his finger in your nose, then order the most expensive wine on the list.

  When he brings it to your table, examine the label for spelling and punctuation errors. Next smell the cork: if you don’t like it, order the waiter to take it back and splash a little cologne on it.

  Finally, take a largish mouthful of wine, swill it around your mouth for a while, swallow it, tell the waiter it won’t do, and demand another bottle. Keep this up until you have a lot of trouble getting the cork near enough to your nose to smell it. Then tell the waiter you wouldn’t dream of eating at a restaurant with an inadequate wine cellar, and march out in a dignified manner, by which I mean without making advances toward the cigarette machine.

  Beer Is The Solution

  Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

  Also, the wheel does not cure the common cold, whereas beer does. This was proved in a recent experiment in which scientists placed two groups of cold sufferers in a bowling alley. One group was given all the beer it could drink, while the other group was given only water. After two or three weeks, the beer drinkers exhibited no cold symptoms whatsoever, in fact couldn’t even stand up; whereas the water drinkers had all gone home.

  Beer can also be used to halt the nuclear arms race. Right now the missile negotiators d
rink coffee, so after three or four cups they get very snappish, which leads to increased international tension:

  RUSSIAN NEGOTIATOR: As I understand your proposal, you wish us to remove our Thundersquat missiles from Hungary, and in return you will ... Would you please stop that?

  AMERICAN NEGOTIATOR: Stop what?

  RUSSIAN: Tinkling your spoon against your saucer. All morning long it’s tinkle, tinkle, tinkle. You sound like the collar on a flea-infested dog. I can barely hear myself negotiate.

  AMERICAN: Is that so? Did it ever occur to you that I might be tinkling my saucer so that I will not have to listen to you snort the same wad of mucus back up your nose every twenty-five seconds precisely by my watch? You cling to that wad as if it had great sentimental value.

  RUSSIAN: Not at all. Let me get rid of it right now. (He blows his nose on the American proposal.)

  In their statements to the press, both sides try to put the best possible face on things (“RUSSIANS EXPRESS VIEWS ON U.S. PROPOSAL”), but the truth is they aren’t getting anywhere. Now if you give those same negotiators a keg of beer, after an hour or so you’ll see all kinds of nuclear cooperation:

  AMERICAN: Tell you what. You take all your missiles out of France, and we’ll send you over some decent men’s suits.

  RUSSIAN: Great! Wait a minute. I don’t think we have any missiles in France.

  AMERICAN: Then put some in, for God’s sake!

  RUSSIAN: Okay, but won’t that irritate the French?

  AMERICAN: Don’t worry about the little snots. If they give us any trouble, we’ll have Jerry Lewis shot.