Bad Habits

by Dave Barry

  With this kind of cooperation, we’d have a lasting arms agreement in no time, and all thanks to beer.

  The Story Of Beer

  One day nearly a thousand years ago, two serfs were working the soil in medieval England when one of them accidentally knocked some grain, yeast, hops, and sugar into a bucket of water. As the two serfs watched in fascination, the mixture began to ferment, and some knights rode up behind them and whacked off their heads with swords, as was the custom in those days.

  “This is hot work,” said one of the knights. “I could forsooth get behind a clean, crisp, cold beverage.”

  “Begorrah,” said another. “Let’s go to Germany, where beer was recently invented.”

  And so they did, and they thought the new invention was terrific, except that they had to go to the bathroom all the time, which is extremely annoying when you are wearing armor. So they decided to quit being knights and start the Renaissance, yet another of the many fine benefits we derive from beer.

  How To Make Your Own Beer

  I really don’t know. Back in 1981, I sent away for this mail-order kit that is supposed to enable you to make your own beer at home. I take this kit out from time to time, to look at it. It’s sitting next to me as I write these words.

  The problem is that you need a bunch of empty beer bottles to put your homemade beer in, so the first thing I always do is go out and buy a case of beer and start drinking it, to empty the bottles. While I am doing this I read the kit directions, and I notice that if I start making beer right now, I won’t have any actual beer available to drink for more than fifteen days. Also I will have to become involved with something called “wort.” So I always decide to stick with store-bought beer and save my kit for use during an emergency, such as following a nuclear attack. I hate to be a pessimist, but I, for one, intend to remain fully prepared for this terrible possibility until I see some clear sign of a lessening of international tension, such as that the missile negotiators send out for a pizza.

  Hold The Bean Sprouts

  I have figured out how to make several million dollars in the fast-food business.

  First, let me give you a little background. As you know, in the past twenty years, fast-food restaurants have sprung up everywhere, like mildew; they have virtually replaced the old-fashioned slow-food restaurants, where you wasted valuable seconds selecting food from menus and waiting for it to be specially cooked and being served and eating with actual knives and forks from actual plates and so on. And why are the fast-food chains so successful? The answer is simple: They serve only things that ten-year-olds like to eat.

  Fast-food-chain executives were the first to abandon the Balanced Diet Theory, which was popular with mothers when most of us were young. Remember? Your mother always fed you a balanced diet, which meant that for every food she served you that you could stand to eat, she served you another kind of food you could not stand to eat.

  My mother stuck to this principle rigidly. For example, if she served us something we sort of liked, such as beef stew, she also served us something we sort of disliked, such as green beans. And if she served us something we really liked, such as hamburgers, she made sure to also serve us something we really loathed, such as Brussels sprouts. We kids feared many things in those days—werewolves, dentists, North Koreans, Sunday school—but they all paled by comparison with Brussels sprouts. I can remember many a summer evening when I had eaten my hamburger in thirty-one seconds and was itching to go outside and commit acts of minor vandalism with my friends, but I had to sit at the table, staring for hours at Brussels sprouts congealing on my plate, knowing that my mother would not let me leave until I had eaten them. In the end, I always ate them, because I knew she would let me starve to death before she would let me get out of eating my Brussels sprouts. That’s how fervently she believed in the Balanced Diet Theory. And, in those days, so did restaurants. When we went out to eat, we kids always ordered hamburgers and French fries, but they always were accompanied by some alien substance, such as peas.

  But the old-fashioned, slow-food restaurant owners were fools to believe in the Balanced Diet Theory, because it does not take into account what people, particularly kids, really want to eat. Kids don’t want to eat wholesome foods: kids want to eat grease and sugar. This is why, given the choice, kids will eat things that do not qualify as food at all, such as Cheez Doodles, Yoo-Hoo, Good ‘n’ Plenty and those little wax bottles that contain colored syrup with enough sugar per bottle to dissolve a bulldozer in two hours. As kids grow up, they reluctantly accept the idea that their diets should be balanced, and by the time they are thirty-five or forty years old they will eat peas voluntarily. But all of us, deep in our hearts, still want grease and sugar. That is what separates us from animals.

  And that is why fast-food restaurants are so successful. At fast-food restaurants, you never run the risk of finding peas on your plate. You don’t even get a plate. What you get is hamburgers and French fries; these are your primary sources of grease. You get your sugar from soft drinks or “shakes,” which are milk shakes from which the milk has been eliminated on the grounds that milk has been identified by the United States Government as a major cause of nutrition.

  At first, fast-food restaurants were popular only with wild teenaged hot rodders who carried switchblade knives and refused to eat Brussels sprouts. But then the fast-food chains realized they could make much more money if they could broaden their appeal, so they started running television ads to convince people, particularly mothers, that fast food is wholesome. You see these ads all the time: you have your wholesome Mom and your wholesome Dad and their 2.2 wholesome kids, and they’re at the fast-food restaurant, just wolfing down grease and sugar, and they’re having such a wholesome time that every now and then everybody in the whole place, including the counterpersons with the Star Trek uniforms, jumps up and sings and dances out of sheer joy. The message is clear: you can forget about the old Balanced Diet Theory; it’s okay to eat this stuff.

  Lately, the advertisements have started stressing how much variety you can get at fast-food restaurants. Besides hamburger, you can get chicken in a hamburger bun, roast beef in a hamburger bun, steak in a hamburger bun, and fish in a hamburger bun; you can even get an entire three-part breakfast in a hamburger bun. A fast-food restaurant near me recently started serving—I swear this is true—veal parmigian in a hamburger bun. And people are buying it.

  This leads me to my plan to make several million dollars. My plan rests on two assumptions:

  People have become so committed to fast food that they don’t care what they eat, as long as it’s in a hamburger bun, and There must be an enormous world glut of green vegetables, since nobody believes in the Balanced Diet Theory any more.

  So I plan to buy several tons of Brussels sprouts, which I figure would cost a total of six dollars. I’ll put them in hamburger buns, then get some actor to dress up as a clown or some other idiot character and go on television and urge everybody to rush right over and pay me $1.69

  for a Sprout McBun. Before long, kids will be begging their parents to buy my Brussels sprouts, and I will be rich. I’ll bet you wish you had thought of it.

  Rooting For Rutabagas

  WARNING: This column contains highly sensitive information about U.S. nuclear strategy and rutabagas.

  From time to time, we newspaper columnists obtain classified government documents that we share with our readers so we can protect the Public’s Right to Know and make large sums of money. A good example is the famous columnist Jack Anderson, who is always revealing government secrets:

  WASHINGTON—Classified documents recently obtained by this reporter indicate that Interior Secretary James glatt is secretly drafting legislation to legalize the shooting of American Indians for sport.

  Over the years, Jack has obtained classified documents proving that every elected official in the United States is a worthless piece of scum. He gets classified documents in the mail as often as normal people ge
t Reader’s Digest sweepstakes offers. It has gotten to the point where high government officials routinely call Jack for information:

  PRESIDENT REAGAN: Hello, Jack?

  JACK ANDERSON: Hi, Mr. President. What can I do for you today?

  REAGAN: Jack, I can’t remember the procedure I’m supposed to use if I want to put the armed forces on Red Alert.

  ANDERSON: Let’S See ... here it is. You call 800-411-9789 toll-free, and you say: “Buford ate a fat newt.”

  REAGAN: “Buford ate a bat suit?”

  ANDERSON: No, that one launches a nuclear attack. It’s “fat newt.”

  REAGAN: “Cat shoot.” Got it. Thanks a million, Jack.

  ANDERSON: Any time.

  I would love to share some classified documents with you, but nobody ever sends me any. Mostly what I get in the mail is threats to sue me or kill me, along with the occasional crank letter. I did, however, recently receive some information that, as far as I know, has not been revealed in any other column. It concerns a topic that few Americans know anything about, and government officials never discuss publicly: rutabagas.

  This information came in the form of a press release from the Ontario Rutabaga Producers’ Marketing Board. Ontario is located in Canada, a foreign country. So what we have is a group of foreign persons who are trying to influence Americans to buy rutabagas, and possibly even eat them.

  Rutabagas, which belong to the turnip family, are fat roots (“Buford ate a fat root”) that grow underground in Canada, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling us she does not want us to eat them. Rutabagas have never been really big in America. Most Americans can go for days at a time without even thinking about them. Unless you live in a community where recreational drug use is widespread, you almost never hear anybody say: “Gee, I’d love to accept those free tickets to the final game of the World Series, but I want to get right home for dinner. We’re having rutabagas.”

  The Ontario rutabaga producers are trying to influence American opinion by planting prorutabaga statements in newspaper food sections. This is fairly easy to do, because food-section editors are desperate for new recipes. There are only about eight dishes that Americans will actually eat, and all the food sections have printed every possible variation of the recipes, so nowadays they’ll print anything:

  SPAM, WHEAT CHEX ADD ZEST TO SPICY GRAPEFRUIT STEW

  So the food sections will be easy prey for the rutabaga producers. Fairly soon, you will begin seeing statements like these, taken from the press release: “Ontario rutabagas give you good taste and good food value in cold, wet winters ... as a fresh snack or served in exciting gourmet dishes ... covered in a thin wax coating ... use a good sharp knife to cut off the purple top ...” Your children will read these statements, and then one cold, wet winter day they will come home, refuse the plate of good, traditionally American Twinkles you have thoughtfully prepared, and demand instead that you whack the purple tops off of wax-covered Canadian roots and serve them as snacks.

  And as sure as night follows day, once we start eating rutabagas, there will be nothing to prevent us from going directly to leeks. I recently obtained an extremely proleek press release from an outfit that calls itself the United Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Association, which is headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia, but obviously takes its orders directly from a foreign government, because it openly uses words such as

  “vichyssoise.” Here is a direct quotation, which I would refuse to print if the national interest were not at stake: “The Scottish use leeks in a traditional favorite, Cock-a-Leekie Soup, which has many delicious variations.” If you start hearing talk like this from your children, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

  I could go on—I could tell you about the California Dried Fig Advisory Board, which recently blanketed the nation with a document called the “Fig News”—but I don’t have the space. I will do my best to keep you abreast of this important story until Jack Anderson picks it up, or I am found stabbed to death with a good, sharp, purple-stained knife.

  Traveling Light

  Vacation Reservations

  This is the time of year to gather up your family and all your available money and decide what you’re going to do on your summer vacation. You should get an opinion from everybody, including your children, because, after all, they are family members too, even though all they do is sit around and watch television and run up huge orthodontist bills and sneer at plain old affordable U.S. Keds sneakers, demanding instead elaborate designer athletic footwear that costs as much per pair as you paid for your first car. On second thought, the heck with what your children want to do. You can notify them of your vacation plans via memorandum.

  The cheapest vacation is the kind where you just stay home, avoiding the hassle and expense of travel and getting to know each other better as

  a family and gagging with boredom. Another option is to put the whole family into the car and take a trip. That’s what my family did, back in the fifties. We usually went to Florida, which has a lot of tourist attractions, always announced by large, fading roadside signs:

  SEE THE WORLD’S OLDEST SHELL MUSEUM

  AND SNAKE RODEO—1 MILE

  We had a system for car travel. My father would drive; my mother would periodically offer to drive, knowing that my father would not let her drive unless he went blind in both eyes and lapsed into a coma; and my sister and I would sit in the backseat and read Archie comic books for the first eleven miles, then punch each other and scream for the remaining 970. My father tended to stop at a lot of tourist attractions, so he could walk around and smoke cigarettes and try to persuade himself not to lock my sister and me in the trunk and abandon the car.

  I bet we stopped at every tourist attraction in Florida. A lot of them involved alligators, which are as common in Florida as retirees. You’d pay your money and go into this fenced-in area that was rife with alligators, which sounds dangerous but wasn’t, because alligators are the most jaded reptiles on earth. They’d just lie around in the muck with their eyes half open, looking like they’d been out playing cards and drinking for four consecutive nights. Sometimes, to liven things up, a tourist-attraction personnel would wrestle an alligator. This was always advertised as a death defying feat, but the alligators never seemed interested. They would just lie there, hung over, while the tourist-attraction personnel dragged them around for a few minutes. It was as exciting as watching somebody move a large carpet. I would have much preferred to watch two tourist-attraction personnel wrestle each other, and I imagine the alligators would have agreed.

  These days, the tourist attractions in Florida are much more educational. For example, Disney World has rides where you get in these little cars and travel through a gigantic replica of a human heart, pausing in the aorta to see an electronic robot imitate Abraham Lincoln giving the Gettysburg Address, then zipping down a chute and splashing into a pond. Another educational thing to do on vacation is visit an authentic colonial historic site, where people in authentic colonial garb demonstrate how our ancestors made candles by hand. I’d say one historic site is plenty, because, let’s face it, after you’ve watched people make candles for a few minutes, you’re ready to go back to watching people haul alligators around.

  Your biggest vacation expenses, besides tourist-attraction admission fees, are food and lodging. You can keep your food costs down by eating at one of the many fine roadside stands, such as the Dairy Queen, the Dairy Freeze, The Frozen Dairy Queen, the Freezing King of the Dairy, the Dairy King, the Dozing Fairy Queen, and so on. Although many nutrition-conscious parents worry that the food sold at these stands is nothing more than sugar, the truth is that it also contains more than the minimum daily adult requirement of gelatin, which builds the strong fingernails children need in the backseat on long car trips.

  Lodging is a trickier problem. if you don’t mind outdoor pit toilets, you can stay at public campsites. On the other hand, if you don’t mind outdoor pit toilets, you need psychiatric help. You can al
so look for cheap motels, the ones that have rooms for six dollars a night, but generally these rooms have 1952 Philco televisions and large tropical insects. So your best bet is to stay with friends or relatives. if you have no friends or relatives where you plan to vacation, you can still get free lodging if you use this proven system: Make a list of ten random names and addresses, with yours at the top. Then obtain the telephone directory for the area you want to visit, pick a dozen names at random, and send each one a copy of your list and this letter:

  “Do not throw away this letter! This is a chain letter! It was started by nuns shortly after the Korean War, and it has NEVER BEEN

  BROKEN! To keep the chain going, all you have to do is provide lodging for a week for the family at the top of the enclosed list! Within a year, YOU will receive 1,285,312 offers of free lodging, enough free lodging to last for the rest of your life! If you break the chain, you will die a horrible death!”

  That should get you all the lodging you need. Have a swell trip, and be sure to write.

  Trip To Balmy California

  If you’re looking for ways to develop a serious drinking problem, I urge you to take a small child across the country in an airplane. My wife and I did this recently, in an effort to get to California. We had heard that California contains these large red trees. Our vacation objective was to go out, look at the trees, and return to Pennsylvania without being assaulted by mass murderers, which abound in California.

  One problem was that we missed our plane because it took off an hour and a half before our tickets said it would. I’m still not sure why. It was just one of those mysterious things that happen all the time in the world of commercial aviation. Maybe the airlines have so many delayed flights that every now and then they let one take off early just to even things out. All I know is that it looked as if our vacation was over before it began, which was fine with me, because our two-year-old son, Robert, had already gone into Public Behavior Mode, which is a snotty behavior pattern that modern children get into because they know that modern parents aren’t allowed to strike them in public for fear of being reported to the police as child abusers.