by Red Green
HOW TO INSTALL AN AQUARIUM SKYLIGHT
Here’s a quick, easy way to install your own skylight in your truck or van. A skylight will beautify your van, increase its value, and make it more fun to drive. It’s such a sure-fire hit, in fact, you’ll be tempted to do it to your own vehicle. But I suggest you work out the bugs first by trying it on a friend’s.
Okay, let’s create the opening for the skylight first. Get up on the roof and eyeball where you want the skylight to go. Over the driver’s seat is a good spot. You’ll be cutting a rectangle with a reciprocating saw, but first grab a pickaxe and make a decent-sized pilot hole.
Cut the hole out with the saw. (Make sure it’s a rental saw, or better still, borrow one from a friend.) Now lay some caulking around the edge to make ’er waterproof. You don’t want rain dripping down the back of your neck. In fact, you might want to put caulking around the collar of your shirt just to be on the safe side. Now you’re ready for the glass.
You know, the difference between a handyman and a hobbyist is the ability to take somebody else’s hobby and turn it into something handy. The handy thing is a van skylight. The hobby thing is an aquarium. Find an empty aquarium (or empty a found aquarium) and use that as your skylight. It’s light and strong and waterproof. All you have to do is put it on the roof upside down. Sure, it might smell a little fishy, but then so does the van. And it’ll be real handy if you’re ever lost and need to look around, because you can pop your head right up into the aquarium, like a turret.
If you really want to push the envelope, mount the aquarium skylight on the side of your van, near the back, for that kid who’s always asking, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet?” Now he can stick his head into the aquarium and see for himself.
BEFORE BEST BEFORE
When I was growing up, we didn’t have “best before” stickers on anything. If the milk smelled okay, you drank it. If the meat was somewhere in the vicinity of its original colour, you ate it. If the can had rust only on the outside, you ate the contents.
That doesn’t happen anymore. Now everyone demands the best. That’s why people are up on the night of January 11 finishing off the “best before Jan 12” ice cream. And they wonder why we’re all overweight. I wonder if this “best before” concept will expand to include friends and family. Can you picture Uncle Ernie with a sticker saying “Best before second martini”? Or Grandpa’s saying “Best before 7 p.m.”? Or your own saying, “Best before 1971”?
THE TRUTH AS WE KNOW IT
Has this ever happened to you? You’re out with your spouse at a social function, and she starts pontificating on a topic about which she knows nothing. Coincidentally, it’s a topic about which you know a great deal—your business or your investment or you personally. And what’s worse, she’s making all kinds of false statements and exaggerations. If you’ve been married only a short time, there’s a temptation to correct your spouse in front of others. You will soon learn that the truth not only does hurt but it is usually a self-inflicted wound. So don’t ever correct your partner in a group. Nor should you stand behind her and make hand gestures indicating to the others that you think your spouse is a little wacko. No, your job is to move away slowly or pretend you’re not listening or act drunk. The truth is for church or the courts. When the truth comes out at parties, it’s only going to make trouble.
HOW TO TELL WHEN YOU’RE BEING DOMINATED
We all know that the best relationships are close to a fifty-fifty partnership. Here are the signs that perhaps one partner is dominating the other:
• There is an old rusty car abandoned in the front yard.
• The husband and wife wear matching shirts.
• The family dog is a cat.
• The family vehicle is a motorcycle with a sidecar.
• The beer fridge is the one in the kitchen.
• One of them wears an “I’m with stupid” T-shirt.
• One of them keeps the TV remote on their person.
• The welcome mat says “Trespassers will be shot.”
• The lawn is covered with cutouts of fat people bending over.
• There’s a couch on the front porch. There’s also a guy sleeping on it.
KEEP YOUR SHIRT ON
I like to watch football on TV, but I find that lately it’s getting violent and offensive and the camera coverage is far too graphic. Of course I’m talking about those shots of inebriated fans with their shirts off. There was a guy on last night’s game sporting a bad green-and-gold paint job on a gut so massive he must have used a roller or he would have been late for the game. And it’s not enough that he has this overwhelming mass of unsaturated fat to share with us, but he also feels that he needs to wave his arms frantically and jump up and down, making his belly look like an aerial video of a 7.2 earthquake.
Now, I know I talk a lot about how difficult it is to be married and have to make compromises, but I think this is a situation where being married can really help. I’m talking to all you fat guys out there. Before you go to the game, get your stomach all painted up and show it to your wife and ask her if she thinks the world wants or needs to see this.
And please, please listen to her answer. Some of us are watching the game with our families, perhaps having dinner in front of the TV. You must stop the madness.
THE LIVING END
I have a theory about the size of a man’s butt. (I’m happy to report that I haven’t done any research on this.) My theory is that through a man’s life, the size of his butt pretty much follows the pattern of the bell curve. It starts out quite small, increases in mass in his early teens, expands exponentially through the thirties and forties, reaches the zenith of its growth potential around the age of fifty-three, and then diminishes in size exponentially until the age of seventy-five, at which time it has returned to being quite small.
I can understand why it enlarges through middle age, because there’s usually a fairly substantial gut out front, and if the butt were too small, a man would be unbalanced and unable to stand up. But I don’t understand why it has to shrink with age. It seems cruel or at least ironic that when you finally get to the age where you can stop worrying, you’ve got nothing to fall back on.
RIGHTSIZING YOUR HOME
A lot of people my age are making the move from the two-storey, four-bedroom family home into a one-bedroom condo. They tell me that they want to reduce the work and general hassle of owning and maintaining a house, but I don’t believe it. Sure, the condo management people will cut the lawn and shovel the snow and look after the outside maintenance, but they charge you a few hundred bucks a month to do it. Chances are, you could have the same level of service for the same price on your own house. Maintenance is not the issue—it’s all about downsizing.
Downsizing is not a new concept. Life does it to most of us. Haven’t you ever noticed how much smaller your grandfather is than he used to be? We’ve been battling life from our four-bedroom fort every day for a lot of years. Now that we’re running out of ammo, we need to be a smaller target. Maybe in a condo with security, the world won’t bother us as often.
And of course, no extra room means no extra visitors. No matter who drops in, at some point it’s going to get late and you’re going to have to go to bed and they’re going to have to go home. And you will have peace.
That’s what this is all about. Moving to a condo is you giving up on conquest and, instead, opting for peace. You’ve always found peace in the smallest room in the home. Now you’re hoping to find it in the smallest home on the block.
LET THERE BE HEADLIGHTS
Take a minute and count the number of headlights on your car. Usually, you come up with the number two, which is not one of my favourites. I like the number eight. With eight headlights, you can have two pointing up, two pointing down, two to the left, and two to the right. The only way another vehicle can surprise you is from the back end, and you can eliminate most of that risk by maintaining a minimum speed of roughly a
hundred miles an hour.
So what you have to do is mount six more headlights on the front of your car, in such a way that they are solid yet infinitely adjustable, not to mention waterproof. Sounds like another job for duct tape.
After you’ve got all the headlights taped to the grill (and make it secure—use lots of tape and run it right back to the doors on each side), aim them as well as you can. They’ll need realignment on hot days and after collisions.
You’re going to need extra power to run the extra lights, so line up half a dozen car batteries in your back seat. Wire them using metal coat hangers, then attach them to the headlights with two or three sets of jumper cables run from end to end.
At this point, some of you are probably thinking, “My wife will say it’s ugly.” Well, if you’ve got an old garage door opener lying around—and who doesn’t?—you can give this a real sporty look. Mount the garage door opener on the hood and attach to it a sheet of plywood (or half a ping-pong table, for those of you who have keys to the community centre). Hinge it with duct tape and now you have a European-style plywood spoiler, giving the effect of hideaway headlights like those you see on Ferraris and Maseratis. If that isn’t sharp, then neither am I.
LAST CHANCE
Recently I’ve been seeing more commercials for wills: how to prepare them, why to have them, what to put in them. I don’t think wills are used to their full potential. First of all, you shouldn’t try to say how much you care about people in your will. It just makes them feel bad. They don’t need to read it from you after you’re gone—they need to hear it from you while you’re still around.
To me, the true fun is to use your will to make people improve themselves. For example, you can leave your riding mower to your neighbour, providing he returns the hedge clippers he borrowed from you in 1973. (And it has to be the exact pair—you kept a picture.) You can leave your barbecue to the people up the street, providing they camp in your backyard listening to their dog bark all night, as you did for so many years. You can leave five thousand dollars to the city, providing they repave the street like they promised to in the last municipal election. You get the idea. Have some fun with it. A will is your last chance to make a point, and nobody can talk back.
NO POINT
I’ve noticed that when I ask my computer to do something by pointing at and clicking on an icon, it will try for thirty seconds or so, and then tell me it failed and just go back to where it was. No guilt. No attitude. It doesn’t kick anything or hurt itself. I envy that. I’m not like a computer at all. You can’t just point and click to make me try something. In fact, the more you point, the less I click. And once I do try something, I don’t quit. I just keep working at it until I keel over or the thing I’m working on explodes in a fireball. That’s because once I start something, I’d rather get incredibly angry than stop. I have attitude. I kick things. I hurt myself. If my computer could see me, it would say, “You have performed an illegal operation.” Maybe one day I’ll turn into a computer and everything will be okay. But for that to happen, I’ll need a lot more memory.
THE YOUNG AND THE USELESS
Our local television station was doing one of those success profiles of a guy in town who had made a gazillion dollars and had women sending in resumes in hopes of having his children. I found the whole thing mildly irritating at first, but I really lost it when they announced that this guy was twenty-seven years old. No average man over the age of forty needs to hear that. If they can make a V-chip that filters out sex and violence on TV, they should be able to invent a gizmo that prevents the viewer from learning that not only are most people doing better than him but they’re also doing it at half his age. Maybe they could even make a thingy that substitutes a higher, more palatable number whenever age is mentioned. Wouldn’t it be great to hear that Bill Gates was eighty-seven or Justin Bieber was sixty-three or Sidney Crosby was seventy-four? It would give us all hope for the future.
THE LAST SHALL BE FIRST
I need some computer nerd out there to come up with software that will allow me to scan a contract into my computer, enlarge the fine print, and put it at the top of the document. That would save me a lot of eyestrain and a lot of ink. When my wife said, “Why do they make the important things so small?” I said it was just nature’s way.
HOW TO BUILD A JET-POWERED CAR
Here’s a way to reduce your carbon footprint: switch to soapbox derby–style cars. To my way of thinking, we need a smaller, lighter vehicle—one made completely of wood, so it won’t rust. Simple but practical. Lightweight with excellent visibility, easy to park, and with room for only one person, which will probably save a few marriages. You steer the vehicle with your feet, which leaves your hands free to use as brakes.
What type of fuel-efficient engine would we use in something like this? I immediately thought of Roman candles, but they wouldn’t sell me the quantities I’d need to power this unit. So I suggest we go with fire extinguishers. Point them out the back and attach them to the vehicle using duct tape. All you do is squeeze on the trigger for a blast of carbon dioxide; that will propel you forward to the point where you should be able to maintain thirty miles an hour on a flat road, putting out fires as you go.
On a safety note, I suggest you wear a scarf around your neck, because you’re sitting real close to the fire extinguishers and the carbon dioxide gets real cold. You wouldn’t want to be cruising down a major thoroughfare with a frozen head.
HOW MEN AND WOMEN WORK
It’s always helpful to identify the difference between men and women in the interests of universal peace and global warming. One thing I’ve noticed is that men and women generally have a different approach to work: women are doers, and men are dele-gators. Women pride themselves on maximizing their own personal productivity. Men pride themselves on getting someone else to do the job. That’s why women are hands-on while men prefer power tools. We’re programmed for work avoidance. It’s not our fault. The human reproductive process is the model for all other forms of man/woman interaction. The man is there for all the fun and excitement of the first five minutes, and at the end of the meeting, the woman takes sole responsibility for the project for the next nine months.
DRIVING MRS. DAISY
You can tell how long people have been married just by watching them drive their car. Here are a few things I’ve noticed:
• If he’s driving and she’s cuddled up close, they’re newlyweds. They must also have an old car to be able to sit that close. That proves they’re newlyweds as well.
• If she’s driving and he’s cuddled up close, they’ve been married for a few years and he’s in a little trouble. Alcohol may be involved. Especially if they have bucket seats.
• If he’s driving and she’s sitting way over on the other side, as far away as she can get, they’ve been married at least five years and he has forced her to leave the mall before she was ready.
• If he’s driving and she’s speaking heatedly to him and pointing out directions with her hands, they’ve been married ten years.
• If he’s driving and she’s not speaking to him at all, they’ve been married eleven years.
• If he’s driving and she’s sitting in the back seat, they’ve been married fifteen years. If he’s wearing a cap, he’s also had a serious demotion.
• If they’re driving separate cars, they’ve been married twenty years.
• If she’s driving and he’s walking, they’re divorced.
HOW TO AVOID HAVING YOUR TIME WASTED
I’ll try to keep this short. I find that guys my age have a short attention span. I’m not saying that’s bad. In fact, most of the time it’s a good thing. We’re starting to sense that time is running out, and we don’t want to waste it reading thick books or watching mini-series or listening to the neighbour talk about her cats. We like short, pithy, meaningful sound bites. People who attempt to communicate with us need to accept that and to alter their style of communication to fit tho
se parameters. Here’s a short list of questions I make people ask themselves before they waste my precious time:
• Do I know you?
• Does this information affect me personally, and will not having it cause me bodily harm or, worse still, cost me money?
• Can you express your thought in less than ten seconds?
• Are you planning to use words that I don’t know?
• Will you be blocking the exit?
HOW TO SPOT A MIDDLE-AGED MAN’S WALLET
Many of us have several ad hoc time capsules that show the chronology of our lives. Our wallets are one of these. If you found a wallet and it had the following things in it, you’d know it belonged to a middle-aged guy:
• A picture of Charo.
• Ticket stubs from a Herman’s Hermits concert.
• A picture of a man in his early twenties wearing the exact same leisure suit that the wallet’s owner is currently wearing.
• A large collection of business cards of varying age. They are each from radically different businesses, although they all have the wallet owner’s name on them.
• A small calendar identifying the owner’s time-share week in Greenland.
