The Green Red Green

by Red Green

  YOU ARE A USED CAR

  If you live with someone who’s an avid shopper, you may need to be extra careful with your appearance and behaviour. A person who shops a lot knows the importance of comparing features and options, and is completely focused on getting good value. And the scariest part is that she continues to comparison shop even after she’s bought the item. If she sees something she likes better or the product doesn’t perform as advertised, she has no qualms about taking it back for a refund. This can be a dangerous pattern if you happen to be the husband of such a person.

  My advice is for you to see yourself as a used car. You can go one of two ways: you can either try to convince your wife that you have retained so much of your original value that she’d never find a better unit of your vintage, or you can convince her that you have zero trade-in value and the only way she’ll get her money out of you is to run you into the ground.

  CIVILIZATION BEGINS AT HOME

  I heard on the radio this week that scientists are looking for house designs that would work well on Mars. The implication is that we’re going to live on Mars soon because earth is getting overpopulated. I beg to differ. New York and Toronto may be overpopulated, but have you been to Alaska lately? We have lots of room left right here on earth. It’s just that most of our available space doesn’t have perfect weather or soil and isn’t close to a major highway or an indoor mall. But then, neither is Mars and it’s a heck of a commute. Maybe one day some of us will live there, but I’d take a hard look at Baffin Island first.

  HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF YOURSELF

  You can’t do a lot about your basic physical appearance, but you can enhance how you look by the way you dress and the environment in which you place yourself. Here are a few suggestions:

  • If you’re short, fill your garden with dwarf plants and stand by the ceramic leprechaun.

  • If you’re on the heavy side, hang out near short, wide buildings.

  • If you’re extra tall, look up all the time.

  • If your eyes are crossed, paint something interesting on the end of your nose.

  • If you’re very thin, lean on telephone poles.

  • If your teeth are yellow, dye your beard brown.

  • If you have halitosis, exhale slowly upwind.

  • The uglier you are, the more cologne you should wear.

  • The more wrinkled you are, the more ironed your clothes have to be.

  HOW TO MAKE A DUAL-PURPOSE PATIO SET

  It’s hard to save money if you don’t have any, so the next best thing is to save money by finding new ways to use things you already own. For example, if you have a home with a door and a couple of window awnings and a television antenna, you can make an attractive, cost-effective patio set. In the winter, the house will look the way it does now; in the summer, it will look quite different. Let’s say you’re starting with a house that looks like this:

  Diagram A

  From now on, this is how your house will look in the winter only.

  Step One

  Remove the television antenna. Nobody watches TV in the summer anyway. Now, you could climb up on the roof to remove it, but it’s very time-consuming to get the ladder back from the neighbour and climb all the way up there and then have to lie for an hour in the shrubs waiting for the ambulance. So I recommend you throw your boat anchor up on the roof and try to hook it around the antenna pole. If you have a lot of anchor rope, you might want to clear the other side of the house of kids and lawn ornaments.

  Once you have the anchor hooked to the antenna, attach the other end of the rope to whichever one of your car bumpers has the least amount of rust. After you tie it on, bring the vehicle as close as possible to the house to create slack in the rope. (When removing a television antenna, you rely heavily on the element of surprise.) Nail the gas pedal. As soon as the rope snaps tight, the unit should be picked cleanly off the roof.

  Step Two

  You have to change the shape of the antenna for our purposes. Be careful. You don’t want to alter the reception capabilities of the frequency-tuned components. Hold the antenna like a battering ram and run it into the inside corner of your garage as shown in Diagram B.

  Diagram B

  Ram it as many times as necessary until it looks like the picture.

  Step Three

  You need a front door with a doorknob right in the middle. These doors were extremely popular for about nine days in the early sixties, and you’ll need to find a house built during that time to find this type of door. The easiest way is to tell a real estate agent that you’re looking to buy a house with the front doorknob in the middle of the door. When he takes you through one, check the walls for a calendar that has the vacation trip to Opryland marked, so you’ll know when to drop back around to get the door. Install it in your own house and then remove the doorknob, leaving a hole in the centre of the door.

  Step Four

  This next step is a little dangerous because you have to drive on the highway. At night. Without your headlights on. Don’t come back until you have two of those triangular yield signs. Take an adjustable wrench with you. And have a really interesting story to tell the highway patrol, just in case.

  Step Five

  Using duct tape, attach the yield signs to the door as shown in Diagram C.

  Diagram C

  The wad of duct tape at the point works as a hinge. The strips of tape to the corners prevent the signs from swinging out too far. Once they’re attached, flip the door over and let the signs swing into place as shown. The door is now a patio table.

  Step Six

  Remove the pair of awnings from the windows. You can use either a screwdriver or an adjustable wrench, or if you’re pressed for time, the boat anchor technique is always quick and effective. Next, duct-tape the awnings together and slide them over the bent antenna and down into the doorknob hole as shown in Diagram D.

  Diagram D

  You’re now ready to enjoy a full summer of outdoor entertaining. When winter comes, simply reverse the steps and move indoors.

  Diagram E

  Beautiful patio set in summer

  Diagram F

  Normal house in winter

  TO DYE FOR

  I know a lot of guys my age are dyeing their hair. That’s fine. I think it’s important for people to look their best. But there is a risk involved. Anything you do to make yourself look younger, if successful, will attract younger people to you. Younger friends and co-workers and even potential love interests will gravitate toward you, and that could create problems. The friends and co-workers will want to do things that are completely outside your experience. You’ll be in trouble. You can’t fake skydiving. And it’s even worse with a love interest. You can’t fake anything. And the last thing you need is a young girlfriend who will cut into your hair-dyeing time. With luck, she’ll actually turn out to be a woman your own age who also dyes her hair. That will give you both a common interest and something you can do together on the weekends.

  FORGIVE WHAT?

  I’ve always had difficulty with the phrase “Forgive and forget.” I think it’s a great idea, but it’s one of those phrases—“I promise I’ll respect you in the morning” is another—that seldom happens. I’m just not spiritually evolved enough to forgive and forget. I was feeling bad about that until I realized that it’s not really necessary to forgive and forget. All you have to do is forget. If you can forget that somebody did something, that’s good enough. You don’t have to forgive them, because you have no idea what you’d even be forgiving them for. This has given me new hope. Forgiving has always been difficult, but forgetting is something I just seem to get better and better at.

  CARS OF THE FUTURE

  I’m looking to buy a new car in the near future, and it’s turning into a real life moment for me. I’ve started to realize that since they’re making cars that last ten years, I won’t need a whole lot more of them. That changes everything. That means I’d better make sure
I get a car I feel good about. I don’t want to end my days in a Yugo. No, I’m thinking I’d better get that sports car I’ve always wanted. The clock is ticking here. So I went looking at Corvettes.

  I noticed the salesman trying to look away as I struggled for a full five minutes to get into the vehicle. But that was like a blink of an eye compared to the time it took me to get out. And while I was in there—lying about three inches off the ground in the prone position—I didn’t look like a macho racer at the Indy 500. I looked like an old guy on a stretcher. People would think I was driving my grandson’s car.

  And on the self-preservation level, bad things happen when reflexes like mine are going more than a hundred miles an hour. I’m calling the salesman today and ordering a small, gutless sedan with plastic doors and airbags. Please don’t say, “You are what you drive.”

  DRESS SENSE

  I’m having a problem with my closet these days: it’s full of clothes that I never wear. I spent an hour or so looking at the situation, trying to figure out what went wrong, and it seems to be a combination of factors.

  First of all, there are the clothes that my wife has bought for me. These tend to be at the stylish, suave, Euro-dork end of the spectrum, and they’re always bought when she’s been to a movie or read a romance novel and has forgotten what I look like.

  Then there are the clothes that I bought while shopping with my wife. These purchases are always made in a hurry, without trying anything on, and for the sole purpose of satisfying her and getting out of the store as quickly as possible. They may look nice, but they rarely come anywhere near to fitting me.

  Then we have the small group of clothes that actually fit me. I refuse to wear these because they’re made for a much fatter, older man.

  That leaves us with the clothes that I actually do wear, and they’re all at least ten years old. They tend to be a little tight, and sometimes I have to suck in my stomach so hard that I get back spasms. But I hate to throw them out because guys like me prefer a wardrobe that’s been lived in. So instead, I came up with a plan. All I need to do is meet a guy my age who’s my height and age but ten pounds heavier. Then I’ll throw out everything I have now and buy all his old clothes.

  HOW TO RECYCLE AN ENGINE AS KITCHENWARE

  If you’re like me, you hate to throw anything out—boxes, string, or automobile engines. I have an engine out back that I could take down to the scrap metal dealer and get a few dollars for, but it wouldn’t be worth my time to load it into the back of the truck and drive all the way down there. So what do we do with an old engine? Well, before you drive to a provincial park and dump it down a ravine, let me show you how one motor can outfit your whole kitchen.

  Everybody who has space between their teeth likes corn on the cob. And parts from a car engine can give you an interesting way to serve it. Use a couple of valves as cob holders and fill up the valve cover with melted butter. Or 10W-30 if it’s to go.

  The air filter makes a handy saucepan for frying. And of course the lid comes with it. If you tighten the wing nut on there, it makes it into a pressure cooker. Just imagine it bursting at the seams with the smell of pressurized yams.

  And I don’t care how far you go, you’re not going to find a better roasting pan with a built-in drain plug than the crankcase cover off the bottom of the engine. You roast a turkey in that and you’ll taste the difference, believe me. It’s greasy eatin’, but it’s good eatin’.

  If you’re serving soup to a large number of guests, the exhaust manifold cuts ladling to a quarter of the regular time. Just line up the exhaust ports on the manifold with your four soup bowls and pour the soup down your own tailpipe.

  And you were going to throw all this out! Where else are you going to find a free set of kitchenware that has over a hundred thousand miles on it? That’s unique, isn’t it? And Mother’s Day is just around the corner.

  WHAT MAKES MEN DIFFERENT FROM WOMEN? THAT’S THE $3,100 QUESTION

  Not all the differences between the sexes are simply to do with fashion, haircuts, and male oppression. Even the most ardent feminists will agree that men are physically different from women. And as the French say, “Vive la différence.” Which translates to “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours.” (See now, some women wouldn’t find that funny. That’s got to be biological.)

  According to scientists (real scientists, not those actors wearing lab coats in the laxative commercials), women and men have physically different brains. More of a woman’s brain is devoted to processing words, while a man has more of the grey matter working on shapes and geometry. That’s why men have trouble describing what they want and would rather just build it and then throw it out if it’s not right. That’s also why they have trouble explaining what went wrong, whereas their wives seem to be able to name all kinds of stupid mistakes.

  You can see the many areas where men are superior by studying their behavioural patterns.

  1) Men have better spatial sense than women. For example, no woman would ever attempt to build a $3,100 garage without a level or a measuring tape simply because she can “eyeball” it.

  2) Men have more sensitive eyesight than women. For example, I can see all the things wrong with our old garage, whereas my wife doesn’t seem to notice any problems.

  3) Men are better drivers than women. Especially with stuff like bulldozers, which we could use very easily to knock down the old garage if our wives would let us.

  4) Men are better at math. For example, I know that spending $3,100 to replace our garage, even though it has at least ten more years of life in it, actually makes economic sense in the long run considering interest rates and amortization and depreciation and good clean fun. My wife disagrees.

  5) Men are better at judging units of time. For example, I can mentally calculate that even though the weekend is almost over, I could have our old garage torn down and the new one well under construction by sunset, and I’d finish it next weekend.

  6) Men are better at performing multiple tasks. For example, even if I don’t get the garage done next weekend, I’ll do it along with the half-finished boat, the half-finished trellis, the fence I started, the leaky bedroom ceiling I haven’t finished patching, the toilet I haven’t totally replaced, and the nine other jobs I have on the go.

  7) Men have better spatial-projection abilities. I swear I can just picture how great a new garage will look, whereas my wife can’t see what a difference it would make.

  8) Men think more logically. For example, my wife thinks it’s crazy to spend $3,100 and tear down a perfectly good garage, but I can see all the benefits. Still, no matter how many times I explain them, she feels that having a brighter, cleaner place to store those old oil drums is not a major priority.

  These are just the most obvious areas of male dominance that deserve scientific research or a study. I would be willing to undertake the study if someone gives me, say, $3,100.

  CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE

  They have sophisticated computers in cars these days. Things like the GPS that tells you exactly how to get to where you’re going, for anyone who doesn’t have a wife. Or the central monitoring unit that tells you if there’s a door open or a seat belt undone or your engine just fell out. So I’m thinking they could easily devise a computer to keep track of how fast you’re going compared to the speed limit. For example, if you’re driving to work and the speed limit is sixty, but you’re only going thirty because the traffic is so bad, that would be registered in the computer. Let’s say you did that for fifteen minutes. The computer would show that as a credit on the dashboard screen, and as soon as you hit an open stretch of road, you’d be allowed to use that credit without getting a speeding ticket. You could go 90 for fifteen minutes or 120 for seven and a half minutes or 150 for three and three-quarters minutes or the speed of light for a nanosecond. As soon as your credit was used up, you would resume the speed limit.

  I know this would never work, but it’s nice to dream about.

&
nbsp; WHAT’S IN IT FOR HER?

  You ever see these old guys with the young ex-model wives? He’s a shrivelled-up billionaire and she’s gorgeous and the same age as his socks. They call them trophy wives—a little something to have on your arm to let other guys know that you have more to offer at ninety than they do at twenty-seven. (You may have more to offer, but not for nearly as long.)

  Okay, I can understand the trophy concept from the old guy’s point of view; I just don’t see the appeal for the woman. Now, if it’s love, that’s fine. Logic and love rarely intersect. But if it’s something else, then it seems to me that this old codger is a trophy husband for her. Some trophy! I’ve got bowling awards that look better than most of these guys.

  I’m thinking that these women are more attracted to the safety and security of a rich grandfatherly type than they are to the good looks and virility of a man their own age. And I guess when the trophy husband passes on in a year or two, she just finds another one like him. There are a lot of rich old guys who find young women attractive. But it takes someone special to be a career trophy wife. You need the personality of a nurse and a bunch of black dresses.