Dave Barry - The Taming Of The Screw

TIRES. Tires are extremely important, for without them the tire industry, as we now know it, would cease to exist. You should inspect your tires frequently for signs of tread and obscure little letters and numbers on the sides, which represent significant events in the lives of the tire factory employees. For example, A78-13 means “All 78 of us tire factory employees went out and got really drunk last night, so maybe 13 of the tires we make today will be any good.”

EXTERIOR. Your car’s exterior takes a real beating, especially during the summer. Hour after hour, day after day, month after month, the sun beats down on your car with harmful rays that can fade the paint and kill you if you spend any time outside trying to do anything about it. So the hell with the exterior.

EXHAUST SYSTEM. This is located under the car, smeared with road kills. From time to time you should hose it down or drive briskly through a wading pool.

The cheapest way to redecorate your home is to cover every horizontal surface in it with home decorating magazines filled with tasteful pictures of the interiors of homes belonging to people who spend more money on end tables in one month than you will spend on food in your entire life.

A much more expensive approach is to hire an interior decorator. Interior decorators are people who have spent years studying the principles of color, shape, and texture, until they have reached the point where they would rather die than agree with an ordinary person such as yourself on a matter of taste. So what you have to do is trick your interior decorator into believing you want the opposite of what you really want. If you want a warm, cozy, intimate look, show the decorator a picture of a General Motors brake-assembly plant. If you want a rustic look, show the decorator a picture of the Sistine Chapel. You’ll get what you want, and the decorator will think you didn’t, so everybody will be happy.

1. To get some inspiration, read a batch of home decorating magazine articles about people who completely remodeled their kitchens even though they’re incompetent jerks. These articles always begin with a black-and-white photograph of a horrible, dingy, 1950s style kitchen, with unclean plates strewn all over and rats lounging around and waving at the camera. Then you see a glossy color photograph of a spectacularly modern kitchen that is clean enough for neurosurgery and is at least six times as large as the kitchen in the other photograph. It is obviously a completely different kitchen, probably in another state.

2. Once you have been inspired, take a hard look at your own kitchen. What don’t you like about it? Is it the layer of grease and scum that has gradually built up on all the surfaces over the years, to the point where the insects have trouble getting enough traction to climb up to the counters? Or is it the color scheme? Are you among the millions of unfortunate American families whose appliances are Harvest Gold or (God help you) Avocado? Have you ever wondered why, of all the colors they had to choose from, major appliance manufacturers for many years insisted on making everything Harvest Gold or Avocado, two of the ugliest colors ever devised by the mind of man, colors more appropriate for stomach secretions than home decorating? Were they Dwight Eisenhower’s favorite colors or something?

Whatever the reason, people finally came to their senses, and you can no longer find appliances in Harvest Gold or Avocado except in stores that have special sections catering to people with bad taste. Appliances now come in many attractive colors, all of which you should ignore, because appliances should be white. So should toilets. It is nature’s way. It is the American way. I am sure that the only reason the U.S. Constitution does not specifically require that appliances and toilets be white is that the Founding Fathers never dreamed anybody would be stupid enough to use any other color.

3. Once you’ve decided on your color scheme (white), you should get a large sum of money somehow and go buy the actual appliances. The big issue here is whether you should get a regular oven or a microwave oven. A regular oven is hot inside, so when you put a tuna casserole inside, it gets hot. Is everybody with me so far? A microwave oven, on the other hand, is not hot inside. Instead, it has these tiny little rays (hundreds of them could easily fit into a woman’s purse) that are manufactured in Japan. These rays travel right through the casserole dish at speeds approaching 250 miles an hour and slam into the tuna, causing it to get hot. The advantage of microwave ovens is that since only the contents get hot, you can pick the dish up with your bare hands. The disadvantage is that as soon as you open the lid, the microwaves come whizzing out in random directions, and could strike your eyeballs or furniture.

4. Once you’ve bought your appliances, you should get some graph paper and draw up a floor plan of your new kitchen, showing where the new appliances will go. To make this project as difficult as possible, try to put each new appliance at least 11 feet from the one it’s replacing. The only exception is the refrigerator. You must not move it, because all the jelly and ketchup you spilled under there over the years and never bothered to clean up has festered and evolved into a grotesque and durable life form that, if exposed to direct sunlight, could awaken and decide to take over the world. The responsible course is to put the new refrigerator on top of the old one.

5. Your new kitchen is almost done! All that remains is for you to take out the old appliances and put in the new ones according to your plan! And put in a new floor! And cabinets! And change the wiring and plumbing all around! Let me know how it goes.

Here’s a project for the really ambitious do-it-yourselfer with no grasp of reality: building an entire house. Not only will you save scads of money, but you’ll be continuing a tradition that dates back to pioneer days, when our hardy forefathers used to whack down trees personally and form them into crude log cabins, which they would live in for maybe two days, after which they would migrate westward, because nothing in the world is worse than living in a crude log cabin. I mean, there’s only one room, so you’re all lying there at night listening to each other’s bodily noises and smelling the aroma of congealing muskrat, or whatever pioneer dish you ate, and you hardly ever get any sleep. That’s why everybody has such vacant stares in those old pioneer photographs.

So in the interest of continuing this fine old pioneer tradition, you should build your own house, following the easy, step-by-step series of steps below.

Step #1: Draw a plan

You should never start to build without some idea of what the house ought to look like when it’s finished, so get yourself a piece of paper and a nice, sharp pencil, and draw yourself a house plan. The plan should consist of two parts: an outside view showing what the completed house would look like if it had smoke curling out of its chimney, and an inside view showing the location of windows, appliances, rooms, etc.

Step #2: Borrow an enormous sum of money from a bank

This is the trickiest part of home building, because you’ll have to convince the banker that you know a lot about building, which is, of course, a lie. The best approach is to sprinkle your conversation with all kinds of technical building jargon.

BANKER: So, Mr. Jones, just how much money were you thinking of borrowing?