Dave Barry - The Taming Of The Screw

The only way to deal with crabgrass is to sneak up on it in the dead of night, pound it repeatedly with a ball-peen hammer, and flee on foot before it can snare you by the ankles. You won’t kill the crabgrass, of course, but it may become irritated enough to move to a neighbor’s lawn.

Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor’s motorized garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one. Then select a section of your lawn or driveway that looks as though it might have soil underneath it, and rip it up with the tiller. As the sharp steel blades slice violently into the ground, you may be able to hear the tiny screams of the various worms and furry little woodland creatures hibernating in the soil. Pay no attention.

Now you should buy some vegetable seeds, which are sold in little packets with attractive photographs on the covers to illustrate what your vegetables will not look like. The backs of the packets will give you specific planting instructions, depending on what area of the country you live in. For example, if you live in Florida, you should plant your seeds in the ground, whereas if you live in Maine, you should plant your seeds in Florida.

Once you have planted your garden, you have to deal with insects. The trick is to prevent them from eating all the seeds within minutes after you plant them, so they’ll have something to eat later on. The best way to do this is to scatter sandwiches and pastries around the garden to distract the insects until the seeds have had a chance to form vegetables.

Larger animals, such as rabbits and elk, are tougher to keep away. You may have to fire a few bazooka rounds over their heads. This will also keep your neighbor at bay if he’s trying to get his motorized garden tiller back.

Your only remaining task is to rotate your crops. About every two weeks, dig everything up and put it where something else was. This may seem like a lot of work, but your major farmers do it all the time. For that matter, some of your major farmers manage to get out of growing crops altogether, and the government pays them for this valuable service. You might want to try setting up the same arrangement. Instead of starting a vegetable garden, write the government a letter like this:

“Dear Sirs: I didn’t grow anything this year. Please send me $126,000.”

I’d appreciate it if you’d let me know how the government responds, especially if it sends you money. If, on the other hand, armed federal agents arrive at your door, I’d prefer that you didn’t mention my name.

Tomatoes are the most popular garden vegetables, because you can do so much with them. For example, you can eat them. The trick to growing tomatoes successfully is to stagger the planting. Plant one-fourth of your tomatoes, then wait two weeks and plant another fourth, and so on, until you have planted them all. This insures that all your tomatoes will ripen within a five-minute period late in August, usually when you are away on vacation, so you will return home to find 700 pounds of tomatoes rotting on the ground in a sodden, insect-covered mass.

The zucchini is a dense, flavorless vegetable that is useful primarily as ballast. You can also eat zucchini, but only in very small quantities: One zucchini is enough to satisfy the zucchini needs of a family of six for a year. The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchinis will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt. To prevent your property from becoming one big, pulsating zucchini herd, you will be forced to sneak over to your neighbors’ houses in the dead of night and hurl excess zucchinis onto their lawns.

Plant your cashew seeds about six inches apart, and be sure to salt them every four days.

This hardy vegetable was a favorite of my mother’s. Every year, she would produce an elaborate rhubarb pie, which was second only to Brussels sprouts in the category of things we kids would rather die than eat. Rhubarb is ideal for canning. You just put it in cans, stick the cans in your pantry, then move.

Your corn should be knee-high by the Fourth of July. If it isn’t, you could be fined or jailed.

The three keys to trouble-free motoring: animal traps, a wading pool, and this fact-crammed chapter

Most common car problems are caused by pets. The best way to avoid these problems is preventive maintenance, by which I mean always checking your car for pets before you start it. You should also change your oil all the time. This is what your top race car drivers recommend. Of course, your top race car drivers also routinely drive into walls at speeds upwards of 180 miles an hour, so I don’t know that we should accept their opinions as gospel.

ENGINE. The engine is the large, filthy object under your hood, unless you live in a really bad neighborhood. To understand the importance of proper maintenance, let’s take a look at what goes on inside your engine when you turn the ignition key. This will require you to cut the engine open with a blowtorch, but I think you’ll be glad you did.

When you turn the key, gasoline comes rushing out of the gas tank and electricity comes rushing out of the battery, and they meet in the engine, where they explode with a force that could easily reduce the engine to hundreds of pieces of red-hot shrapnel traveling at high speeds and capable of destroying every living thing within 50 feet. But this will probably not occur if every one of the 63,000 parts that make up the engine is working perfectly, which is why you should maintain your engine. Every six or seven thousand meters, open up the hood and inspect the engine closely. It should have many random tubes and wires running off toward other areas of the car. Newer engines should also have oriental writing.

1. Start your car and allow it to warm up.

2. Lie on your back and inch along under the car until you locate a little boltlike object that you cannot remove without a wrench, then inch back out and locate a wrench.

3. Inch back under and rotate the boltlike object counterclockwise until oil starts gushing out, just like in those old movies where John Wayne and his sidekick discover oil and dance around, except whereas they are dancing vertically in glee, you will be dancing horizontally in pain, inasmuch as the oil has been heated to roughly 6,000 degrees by the engine.

4. Speaking of the engine, I forgot to tell you to turn it off. That should have been Step 2. I’ll try to remember to correct that before this book goes to the printer, so as to avoid a lot of unnecessary engine damage and death.

5. Get some oil and pour it into an orifice in the engine until you see little rivulets of oil running across the driveway because you forgot to put the little bolt back in the engine, which I suppose I should have told you to do back in Step 3, which will be Step 4 once I move the current Step 4 to Step 2, where it belongs, but frankly, I’m tired of having to think of every tiny little detail for you.

TRANSMISSION. The truth is, there is nothing you can do about your transmission. Nobody knows how transmissions work, or even where they come from. They just arrive at car factories in unmarked crates, and the workers put them into the cars. Many people believe transmissions are created by beings from other solar systems. There is evidence to support this theory, namely transmission manuals, which contain bizarre diagrams and deranged alien commands such as: “Using a 6.57 reductionended canister wrench, rotate the debenture nut 6 degrees centigrade, taking care not to disenfranchise the gesticulation valve.” So if something goes wrong with your transmission, your best bet is to just give your car to the poor and claim a tax deduction.