Dave Barry - Bad Habits

I, for one, was stunned by this revelation. Believe it or not, I had never made the connection between Sister Jacqueline and Sara Tucker. Now, of course, it seems obvious: only an actress skilled enough to perform in “The Flying Nun” would be able to convincingly portray a woman who is so deranged that she puts huge globs of Cool Whip on her desserts at what is supposed to be a good restaurant. But without the Enquirer I would never have known.

And without the National Examiner, which is like the Enquirer except it uses even smaller words, I would never have found out that

40 VAMPIRES ROAM NORTH AMERICA

This extremely scientific story reports on the research of Dr. Stephen Kaplan, a parapsychologist who founded the Vampire Research Center. I got the impression that Dr. Kaplan is the Vampire Research Center, but the story never makes this clear. It also doesn’t say where he got his degree in parapsychology, but we can safely assume it was someplace like Harvard.

Anyway, Dr. Kaplan sent questionnaires to people who requested mail from the center, and forty responded that, yes indeed, they are vampires. In a way, this cheered me up. I mean, I always thought of vampires as evil, uncooperative persons of Central European descent who never even file income tax returns, and here we have forty of them who cheerfully fill out questionnaires for the Vampire Research Center.

Dr. Kaplan, who (surprise!) plans to write a book about vampires, believes there are lots more vampires around. “This probably represents the tip of the vampire iceberg,” he told the Examiner, which knows a good metaphor when it hears one. If Dr. Kaplan is correct, I imagine that before long we’ll have a federal law requiring large companies to hire a certain percentage of vampires. They have been discriminated against long enough.

Here are some more stories you missed: “Bingo Can Restore the Will to Live On,” “$50 Operation to Restore Virginity....,” “A Machine Chewed Up My Legs,” “Cancer Ruins Sex,” “Dead Man Thanks Killer” and “34 Years in a Haunted House.” The last one is about a Massachusetts man and woman whose house is occupied by a ghost that does terrifying things, such as caressing the woman’s brow with ghostly fingers when she’s reading. By way of proof, the article is accompanied by an actual photograph of the woman reading.

Check-out-counter publications also perform valuable services for their readers. The Examiner has a psychic named Maria who uses her incredible psychic ability to answer baffling questions, such as “Dear Maria: A man I am dating keeps asking me to spank him. What should I do?” To which Maria replies: “Dump him. He’s nuts.” And some people have the nerve to claim that psychics are frauds.

But the best part of check-out-counter publications is the advertisements. They can make you rich. I, for one, never realized how much money you can make stuffing envelopes, but according to the ads in the Enquirer and the Examiner, the sky is the limit. I mean, people are willing to pay you thousands of dollars a week to stuff envelopes. I figure there must be a catch. For one thing, they never tell you what you have to stuff the envelopes with. Maybe it’s poison spiders. That would explain the high pay.

Another ad I saw in the Examiner just intrigues me. The headline says: JESUS IS HERE. Now I am going to quote very carefully from the ad, because otherwise you won’t believe me:

Tired of money-mad ministers and physicians? Free, drugless urine cures all ills, increases energy and intelligence and is prescribed in the Bible ... Due to its Ammuno-genetic qualities, urine is the only antidote for nuclear radiation ... If you are not fully convinced that the course heralds the Second Coming of Christ, return it in perfect condition for a full refund ...

The course costs seventy-five dollars; otherwise I would have sent for it already. I am very curious about it, and even more curious about the person who wrote it. I strongly suspect he’s one of the people who responded to Dr. Kaplan’s vampire survey.

If we’re ever going to return the United States to its glory days (August 14 and 15, 1955) we’re going to have to do something about television. This country has been going downhill ever since they took the Ed Sullivan show off the air, and I say we should bring it back. Some of you may argue that Ed Sullivan is dead, but I don’t see how that would affect his judgment or delivery in the slightest. Ed knew talent when he saw it. He discovered such acts as the little dogs that wore dresses and walked around on their hind legs for twenty or thirty minutes while the audience, whose average IQ could not have been higher than eighteen, roared with laughter. That was entertainment. If we had Ed Sullivan back, we wouldn’t spend Sunday evenings being depressed by “60 Minutes”:

“Good evening, I’m Mike Wallace. Tonight on ‘60 Minutes’ we will explain why the Earth will be covered with a sheet of ice eight miles thick within the next fifteen years; we talk to a government researcher who has discovered that, because of a manufacturing defect, 93 percent of the refrigerators in the United States could explode at the slightest touch; and Andy Rooney will take an amusing look at whisk brooms.”

Another show we could do without is “Phil Donahue”:

“Hi, and welcome to the Phil Donahue show. My guest today is Wesley Snate, who was convicted in 1979 of charges that he bludgeoned roughly three hundred Los Angeles-area French poodles to death. Mr. Snate has written a very sensitive and moving book about his experience, entitled They Deserved It, and I have invited him on the show so I can ask him many sensitive and insightful questions so our viewing audience will gain a deeper understanding of dog bludgeoners and perhaps buy his book.”

The trouble with Phil’s approach is that, with all his tiptoeing around, he hardly ever gets around to the really depraved stuff everybody is tuned in to hear. For sheer depravity, Phil’s show can’t hold a candle to the old “Queen for a Day” show, in which deranged housewives competed to see who had the most miserable life:

FIRST CONTESTANT: My husband had a stroke and he lost his job and our house got repossessed so we had to live under a sheet of plywood in the supermarket parking lot but when it got cold our kids got tuberculosis except the youngest who got kidney disease so we built a fire under there to keep warm but the plywood caught fire and burned up my insulin and all our clothes so I had to wrap the kids in discarded plastic garbage bags which is giving them a rash.

SECOND CONTESTANT: Well, I have cancer, of course, and my husband was hit by a truck which gave him amnesia and he wandered off and I haven’t seen him since which would be okay except he had just withdrawn our life savings so we could pay for an operation for little Theodora who has lost the use of her fingers because of rat bites and can’t tend little Buford’s iron lung when I’m out picking through the garbage for supper.

THIRD CONTESTANT: Well my problem is that ... arghhhhh. (The third contestant keels over and dies.)

Then the audience would applaud each contestant, and the one who got the most applause would win an Amana freezer. It was a terrific show.

We’re also going to have to do something about children’s television. Today’s children watch shows like “Sesame Street,” which teaches them that the world is full of friendly interracial adults and cute puppets and letters that form recognizable patterns. This is, of course, a pack of lies. When I was a kid, in New York, my friends and I watched shows like “Captain Video,” which taught us that the world was full of evil forces trying to destroy the earth, which turns out to be absolutely correct.