Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Music scholars divide orchestra instruments into five families:

Instruments You Blow into and Eventually Have to Get the Spit out of (tubas, whistles, cormorants, tribunes).

Instruments You Hit (drums, triangles, rhomboids, homophones).

Instruments That Are Easily Concealed (piccolos).

Furniture (pianos).

Instruments That Could Turn out to Be Worth a Million Skillion Dollars (violins). The really valuable violins are the ones made by Antonio Stradivarius, which are prized because they were made with exquisite care and craftsmanship and each one contains just over seventeen ounces of pure heroin in a secret compartment which you open by pressing with your chin.

Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music. The most profitable kind of regular music is rock ‘n’ roll. Rock ‘n’ roll comes from the blues, a kind of music developed by American slaves. It is called the “blues” because it is very sad. Evidently the slaves found slavery depressing. Blues lyrics generally go like this:

My woman she done left me

My children left me too

My mule done kicked my kidneys

And my income tax is due

For a long time, blues music was popular only with black people, who were then known as “Negroes.” Black blues musicians played in lowdown bars for very little money. Then, in the early 1950s, young white people got interested in the blues. They developed a modified version called “rock ‘n’ roll,” which became enormously popular and turned many of them into millionaires. They routinely paid homage to the black blues musicians who paved the way for them, who made it all possible, and who continued to play in lowdown bars for very little money.

The principal difference between rock ‘n’ roll and classical music is that your average piece of classical music has about a dozen melodies and no words, whereas your average rock ‘n’ roll song has one melody (sometimes less) and about a dozen words. When rock ‘n’ roll composers are in a hurry to finish songs so they can get to important luncheon dates, they sometimes make up some of the words. Take, for example, the words to the 1960s hit rock ‘n’ roll song “Sittin’ in La La”:

Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya

Uh huh, uh huh

Sittin’ in la la waitin’for my ya ya

Uh huh, uh huh

Probably the composer planned to go back and put in real words for “la la” and “ya ya,” but before he could get around to it somebody released the song and it sold several million records. Another example is “Land of a Thousand Dances,” whose composer evidently got called away to an urgent appointment after he had written only two words:

I said aa na aa aa aa Na aa na na na na aa na na na Na na na na

The other kinds of regular music you can make money from are country music, which is popular with people who like songs about drunken infidelity but requires singers with funny clothes and Southern accents; big-band music, which is popular with people who like big bands but requires big bands; and easy-listening music, which is popular in elevators and supermarkets but can be sung only by groups of heavily sedated suburbanites. You should steer clear of jazz, opera, folk, marching-band and bagpipe music: the market for these is minuscule. You will never see hordes of fans clamoring for the autograph of a bagpiper.

Anyone can read music. It’s simply a matter of memorizing the various notes and musical signs. The major notes are:

dum da de tra tra-la

The major musical signs are:

start of song

halfway through song

clap hands two-thirds of way through song

end of song

I am opposed to pornography. First, let me make it clear that I believe if God wanted people to be seen naked, He would not have made so many of them unattractive. Nevertheless, I feel compelled to write about pornography, because it is directly related to the increase in drug abuse, unemployment, international terrorism, all-polyester clothing, and, above all, violence. This was a far less violent country in the days when pornography was illegal, unless you count the Civil War. Pornography is like tooth decay, eating slowly away at the molars of our morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation, gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean tablecloth of our children’s futures. The dictionary tells us that the word “pornography” comes from the words “Porno,” meaning “publications,” and “graphy,” meaning “that adolescent males gather around in junior high school halls and snicker at.” The problem is that this simple definition is inadequate for the legal authorities, who need something less comprehensible. So for the past twenty years or so, the legal authorities have spent enormous amounts of time and effort gathering up and scrutinizing dirty books, trying to come up with a suitable definition of pornography so they can throw people in jail for selling it. The dirty books are scrutinized first by the police, then by the district attorney, then by a local judge and jury, then by some appeals judges, and then finally, when the really pornographic pages are dog-eared from all this intense legal scrutiny, the books are shipped in unmarked crates to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices sit around in their robes and discuss them:

CHIEF JUSTICE: Okay, we have here the case of Nebraska v. The Huge Boar Adult Book Store and Health Spa, which is accused of selling an illustrated publication entitled Young Teenaged Babysitters with Flawless Skin Go to Daytona Beach to eight undercover agents on July 3, 1972. Have you all scrutinized the evidence?

OTHER JUSTICES (crowd around the evidence): Not yet! Not yet! We’re still scrutinizing, and ... My God! Look at this photograph! It looks like a—No, it can’t be—Yes it is! It’s a ...

CHIEF JUSTICE: Now as I interpret the First Amendment, the issue here is ... OTHER JUSTICES: It’s a flamingo! Incredible! I mean, I know flamingos thrive in captivity, but I had no idea that ... CHIEF JUSTICE: ... whether the constitutional guarantee of free speech conflicts with the ... OTHER JUSTICES: How do you suppose they got all that Cool Whip to adhere to the ceilings?

After a few sessions like this, the justices render a decision, which says: “Having reviewed the evidence in this case, the court finds that, inasmuch as the prothonotary nature of the alleged violation precludes a pro forma elucidation of its meretriciousness or meritoriousness per se, it cannot be determined whether such alleged violation may or may not be deleterious without a heck of a lot more scrutiny by the members of the court.”

Since nobody ever has the vaguest idea what the justices mean, their decisions always set off a new round of arrests and scrutiny throughout the legal system, which by now has accumulated over thirty million cubic yards of evidence suspected of being pornographic. Eventually, the national stockpile will get so large that the authorities will have to start giving pornography away to poor people, the way they did with cheese.

Years ago, the pornography industry was fairly small, because people were ashamed to be caught reading dirty books and magazines. Then along came Hugh Hefner, who had a dream: to publish a cultured, sophisticated magazine, a magazine with in-depth interviews of influential people, with top-notch fiction, with thought-provoking articles, with pictures of large-breasted women either naked or dressed up as bunny rabbits. The beauty of Hugh’s idea was that you could pretend you were buying his magazine to read the thought-provoking articles. You could grab an issue of Playboy and say “I’m very eager to read this interview with Albert Schweitzer,” knowing full well that it is very difficult to read any magazine when you hold it sideways, which is how people generally hold Playboy.