Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Hugh’s mistake is that he started to believe that Playboy really was a cultured, sophisticated magazine, and he started writing these enormous, droning articles about his philosophy of life. This was a stupid mistake. I mean, it’s not as if thousands of Playboy readers wrote in and said: “Hey, Hugh, enough with all these big-breasted naked women. What’s your philosophy of life?” But he published his philosophy anyway, and it took up many pages of valuable space that could have been used for naked women. Soon competitors sprung up, and now you can’t walk into a convenience store without seeing dozens of magazines like Hustler, Rogue, Gallery, Newsweek. Newsweek got into the market just recently, when it published a picture of a semi-naked woman on the cover. It’s a small start, but if it works out, I suspect that in a couple of years Newsweek will start telling us its philosophy of life, and people will be holding it sideways. If it plays its cards right, it might even get scrutinized by the Supreme Court.

One effective technique for avoiding boring conversations on airplanes is to pull an extremely sharp ax Out Of your briefcase and spend the entire flight fondling it and muttering. Of course, to get the ax onto the airplane, you’ll have to convince the airport security people that you’re not a hijacker:

SECURITY PERSON: Excuse Me, sir, but there’s an extremely sharp ax in your briefcase.

YOU: Yes, I need it for my business. I’m an ax murderer.

SECURITY PERSON: Oh, okay. Sorry to inconvenience you, but we have to be on the lookout for hijackers. It’s for your own protection.

YOU: Of course. Keep up the good work.

The only problem with the ax approach is that it tends to make the flight attendants skittery, and you may be forced to waste valuable time dealing with large numbers of armed law-enforcement personnel after you land.

SID: the technique I use to ward off boring conversations is to carry a book, which I pull out the instant a boring person tries to talk to me:

BORING PERSON: Hi. Where are you headed?

ME: Detroit.

BORING PERSON: No kidding? That’s where I’m headed.

ME: What an astounding coincidence. And here we are, sitting together on a plane bound for Detroit, the very place we’re both headed.

I think I’ll read my book now.

The problem here is that you have to actually read the book, which may turn out to be even more boring than the person you’re sitting next to, because, as a rule, books contain far too many words. For example, I was recently on a flight to St. Louis, unaware that my suitcase was going to get off at Indianapolis (apparently on the theory that all Midwestern cities are basically the same), and I read a new book about James Bond, the famous spy. I thought there would be no new James Bond books, because the person who wrote them is dead, but evidently the folks in the publishing world decided that if the original author was inconsiderate enough to die, then by God they would find somebody else to write his books for him. I think they’re onto something. I think they ought to use the same approach with other famous dead authors, such as William Shakespeare:

The Warble, Peddle, and Leek Publishing Company proudly announces Romeo and Juliet II –a sweeping saga of lust and passion that begins where the best-selling original left off. The story begins with the discovery that the two lovers didn’t really stab themselves hard enough to die, and follows them through their lustful and passionate efforts to escape the clutches of their warring families and find a peaceful life of lust and passion! Now on sale at every drugstore and supermarket in the world.

Better than the original!—The Bullock, Missouri, Herald Gazette Chronicle Bugle .

Lustful ... passionate!— Field and Stream .

A recently published book!— The New York Times .

Well anyway, I was reading this James Bond book, and right away I realized that, like most books, it had too many words. The plot was the same one that all James Bond books have: An evil person tries to blow up the world, but James Bond kills him and his henchmen and makes love to several attractive women. There, that’s it: twenty-four words. But the guy who wrote the book took thousands of words to say it. I mean, he never just writes: “Bond walked into the bedroom.” Instead, he writes:

“Bond eased the bedroom door latch open gently, praying that the click of the ZuchSweiss stainless steel door latch would not disturb the other inhabitants, and cautiously eyed the room, which he noted was paneled with European birch, or Betula verrucose, probably from the Vorarlburg region of western Austria.” And it goes on like this for pages before Bond gets around to killing a henchman. I could barely wade through it.

I was tempted to start chatting with the person next to me about how we were both going to St. Louis.

And it’s not just spy novels. Most books are too long. I remember in college when I had to read The Brothers Karamazov by the famous Russian alcoholic Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It’s about these two brothers who kill their father. Or maybe only one of them kills the father. It’s almost impossible to tell, because what they mostly do is talk for nearly a thousand pages. If all Russians talked as much as the brothers Karamazov did, I don’t see how they found time to become a major world power.

Our literature professor told us that Dostoyevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov to raise the question of whether there is a God. So what I want to know is, why didn’t Dostoyevsky just come right out and ask? Why didn’t he write:

Dear Reader,

Is there a God? It sure beats the heck out of me.

Sincerely,

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Here are some other famous works of literature that could easily have been summarized in a few words:

Moby-Dick –Don’t mess around with large whales, because they symbolize nature and will kill you.

A Tale of Two Cities –French people are crazy. Every poem ever written—Poets are extremely sensitive.

Think of all the valuable time we would save if authors got right to the point this way. People would be able to read several dozen great books in a matter of minutes. College would take about two weeks. We’d have more time for more important activities, such as reading newspaper columns.

A distinguished, high-level, blue-ribbon federal panel of people wearing suits recently released a report concluding that (and here I quote directly): “The American public-education system has done just about as good a job of educating the nation’s children as might be expected from a bucket of live bait.” The report presented some shocking statistics to support this finding:

For the past eleven years, American students have scored lower on standardized tests than European students, Japanese students and certain species of elk; Seventy-eight percent of America’s school principals have, at some point in their careers, worn white belts or shoes to school; Nobody in the entire United States remembers the exact date of the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.

The bottom line is that the educational system, which costs over

$200 billion a year, is an unmitigated disaster. This is good news for everybody. It’s good news for those of us who went to high school back when the schools were supposed to be better, because we can feel superior to today’s students. When we go to shopping malls and see batches of teenagers standing around and laughing in a carefree teenaged manner, we can reassure ourselves by saying: “Those kids may be attractive and slim and healthy, and they may have their entire lives ahead of them and no gum problems whatsoever, but by God they never learned how to conjugate the verb ‘to squat’ in Latin, the way I had to when I was in school.”