Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Answer. Ancient Man tried for thousands of years to explain Life. Ancient Man would do anything to avoid honest work. Ancient Woman would yell at him: “Don’t forget to make pointed stones to stab the saber-toothed tiger with” or “Don’t forget to migrate to North America” and he would say “I can’t right now, dear, I’m trying to explain Life.”

Over the years, Man came up with many explanations for life, all of them stupid. In fact, when you get right down to it, almost every explanation Man came up with for anything until about 1926 was stupid. I bet kids would be able to get from kindergarten through high school in about thirty-five minutes if we stopped making them memorize all the drivel Ancient Man came up with about the gods and goddesses and why the moon goes through phases and so on.

Anyway, Modern Science, using all the sophisticated analytical tools at its disposal, has discarded all the myths and come up with a definition that covers all forms of Life:

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

By this definition, the amoeba, the mango, the frog, the squirrel, the bear, the begonia, and many lawyers are forms of Life. But this just begs the question, Where does Life come from? And how can the mango, which clearly has some value, be related to the lawyer?

Modern Scientists explain all this with the Theory of Evolution. They say that at one time the earth was nothing but a bunch of slime and ooze, sort of like Bayonne, New Jersey. Then lightning struck some chemicals and formed one-celled creatures (am I going too fast here?), which floated around for several million years until the smart ones decided to organize the dumb ones into higher forms of life:

SMART CELLS: What do you say we evolve into a higher form of life?

DUMB CELLS: Sounds good to us.

SMART CELLS: Fine. We’ll be the brain. You be the sphincter.

And so they crawled out on land. Then they started adapting to the environment, according to the law of the Survival of the Fittest. For example, if the climate was very hot, the animals without air conditioning died. If the climate had daytime television, the animals without small brains died. And so on.

NOTE: Some people, particularly religious personnel, dispute the Theory of Evolution: they say God created all Life all at once. I have done a lot of research on both theories, and I firmly believe the evidence supports the theory that anybody who supports either theory gets

a lot of nasty mail, so I’m staying the heck out of it. And I’ll stand by this position.

Life as we know it today falls into two categories: Plants and Animals. Plants are divided into three subcategories: Green Vegetables, Yellow Vegetables, and Weeds. Animals are divided into six subcategories:

Animals You Can Eat: cows, turkeys, porks, bolognas, veals, zucchinis, tuna fish. Animals You Can Sit on: horses, certain turtles. Animals That Can Knock Over Your Car: rhinoceroses, soccer fans. Totally Useless Animals That Would Have Ceased to Exist Thousands of Years Ago If Not for Greedy Pet Store Owners Who Prey on Unsuspecting Eight-Year-Olds: hamsters, gerbils. Animals That Are Easily Impressed: dogs. Animals Whose Sole Goal in Life Is to Wait at the Bottom of Sleeping Bags and Sting or Bite People to Death: scorpions, snakes. Animals That Are Not Easily Impressed: cats.

You’ll notice this list does not include insects. This is because insects are not animals: Insects are insects, and their sole reason for existing is to be sprayed by poisonous substances from aerosol cans. Oh,

I know you’ve heard a lot of ecology-nut talk about how you shouldn’t kill insects because they’re part of the Great Chain of Life and birds eat them and so on, but I say go ahead and kill them. If necessary, we can do without birds, too.

Many of you have written cards and letters asking me to explain chemistry. Here is a sampling:

Dear Dave:

Please explain chemistry—Otherwise I will kill myself.

Sincerely,

A Deranged Person

Dear Dave:

If You don’t explain chemistry by 6 P.M. Friday, we will detonate a nuclear device in Brooklyn.

Regards,

Several Terrorists

Okay, here goes. Chemistry, in technical terms, is the study of all the weensy little objects that make up the large objects we can see with our naked eyes, such as toasters. Most of you were probably exposed to chemistry in high school, assuming you were dumb enough to believe your guidance counselors when they said you would need some knowledge of chemistry in later life. They probably used the same routine to get you to take Latin, another subject unrelated to the real world. The only time you ever need to understand Latin is when you’re at the doctor’s office wearing one of those embarrassing garments, designed by Nazi sadists, that they make you wear, and you have finished emitting various bodily fluids into various containers, which you have carried around the crowded waiting room looking for a nurse to give them to so he or she can do Lord knows what perverted things with them, and you’re waiting in the examining room on a cold table covered with the kind of paper they give you to cover toilet seats with in public rest rooms, hoping the doctor will come within the next two or three days to examine you, and finally you get so bored you look at all the diplomas and certificates on the wall, which are written in Latin. If you don’t know Latin, they look pretty impressive:

Quod erat demonstrandum Opere citato et cetera, id est amo amas amat plume de ma tante NORBERT B.

HODPACKER vamos al cine exernpli gratia marquis de sade XLIVIIICBM.

If you know Latin, you’ll figure out this means:

This certifies that

NORBERT B. HODPACKER has a great big piece of paper on his wall.

Chemistry is similar. Actually, I never took any chemistry myself, but I did sit outside Mr. Hoose’s chemistry class for a whole year in high school. I was a hall monitor. My job was to make sure the other students had legal hall passes so they could smoke cigarettes in the bathrooms. That was back in the days when kids smoked cigarettes.

Sitting in the hall, I overheard a lot of chemistry. The big thing was atoms and molecules, which are the Building Blocks of Matter. In ancient times, people didn’t know about atoms and molecules: they thought the Building Blocks of Matter were earth, air, fire, and water. What a bunch of jerks.

Today we know about atoms and molecules, which are very tiny. For example, the head of a pin has 973 trillion million billion spillion drillion gillion thousand jillion hillion zillion atoms and molecules. Let me try to give you an idea how many atoms and molecules that is, in terms that a lay person might understand: it is a lot of atoms and molecules.

What happens is the atoms and molecules whiz around and form elements, such as gold, iron, ivory, gravel, and vinyl. Sometimes several elements come together (don’t ask me why) to form new chemical structures. For example, common table salt is actually composed of two deadly poisons, arsenic and strychnine. They are perfectly safe if combined properly, but if the salt manufacturers should mess up on one tiny little grain, and you happen to put that grain, among thousands of others, on your egg, you will die a horrible death. That’s what makes chemistry so fascinating.

Chemists are always messing around with atoms and molecules, hoping to come up with new combinations that will Benefit Mankind. Not long ago they developed a compound that consumes forty-seven times its weight in excess stomach acid. They are even working on new forms of life; in fact, they have already created a one-celled organism that eats oil slicks. I admit this is a fairly stupid thing to do, but it’s a start. And someday, within your lifetime, if you’re lucky, you will see laboratory-created life forms capable of applying for government aid and buying Chrysler products. It’s something to look forward to.