Dave Barry - Bad Habits

Everybody should know something about birds, because birds are everywhere. Zoologists tell u, there, are over

23,985,409,723,098,050,744,885,143 birds in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, alone, which is one of the many reasons not to go there.

Now perhaps you get a bit nervous when you think about all those birds out there. Perhaps you remember Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie The Birds, in which several million birds got together one afternoon and decided to peck a number of Californians to death. Well, you needn’t worry. First, any animal that attacks Californians is a friend of man. And second, The Birds was just a movie; in real life, your chances of being pecked to death by birds are no greater than your chances of finding a polite clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

There is an incredible range of birds, from the ostrich, which weighs up to six hundred pounds and stands up to nine feet tall and can run two hundred miles an hour and crush a man’s head as if it were a Ping-Pong ball; to the tiny bee humming bird, which is a mere 6.17 decahedrons long and can fly right into your ear and hum its tiny wings so hard you think your brain is going to vibrate into jelly and you will eventually go insane.

Birds, like most mammals, especially lawyers, evolved from reptiles. The first bird appeared millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period

(which gets its name from the fact that it was a fairly jurassic period). What happened was this reptile, inspired by some mysterious, wondrous inspiration to evolve, climbed up a Jurassic Period tree and leaped from the topmost branch and thudded into the ground at 130 miles an hour.

Then other reptiles, inspired by the same urge as the first reptile but even stupider, climbed up and began leaping from the branch. Soon the ground trembled with the thud of many reptile bodies, raining down on the Jurassic plain like some kind of scaly hailstorm. This went on for a few thousand years, until one of the reptiles evolved some feathers and discovered it could fly. As it soared skyward, the other species, who had grown very tired of being pelted by reptile bodies, let out a mighty cheer, which stopped a few seconds later when they were pelted by the first bird droppings.

Soon birds had spread to the four corners of the earth, which is where they are today. And wherever there are birds, there are also bird watchers, in case the birds decide to try something. Bird watchers are known technically as bird watchers, which comes from the Latin word for ornithologist.

Bird watchers divide birds into four main groups:

Boring little brown birds that are all over the place: Wrens, chickadees, sparrows, nutcrackers, spanners, catcalls, dogbirds, hamsterbirds, flinches. Birds that can lift really heavy things, such as your car: Albatrosses, winches, pterodactyls, unusually large chickadees, elephant birds, emus. Birds with names that you are going to think I made up but I didn’t: Boobies, frigate birds, night jars, frogmouths, oilbirds. Birds that make those jungle noises you always hear during night scenes in jungle movies: Parrots, cockatoos, pomegranates, macadams, cashews, bats.

Your avid bird watchers spend lots of time creeping around with binoculars, trying to identify new and unusual birds. The trouble is that most birds are of the little-and-brownish variety, all of which look exactly alike, and all of which are boring. So what bird watchers do is make things up. If you’ve ever spent any time at all with bird watchers, you’ve probably noticed that every now and then they’ll whirl around, for no apparent reason, and claim they’ve just seen some obscure, tiny bird roughly 6,500 feet away. They’ll even claim they can tell whether it was male or female, which in fact you can’t tell about birds even when they’re very close, what with all the feathers and everything.

I advise you to do what most people do when confronted with bird watchers, which is just humor them. If their lives are so dull and drab that they want to fill them with imaginary birds, why stand in the way? Here’s how you should handle it:

BIRD WATCHER: Did you see that?

YOU: What?

BIRD WATCHER: Over there, by that mountain (he gestures to a mountain in the next state). It’s a male Malaysian sand-dredging coronet. Very, very rare in these parts.

YOU: Ah, yes, I see it.

BIRD WATCHER: You do?

YOU: Certainly. It’s just to the left of that female European furloughed pumpkinbird. See it?

BIRD WATCHER: Uh, yes, of course I see it.

YOU: Look, they’re playing backgammon.

BIRD WATCHER: Um, so they are.

If you have a good imagination, you may come to really enjoy the bird watching game, in which case you should join a bird-watching group. These groups meet regularly, and usually after a few minutes they’re detecting obscure birds on the surface of Saturn. It’s a peck of fun.

I don’t want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days. Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast Signals to alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.

I realize that some of you may not believe that alien beings exist. But how else can you explain the many unexplained phenomena that people are always sighting, such as lightning and flying saucers? Oh, I know the authorities claim these sightings are actually caused by “weather balloons,” but that is a bucket of manure if I ever heard one. (That’S just a figure of speech, of course. I realize that manure is silent.)

Answer this question honestly: Have you, or has any member of your immediate family, ever seen a weather balloon? Of course not. Nobody has. Yet if these so-called authorities were telling the truth, the skies over America would be dark with weather balloons. Commercial aviation would be impossible. Nevertheless, the authorities trot out this tired old explanation, or an even stupider one, every time a flying saucer is sighted:

NEW YORK—Authorities say that the gigantic luminous Object flying at tremendous speeds in the skies of Manhattan last night, which was reported by more than seven million people, including the mayor, a Supreme Court justice, several bishops, thousands of airline pilots, brain surgeons, and certified public accountants, was simply an unusual air-mass inversion. “That’s all it was, an air-mass inversion,” said the authorities, in unison. Asked why the people also reported seeing the words, “WE ARE ALIEN BEINGS WHO COME IN PEACE WITH CURES FOR ALL YOUR MAJOR DISEASES AND A CARBURETOR THAT GETS 450 MILES PER GALLON HIGHWAY ESTIMATED” written on the side of the object in letters over three hundred feet tall, the authorities replied, “Well, it could also have been a weather balloon.”

Wake up, America! There are no weather balloons! Those are alien beings! They are all around us! I’m sure most of you have seen the movie E.T., which is the story of an alien who almost dies when he falls into the clutches of the American medical-care establishment, but is saved by preadolescent boys. Everybody believes that the alien is a fake, a triumph of special effects. But watch the movie closely next time. The alien is real! The boys are fakes! Real preadolescent boys would have beaten the alien to death with rocks.

Yes, aliens do exist. And high government officials know they exist but have been keeping this knowledge top secret. Here is the Untold Story:

Years ago, when the alien-broadcast program began, government scientists decided to broadcast a message that would be simple, yet would convey a sense of love, universal peace, and brotherhood: “Have a nice day.” They broadcast this message over and over, day after day, year after year, until one day they got an answer: