Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (24 page)

T
oday, as part of our series “The Human Brain, So to Speak,” we explore the phenomenon of: Brain Sludge.

“Brain sludge” is a term coined by leading scientists to describe the vast collection of moronic things that your brain chooses to remember instead of useful information.

For example: Take any group of 100 average Americans, and sing to them, “Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed.” At least 97 of them will immediately sing: “A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed.” They will sing this even if they are attending a funeral. They can’t help it.

This particular wad of sludge—known to scientists as
The Beverly Hillbillies Theme Song Wad
—is so firmly lodged in the standard American brain lobe that it has become part of our national DNA, along with the
Gilligan’s Island
wad. If a newborn American infant were abandoned in the wilderness and raised by wolves without any human contact or language, there would nevertheless come a day when he or she would blurt out, without having any idea what it meant: “A THREE-hour tour!” And the wolves would sing along. That’s how pervasive brain sludge is.

What is the root of this problem? Like most human defects,
such as thigh fat, the original cause is your parents. Soon after you were born, your parents noticed that you were, functionally, an idiot, as evidenced by the fact that you spent most of your waking hours trying to eat your own feet. So they decided to put something into your brain, but instead of information you’d actually
need
later in life—for example, the PIN number to your ATM card—they sang drivel to you, the same drivel that parents have been dumping into their children’s brains since the Middle Ages, such as “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.” Your parents thought they were stimulating your mind, but in fact they were starting the sludge-buildup process, not realizing that every cretinous word they put into your brain would stay there FOREVER, so that decades later you’d find yourself waking up in the middle of the night wondering:
Why? WHY did she cut off their tails with a carving knife?

But your parents aren’t the real problem. The REAL problem, the nuclear generator of brain sludge, is television. Here’s a little test for those readers out there who are approximately forty-eight years old. How many of you know what the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says? Let’s see those hands … one … two … Okay, I count nine people. Now, how many of you remember the theme song to the 1950s TV show
Robin Hood?
Thousands of you! Me too! Everybody join in:

My brain also contains theme songs to early TV shows about Daniel Boone (“Daniel Boone was a man, yes a BIG man!”); Zorro (“The fox so cunning and free! He makes the sign of the Z!”); and Bat Masterson (“He wore a cane and derby hat! They called him Bat!”).

I am not proud of this, but I can name only five Supreme Court Justices (one of whom sticks in my mind solely because of the term “pubic hair”); whereas I can name six Mousketeers.

Of course the densest layer of sludge consists of commercial jingles for products that no longer exist. Your brain assigns the highest priority to these. That’s why, although I honestly cannot name the current secretary of defense, I can sing:

My brain also loves to remind me that my beer is Rheingold, the dry beer; think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer! Brush-a, brush-a, brush-a! New Ipana toothpaste! With the brand-new flavor! It’s dandy for your teeeeeeth!

Here’s how pathetic my brain is: If it
forgets
some worthless piece of brain sludge, it drops everything else and becomes obsessed with
recalling
it. For example, right now my brain is devoting all available resources to remembering the name of the candy featured in the following jingle:

This is currently my brain’s Manhattan Project; it will think of nothing else. A lot of people have this problem, and society pays a price for it:

Yes, brain sludge is a leading cause of needless tragedy, which is why I’m asking you to join in the fight against it. How? Simple: Write a letter to senators and congresspersons DEMANDING that they appropriate $500 million for a study to for God’s sake find out what kind of candy lasts all day if you have one head. And if there is any money left over, we should hire professional assassins to track down whoever wrote:

BANG

Thank you.

H
ere in the newspaper industry (official motto: “For Official Motto, Please Turn to Section F, Page 37”) we are seriously worried. Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there’s a good chance that nobody is reading this column. I could write a pornographic sex scene here and nobody would notice.

“Oh Dirk,” moaned Camille as she writhed nakedly on the bed. “Yes yes yes YES YES YES YES YESSSSSSSSSS!”

“Wait up!” shouted Dirk. “I’m still in the bathroom!”

It was not always this way. There was a time in America when everybody read newspapers. Big cities had spunky lads standing on every street corner shouting “EXTRA!” These lads weren’t selling newspapers: They just shouted “EXTRA!” because they wanted to irritate people, and boomboxes had not been invented yet.

But the point is that in those days, most people read newspapers, whereas today, most people do not. What caused this change?

One big factor, of course, is that people are a lot stupider than they used to be, although we here in the newspaper industry would never say so in print.

Certainly another factor is that many people now get their news from television. This is unfortunate. I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV news people, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

But if we want to identify the “root cause” of the decline in newspaper readership, I believe we have to point the finger of blame at the foolish decision by many newspapers to stop running the comic strip
Henry
. Remember Henry? The bald boy who looks like Dwight Eisenhower? I believe that readers liked the
Henry
strip because, in times of change and uncertainty, it always had the same plot:

Panel One:
Henry is walking along the street. He is wearing shorts, even if it is winter.

Panel Two:
Suddenly Henry spies an object. You can tell he’s spying it, because a dotted line is going from his eyeball to the object. Often the object is a pie cooling on a windowsill (pies are always cooling on windowsills on the planet where Henry lives).

Panel Three:
Things get really wacky as Henry eats the pie.

Panel Four:
The woman who baked the pie comes to the window and discovers that—prepare to roll on the floor—
the pie is gone
. The woman is surprised. You can tell because exclamation points are shooting out of her head.

This timeless humor has been delighting readers for thousands of years
(Henry
strips have been found on prehistoric cave walls), but for some reason, a while back most newspapers stopped running the strip, and readership has been in the toilet ever since. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

Whatever the cause, the readership decline is producing major underarm dampness here in the newspaper industry. We’re especially concerned about the fact that we’re losing young readers—the so-called Generation X, which gets its name from the fact that it followed the so-called Generation W. We’re desperate to attract these readers. Go to any newspaper today and you’ll see herds of editors pacing around, mooing nervously, trying to think up ways to make newspapers more relevant to today’s youth culture. This is pretty funny if you know anything about newspaper editors, the vast majority of whom are middle-aged Dockers-wearing white guys who cannot recognize any song recorded after “Yellow Submarine.”

But they’re trying. If you read your newspaper carefully, you’ll notice that you’re seeing fewer stories with uninviting, incomprehensible, newspaper-ese headlines like
PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT
, and more punchy, “with-it” headlines designed to appeal to today’s young people, like
PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, DUDE
.

I applaud this effort, and as a middle-aged Dockers-wearing white guy, I want to do my part by making my column more “hep” and appealing to young people. So I’m going to conclude by presenting the views of some students of Daniel Kennedy’s English class at Clearfield (Pennsylvania) Area High School. I recently wrote a column in which I said that some young people today have unattractive haircuts and don’t know who Davy Crockett was. Mr.
Kennedy’s class read this column and wrote me letters in response; here are some unretouched excerpts, which I am not making up:

• “Maybe one of these days, you should look in the mirror, Dave. Dave, you need a new hairstyle, man! You have a puff-cut, Dave.”
  

• “Without hair I think every guy in the world would just die of imbarresment. I know I would, but I am a girl.”
  

• “You say that I don’t no any thing about Davy Crockett. Well I no that he fought at the Alamo. He also played in several movies.”
  

Let me just say that we in the newspaper industry totally agree with you young people on these points and any other points you wish to make, and if you will please please PLEASE start reading the newspaper we’ll be your best friend, okay? Okay? Young people? Hello?

You’re not even reading this, you little twerps.

“Oh Dirk,” moaned Camille, “I am overcome by desire at the sight of your … your … What do you call those?”

“Dockers,” said Dirk
.

C
all me paranoid, but my first reaction, upon learning about the dead sheep being found in treetops in New Zealand, was that something unusual was going on.

I found out about this thanks to alert reader Steven Moe, who sent me an article from
The Press
of Christchurch, New Zealand, concerning “the discovery of several dead sheep high in the trees of Tunnicliffe Forest.”

Right away I said to myself: “Hmm.” I base this statement on the well-known fact that sheep are not tree-dwelling animals. Zoologically, sheep are classified in the same family as cows: Animals That Stand Around and Poop. On very rare occasions, a single sheep or cow will climb a tree in an effort to escape a fierce natural predator such as a wolf or (around lunchtime) Luciano Pavarotti. But
The Press
article states that “four or five decomposing sheep were high in the branches.” That is too many sheep to be explained by natural causes. Which leads us to the obvious explanation: namely, supernatural causes.