Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (6 page)

I am very familiar with this problem, because I live and drive in Miami, which proudly bills itself as The Inappropriate-Lane-Driving Capital Of The World, a place where the left lane is thought of not so much as a thoroughfare as a public recreational area, where motorists feel free to stop, hold family reunions, barbecue pigs, play volleyball, etc. Compounding this problem is another common type of Miami motorist, the aggressive young male whose car has a sound system so powerful that the driver must go faster than the speed of sound at all times, because otherwise the nuclear bass notes emanating from his rear speakers will catch up to him and cause his head to explode.

So the tiny minority of us Miami drivers who actually qualify as normal find ourselves constantly being trapped behind people drifting along on the interstate at the speed of diseased livestock, while at the same time we are being tailgated and occasionally bumped from behind by testosterone-deranged youths who got their driver training from watching the space-fighter battle scenes in
Star Wars
. And of course nobody EVER signals or yields, and people are CONSTANTLY cutting us off, and AFTER A WHILE WE START TO FEEL SOME RAGE, OK? YOU GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT, MISTER NEWS MEDIA OPINION-MAKER??

In addition to Road Rage, I frequently experience Parking Lot Rage, which occurs when I pull into a crowded supermarket parking lot, and I see people get into their car, clearly ready to leave, so I stop my car and wait for them to vacate the spot, and … nothing happens! They just stay there! WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING IN THERE??!! COOKING DINNER???

When I finally get into the supermarket, I often experience Shopping
Cart Rage. This is caused by the people—and you just KNOW these are the same people who always drive in the left-hand lane—who routinely manage, by careful placement, to block the entire aisle with a single shopping cart. If we really want to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States, we should employ Miami residents armed with shopping carts; we’d only need about two dozen to block the entire Mexican border.

What makes the supermarket congestion even worse is that shoppers are taking longer and longer to decide what to buy, because every product in America now comes in an insane number of styles and sizes. For example, I recently went to the supermarket to get orange juice. For just
one brand
of orange juice, Tropicana, I had to decide whether I wanted Original, HomeStyle, Pulp Plus, Double Vitamin C, Grovestand, Calcium, or Old-Fashioned; I also had to decide whether I wanted the 16-ounce, 32-ounce, 64-ounce, 96-ounce, or six-pack size. This is WAY too many product choices. It caused me to experience Way Too Many Product Choices Rage. I would have called Tropicana and complained, but I probably would have wound up experiencing Automated Phone Answering System Rage (“… For questions about Pulp Plus in the 32-ounce size, press 23. For questions about Pulp Plus in the 64-ounce size, press 24. For questions about …”).

My point is that there are many causes for rage in our modern world, and if we’re going to avoid unnecessary violence, we all need to “keep our cool.” So let’s try to be more considerate, OK? Otherwise I will kill you.

T
oday’s topic for young people is: How to Do a School Science-Fair Project

So your school is having a science fair! Great! The science fair has long been a favorite educational tool in the American school system, and for a good reason: Your teachers hate you.

Ha ha! No, seriously, although a science fair can seem like a big “pain,” it can help you understand important scientific principles, such as Newton’s First Law of Inertia, which states: “A body at rest will remain at rest until 8:45
P.M
. the night before the science-fair project is due, at which point the body will come rushing to the body’s parents, who are already in their pajamas, and shout, ‘I JUST REMEMBERED THE SCIENCE FAIR IS TOMORROW AND WE GOTTA GO TO THE STORE RIGHT NOW!’ ”

Being driven to the store by pajama-wearing parents at the last minute is the most important part of any science-fair project, because your project, to be legal, must have an Official Science-Fair Display Board. This is a big white board that you fold into three sections, thus giving it the stability that it needs to collapse instantly when approached by humans. The international scientific community does not recognize any scientific discovery that does not have an Official Science-Fair Display Board teetering behind it; many top scientists fail to win the Nobel Prize for exactly this reason.

Once you have returned home and gotten your display board folded into three sections (allow about six hours for this) it’s time to start thinking about what kind of project to do. The prize-winning projects are the ones that clearly yet imaginatively demonstrate an interesting scientific principle. So you can forget about winning a prize. What you need is a project that can be done at 1
A.M
. using materials found in your house. Ideally, it should also involve a minimum of property damage or death, which is why, on the advice of this newspaper’s legal counsel, we are not going to discuss some of our popular project topics from previous years, such as “What Is Inside Plumbing?” and “Flame-Proofing Your Cat.”

Whatever topic you select, your project should be divided into three parts: (1) The Hypothesis; (2) The Part That Goes After the Hypothesis; and (3) The Conclusion (this should always be the same as the Hypothesis).

The hypothesis—which comes from the Greek words “hypot,” meaning “word,” and “hesis,” meaning “that I am looking up in the dictionary right now”—is defined as “an unproved theory, proposition, supposition, etc. tentatively accepted to explain certain facts.” For example, a good hypothesis for your science-fair project might be: “There is a lot of gravity around.” You could prove this via an experiment in which you pick up various household items such as underwear, small appliances, siblings, etc., and observe what happens when you let go of them. Your conclusion would of course be: “There is a lot of gravity around.” This would be dramatically illustrated, in your science-fair exhibit, by the fact that your Official Science-Fair Display Board was lying face-down on the floor.

If that project sounds like too much effort, you might consider duplicating the one that my wife swears she did in the seventh grade late on the night before the science fair. It was called “Waves,” and it consisted entirely of a baking pan filled with water, and a pencil.

“You swished the pencil around in the water, and it made waves,” my wife explained.

I asked her what scientific principle this project demonstrated,
and, after thinking about it for a moment, she answered: “The movement of the water.”

Impossible though it may sound, I did a project in sixth grade that was even lamer than that. It was called “Phases of the Moon,” and it consisted of a small rubber ball that I had darkened half of by scribbling on it with a pen. You were supposed to rotate the ball, thus demonstrating scientifically that the phases of the Moon were caused by, I don’t know, ink.

The total elapsed time involved in conceiving of and constructing this project was maybe 10 minutes, of which at least nine were devoted to scribbling. But it still might have been a success had it not been for the fact that some of my fellow students found it amusing to snatch up the Moon and throw it, so that it became sort of a gypsy exhibit, traveling around the Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School gymnasium, landing in and becoming part of other projects, helping to demonstrate magnetism, photosynthesis, etc. So my project ended up being just a sign saying “PHASES OF THE MOON” sitting on an otherwise bare naked table, the scientific implication being that the Moon is a very moody celestial body that sometimes gets in a phase where it just takes off without telling anybody.

Of course if you want to get a good grade, you have to do a project that will impress your teachers. Here’s a proven winner:

“HYPOTHESIS—That (Name of Teacher) and (Name of Another Teacher) would prefer that I not distribute the photo I took of them when they were ‘chaperoning’ our class trip to Epcot Center and they ducked behind the cottage-cheese exhibit in the Amazing World Of Curds.”

Depending on the quality of your research, you might get more than a good grade from your teachers: You might get actual money! Yes, science truly can be rewarding. So why wait until the last minute to start your science-fair project? Why not get started immediately on exploring the amazing world of science, without which we would not have modern technology. Television, for example. Let’s turn it on right now.

I
was walking through my bedroom on a recent Sunday morning when I suddenly had a feeling that something was wrong. I’m not sure how I knew; perhaps it was a “sixth sense” I’ve developed after years of home ownership. Or perhaps it was the fact that there was water coming out of the ceiling.

But whatever tipped me off, I knew that I had a potentially serious problem, so I did not waste time. Moving swiftly but without panic, I
went into the living room and read the entire sports section of the newspaper, thus giving the problem a chance to go away by itself. This is one of the four recommended methods for dealing with a household problem, the other three being (1) wrapping the problem with duct tape; (2) spraying the problem with a product called “WD-40”; and (3) selling the home, and then telling the new owners, “Hey, it never did that when WE owned it.”

Unfortunately, when I went back to the bedroom, the ceiling was still dripping. My wife, Michelle, suggested that maybe there was water sitting on the roof and leaking into the house, but I knew, as an experienced guy of the male gender, that she was wrong. I knew that the problem was the plumbing. It’s time that we homeowners accepted the fact that plumbing is a bad idea. Many historians believe that the primary reason why the Roman empire collapsed is that the Romans attempted to install plumbing in it. Suddenly, instead of being ruthless, all-conquering warriors, they became a bunch of guys scurrying around trying to repair leaking viaducts. (Tragically, the Romans did not have “WD-40.”)

So I knew that our plumbing had broken, and I also knew why it had chosen that particular morning: We had a houseguest. Plumbing can sense the arrival of a houseguest, and it often responds by leaking or causing toilets to erupt like porcelain volcanoes. And of course our plumbing had waited until Sunday, which meant that the plumber would not come for at least a day, which meant that it was up to me, as a male, to climb up into the attic and do the manly thing that men have had to do as long as men have been men: shine a flashlight around.

“Maybe you should check the roof first,” said Michelle. “Maybe there’s water sitting up there.”

She was fixated on this roof theory. Women can be like that. I had to explain to her, being as patient as possible considering that I had urgent guy tasks to perform, that she was being an idiot, because THE PROBLEM WAS THE PLUMBING.

So I got my flashlight and climbed up a ladder into the attic, where
I was able, thanks to my experience as a homeowner and my natural mechanical sense, to get pieces of insulation deep into my nose. I was not, however, able to locate the source of the leak, because my attic turned out to be a cramped, dark, dirty, mysterious place with pipes and wires running all over the place, and off in the distance—just out of flashlight reach, but I could definitely sense its presence—a tarantula the size of the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

So I came briskly back down the ladder and told Michelle that, to stop the plumbing from leaking, I was going to turn off all the water to the house until the plumber came. Speaking in clipped, efficient, manly sentences, I instructed Michelle to fill containers with water and write a note for the houseguest telling him how to flush his toilet with a bucket.

“Before we do all that,” she said, “Maybe you should check the …”

“DON’T TELL ME TO CHECK THE ROOF!” I explained. “STOP TALKING ABOUT THE ROOF! THE PROBLEM IS THE PLUMBING!”

Sometimes a man has to put his manly foot down.

So while Michelle wrote toilet-flushing instructions for our houseguest and prepared a small apologetic basket of fruit and cookies, I tried to locate the valve that would shut off all the water. This was very difficult, because our plumbing system turns out to have approximately one valve for every water molecule. We could start a roadside tourist attraction (“TURN HERE FOR THE AMAZING VALVE FOREST”).

The fascinating thing is, not one of these valves controls the flow of water to our particular house. I shut a number of them off, and nothing happened. So if, on a recent Sunday, the water stopped flowing in your home or store or nuclear power plant, that was probably my fault.

Since I could not turn off our water, our ceiling continued to leak all Sunday night, so that by morning our bedroom carpet was a federally protected wetland habitat teeming with frogs, turtles, Mafia-hit victims, etc. So we were very happy when the plumber arrived. And if
you are a student of literary foreshadowing, you know exactly what he did: He looked at the ceiling, went outside, got a ladder, climbed up on the roof, and found some water sitting up there. It couldn’t drain because there was a little place clogged by leaves. The plumber fixed it in maybe 10 seconds. I could have easily fixed it myself at any time in the previous 24 hours if I had not been so busy repairing our plumbing. I wrote the check in a manly manner.