Dave Barry's Homes and Other Black Holes (11 page)

Which reminds us of another important housekeeping rule …

   ***> Never Have a Dog <***

Let’s not beat around the bush here: dogs are morons. Don’t get me wrong: I like dogs. We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as:

1. Peeing on everything.
   

2. When we’re driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking
   real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles.
   

3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.
   

But despite their instinctive skills in these areas, dogs generally rank, on the Animal Kingdom IQ Scale, somewhere down in the Paramecium range, and they above all do
not
grasp the concept of housekeeping. Show me a household with a dog in it, and I will show you a household with numerous low-altitude wall stains where the dog, rounding a corner at several hundred miles per hour in an effort to get to the front door and welcome the master home by knocking the master down, whammed into the wall and left a brownish smear of whatever repulsive substance it was rolling in earlier that day.

Discipline will not prevent this kind of thing. You can sit a dog down and explain to
it very carefully that you just purchased a new oriental rug, and you don’t want the dog to go anywhere
near
it. You can point to the rug and go “NO!” a dozen times, and the dog will look at you with an extremely alert and intelligent expression, similar to the way Lassie always looked when she was piloting a helicopter somewhere to rescue her young cretin master Jeff, who had fallen into the quicksand again. Then your dog will go outside and sprint around in concentric circles until it has found a rancid, maggot-festooned sector of deceased raccoon. It will race back to your house with this prize as though the fate of the Free World depended on it, deposit it on your rug, and wander off to take a well-earned nap.

• If your child draws pictures of cows on your woodwork with a felt-tipped marker, you can scrub them with a mixture of one part baking soda, one part lemon juice, and one part ammonia, but they won’t come off.
  

• The best way to clean a frying pan that has burned food cemented to the bottom is to let it soak in soapy water for several days and then, when nobody is looking, throw it in the garbage.
  

• If you ever find the person who invented “Slime,” call me and I will come over and plug up all the orifices in his head with a mixture of one part Tabasco sauce and one part Play-Doh.
  

• Many smart homemakers such as Cher and Queen Elizabeth have found that the best way to “stay ahead” of those pesky household “chores” is to have a “staff.”
  

• Ever wonder how come the males in your household pee everywhere except into the actual toilet bowl? It’s because they are jerks.
  

One of our major responsibilities, as homeowners, is to become needlessly alarmed about home security. And with good reason. All we have to do is look at the front page of our newspaper, and we will see frightening headlines such as the following:

BOY RAISED BY CHICKENS
ET SPACE ALIEN CURED MY ACNE
GIRL, 2, GIVES BIRTH WHILE
SKYDIVING

Okay, perhaps we should be reading a better class of newspaper. But the point is, there are grave threats all around us, and we need to be ready.

HOME SECURITY

I happen to be an expert in the area of home security, because I live in South Florida, home of Miami Vice, where guns are extremely easy to obtain. Down here they give you a free revolver when you buy a Big Gulp at the 7-Eleven. So you have a lot of people walking around armed, the result being that a lot of homeowners feel that they, too, need to arm themselves in self-defense. Of course your bleeding-heart-liberal-secular-humanist
left-wing communists will tell you that it’s a bad thing to own a gun, but as any knowledgeable gun nut will tell you, there are countless factual anecdotes concerning alert gun-toting homeowners who have thwarted the forces of evil.

For example, we recently had a case here where a homeowner woke up at 2:30 a.m. because he thought he had heard a noise in the family room. Grabbing his revolver, he slowly opened his bedroom door and crept stealthily into the darkened hallway, where he stepped barefooted onto a cockroach—down here we get cockroaches large enough to derail trains—causing him (the homeowner) to leap straight into the air and shoot his gun, the bullet from which went through the wall and into the garage, where it hit the circuit breaker box and cut off the electrical power to the house, thus shutting down the videocassette recorder in the family room, where the homeowner’s eleven-year-old son had been watching
Debbie Does Dallas
. So don’t try to tell
me
that guns have no place in the home. Don’t try to tell it to the Founding Fathers of this nation, either. For one thing, they are dead. For another
thing, they specifically considered the question of guns when they wrote the Constitution, and after much debate, they agreed on the following unequivocal wording regarding the right of the people to keep and bear arms:

So you can play it any way you want it, but this is one homeowner whose motto is: “You can have my gun when you threaten to pry one of my fingers off the trigger.”

Of course, if you
do
get a gun, you need to follow certain basic safety procedures, such as:

1. Don’t keep it loaded.
   

2. Don’t even have the proper caliber of bullet for it.
   

3. Keep it someplace safe, such as a safe-deposit box in Switzerland.
   

What other steps can you take to protect yourself? One approach that combines the advantage of costing a lot of money with the
advantage of really ticking off your neighbors is …

Essentially, this is a complex system of modern, sophisticated, state-of-the-art, fully computerized components, costing no more than several semesters at Stanford University graduate school, yet giving you the sense of security and well-being that comes from knowing that everyone in your neighborhood will be instantly alerted by a horrible ear-splitting noise whenever lightning strikes anywhere within 137 miles of your home. Invariably this will happen at night when you’re out of town, so that your neighbors will get to lie in bed, listening to the piercing sound, which is only fair because it makes up for all the nights when
you
had to listen to
their
burglar alarm systems.

I do not mean to suggest that burglar alarm systems go off only when lightning strikes. No, they also go off when the electric
company has problems, or when homeowners forget to turn them off upon returning. Sometimes birds set them off. “Let’s go set off some burglar alarms!” is a cry frequently heard among adolescent finches. Even air molecules, which are plentiful in the suburbs, can set off burglar alarm systems. In fact, the only thing that
doesn’t
set them off, as far as we can tell, is burglars. Nobody can explain this phenomenon, but police rely on it when they go on their patrols. They’ll drive through a neighborhood at 4 a.m., listening to three or four home security systems electronically whooping and shrieking into the night, and they’ll say to each other, using hand signals so they can be understood over the din: “Everything’s fine here!”

Of course these systems are not perfect. Even the most well-designed electronic device cannot be relied upon to go off without any reason one hundred percent of the time. Thus most security experts also recommend that you have a backup system consisting of …

I realize that in the chapter on housecleaning I specifically said you should never have a dog, on the grounds that they are filthy, but my feeling, as a professional author, is that if I go through life worrying about what I may have said in previous chapters, I will never get anything done. So in this chapter, I am strongly in favor of dogs as security devices, but I stress that they must be
large
. You don’t want one of those repulsive little yapping “lap”-style dogs that look like fur-covered insects, because the burglar will simply stuff it down the garbage disposal. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t do you any good, home-security wise. What you want is a major hunk of canine muscle, the kind that is always on Full Red Alert, the kind that will race to the front door, barking violently, when it hears any sound, including its own parasites.

We are blessed with such a dog, Earnest, and she is a source of great comfort to us, for we know that as long as we have her, our home is totally protected from Zachary
Liebman, age five. This is the little boy who lives next door and comes over to play with our son. Earnest absolutely hates him. When we moved in, Earnest received signals from whatever distant planet it is that dogs get their instructions from, and these signals told her that Zachary Liebman is the most dangerous creature in the galaxy, and there is nothing we can do to change her mind. Zachary has come over to our house almost daily for two years now, and still she follows him around, emitting a constant low growl to let him know that she is ready in case he suddenly pulls out a concealed machine gun. And so of course we have to follow
her
around, going “NO! Earnest, NO!!” although this has no effect, because in matters of home security, Earnest takes orders only from the Dog Planet. So we form a colorful and loud procession—Zachary, oblivious; Earnest, furious; and my wife or me, slowly going hoarse—parading around the house, sometimes for hours. You can’t put a price on this kind of piece of mind.

None of the security methods we have discussed here will foil the truly determined burglar, the veteran professional who has already broken into hundreds of homes just like yours and has been convicted seventeen times and is currently out of jail on his own recognizance. The best you can hope for, with any security method, is that you will make your home look slightly less attractive to the burglar, so that he’ll pass you and burglarize somebody else’s house. In fact, you might leave a little note on your door, letting the burglar know that your particular house is probably less attractive to him than several other homes in your neighborhood where you know for a fact that the owners are away on vacation. Sure, this means extra work for you, but society has no chance against the Criminal Element if people like yourself aren’t willing to “get involved.”