I don’t know yet about Earnest. One day soon I will give her the dog intelligence test, where you show her the ball, then you put the ball under a blanket, and then you see if she can find the ball. Shawna never could find the ball. I doubt Augie could find the blanket. I’m hoping Earnest does better, but I’m not counting my chickens. I am also not looking forward to receiving a lot of violent letters from you dog lovers out there, the ones with the “I (heart) my (breed of dog)” bumper stickers, asking how dare I say dogs are stupid when your dog can add, subtract, land the space shuttle, etc.
So please note, dog lovers: I never said your dog is stupid. I said my dog might be stupid. I know for a fact that she can’t be too intelligent, because here I’ve written a fairly insulting column about her species, and despite the fact that she’s lying right at my feet, it hasn’t occurred to her to pull the plug on my word proces
Some Thoughts On The Toilet
Both of our household toilets broke recently, on the same day. They work together, toilets. You know those strange sounds your plumbing makes at night?
The ones that worry you much more than, for example, the threat of nuclear war? Those are your toilets, talking to each other. They communicate via plumbing sounds, similar to whales. “It’s New Year’s Eve,” they’ll say. “We break tonight.”
I happen to know a great deal about toilets, although that was not the original plan. The original plan was for me to become profoundly wealthy by investing in real estate. I had read a book about it, which made the whole process sound as easy as getting insurance offers from Ed McMahon by mail. The trick, according to this book, was that when you purchase your real estate, you never used your own money.
You used other people’s money. The way the book described it, you strode into the bank, and you said: “Hi! I’d like to become filthy rich via real estate, but I don’t wish to use my own money!” And the bank would say: “Well then! Here! Take some of ours!!”
So I got some partners who also had a sincere interest in becoming rich, and we hatched a plan wherein we would, using other people’s money, buy a couple of small apartment buildings, after which we would sit around drinking gin and tonic and amassing great wealth due to Depreciation and Leverage, two characters who appeared often in the real 154-155 real estate book, performing amazing financial feats. They reminded me of Batman and Robin.
So my partners and I went around presenting our proposal to various bankers, and they thought it was the greatest thing they had ever heard. They would set up extra chairs and invite all their banker friends over, and they’d make us go through our proposal again and again, and when we’d get to the part about not using any of our own money, they’d fall over backwards and hurl their loan application forms into the air and laugh until there was spittle all over their vests. They had evidently not read the book.
So eventually we worked out a compromise arrangement whereby my partners and I would each provide our life’s savings, and the bank would provide a Closing Ceremony, which is when you go into a little room with unfamiliar lawyers and you sign every piece of paper they have managed to acquire in their lives, including book reports. This is how we came to acquire, as an investment, eight toilets. The Head Toilet, of course, immediately fired off an urgent message to the others. “We have been purchased,” the message said, “by people who have read a real estate investment book.” As you can imagine, the sound of hysterical gurgling went on well into the night.
I became intimately familiar with every single one of these investment toilets. See, my partners all had useful skills, such as carpentry, whereas my only area of proven competence was listening to the radio, so we agreed that I would learn how to be the plumber. Gradually, I learned that there are two major toilet facts:
TOILET FACT NUMBER ONE: The only way to prevent a toilet part from leaking is to tighten it until it breaks.
TOILET FACT NUMBER TWO: Circling the Earth, at this very moment, is an alien spacecraft that is sending down powerful radio beams that affect the brains of tenants in such a way that they must put inappropriate objects in the toilet. They cannot help themselves. “Find an inappropriate object!” the beam commands them. “Put it in the toilet RIGHT NOW!”
You landlords out there, you know I’m telling the truth, right? And the tenants, they don’t even remember what they have done. “How in the world did THAT get in there?” they say, when you show them, for example, a harmonica. “Ha ha!” they add. “Ha ha,” you agree, all the while calculating the various angles and forces involved in killing them with your wrench.
Because of these two facts, I soon got to know all eight toilets personally, as individuals. I would call them by name. “So, Bob,” I would say. “Leaking again, eh? How would you like to be replaced, Bob? How would you like to be taken outside and have your smooth white porcelain body smashed repeatedly with a hammer? Because there are plenty more toilets, down at the Home Center, who would love to have your job.” But Bob would just chuckle, knowing that even if I could somehow manage to install an entire new toilet, it would quickly become part of the cadre.
This went on for several years, during which I amassed the world’s largest privately held collection of broken toilet parts, but not, surprisingly enough, great wealth, so finally I ceased playing an active role in the investment property. But I have used the knowledge I acquired, in my home. When our toilets break, I call the plumber, and I am able to describe the problem in technical plumbing terms. “It’s our toilets,” I say. “They are broken.” And he comes out and fixes them, and I don’t care how much he charges. “That will be $68,000,” he could tell me, and I would come up with it, somehow, because anything is better than having to deal with the toilets directly. Particularly the one in the hall bathroom. Norman.
The Elements Of Elegance
Today we’re going to talk about how you can hold an elegant dinner party in your home. Well, not really your home, of course. You’ll need a much more elegant home, one where there is fine nonvelveteen art on the walls and a harp in the corner of the living room and some effort has been made over the years to clean behind the toilets.
You’ll also need elegant guests, by which I mean not your friends. You want to invite socially prominent people, which means people who do not object to being called Thad and Bootsie right to their faces and who are directly affected by oil-company mergers. The best way to lure such people to your dinner party is to tell them it has something to do with disease. Socially prominent people are very fond of disease, because it gives them a chance to have these really elaborate charity functions, and the newspaper headlines say “EVENING IN PARIS BALL RAISES MONEY TO FIGHT GOUT” instead of “RICH PEOPLE AMUSE THEMSELVES.”