Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (16 page)

The point is that, in my era, Superman did not have visible stomach muscles, and neither did Hercules or Tarzan, who needed steel-reinforced vines. But now, suddenly, every
body is supposed to have rippling abdominals. They are hot. If muscle groups were rock bands, the abdominals would be Hootie & the Blowfish. Turn on your television, and if you do not see a commercial in which a leading economist such as Candice Bergen, Michael Jordan, or Whoopi Goldberg explains which long-distance carrier is best for your individual case (Answer: Whichever one is paying millions of dollars to Candice, Michael, or Whoopi), you will see the Abdominals People—and I do not wish to generalize here, but these people display the intelligence of sherbet—selling abdominal devices, demonstrating abdominal exercises, and of course proudly showing off their abdominal muscles, which bulge and writhe beneath a thin sweaty layer of skin, so that the people look as though they’re smuggling pythons down there.

What I want to know is, why is this considered attractive? And how important, really, are abdominal muscles? I mean, I’m sure they serve some medical function, such as keeping your intestines from falling into your lap, but do they have to be HUGE? Do these people who spend seventeen hours a day building up their abdominals ever actually use them for any practical purpose? If so, what? Moving furniture? (“Okay, Thad, you push your awesome stomach muscles against THAT end of the bureau, and I’ll push mine against THIS end, and we’ll just… Huh! It’s not moving!”)

What I also want to know is: What’s next? I mean, when the Abdominals People—formerly the Biceps People; formerly the Thighs People; formerly the Buns People—have made all the money they can from our stomachs, where will they go? Are they going to work their way through ALL of our muscles? Will there come a time, say ten years from now, when they’re going to announce that we all
need to build up, say, our eyelid muscles? Will we turn on the TV and see commercials for the Lid-A-Cizer, featuring enthusiastic men and women with form-fitting workout outfits and bulging eyelids the size of golf balls? Are we going to fall for THAT, too? Or are we going to draw the line somewhere? Think about it!

And while you’re thinking, pass the dip.

y
ou don’t realize it, but you are constantly enjoying the benefits of science. For example, when you turn on the radio, you take it for granted that music will come out; but do you ever stop to think that this miracle would not be possible without the work of scientists? That’s right: There are tiny scientists inside that radio, playing instruments! A similar principle is used in automatic bank-teller machines, which is why they frequently say: “SORRY, OUT OF SERVICE.” They’re too embarrassed to say: “SORRY, TINY SCIENTIST GOING TO THE BATHROOM.”

Yes, science plays a vital role in your life; but when it comes to scientific knowledge, there’s an excellent chance that you’re a moron. I base this statement on a recent survey, conducted by the National Science Foundation, which showed that the average American does not understand basic scientific principles. Naturally the news media reported this finding as though it were shocking, which is silly. This is, after all, a nation that has produced tournament bass fishing
and
the Home Shopping Channel; we should be shocked that the average American still knows how to walk erect.

But the point is that we have a scientific illiteracy problem in this nation, and you could be a part of it. To find out, see if you can answer these three actual questions from the National Science Foundation survey:

1. True or False: The earliest human beings lived at the same time as the dinosaurs.
   

2. Which travels faster, light or sound?
   

3. Explain, in your own words: What is DNA?
   

All finished? Now let’s look at the correct answers:

1. FALSE. The truth is that the dinosaurs had been dead for over a week before the first human came along, probably in the form of Bob Dole. Yet most Americans firmly believe that humans and dinosaurs once coexisted. This misconception arose from the many absurdly inaccurate fictional depictions of caveman life, such as the TV cartoon show
The Flintstones
, in which the Flintstones own a pet dinosaur named Dino. But paleontologists, who can determine the age of fossils with a high degree of accuracy using a technique called “carbon dating,” have known for many years that “Dino” is actually another character wearing a costume. “We think it’s Barney,” the paleontologists announced recently, “but we can’t say for sure until we get another government grant.”

2. To answer the light-vs.-sound question, consider what you observe when a thunderstorm is approaching and a bolt of lightning strikes. First you see the lightning bolt; then you hear thunder; then you hear a scream if the lightning bolt has struck a person; then you hear a loud cheer from bystanders if the person was George Steinbrenner. This tells us that light travels faster than sound, because
light goes straight down from the sky and is therefore attracted by gravity; whereas sound goes sideways and is slowed down by friction with the Earth’s rotation, also known as “peristalsis,” or “The Greenhouse Effect.”

3. “DNA” is an abbreviation for “deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism,” a complex string of syllables that is found inside your body in tiny little genes called “chromosomes.” Biologists often refer to DNA as “The Body’s Secret Handshake,” because the information encoded in your DNA determines your unique biological characteristics, such as sex, eye color, age, and Social Security number.

There is surprisingly little difference between the DNA found in humans and that found in other species such as H. Ross Perot. This fact has led to research that could benefit mankind, most notably a series of experiments in which biologists chemically altered the DNA in fruit flies in an effort to isolate the gene that causes baldness. The biologists reasoned that fruit flies must contain this gene, because virtually all of them (the fruit flies) (also the biologists) are bald. This work took nine years and cost $31 million, but the results were impressive: When a group of fruit flies with normal DNA were compared with a group with altered DNA, both groups were found to consist of little random black smears, because the only way the biologists could get them to hold still was to whack them with rolled-up copies of
Scientific American
. Nevertheless the biologists believe that they are on the right track.

“We think it’s Barney wearing a Dino costume,” they announced recently in a press conference that led to allegations of plagiarism from angry paleontologists, “but we can’t say for sure until we get another government grant.”

So those are your correct answers. If you did poorly, you’re not alone; the National Science Foundation reports that only 25 percent of the people surveyed, or 1 in 6, passed the quiz. And if you think that’s a pathetic commentary on our national intelligence, you should see all the mail I’m going to get in which people will send me this column with the words “25 percent” and “1 in 6” circled and a snotty note informing me that this is incorrect.

So there’s no question about it: Scientific illiteracy is definitely a major problem in America. And as the saying goes: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re a newspaper columnist.” So I feel I’ve done my part. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to shake the radio.

W
e here at the Bureau of Medical Alarm hope you had a restful, carefree, fun-filled summer. But before you get back into “the swing of things” for fall, we’d like to take just a moment to remind you that practically everything can kill you.

We have here a Health Advisory issued June 27 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (motto: “We Have Not Yet Determined That Our Motto Is Safe”). This advisory, which was sent in by several alert medical people, begins with the following statement:

“In the spring and summer of 1995, the spontaneous combustion of powder-free latex patient examination gloves caused four fires in different states.”

The advisory states that all four fires involved large quantities of gloves stored in hot warehouses. But we here at the Bureau of Medical Alarm are asking ourselves: What
if a single glove (this is sometimes called the “Lone Glove” theory) were to burst into flames? What if this happened while the glove was on a doctor’s hand? And what if the doctor’s hand was, at that very moment,
inside your personal body?

One thing that would happen, of course, is the doctor would charge you a lot of money The underlying philosophy of our entire health-care system is that the more scary, painful, dangerous, and unnecessary a medical procedure is, the more it should cost. So you would definitely pay top dollar to have a flaming glove thrust into what is technically known as the Booty Region. Once word of this lucrative new procedure got around, doctors would be prescribing it for athlete’s foot.

And here’s a related item to be concerned about: An alert dental surgeon named Ian Hamilton sent me the June 1996 newsletter of the Canterbury Branch of the New Zealand Dental Association, which contains a letter to the editor, accompanied by a photograph, concerning a latex medical glove that was found to have a
moth
embedded in one of the fingers. Yes. This means you could wind up with a
burning rubberized insect
inside your body. Imagine the bill you’d get for THAT:

We know what you’re wondering at this point. You’re wondering: “Wouldn’t The Flaming Booty Moths’ be a great name for a rock band?”