By Dave Barry
I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I'm talking about taking CRAZY risks.
We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as "DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER." But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was - prepare to be shocked - we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.
I know, I know. It was wrong. But we were young and foolish, and there was a lot of peer pressure. You'd be at a party, and there would be a lava lamp blooping away, and a Jimi Hendrix record playing (a "record" was a primitive compact disc that operated by static electricity). And then, when the mood was right, somebody would say: "You wanna do some 'drates'?" And the next thing you know, there'd be a bowl of pretzels going around, or crackers, or even potato chips, and we'd put these things into our mouths and just...EAT them.
I'm not proud of this. My only excuse was that we were ignorant.
It's not like now, when everybody knows how bad carbohydrates are, and virtually every product is advertised as being "low-carb," including beer, denture adhesives, floor wax, tires, life insurance and Viagra.
We had no idea. Nobody did! Our own MOTHERS gave us bread! Today, of course, nobody eats bread. People are terrified of all carbohydrates, as evidenced by the recent mass robbery at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, where 87 patrons turned their wallets over to a man armed only with a strand of No. 8 spaghetti. ("Do what he says! He has pasta!") The city of Beverly Hills has been evacuated twice this month because of reports - false, thank heavens - that terrorists had put a bagel in the water supply.
We didn't recognize the danger of carbohydrates. We believed that the reason you got fat was from eating "calories," which are tiny units of measurement that cause food to taste good. When we wanted to lose weight, we went on low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible foods such as celery, which is actually a building material, and grapefruit, which is nutritious, but offers the same level of culinary satisfaction as chewing on an Odor Eater. The problem with the low-calorie diet was that a normal human could stick to it for, at most, four hours, at which point he or she would have no biological choice but to sneak out to the garage and snork down an entire bag of Snickers, sometimes without removing the wrappers. So nobody lost weight, and everybody felt guilty all the time.
But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented the Atkins Diet: Dr. Something Atkins. After decades of research on nutrition and weight gain Dr. Atkins discovered an amazing thing: Calories don't matter! What matters are carbohydrates, which result when a carbo molecule and a hydrate molecule collide at high speeds and form tiny invisible doughnuts.
Dr. Atkins' discovery meant that if you avoided carbohydrates, you could, without guilt, eat high-fat, high-calorie foods such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. You could eat an entire pig, as long as the pig had not been exposed to bread.
Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream - a dream that, some day, he would help the human race by selling it 427 million diet books. And he did, achieving vindication for his diet before his tragic demise in an incident that the autopsy report listed as "totally unrelated to the undigested 28-pound bacon cheeseburger found in his stomach."
But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of Americans to lose
weight. The irony is, you can't tell this by looking at actual
Americans, who have, as a group, become so heavy that North America will
soon be underwater as far inland as Denver. Which can only mean one
thing: You people are still sneaking Snickers. You should be ashamed!
Uh, got any more?
Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends.
:: Anon
Having a family is like having a bowling alley installed in your brain.
:: Martin Mull
My doctor gave me 2 weeks to live. I hope they're in August.
:: Ronnie Shakes
I don't like school. They keep trying to teach us stuff we don't know.
:: Unknown child
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
:: Barbara Ehrenreich
The trouble with jogging is that the ice falls out of your glass.
:: Martin Mull
I have to exercise in the morning before my brain figures out what I'm doing.
:: Marsha Doble
If God invented marathons to keep people from doing anything more stupid, Ironman triathlons must have taken him completely by surprise.
:: P.Z. Pearce
Messengers and mountain bikers share a common chromosome.
:: James Bethea
Thanks to Bill Dickerson for the following:
The hardest years in life are those between ten and seventy.
:: Helen Hayes (at 73)
I refuse to think of them as chin hairs. I think of them as stray eyebrows.
:: Janette Barber
My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.
:: Erma Bombeck
If you can't be a good example -- then you'll just have to be a horrible warning.
:: Catherine
I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb -- and I'm also not blonde.
:: Dolly Parton
If high heels were so wonderful, men would be wearing them.
:: Sue Grafton
When women are depressed they either eat or go shopping. Men invade another country.
:: Elayne Boosler
I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career.
:: Gloria Steinem
I am a marvelous housekeeper. Every time I leave a man, I keep his house.
:: Zsa Zsa Gabor
Pun of the Month
The famous Olympic skier Picabo Street (pronounced Peek-A-Boo) is not just an athlete, she is a nurse currently working at the Intensive Care Unit of a large metropolitan hospital. She is not permitted to answer the telephone however, as it caused simply too much confusion when she would answer the phone and say, Picabo, ICU.
Forwarded from ron nye, who heard it, like, somewhere, eh...
Two engineers take a test in applying for a position... they both get one question wrong, but one is hired and the other not. It was the same question, so the one not hired asks why the choice of candidates wasn't him. Answer: the other guy wrote 'I don't know this one'; you wrote, 'Neither do I'.
