Only in Keswick

By Tony Vanderwarker

Every winter Virginians moan and bitch about the cold. “Can you believe this weather? I’m really sick of it,” or, “I’ve had it up to here with this damn cold,” you hear from everyone. Sure 0° degrees is no fun, neither is 20°. Even if we have a string of 20° days, it quickly warms up, goes up to 65° or even 70° in January.

What we fail to take into account is the folks in Fargo have an average low of 0° in January and an average high of 18°. Okay, you say, but who in their right mind would live in Fargo? But plenty of people do live in Chicago where the average low is 17° and the high is 31°.

So relatively, we’ve got it good. I know because I lived in Chicago for twenty years. On one winter day in February, even though it was cold as hell and starting to snow, I decided to hoof it home, a distance of twelve blocks down the main drag, Michigan Avenue.

After two blocks, I realized I was in the middle of a full-fledged blizzard. Already there was two inches of snow on the ground and all I had on was my pair of red Italian loafers, very stylish complete with fancy tassels and decorative stitching but hardly the mukluks I needed for a snowstorm. Of course there were no cabs, and few cars on Michigan as it was coming down so hard no one could see five inches in front of their face.

By block six, there was a corresponding six inches. The snow was so high you could barely make out the curbs. Plus it started piling up on the soles of my loafers, sticking to them and creating big slippery pads so I lost what little traction I’d once had.

Now I was holding on to window ledges along the avenue and slip-sliding from light pole to traffic sign in an effort to stay standing. Plus the wind started to whip up (in Chicago, they have a special name for it, the Hawk) so despite my shaky footing, I was getting buffeted around the sidewalk like a toy top.

Here I was in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the country and I might as well have been in the middle of a Saskatchewan snowfield during a major blizzard. It was now taking me ten minutes to walk a block and the snow was sneaking inside my collar and coursing in rivulets down my back. My eyebrows and moustache were crusted with snow and I could feel my feet getting first damp then frigid, the snow getting the best of my Italian loafers.

“Why did I decide to walk home?” I asked myself. I could have stayed in my nice warm office until the snow let up and I could call a cab.

After eight blocks, there was a good ten inches of snow on the ground and I was high-stepping like a Lipizzaner horse. In block nine, my feet slipped out from under me and the wind took me down. In that one block, I hit the ground four times and it occurred to me that if I happened to bang my head on a lamp post and passed out, I could conceivably freeze to death on the Magnificent Mile and not be found until hours later when a snow blower revealed my lifeless, frostbitten form.

Three more blocks, then two. Now I was covered in snow, it was piled on my shoulders, stuck to my coat, accumulating on my knees, though I couldn’t see, I wasn’t wearing a hat so it must have been crowning my head.

One more block, I was smelling the barn. Now there was a foot of snow on the ground, making the going even harder. Finally, I made it to the front door and banged the doorknocker hard.

When my wife opened the door, her hand flew up to her face and she gasped, “I hardly recognized you. You look like the Abominable Snowman,”
“Look like him? I feel like him.” I answered, stepping into the hallway.
“Stay here, I’ll run get a broom to brush you off.”

Though my red loafers never looked the same, I quickly recovered. And over drinks that night, we had some good chuckles over my Arctic experience in the middle of the city.

So whenever I hear a Virginian complain about the cold, I offhandedly say to them, “You ought to try living in a place like Chicago, you’d now what cold really is.” I always get an odd look, as if the person is thinking, “Why would I ever do that? This is plenty cold enough for me.”

So I drop it, thinking, at least I know what cold is—and this isn’t!

By Tony Vanderwarker

I was twenty years old and didn’t know any better. The temperature was soaring over a hundred and the river looked cool and inviting. 200 yards across with vegetation and sandy banks on both sides, this was the Niger River, West Africa’s version of the Mississippi. Running 2500 miles from the west coast up to Timbuctu and then down through Nigeria to the Gulf of Guinea, it is Africa’s third longest river.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer stationed in a podunk town called Siguiri. A couple hundred miles from the Atlantic in the midst of the savannah, flat lowlands populated by scrub brush and hordes of baboons. The Niger saves the savannah from being dry and desolate, slicing through it and supporting lush greenery along its banks. Hundreds of women flock down to the river from town in the morning, wading in with their laundry to scrub and rinse their garments in the water. The Peace Corps discouraged us from swimming in the river because of the chance of picking up a nasty parasitic worm that can give you shistosomiasis which can lead to cancer and cirrhosis. But we figured one quick dip in the Niger wouldn’t expose us to the worms.

A few days later, a couple of us drove up the river (away from the women and their dirty laundry) to a point where the road veered over close to the Niger’s banks. We parked, kicked off our shoes, stripped down to our shorts and, running across the sand like a bunch of kids at the beach, raced into the water shouting and splashing. We found the river deep enough to swim in and soon were paddling out in the middle. The sun was out, the sky a bright blue and the water clear and sparkling. The current was insistent but we were all good swimmers so we could easily maintain our positions. At one point, I flipped over on my back and floated for a while. When I turned over, I saw what looked like shiny black rock not ten feet away from me.

But I quickly learned that this was no rock for what loomed up from the water was this enormous set of jaws opening to stretch six feet high. I remember an enormous expanse of bright pink gums two feet across punctuated by fat yellow teeth, five inch wide pegs, flat at the top, one on each side. Needless to say, by then I was setting a new world record for the 100-yard freestyle, swimming like hell for the shore and hoping the hippos wouldn’t come after me. I didn’t stick around long enough to count the others but I’d seen a couple more coming out of the water behind the first. Somehow I’d stumbled into a hippo colony.

When the water got shallower, I was able to sprint toward the shore, my buddies racing along with me for they’d seen the hippos also. What was propelling us was the knowledge that despite their size, hippos can run twenty miles per hour. Usain Bolt has been clocked at 28 mph and we were no Usain Bolt so when we reached the shore, we didn’t stop running until we got to our car.

Fortunately, the hippos didn’t decide to give chase, remaining in the river, opening and their huge mouths and closing them with noisy splashes. We watched them from the safety of our vehicle, then, deciding that the car probably wouldn’t hold up to a charging hippopotamus, quickly decided to book the hell out of there.

We later learned that while the Africans hadn’t heard of many hippo attacks, there were a few instances of people being dragged under water by hippos and drowned.

After that experience, we stayed out of the Niger. The women could do all the washing they wanted but we weren’t going near the damn thing again.

That wasn’t my only near-death experience with African wildlife. Occasionally, we’d have to drive five hours to the nearest big city to pick up supplies or for some Peace Corps meeting. I’d earlier mentioned hordes of baboons, you’d see them running through the scrub brush, packs of twenty or thirty, good-sized creatures, I’d say two or three feet tall on all fours, looking to weigh close to a hundred pounds, covered in thick hair and with shiny scarlet behinds.

One day we were driving along and suddenly a pack of baboons broke out of the brush and started heading for us. Leaping up on the hood and roof, all of a sudden our Land Rover was covered with baboons, there could have been sixty of them, not that I was counting. Not only did they block the light, they made eerie screeching noises that were right out of a horror movie.

Then the worst happened, they started to pound on the roof and windshield like they wanted to get in. The looks on their faces didn’t give the impression they wanted to go dancing, Could they break the glass? Could they come in and attack us?

I wasn’t about to find out so I turned on all the lights, cranked up the radio, got front and rear wipers working, started honking like mad and tromped on the gas. Slowly, one by one, they began dropping off the car and scrambling away into the brush. Whew! We just avoided death by baboon attack. Our African friends later told us, “It doesn’t happen often, but when they do attack humans, it isn’t pretty.”

Then there was the close call with the bull elephant. I had a couple of French friends and one weekend they decided to go elephant hunting. I thought it would be an interesting experience (amazing what you think when you’re twenty) so I asked if I could tag along.

We trekked through fifteen-foot high grass, our path making a tunnel with the grass bending down behind us to block out the sky. Every so often, our African guide would come upon a fresh pile of elephant dung. Sticking his finger into it, (the African version of wetting your finger and holding it up in the wind) he could judge by the temperature how far ahead the animal was. After about four piles, he estimated the elephant was two minutes ahead. I had heard stories about elephants turning on hunters and trampling them to death. So I was mildly alarmed at the idea of surprising the rear end of an elephant.

Eventually we came to a watering hole, tall trees surrounding a wet area crammed with vegetation. To me, it looked like Tarzan territory, almost jungle. Slipping and sliding down the wet bank, I lost contact with my fellow hunters and that’s when I started hearing the bellowing. Also, loud swishing in the trees above me.

That’s when I saw a huge gray trunk twenty-five feet over my head, ripping the trees apart trying to make headway and coming right at me. The beast couldn’t have been more than twenty feet away and closing fast, roaring like a railroad train. I couldn’t run for there was no place to go and I was knee deep in muck. Though I could only see the beast’s trunk, it towered above me and I began to think I was a goner. Suddenly a bunch of shots rang out and all hell broke loose.

The French hunters had fired at the group of elephants and caused them to vamoose, bellowing and clumping, out of the watering hole, leaving only a dead baby elephant behind. Sad, of course, but the local villagers had meals for the next month.

After that experience, I never asked to tag along on an elephant hunt again.

A half-century later, thinking back on my experiences in Africa, I’m astonished I didn’t get chomped by hippos, mashed in a swamp or beaten up by baboons.

When I happen to visit a zoo, I always walk by the baboon cages and hippo and elephant enclosures and think, “I’m just glad I got out of Africa alive.”

By Tony Vanderwarker

In the country, there’s no such thing as a smart phone, only dumb ones. You can pay a grand for the latest iPhone and still get no bars, no internet, no texts, no email—nada. I don’t know whether it’s the hills or the trees or the country air but you can turn on your fancy new iPhone and five’ll get your ten you’ll be incommunicado.

Forget inside the house, you’ll never see a bar in there, so you have to resort to a search for a signal. A signal search involves aimless wandering through the fields staring at the face of your phone, kind of like panning for gold. If you get lucky, you’ll get a bar or two which means you may (or may not) make a call. If you get really, really lucky, your call will go through. Whether you maintain the connection or not is another story. And just forget about going online.

When we have Airbnb guests, we tell them cell service on the farm is spotty. Pointing out that depending on your carrier, you might get service in the front field or you may have to walk up to my studio on the hill. Often we’ll see guests standing out in the middle of a pasture, sometimes two or three, the AT&T customer over there, the Verizon one way off to the left and the Sprint person trudging up the hill in search of a signal.

That’s why in the country you often see cars parked in odd places. Say someone gets an important call. They know from experience that they can pull into the propane company lot and continue their call. Go two hundred yards more and the line will goes dead with the “no service” light going on. You see people parked at the post office chatting away on their phones. Or pulled off into a farm entrance, or on the side of the road.

Sometimes “no service” comes in pretty handy. Say you’re on a call with someone who is droning on (your great uncle in Nebraska who can’t stop talking about the corn crop) or someone who asks you a question you’d prefer not to answer (like, “Can I bring a couple guys over to fish in your pond?”—all you do is say, “Look, I’m heading into a dead zone so I’ll have to call you back.”

Now you’ve got cover to hang up. I don’t know how many pesky calls I’ve gotten rid of by invoking the “dead zone.” Once I was talking with the agent of a famous author. I told him that I was coming up on a dead zone so if I lost him, I’d call back when I got service. He said, “Oh, you actually have dead zones? I thought (famous author) was using it as an excuse to get rid of me.”

A favorite topic of conversation in the country is what carrier gets the best signal where. People who have local businesses and have to communicate with nearby customers swear by US Cellular. But just try to get US Cellular when you’re traveling in Des Moines, for instance or God forbid, a Parisian suburb.

We were ecstatic when AT&T, our carrier, put in a cell tower a couple miles away. But even when the tower went into service, we were still starved for bars.

Having heard that Verizon had better coverage in the country, we bit the bullet and changed carriers. The salesman at Verizon assured us that we’d be good with them. Imagine our dismay when we returned home and checked our phones. While we could get one bar in the driveway, there was zip, zero in the house.

Irate, we stormed back to the Verizon store. Now customers coming in complaining about service must be a frequent experience to them so he had a ready remedy. “We can sell you a booster that works off your internet connection.”  Two hundred and fifty bucks later, we were back home setting it up, carefully keeping all the wrappers and bags in case it didn’t work.

Problem was they had this gizmo that had to connect to GPS so the 911 service could locate you. It had to be near a window but our internet connection was in the bathroom (doesn’t everyone keep their router in the crapper?). Fortunately, the thing had a twenty-five foot cord so we were able to get the business end smack up to a window.

We went through the activation sequence but alas, the blue light didn’t come on. We were ready to pack the damn thing up and return it, when I noticed the little plastic box by the window had an arrow on it. Now I said it was a little box so the arrow was even littler. “But damn,” I thought, “maybe the arrow means that the box has to be pointed that way.”

EUREKA! We got the blue light and even better, when we checked our phones, we had bars, four of them! Four bars in the house! Cell service inside, yippee!

We were like blind people who could suddenly see, or like people who had said goodbye to their horse and buggy and hopped into their new Model T. We started making calls to tell people about our new-found freedom. Of course our friends in cities thought we’d gone daft, getting cell phone service at home was as routine to them as water coming out when you turned on the tap.

But now our cell phones were really smart phones—they actually worked inside the house! We started thinking about cutting the cord, saying sayonara to our landline. Who wants that dumb old thing when we’ve got a phone that not only makes calls, but takes pictures, lets you read your email, stream video and send text messages—in the country?

Because we did ads for the phone company, I had my first cell phone in 1985, before they were widespread. It was a shoe phone that weighed a good pound and a half and attracted attention every time I used it in public. No wonder, I must have looked weird walking around talking into a foot long gray box with a six-inch antenna.

Now I felt the same way as I did back then. Liberated, free to take advantage of the latest technology—and in the country no less.

So please excuse me, I have to go watch the World Series. At home, on my phone!

By Tony Vanderwarker

As a humorist, I’m constantly looking for amusing stuff to write about. But lately, I find my funny tank is running dry.

Maybe it’s the thought of Kim Jong-un with his finger on the button or maybe it’s because I’m finishing up a book and am lodged in a writer’s miasma, stuck in a chasm between one work and another.
Or maybe it’s because I’m really running on empty, egads!

So when I get desperate (like I am now) I can always turn to my dogs for inspiration.

Take Butter, for instance. Some dogs chase cars, Butter chases planes. He’s a Jack Russell/beagle mix but if he was a human, he’d be in the Air Force because he runs after aircraft barking furiously like they have no business flying over our farm.

He’ll start woofing up a storm and I’ll step outside to see what he’s barking at. I search the landscape but can’t find anything. Not a car, not a deer, but I can hear a slight hum in the distance. Scanning the sky, I see a speck, a plane way off in the distance. That’s what Butter’s barking at. When it recedes past the horizon, Butter stops, turns and heads back into the house as if he’s thinking, “Damn, I sure took care of that one.”

He really goes bananas when four or five helicopters come whopping over the house. They fly over once or twice a month, maybe carting generals to the spook palace up on 29. And for some reason, they fly low, like a couple thousand feet over the farm so they make a real racket, even rattling the windows.

When he hears them approaching, Butter races out onto the lawn and goes into his defensive posture which involves a series of wild leaps into the air in the direction of the choppers. He’ll get a good eighteen inches off the ground all the while nipping at the air like he’s trying to bite their tires, not caring that he’s a good two thousand feet shy. His aerial acrobatics go on until the helicopters disappear behind the trees.

But the pinnacle of Butter’s air controller antics came last fall when a hot air balloon came sailing over the house. Low enough so I could make out the faces of the passengers, for a second I thought they were going to land in the front field.
If I thought his helicopter jumps were impressive, he went after that hot air balloon like it was loaded with cats, shooting up in the air and howling frantically, the apex of his leaps easily two feet off the ground.

I can imagine the passengers in the balloon’s basket looking down at this tiny creature trying to rocket himself up to their altitude. They must have been howling like I was, this tiny Jack Russell trying to ward off an invasion by air.

When the balloon passed over, Butter came back to ground and I walked up and patted him, saying, “Good job, Butter, you saved us from certain death and destruction.”

He looked up at me as if he was thinking, “Thanks, Boss, but it’s my job.”

The only thing Butter hates more than airborne objects is people in uniforms. He broke the skin of a young lady, a tech out to repair our air conditioning system, nipped her shin right through her pants so much it began to bleed. She had it treated at Sentara and they reported it to the county so we got a visit from an animal control officer. We sent the victim a gift card and placated the guy from the county. But word quickly got around about the ferocious creature residing at Chopping Bottom so now when technicians visit to fix this or that, they cower in their trucks until I come out and leash him. He’s only about a foot tall and can’t weight more than twenty pounds but to them Butter might as well be Cujo.

Another amusing trick he has is spelunking. When we’re in bed, he jumps up, walks to the top of the covers and works his head under until he can tunnel down to the bottom of the bed to stay there all night. Early on, I had to poke him with my toes to make sure he hadn’t suffocated. Now I just take it for granted that even under a sheet, blanket and comforter, Butter can breathe.

In the morning, he doesn’t come out until I throw back the covers and he slowly crawls out, blinking like a badger coming out of his burrow.

This dog is a real hoot—unless you fix air conditioners for a living.

So thanks, Butter, for helping Tony get his funny back.

By Tony Vanderwarker

That’s okay, because we are. Just have someone paint their fence yellow and the community goes bonkers. People around here like things as they are. And if they’re not, they push and prod to get them back the way they should be.

When we first moved in, Anne Barnes called us aside and asked, “This might sound silly, but for years the orange azalea at your farm entrance has bothered me. It clashes with the purple one across the way. Would you please consider taking it out?”

Pull up a bush because your neighbor doesn’t like it? No problem. I quickly tore it out and Anne Barnes was mighty pleased.

And the community was relieved when the new owner of Kesmont painted the yellow fence black. When it comes to fences, black is good, white is better and split rails get a pass. But yellow? You might as well paint the Hunt Club purple.

Speaking of fences, there’s the monstrosity that goes beyond hideous. Someone told a farm owner that vehicles could crash through her wooden fence and kill her horses so she put up the ultimate car killer—a concrete fence. This thing gives ugly a bad name. To come upon it amidst the lush greenery and carefully tended roadside, is like rounding a corner and encountering Sasquatch. Ersatz clapboard topped with crisscross and festooned with pineapples, the fence is truly ghastly. Plus it’s the color of what you’d find in a diaper. And to make matters worse, a couple years after she put it up, a car crashed through it.

The Keswick aesthetic is throwback, definitely, but in an age of passwords and streaming media where change is constant, it’s nice to drive down a road where everything is familiar. The signs and plantings at the farm entrances are reassuringly the same, when a tree goes down or someone mars the side of the road with tire tracks, everyone gabs about it.

How fiercely protective are people about 231? Just ask the people who religiously hew to the speed limit. Have twenty cars riding your bumper for ten miles? Keswickians could care less. This is our road and the speed limit is 45–so live with it.

When VDOT announced plans to trim the trees along the road to increase visibility, the community went into conniptions. You might as well have suggested putting triple-track storms on Monticello or clear-cutting Lonesome Mountain. You don’t mess with Keswick.

Same when a past owner of the Cismont store let it be known that he was considering a huge Sheetz-style awning over his gas pumps—the outcry caused him to quickly ditch the idea.

People police their road frontage, pick up trash, manicure the grass and clean their farm signs. One neighbor hires a tribe of Hispanics to pick up trash along the roadway, another goes out on Sunday mornings and pulls down ads tacked to trees.

If you let soda cans accumulate on your roadside or your grass grow long, you might as well go out with spinach in your teeth or soap in your ears. People gossip when a neighbor’s fences look like they need painting and kibbitz about the new house at Clark’s Tract. Even newcomers, like the guy with the new house, understand there’s a Keswick design ethic. The owner even emailed me, remembering something I had written about the famous yellow fence, and saying he hoped Keswickians wouldn’t be upset that he painted his house yellow. I reassured him that yellow is fine for houses, just not for fences.

The new owners of a big farm put up a world-class entrance, with fancy stonework, extensive planting, even some decorative chains. While some road snobs have snarkily suggested the whole thing is over-the-top, there’s no doubt it will wear well and become an accepted and admired piece of the landscape.

Then there are the gates. When we first moved here, no one had gates. Now there are six. They are all nicely done, tasteful, and understated but they do change the road’s character. The neighborhood takes them in stride, realizing that like texting and hiphop, they are here to stay. But every time a new gate goes you can hear Keswickians wistfully ask, “Can you believe all these gates?”

In the two years we were building our house, we often talked about the how neighbors would react. Would people think a modern house would be tainting the area’s Palladian heritage? Soon after we moved in, we had a group of friends over for cocktails, Anne Barnes among them. Would Keswick’s leading aesthetician look down her nose at our house? Sitting in the living room, Anne surveyed our new digs and pronounced, “Well, I couldn’t live in it, but I kind of like it.”

And recently we were concerned about the community reaction to the new light posts and plantings we were putting in at the entrance to Chopping Bottom so Annie and I were and were relieved when people reacted positively.

Your farm entrance is your face to the world. And the last thing you want is to have egg on it.

Especially for a fuddy duddy like me.

By Tony Vanderwarker

One area where Martians and Venusians fall apart is money. While a guy might understand that he should pick his shoes up off the floor (but never does unless prompted), he’ll never get why women buy things because they’re “cute”.

A man would never buy a cute hammer or a cute battery charger, but set a woman loose in a department store and she’ll come back with all kinds of cute stuff. I’m talking cute purses, cute shoes, cute you-name-it, she’ll buy it. Even when there’s a hole in the financial bucket, she’ll come back with a load of cute.

When things get tight, guy’s wallets freeze up. I don’t care if there’s a new kind of ergonomic loppers with a revolutionary ratchet mechanism that promises to cut branches two inches thick, a Martian might pick it up and take a couple chops with it, but he will never buy it. Because his wallet is locked and he’s thrown away the key. He might note it as a future purchase and when things loosen up, go back and buy it months later.

Women, on the other hand, show no such restraint.

For them, right behind “cute” in the “got to have it” category comes stuff that’s on sale. Marshall’s and TJ Maxx have made billions because they know Venusians can’t resist items that are marked down. One retail slogan used to say, “If you spend more, you save more.”
“I got it at Marshall’s,” she says, holding up her thirty-fifth white blouse. “Look, it was only $13.99.”

“But don’t you have a load of white blouses?”

“Are you kidding me? It was marked down from $39.99—that’s a twenty-six dollar savings! Isn’t it the cutest?”
See, women like to shop. Guys hate it. Ever seen the look on a Martian’s face when he’s perched on a settee in some woman’s store waiting for the wife? That’s the purest kind of pain etched on his mug. Because guys don’t shop.

Instead, they set out to buy something they need. Fertilizer, a lug wrench, WD-40 or AAA batteries—and that’s all they come back with. They don’t come back with a huge bag and proceed to unload twelve items, excitedly saying, “Look what I got!”

In the guy’s bag is one lug wrench and that’s it. Because shopping is not in their genes. Guys would never think of wandering through a store perusing items. They go straight to the tool section and select the lug wrench, total time elapsed from entering the store to checking out, maybe four minutes.

On the other hand, if a Venusian sets foot in say, Marshall’s, she’ll wander down the shoe displays for twenty minutes, picking up and examining various flats, sneakers, sandals. Now you may get the idea she’s looking for something specific—but she’s not. She’s just shopping.

Then comes the clothes section, then underwear, then this and then that. And to top it off, there’s a whole bunch of aisles in the back with shelves full of random items. Crockery, trays, glassware, curtains, ice buckets—this is no man’s land. No guy in his right mind would get caught dead in here. It’s browsing on steroids and women thrive on it. “Who know what great things you can find in here?” the wife asks.

“Who cares?” the husband says, “I’m going out to sit in the car and listen to the game.”

And when she finally exits, she jumps in the car and pulls something that looks like an object from the world of Jules Verne out of the bag and exclaims, “Isn’t this amazing?”

“What is it?” the hubby asks.

“Oh, I don’t know but I can use it for all kinds of things. I can arrange flowers in it, I can use it to hold hors d’oeuvres, put a bunch of pussywillows in it—there’s a world of things I can do with it. And you know the best part?”

“What?”
“It was only $17.99.”

This is where you see the chasm gaping open. A guy would never ever buy some gloppy-looking, green china thing that he had no definite use for. Not in a million years. And when the wife asks, “Don’t you think it’s wonderful?”

He’s forced to swallow his pride and say something like, “I’m glad you’re happy with it.” All the while thinking, “There’s a total waste of eighteen bucks for something that’s going to sit in that closet with all the other useless crap she’s bought over the years.”

Once in a while I’ll slip up and go shopping with her. The experience never fails to emphatically remind me how much I hate it. While she’s zipping around the racks checking things out, I’m standing in a trance right in the middle of an aisle wondering what the hell am I doing in here.

“Go check out the mens’ sections,” she says as she speeds by with an armful of clothes, obviously heading to the dressing room. I’m looking at my watch while I’m wondering, “Why don’t they put bars in department stores?”

Give me a beer and a big screen TV and I might just get to enjoy shopping. Then again…

By Tony Vanderwarker

I haven’t had hair since my twenties so everything I know about it comes from my wife. Venusians are obsessed with hair, who else has bad hair days? Now and then I’ll have a bad day, say I have a blowout on 95 or get a speeding ticket—now that’s a bad day. But having a bad day because of your hair?

“It’s like walking around with a stone in your shoe or your bra strap showing—you just don’t feel right,” she explains to me. I guess to a Martian, the closest thing to a bad hair day is realizing your fly is unzipped and wondering how many people have noticed. But its not like it wrecks your day.

I’ll see her in front of the full-length mirror in our dressing room mussing with her hair and scowling at it as if expressing her disapproval will make it fly right. Of course it never does so she has to resort to showering and blow-drying it. Total of half an hour down the toilet to avoid having a bad hair day. Doing the math, if she fixes her hair half the time, that’s over 91 hours out of her life every year or almost four complete days totally wasted.

But of course to her, it’s time well spent. When she turns the blow dryer off, primps her hair once or twice, then turns with a look on her face like Wyatt Earp who’s just strapped on his six guns. Her hair’s good so she’s ready to face the world.   

Me, I’m good to go right after I’ve checked my face to make sure I haven’t left any shaving cream behind. Total time expenditure: half a second. Once in a while I get flagged by my wife for not shaving what little hair I do have. “You missed a big patch back here,” she’ll say, rapping on the back of my skull.

“But I can’t see the back of my head so how can I shave it?” I complain.

“Get a mirror,” she says.

Figuring that if I can’t see it, who cares who else does? So I try to ignore her until she comes racing up waving a razor. “Turn around,” she commands. I do a 180 and stand there while she scrapes away. The hair-impaired being tended to by the hair-aware.

Beside time, the other investment Venusians make on their hair is money. Every time she heads off to the hairdresser, I see a hundred and fifty bucks circling the drain. And she never fails to ask when she returns, “What do you think?”

This is where I step in it big time. Because I’ve forgotten she went to the hairdresser so my answer usually is, “About what?”

And that’s when I get the sneer and the retort, “About my HAIR.”

The truth is I can never see any difference between pre and post hairdresser but I’ve learned to act impressed by her latest do and say, “Gee, it looks terrific.” Here’s where I’m hoping she doesn’t ask, “You sure it’s not too short?” Or, “Do you think she made it too light?” Because I never know what the right answer is and I’m bound to get it wrong.

Not only does she get a cut and color at the hairdresser, she also gets good gossip because people who cut hair for a living hear it all. When I did have hair, I can never remember gossiping with the barber. It was slam, bam, thank you, Sir and I’m up and out of there. But when women sit down in the chair their chitchat mechanism is activated and they gab away throughout the entire time. To women, hairdressers are like psychiatrists with scissors. They can air their grievances about anything and everything, their clueless husbands who never notice their new hairdos, or the dog that ate their hors d‘oeuvres or the awful dish they got served at a dinner party. It’s never front-page stuff, just the odds and ends of everyday life that guys wouldn’t spend a second talking about.

I seldom hear anything interesting, once blue moon I get a juicy nugget, some dirt on who did what to whom. Occasionally there’s a funny, like the one about the woman whose high heel broke off at a party and she had to limp around all evening like a horse with a bum shoe.

Back in my movie days, I once went down to a hairdresser convention in Atlanta to film the thing for Clairol. For two days, I went from room to room with my camera shooting hairdressers doing crazy, outlandish dos on these poor models. I remember one looked like a kite perched on the girl’s head, another like a small car. One guy turned a head of hair into what looked like a pile of muffins. And the whole hotel smelled like someone had gone wild with a chemistry set.

Face it, Venusians and their hairdressers go overboard with hair. After all, it’s just strings of dead cells on your head. But its best for us guys to give hair a wide berth. Where you don’t know, don’t go.

Let’s just say there’s a whole world of hair out there and me, I’m just glad I don’t live in it.

By Tony Vanderwarker

One hears nonsense from would be experts and so-called “scientists” all the time. They claim they are following rigorous discipline but often it is no more than holding a finger to the wind and saying whatever comes to mind.

“The sun comes up every day in the morning,” is a prime example, another pseudo-scientific theory that threatens our democratic way of life. First, the sun’s rising is arbitrary, it may come up in New York at 7:38, but appear at Sri Lanka ten hours earlier.

And if there is a thunderstorm, the sun may not show up at all. That’s the Lord’s way and for anyone to make a blanket statement like the sun comes up every day in the morning is not only creating a false reality but threatening the very foundations of our Christian society. The sun comes up if and when the Almighty wants it to and doesn’t conform to any artificial constructs advanced by liberal scientists.

The reality is this: one must embrace the fact that while the first rays of sunlight may show in Iowa at 6:42 AM, months later it may climb over the horizon at 8:27. If that isn’t arbitrary, I don’t know what is and anyone who believes differently not only does not accept the divine order but is also one brick shy of a load.

I call these misguided people “One Brickers”—“one-bees” for short (rhymes with wanna-be’s). They refuse to accept fact and instead peddle absurdist theories like the groundhog as a predictor of the seasons and stepping on sidewalk cracks as harbingers of bad news for your mother’s back. C’mon, folks, let’s get real.

I unfortunately live in a country of one-bees and know them all too well.

These are people who when you ask them a simple question like: “Why did the chicken cross the road?” they give you a bunch of gobbledegook like, “Well, the answer depends on what kind of road it is. If its asphalt, then the answer would be “The chicken crossed the road because they enjoy walking on bituminous surfaces.”

And the malarkey doesn’t stop there. They’ll go on to tell you that if it is a dirt road, the chicken crossed it for no good reason at all since chickens have anomalous trichromatic vision and can’t tell grass from gravel.

That’s the one-bee BS for you—when every American with their head screwed on right knows that the chicken crossed the road because its GPS said, “Make a left turn and proceed to your destination”.

See what I mean? Obfuscating theories getting in the way of just plain fact–that’s the way these self-styled know-it-alls work.

Here’s another stupefying example I picked up from hanging with one-bees. These “geniuses” will tell you: “An apple does not fall far from the tree.”

Can you believe that? What about during a tornado? C’mon, cyclones have flung apples miles away from the tree they came from. Squirrels can pick them up and carry them off. Crows too—they love apples.

In fact, from my experience, you seldom find apples under the tree, you find them most often in the produce section of the supermarket. So the statement should be revised to read, “An apple does not appear by magic at the A&P, it is transported there by Teamsters and placed in displays by produce department employees for people to buy and enjoy.”

Here’s another doozy: “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” That’s one you hear all the time from one-bees. As if you can cut a house in half and expect the two halves to stand. Hell, they’ll collapse in a big pile and they’ll be dust and rubble all over the place.

Back to apples for one final example: An over-educated smart alec will tell you “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.” Now how stupid is that?

Just try putting an apple in front of the door and see if that keeps the doctor out! Now if you took 365 days worth of apples, you probably could build a big enough pile to stop anyone from opening the door. Or, if you took fifty days worth of apples and catapulted them at the doctor as he got out of his car, you probably could give him pause.

So let’s revise the statement to read, “Apples can be an effective weapon against trespassing doctors.”

See how applying a little scientific method can cut through the confusion and lack of clarity in this world and help us to see things as they really are?

Now go eat your apple before the sun goes down and your house splits in two.

By Tony Vanderwarker

Admittedly, this is a touchy subject. Although the word is one of the oldest in the English language, using it is considered by many to be beyond the pale. Deriving from the Middle English fertan, it’s akin to the Old High German fersan, which means to break wind. I guess the High Germans figured it you fersanded, there’d better be a wind around.

Now Martians accept the word for what it is but the ladies from Venus consider it to be indecent and offensive. So guys fersan (with sound) and polite people like Venusians pass wind (no sound). Which makes me wonder if you pass wind with no sound, is that an actual fersan? Sort of if a tree falls in the forest kind of thing.

Then there is the scent. Most fersanders (Martians and Venusians) quickly stride away from the noxious yellow cloud, leaving it hovering behind for unfortunates to unwittingly walk into. If that’s ever happened to you, you know well the reaction. You stand there with your nose wrinkling up looking around to locate the guilty party. Of course, everyone is far away and acting totally innocent so you write it off, thinking, maybe there’s a dead mouse under the sofa?

Now while the word is banned in printed media, it is used all the time in common parlance. For instance, “he’s an old fersan”, or “as out of place as a fersan at a garden party,” and of course, every teenager’s great love, the “fersan cushion.”

But God forbid you ask in mixed company: “Did someone just fersan?” Even if someone did, you don’t dare use the word lest you be written off as a barbarian.

Which brings me to guys. Guys learn at an early age that nothing is quite as satisfying as lifting one leg and letting a fersan rip–the louder and more flapping the sound (imagine a playing card clothes-pinned to a bicycle wheel)–the better. It’s a male ritual, one that survives into old age. It’s especially gratifying for guys to rip one in a narrow corridor so the sound reverberates like clapping hands in a canyon.

Of course, nothing offends Venusians more than a juicy fersan, especially if an odor attends it.

Now if you choose to fersan in a car, here’s my counsel. Before the cheek-lifting maneuver, hit the down buttons on the front windows so most of the yellow cloud flies out into the county. And all you get is a sneeringly-intoned, “That’s disgusting.”

If you don’t go for the open window option, be prepared for your wife to act like she’s been tear-gassed, swatting at the air with her hands while screaming unmentionables at you.

Of course, they never cut the cheese–never ever. They might pass gas or break wind, but as I said earlier, women never fersan. If you say, “Did you just fersan?” They get all self-righteous, and archly ask, “Who me?” Here’s the way the rest of the conversation goes:

Me: “Yes–you, I heard it.”

Her:“ Heard what?”

Me: “The fersan.

Her: “I didn’t fersan.”

Me: “Then what’s that smell?”

Her: “What smell? I don’t smell anything.”

When it comes to fersanding, women always take the 5th. If you really catch them in the act, they’ll offhandedly dismiss it as “just an intestinal disturbance.”

The history of fersanding is fascinating. In a recent article, “How a Fart Killed 10,000 People”*, Candida Moss, a professor at Notre Dame, writes, “We might think of farts as trapped gas, but the history of farting is more than just hot air. The historian Josephus tells us that an irreverent Roman soldier lowered his pants, bent over, and ‘spoke such words as you might expect from such a posture.’ The incident took place shortly before the Passover and caused a riot that led to the deaths of 10,000 people.”

Lest you think that the history of fersanding is only tragic, she goes on to say that “the oldest joke in the world is a fart joke.” She cites Roland le Sarcere, “also known as Roland the Farter, court minstrel to King Henry II, as the most successful purveyor of fart jokes. Roland performed a dance that ended with the simultaneous execution of one jump, one whistle, and one fart. For his talents, Roland was gifted a manor house in Suffolk and 100 acres of land.”

She sums up her article by saying that fersands are the cellar dwellers of bodily sounds. Burps can embarrass, hiccups may get a laugh, sneezes meet with “God bless” and even coughs are acceptable, while the lowly fersand awaits social rehabilitation—even though scientists estimate that the average person fersands 14 times a day.

So the next time your hubby cuts one, remember all you Venusians, maybe he’s simply angling for a house and a hundred acres in the country.