I say we give the medical community two more weeks to cure the common cold, and, if it doesn’t, we turn the problem over to a more competent outfit, like the Sony Corporation. Sometimes I wonder what the medical community is thinking. We give it buddles of money to buy office furniture and white coats and other medical devices, and all it seems to want to do is invent obscure new operations nobody you know or I know ever needs:

CHICAGO—A team of surgeons at the Warpfinger Medical Institute here has successfully implanted a tiny electronic device into the right tonsil of a fifteen-year-old boy. “We don’t really know why we did it,” said a spokesman. “We just had this tiny electronic device and this fifteen-year-old boy, so we figured, whY not? Next week we’re going to install the battery.

Meanwhile, millions of people are out here getting common colds and generally making the world a tackier place to live in. You have two kinds of cold victims: your nose blowers and your snorters. For overall ability to make you want to walk out of restaurants, I’d have to give the edge to the nose blowers. And they are everywhere. Americans think nothing of public nose-blowing. They encourage it in their young. My fourth-grade teacher once spent two hours instructing us on nose-blowing. She never married.

As far as I can tell, the only groups trying to do anything useful about the common cold are the cold-remedy companies that advertise on TV:

(The scene opens in a pleasant suburban home. The husband walks in through the front door and speaks to his wife, who is wearing a bathrobe and lying on the floor.)

HUSBAND: Are you ready to go visit my father at the Home for Sickly Old People?

WIFE: I don’t think I can, dear. It’s this darn cold. I have a fever of 112

degrees and I can no longer move anything on the left side of my body.

HUSBAND: Here, try some Phlegm-B-Gone.

WIFE: Phlegm-B-Gone?

HUSBAND: Phlegm-B-Gone.

(The scene shifts to an impressive office with a big desk. On a shelf behind the desk is a huge collection of books. It is actually the complete Hardy Boys series, but the camera doesn’t get close enough for you to realize this. A medical-looking actor, wearing a white coat, is standing in front of the desk, holding a clipboard.)

MEDICAL-LOOKING ACTOR: Medical tests show that Phlegm-B-Gone, a collection of medical ingredients, is extremely medical when used in a conscientiously applied program of oral hygiene and regular professional care. Get back on your feet with Phlegm-B-Gone.

(The scene shifts to the Home for Sickly Old People.)

WIFE: Gosh, that Phlegm-B-Gone, with a collection of medical ingredients, is great! I’m back on my feet again with only a slight limp!

HUSBAND: I’m beginning to feel a little feverish. How about you, Dad? ... Dad? ... Dad?

Some people think the way to avoid colds is to eat a lot of vitamin C, something on the order of nine billion pentagrams a day. My wife believes in this approach. She’s always choking down vitamin C pills, which are the size of toaster-ovens. She gets colds anyway. My approach is to drink large quantities of beer. It seems to work. Since I started drinking large quantities of beer, I have not had one cold that I remember clearly.

NOTE: If you are a little kid, and your parents have not yet told you about sex and where babies come from, do NOT read this column, because it contains a lot of stuff you would kill to find out.

Things go in and out of fashion. Take water. For years, water was unfashionable, something to wash bird droppings off the car with. Today, water is fashionable, something to be advertised on national television by great men such as Orson Wells. (I use “great” not in the sense of “superior” but in the sense of “Considerably larger than Zanesville, Ohio.”) So today you’ll see people paying $2.50 and more for fancy-looking six-packs of water. Five years ago, these people would have been considered stupid. Today, they are considered fashionable. Stupid, but fashionable.

Another example is babies. They were out of fashion during the seventies. Young couples were too busy. They’d say: “Should we have a baby? Should we embark on this great human adventure, which brings with it great responsibility, but also great joy and fulfillment? Nah, let’s play tennis.”

But babies are back in fashion. In the past year or two, many a couple has decided to sacrifice material things for the chance to create a new life, a life capable of love and hate, a life capable of dreams and desires, a life capable of excreting things in large volumes from three or four orifices at the same time.

But before you decide to have a baby, let me warn you, particularly you males: They have changed the rules.

When your parents had you, the responsibilities of childbirth were clearly defined:

THE WOMAN went to the doctor regularly, read a lot about pregnancy, made sure she ate the right foods, kept track of the baby’s growth inside her, bought baby clothes and furniture, told the doctor when contractions began, timed them, made sure she got to the hospital on time, went to the delivery room, went through labor, and had the baby.

THE MAN smoked Cigarettes.

This system is obviously fair, and it worked well for years. But somewhere along the line, some sinister granola-oriented group got to the medical community and the women’s magazines and convinced them that the man should become more involved. That’s right, men: they want you right there in the delivery room when it happens. Not only that, they want you to go to classes at which people openly discuss pregnancy.

I found all this out the hard way.

Let me assure you that I want to play a responsible role in my wife’S pregnancy. I am willing to pace for hours in the waiting room with the other fathers-to-be and old copies of National Geographic. I am willing to go to classes on how to pace in the waiting room. But at our classes we don’t talk about pacing: we talk about what goes on inside a pregnant person’s body. I don’t want to know what goes on inside a pregnant person’s body. I don’t want to know what goes on inside my own body. I think if the Good Lord had wanted us to know what goes on inside our bodies, He would have given us little windows.

Another thing we do at our classes is practice breathing. That’s right: breathing. The idea is the man helps the woman breathe steadily and imagine she’s on a beach; this takes her mind off her labor and helps her relax. They haven’t told us men how we’re supposed to relax. I can see it now: my wife will be breathing steadily, imagining she’s on a beach; I will be breathing shallowly, imagining I am lying on the delivery-room floor, because I am lying on the delivery-room floor.

I could go on: I could tell you about how the women in the class talk about really personal things in hearty, cheerful tones while we males stare intently at various ceiling tiles. But you’ll find out anyway, if you haven’t already.

At our last class, the leader said we’re going to see a film soon. I just know my wife will have to drive us home afterward.