NOTE: Some people, particularly religious personnel, dispute the Theory of Evolution: they say God created all Life all at once. I have done a lot of research on both theories, and I firmly believe the evidence supports the theory that anybody who supports either theory gets

a lot of nasty mail, so I’m staying the heck out of it. And I’ll stand by this position.

Life as we know it today falls into two categories: Plants and Animals. Plants are divided into three subcategories: Green Vegetables, Yellow Vegetables, and Weeds. Animals are divided into six subcategories:

Animals You Can Eat: cows, turkeys, porks, bolognas, veals, zucchinis, tuna fish. Animals You Can Sit on: horses, certain turtles. Animals That Can Knock Over Your Car: rhinoceroses, soccer fans. Totally Useless Animals That Would Have Ceased to Exist Thousands of Years Ago If Not for Greedy Pet Store Owners Who Prey on Unsuspecting Eight-Year-Olds: hamsters, gerbils. Animals That Are Easily Impressed: dogs. Animals Whose Sole Goal in Life Is to Wait at the Bottom of Sleeping Bags and Sting or Bite People to Death: scorpions, snakes. Animals That Are Not Easily Impressed: cats.

You’ll notice this list does not include insects. This is because insects are not animals: Insects are insects, and their sole reason for existing is to be sprayed by poisonous substances from aerosol cans. Oh,

I know you’ve heard a lot of ecology-nut talk about how you shouldn’t kill insects because they’re part of the Great Chain of Life and birds eat them and so on, but I say go ahead and kill them. If necessary, we can do without birds, too.

Many of you have written cards and letters asking me to explain chemistry. Here is a sampling:

Dear Dave:

Please explain chemistry—Otherwise I will kill myself.

Sincerely,

A Deranged Person

Dear Dave:

If You don’t explain chemistry by 6 P.M. Friday, we will detonate a nuclear device in Brooklyn.

Regards,

Several Terrorists

Okay, here goes. Chemistry, in technical terms, is the study of all the weensy little objects that make up the large objects we can see with our naked eyes, such as toasters. Most of you were probably exposed to chemistry in high school, assuming you were dumb enough to believe your guidance counselors when they said you would need some knowledge of chemistry in later life. They probably used the same routine to get you to take Latin, another subject unrelated to the real world. The only time you ever need to understand Latin is when you’re at the doctor’s office wearing one of those embarrassing garments, designed by Nazi sadists, that they make you wear, and you have finished emitting various bodily fluids into various containers, which you have carried around the crowded waiting room looking for a nurse to give them to so he or she can do Lord knows what perverted things with them, and you’re waiting in the examining room on a cold table covered with the kind of paper they give you to cover toilet seats with in public rest rooms, hoping the doctor will come within the next two or three days to examine you, and finally you get so bored you look at all the diplomas and certificates on the wall, which are written in Latin. If you don’t know Latin, they look pretty impressive:

Quod erat demonstrandum Opere citato et cetera, id est amo amas amat plume de ma tante NORBERT B.

HODPACKER vamos al cine exernpli gratia marquis de sade XLIVIIICBM.

If you know Latin, you’ll figure out this means:

This certifies that

NORBERT B. HODPACKER has a great big piece of paper on his wall.

Chemistry is similar. Actually, I never took any chemistry myself, but I did sit outside Mr. Hoose’s chemistry class for a whole year in high school. I was a hall monitor. My job was to make sure the other students had legal hall passes so they could smoke cigarettes in the bathrooms. That was back in the days when kids smoked cigarettes.

Sitting in the hall, I overheard a lot of chemistry. The big thing was atoms and molecules, which are the Building Blocks of Matter. In ancient times, people didn’t know about atoms and molecules: they thought the Building Blocks of Matter were earth, air, fire, and water. What a bunch of jerks.

Today we know about atoms and molecules, which are very tiny. For example, the head of a pin has 973 trillion million billion spillion drillion gillion thousand jillion hillion zillion atoms and molecules. Let me try to give you an idea how many atoms and molecules that is, in terms that a lay person might understand: it is a lot of atoms and molecules.

What happens is the atoms and molecules whiz around and form elements, such as gold, iron, ivory, gravel, and vinyl. Sometimes several elements come together (don’t ask me why) to form new chemical structures. For example, common table salt is actually composed of two deadly poisons, arsenic and strychnine. They are perfectly safe if combined properly, but if the salt manufacturers should mess up on one tiny little grain, and you happen to put that grain, among thousands of others, on your egg, you will die a horrible death. That’s what makes chemistry so fascinating.

Chemists are always messing around with atoms and molecules, hoping to come up with new combinations that will Benefit Mankind. Not long ago they developed a compound that consumes forty-seven times its weight in excess stomach acid. They are even working on new forms of life; in fact, they have already created a one-celled organism that eats oil slicks. I admit this is a fairly stupid thing to do, but it’s a start. And someday, within your lifetime, if you’re lucky, you will see laboratory-created life forms capable of applying for government aid and buying Chrysler products. It’s something to look forward to.

Everybody should know something about birds, because birds are everywhere. Zoologists tell u, there, are over

23,985,409,723,098,050,744,885,143 birds in the city of Lincoln, Nebraska, alone, which is one of the many reasons not to go there.

Now perhaps you get a bit nervous when you think about all those birds out there. Perhaps you remember Alfred Hitchcock’s famous movie The Birds, in which several million birds got together one afternoon and decided to peck a number of Californians to death. Well, you needn’t worry. First, any animal that attacks Californians is a friend of man. And second, The Birds was just a movie; in real life, your chances of being pecked to death by birds are no greater than your chances of finding a polite clerk at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles.

There is an incredible range of birds, from the ostrich, which weighs up to six hundred pounds and stands up to nine feet tall and can run two hundred miles an hour and crush a man’s head as if it were a Ping-Pong ball; to the tiny bee humming bird, which is a mere 6.17 decahedrons long and can fly right into your ear and hum its tiny wings so hard you think your brain is going to vibrate into jelly and you will eventually go insane.

Birds, like most mammals, especially lawyers, evolved from reptiles. The first bird appeared millions of years ago, during the Jurassic Period

(which gets its name from the fact that it was a fairly jurassic period). What happened was this reptile, inspired by some mysterious, wondrous inspiration to evolve, climbed up a Jurassic Period tree and leaped from the topmost branch and thudded into the ground at 130 miles an hour.

Then other reptiles, inspired by the same urge as the first reptile but even stupider, climbed up and began leaping from the branch. Soon the ground trembled with the thud of many reptile bodies, raining down on the Jurassic plain like some kind of scaly hailstorm. This went on for a few thousand years, until one of the reptiles evolved some feathers and discovered it could fly. As it soared skyward, the other species, who had grown very tired of being pelted by reptile bodies, let out a mighty cheer, which stopped a few seconds later when they were pelted by the first bird droppings.