You know what you never see? A Korean guy with freckles and a big hook

nose.

I wonder when we pick up the telephone, does each of us get his own individual dial tone, or is there just one systemwide, master dial tone

that each of us jumps on and off when we need it? These things eat at me.

If a safe is unlocked, is it still a safe?

Here’s an optical illusion you can try at home. Take a pencil and make a small black dot in the middle of an ordinary piece of paper. Cover your left eye and stare at the dot from a distance of about two inches. You will see the Battle of Chancellorsville. If you don’t, check the paper. Or maybe you made the dot wrong.

Just because you don’t have a lot of money to spend is no reason you shouldn’t spend what little you have.

A good promotional idea for a singles bar would be to have “Date-rape Friday.” Drinks half-price, free GHB, free Plan-B pills, free RU-486 morning-after pills, free rape counseling and generous rebate coupons for an abortion clinic. That takes care of attracting the men; I’m still working on how to get some women to show up.

I had no shoes, and I felt sorry for myself until I met a man with no feet. I took his shoes. Now I feel better.

You know what would have been a smart thing to do in these developing countries that need electricity? To have tried large-scale experiments with alternative energy sources: solar, wind, geothermal, etc. We could have tested and tried to perfect these technologies on a large scale in places that need it. That would have been smart. That’s why we didn’t do it.

You know what you never see? A really good-looking homeless couple.

I’ve always wondered if the Library of Congress provides books in their public toilets to promote reading. I should think they wouldn’t want to pass up a captive audience like that.

A GENERIC JOKE: A person goes into a place and says something to another person. The second person says something back to the first person, who listens to that and then says something back to the second person. The thing he says back is really funny.

Stick around. China’s gonna win it all.

TRUE FACT: In Moscow there’s a professional entertainer who is described as a Hitler impersonator. Show biz.

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KEEPIN’ IT REAL IN THE AIR OFF WE GO, INTO THE WILD BLUE YONDER

I think the safety instructions that airline flight attendants deliver before departure could be greatly improved if they were simply a bit more honest and complete. They should include graphic descriptionsaccompanied by animated and live-action videoof the devastating physical damage done to the human body during a crash. They should cite examples of various anatomical mutilations. They should also include a detailed description of the damage done to the lungs and skin by fire and smoke inhalation, to demonstrate that surviving the impact of the crash alone is not always sufficient. People deserve the truth.

Then, how about a more relaxed, breezy pre-flight announcement made in the cadences of young people: “Hi. Listen, we’ll be leaving soon? Then we’re gonna fly a while and get there possibly this afternoon? Okay? Later on, we’ll chow down, have some brews and maybe catch a movie? Okay? And hey, try not to ring your bell a lot and wake us up … unless something really scary is going on. Okay? Thanks. Oh, and by the way, the captain says do that thing with the belts.”

LEVELING OFF

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re leveling off at our cruising altitude. That means the cockpit crew will soon be lighting up and enjoying a few hits of something really nice we picked up in Hawaii. After about six hits, they’re gonna turn off the autopilot, take their hands off the controls and let the plane do what it wants for a couple of minutes. The captain suggests you keep your seat belts fastened unless you have a strong appetite for blunt trauma.”

“The captain has just turned on the fasten-seat-belt sign. He didn’t mean to, but the joint he was smoking fell in his lap, and when he jumped up, his head hit the switch.”

“The captain has turned off the seat-belt sign. But he cautions you to stay alert, as sometimes these planes don’t work as well as we’d like them to.”

“The captain has just turned the seat-belt sign on again. Of course, he also just stuffed a pound of walnuts up his nose, one by one, so you can decide for yourselves what you want to do about the belts.”

STILL CRUISIN’ ALONG

A socially responsible pilot: “On your right, you will see Las Vegas, where millions of visitors are fleeced out of their hard-earned money each year by huge, impersonal hotels originally built by brutal, criminal syndicates and now owned by brutal, criminal corporations. These large, impersonal hotels have no concern for service or quality, but merely wish to generate more gambling activity, because the advantage is heavily weighted toward the house. Whores and drugs are available at all hours.”

A poetic pilot: “Off to your right you 11 see the Colorado River as it snakes its way carefully through the ancient, multicolored walls of the Grand Canyon, echoing mutely the dreams and disappointments of countless generations of red-skinned people who inhabited the Great Southwest.”

An interesting pilot: “There’s the house where John Gacy lived. If you look carefully, in his backyard you can see the top of the chute where he dropped the bodies of the twenty-six children he killed. Over on the right, we’ll soon be coming up to the gas station where Ted Bundy picked up his twenty-third victim. Altogether, he is thought to have killed between thirty-six and fifty young women, almost all of whom parted their hair in the middle.”

A political pilot: “Most of the farms you see used to belong to small farmers. But their land has been brutally repossessed by the greedy, grasping bankers, only to be bought up by huge agribusiness corporations who poison the land and produce tasteless food. These corporations receive billions of dollars a year from the taxpayers for no good reason except to enhance their wealth.”

Pilot with the blues: “Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been feeling kind of depressed lately, and I think you’ll agree, we all share guilt for the world’s suffering and deteriorating condition. Sometimes I ask myself, ‘Is it all worthwhile? Quite often, I give up hope completely and try to think of interesting ways of killing myself that would get my name on television.” (Sounds of a struggle in the cockpit)

COMIN’ DOWN

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have just begun our gradual descent into the Indianapolis area, a descent similar in many ways to the gradual slide of the United States from a first-class world leader to an aggressive, third-rate debtor nation of overweight slobs, undereducated slob children and aimless elderly people who can’t afford to buy medicine. The current conditions in Indianapolis: Temperature sixty-one degrees, partly cloudy skies, winds from the southwest and intense Midwestern boredom.”

TIRED OF THE HANDICRAP

Now, listen, I gotta tell you something’ and I’m not gonna sugarcoat this because it is what it is. But boy, oh boy, am I gettin’ tired of this handicapped business. Aren t you? Hah? Don’t you think this handicapped shit has gone far enough?

And I’m like you, folks; normally I would feel sympathy for these people. But the first thing they tell you is that they don’t want sympathy. You ever hear em say that? “I don’t want your sympathy.” And I say, fine, fuck you. No sympathy.

And by the way, if there are any handicapped people reading this, I’m not talking about you, all right? I’m talking about the other handicapped people, the ones who’ll never see this book. So don’t get all excited and start rolling around causing trouble in your electric go-cart or whatever the fuck it is. Calm down. I’m on your side.