I have here in front of me a recent front-page newspaper story about a biologist who claims that he isolated the genes of an animal called a “quagga,” which used to live in South Africa before it became extinct. The story says the biologist got the genes from the skin of a stuffed quagga in St. Louis, and that there are 25,000 different gene fragments, each of which is being reproduced in a separate culture of bacteria. So what we have here is a biologist telling reporters, with a straight face, that he has 25,000

dishes containing pieces of genes that they cannot see, which belong to an animal that they never heard of, which exists only in stuffed form in St. Louis. And instead of spitting into the dishes and striding disdainfully from the room, the reporters take notes and actually put the story in the newspaper.

And don’t get me started on astronomers, with their $57 million atomic laser telescopes, and their breakthrough photographs of “new galaxies” that look remarkably like important viruses, and their “black holes,” which are of course invisible to the layperson because they suck up all the light around them. Of course. In fact this very phenomenon probably contributed to the extinction of the quagga.

I say it’s time the government stopped giving money to the particle-and-virus crowd, and started giving it to scientists who will do experiments that the public can understand and appreciate. Mister Wizard comes to mind. Think of what he could do with several million federal dollars:

“NEW YORK—Mister Wizard announced that he has successfully demonstrated the existence of gravity by dropping a mobile home onto Long Island from a height of 60,000 feet. ‘To my knowledge,’ Mister Wizard told reporters, ‘this is the first time this has been done, and we intend to look at slow-motion videotapes over and over in hopes of furthering our understanding of what happens when gravity causes a mobile home to strike Long Island at a high rate of speed.’ He added that ‘in the very near future’ he will attempt to determine ‘what happens when you pump 300 gallons of grape juice into a cow.’”

The best way I know of to deal with heat is to wait until the middle of a major jungle-style heat wave, when if you lie still for more than 20 minutes patches of fungus form on your skin, when birds are bursting into flames in midair and nuns are cursing openly on the street, then go down to Sears and try to buy an air conditioner. Or, if you already have an air conditioner, you can try to get somebody to fix it.

But as of the last heat wave, we didn’t have one, and after about the fourth or fifth day my wife was getting that look where, later on, the neighbors tell the homicide detective: “We knew she was feeling emotional strain, but we had no idea she owned a scythe.” So I went down to Sears and joined the crowd of people thrusting credit cards at the appliance salesperson, who was of course being extra surly and slow. Who could blame him? Throughout spring, he had stood alone in Major Appliances, an outcast, wearing a suit whose fabric originated outside the immediate solar system, drumming his fingers on a washer until he had drummed little finger holes right through the lid, and we had all strode right past him. And now we were clustered around him like Titanic passengers hoping to obtain lifeboat seating.

CUSTOMER: Please please PLEASE can I buy an air conditioner?

SALESPERSON: That depends. Will you be wanting the service warranty?

CUSTOMER: Yes of course.

SALESPERSON: JUST one?

CUSTOMER: No, no, of course not. Several service warranties. Eight service warranties.

SALESPERSON: Well, I don’t know ...

CUSTOMER: And these two dishwashers.

Wise consumer that I am, I bought the air conditioner with the maximum number of “BTUs,” an electronic measurement of how heavy an air conditioner is. To get it into the house, my wife and I used the standard husband-and-wife team lifting system whereby the wife hovers and frets and asks “Can I help?” and the husband, sensing from deep within his manhood that if he lets a woman help him, all the males he feared in tenth grade gym class, the ones who shaved because they actually had to, will suddenly barge into the house and snap him with towels, says “No, I’m fine,” when in fact he also senses deep within his manhood that he is on the verge of experiencing a horrible medical development that would require him to wear a lifetime helpful groin device.

To install my air conditioner, all I had to do was get a hammer and whack out a large permanent metal part of our window that was not shown in the official Sears instruction diagram, then plug it in, using of course a plug adaptor, which you need to void any potential warranty. This particular air conditioner is one of those new “energy-efficient” models, which means that rather than draw electricity from the power company, which would cost money, it operates by sucking power out of all the other appliances in the house. You can actually see them get smaller and writhe in pain, when it kicks in. More than once we have been awakened in the dead of night by the pitiful shrieks of the toaster, which has been with us for many years and does not understand what is happening.

Sometimes my wife expresses concern about “overloading the circuit,” a term I suspect she read in one of her magazines. In the past decade or so, the women’s magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that men know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is look at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home. So I looked at our air conditioner, which appeared, in what feeble brownish light the lamp was able to give off, to be getting larger and chuckling softly, and I gave my wife a reassuring home-handyman speech featuring the term “ampere,” which I believe is a BTU that has broken loose from the air conditioner and lodged in the wiring.

If you cannot install air conditioning, I suggest you perspire. Perspiring is Mother Nature’s own natural cooling system. When you’re in a situation involving great warmth or stress, such as summer or an audience with the queen, your sweat glands, located in your armpits, rouse themselves and start pumping out perspiration, which makes your garments smell like a dead rodent, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling you she wants you to take them off and get naked. Of course the average person cannot always get naked, let alone the queen, so many people put antiperspirant chemicals on their armpits; this forces Mother Nature to reroute the perspiration to the mouth, where it forms bad breath, which is Mother Nature’s way of telling you she is basically a vicious irresponsible slut.

One final note: Do not be tempted to beat the heat by drinking alcoholic beverages. A far better route is to inject them straight into your veins. No, ha ha, seriously, the experts tell us that alcohol actually makes us warmer! Of course, these are the same experts who tell us, during cold weather, that alcohol actually makes us colder, so we have to ask ourselves exactly how stupid these experts think we are. My common-sense advice to you is: If you must drink alcoholic beverages, fine, but for your own sake as well as the sake of others, take sensible precautions to insure you don’t spill them on your clothing, which is already disgusting enough.