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Authors: Dave Barry
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eighteen months. You should also keep in mind that, according to the American Soybean Association, Asian soybean rust spores can remain viable for as long as fifty days.
9
TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT MONEY
Let the Little Bastards Starve
I F YOU’RE A PARENT, one of your most important jobs is teaching your children about money. Of course, you also need to teach them about sex, but that’s easy: You just sit them down and say, “Children, sex is a very, very important topic. Ask your mother about it.”
Teaching kids about money is not so simple, and yet it is vital. As a boy, I learned about money from my dad, who was a Presbyterian minister. The most important lesson I learned from him was: If you want to have money, you should not be a Presbyterian minister.
I’m not saying we were dirt poor. We had plenty of dirt. We were more what I would call “really bad car” poor. We never had a new car, of course, but my dad couldn’t even afford a
used
car built by a normal car company such as Ford or Chevrolet. Our cars were built by companies that obviously had more experience making nonautomotive products—toaster ovens, maybe, or saltwater taffy. Apparently one day, the corporate executives, while sitting around a large conference table, decided to branch out from kitchen appliances or candy and take a stab at making—why not?—automobiles. Having no idea what they were doing, they produced these truly awful cars, these turdmobiles, which never achieved market success because nobody would buy them, except, of course, my dad.
For example, we were the only American family that I know of ever to own a Hillman Minx. This was a British car that was engineered in accordance with the philosophy “For maximum passenger safety, the best car is the car that cannot, physically, be started.”
You know in movies, when they have a scene where a woman is trying to get away from a scary bad guy, and she jumps into her car and turns the key, and as the bad guy gets closer and closer the starter motor goes
rrr-rrr-rrrr
but the engine won’t start? In those scenes, the part of the car is usually played by a Hillman Minx wearing heavy makeup to appear to be some other brand of car. Hollywood professionals have learned that the Minx is the only car that can absolutely be relied upon, when the chips are down, to not start. My boyhood memories of family car trips involve all of us sitting in the car, ready to go somewhere, listening to the familiar sounds of the Minx going
rrr-rrr-rrrr
and my dad saying non-Presbyterian words.
This was actually a good thing, because the Minx also had a feature—at least ours did—whereby the steering wheel would spontaneously become disconnected from the wheels it was supposed to be steering. This happened several times to our Minx, leaving my dad spinning the wheel frantically around and around, like a pretend steering wheel on an amusement-park kiddy ride, while the Minx continued happily onward in whatever direction it had been going. This could have been very dangerous in a different car, but fortunately the Minx—this was another safety feature—had an engine that, on those rare occasions when it was running, produced approximately the same horsepower as a deceased gerbil, so we were rarely moving faster than 8 miles per hour when the Random-Steering-Disconnect Feature kicked in.
My dad finally got rid of the Minx. That was the good news. The bad news was that he replaced it—just when I got old enough to drive—with a used Nash Metropolitan. This was one of the silliest-looking cars ever made, as we can see from this advertisement for it:
Photography Credits
This is not a car designed for grown-ups. This is a car designed to be the lead character in a children’s cartoon book entitled
Curtis the Car Goes to the Circus.
In addition to looking silly, the Metropolitan was also ludicrously small, as we can see in these actual photographs of a Metropolitan side by side with actor Tom
9
TEACHING YOUR CHILDREN ABOUT MONEY
Let the Little Bastards Starve
I F YOU’RE A PARENT, one of your most important jobs is teaching your children about money. Of course, you also need to teach them about sex, but that’s easy: You just sit them down and say, “Children, sex is a very, very important topic. Ask your mother about it.”
Teaching kids about money is not so simple, and yet it is vital. As a boy, I learned about money from my dad, who was a Presbyterian minister. The most important lesson I learned from him was: If you want to have money, you should not be a Presbyterian minister.
I’m not saying we were dirt poor. We had plenty of dirt. We were more what I would call “really bad car” poor. We never had a new car, of course, but my dad couldn’t even afford a
used
car built by a normal car company such as Ford or Chevrolet. Our cars were built by companies that obviously had more experience making nonautomotive products—toaster ovens, maybe, or saltwater taffy. Apparently one day, the corporate executives, while sitting around a large conference table, decided to branch out from kitchen appliances or candy and take a stab at making—why not?—automobiles. Having no idea what they were doing, they produced these truly awful cars, these turdmobiles, which never achieved market success because nobody would buy them, except, of course, my dad.
For example, we were the only American family that I know of ever to own a Hillman Minx. This was a British car that was engineered in accordance with the philosophy “For maximum passenger safety, the best car is the car that cannot, physically, be started.”
You know in movies, when they have a scene where a woman is trying to get away from a scary bad guy, and she jumps into her car and turns the key, and as the bad guy gets closer and closer the starter motor goes
rrr-rrr-rrrr
but the engine won’t start? In those scenes, the part of the car is usually played by a Hillman Minx wearing heavy makeup to appear to be some other brand of car. Hollywood professionals have learned that the Minx is the only car that can absolutely be relied upon, when the chips are down, to not start. My boyhood memories of family car trips involve all of us sitting in the car, ready to go somewhere, listening to the familiar sounds of the Minx going
rrr-rrr-rrrr
and my dad saying non-Presbyterian words.
This was actually a good thing, because the Minx also had a feature—at least ours did—whereby the steering wheel would spontaneously become disconnected from the wheels it was supposed to be steering. This happened several times to our Minx, leaving my dad spinning the wheel frantically around and around, like a pretend steering wheel on an amusement-park kiddy ride, while the Minx continued happily onward in whatever direction it had been going. This could have been very dangerous in a different car, but fortunately the Minx—this was another safety feature—had an engine that, on those rare occasions when it was running, produced approximately the same horsepower as a deceased gerbil, so we were rarely moving faster than 8 miles per hour when the Random-Steering-Disconnect Feature kicked in.
My dad finally got rid of the Minx. That was the good news. The bad news was that he replaced it—just when I got old enough to drive—with a used Nash Metropolitan. This was one of the silliest-looking cars ever made, as we can see from this advertisement for it:
Photography Credits
This is not a car designed for grown-ups. This is a car designed to be the lead character in a children’s cartoon book entitled
Curtis the Car Goes to the Circus.
In addition to looking silly, the Metropolitan was also ludicrously small, as we can see in these actual photographs of a Metropolitan side by side with actor Tom
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