A. The American Funeral Industry Council advises us that the preferred term is “bought the farm.”

Q. Where should punctuation go?

A. It depends on the content.

EXAMPLE: Hi Mr Johnson exclaimed Bob Where do you want me to put these punctuation marks Oh just stick them there at the end of the following sentence answered Mr Johnson OK said Bob

The exception to this rule is teenagers, who should place a question mark after every few words to make sure people are still listening.

EXAMPLE: “So there’s this kid at school? Named Derrick? And he’s like kind of weird? Like he has a picture of Newt Gingrich carved in his hair? So one day he had to blow his nose? like really bad? But he didn’t have a tissue? So he was like sitting next to Tracy Steakle And she had this sweater? By like Ralph Lauren? So Derrick takes the sleeve? And he like ...”

PROFESSIONAL WRITING TIP: In writing a novel or play, use “foreshadowing” to subtly hint at the outcome of the plot.

WRONG: “O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” RIGHT: “O Romeo, Romeo! I wonder if we’re both going to stab ourselves to death at the end of this plot?”

You’ve Gotta Be Kidding

Today’s scary topic for parents is: What Your Children Do When You’re Not Home.

I have here a letter from Buffalo, New York, from working mom Judy Price, concerning her 14-year-old son, David, “who should certainly know better, because the school keeps telling me he is a genius, but I have not seen signs of this in our normal, everyday life.”

Judy states that one day when she came home from work, David met her outside and said: “Hi, Mom. Are you going in?”

(This is a bad sign, parents.)

Judy says she considered replying, “No, I thought I’d just stay here in the car all night and pull away for work in the morning.”

That actually would have been a wise idea. Instead, she went inside, where she found a large black circle burned into the middle of her kitchen counter. “DAVID,” she screamed. “WHAT WERE YOU COOKING?”

The soft, timid reply came back: “A baseball.”

“A baseball,” Judy writes. “Of course. What else could it be? How could I forget to tell my children never to cook a baseball? It’s my fault, really.”

It turns out that according to David’s best friend’s cousin—and if you can’t believe HIM, who CAN you believe?—you can hit a baseball three times as far if you really heat it up first. So David did this, and naturally he put the red-hot pan down directly onto the countertop, probably because there was no rare antique furniture available.

For the record: David claims that the heated baseball did, in fact, go farther. But this does NOT mean that you young readers should try this foolish and dangerous experiment at home. Use a friend’s home.

No, seriously, you young people should never heat a baseball without proper adult supervision, just as you should never—and I say this from personal experience—attempt to make a rumba box.

A rumba box is an obscure musical instrument that consists of a wooden box with metal strips attached to it in such a way that when you plunk them, the box resonates with a pleasant rhythmic sound. The only time I ever saw a rumba box was in 1964, when a friend of my parents named Walter Karl played one at a gathering at our house, and it sounded great. Mr. Karl explained that the metal strips were actually pieces of the spring from an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph. This gave my best friend, Lanny Watts, an idea. Lanny was always having ideas. For example, one day he got tired of walking to the end of his driveway to get the mail, so he had the idea of hanging the mailbox from a rope-and-pulley system strung up the driveway to his porch, where he hooked it up to a washing-machine motor. When the mailman came, Lanny simply plugged in the motor, and whoosh, the mailbox fell down. The amount of time Lanny spent unsuccessfully trying to get this labor-saving device to work was equivalent to approximately 5,000 trips to get the actual mail, but that is the price of convenience.

So anyway, when Lanny heard Mr. Karl explain the rumba box, he realized two things:

1. His parents had an old-fashioned wind-up phonograph they hardly ever used.

2. They both worked out of the home.

So Lanny and I decided to make our own rumba box. Our plan, as I recall it, was to take the phonograph apart, snip off a bit of the spring, then put the phonograph back together, and nobody would be the wiser. This plan worked perfectly until we removed the metal box that held the phonograph spring; this box turned out to be very hard to open.

“Why would they make it so strong?” we asked ourselves.

Finally, recalling the lessons we had learned about mechanical advantage in high-school physics class, we decided to hit the box with a sledge hammer.

Do you remember the climactic scene in the movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, when the Nazis open up the Ark of the Covenant and out surges a terrifying horde of evil fury and the Nazis’ heads melt like chocolate bunnies in a microwave? Well, that’s similar to what happened when Lanny sledge-hammered the spring box. It turns out that the reason the box is so strong is that there is a really powerful, tightly wound, extremely irritable spring in there, and when you let it out, it just goes berserk, writhing and snarling and thrashing violently all over the room, seeking to gain revenge on all the people who have cranked it over the years.

Lanny and I fled the room until the spring calmed down. When we returned, we found phonograph parts spread all over the room, mixed in with approximately 2.4 miles of spring. We realized we’d have to modify our Project Goal slightly, from making a rumba box to being in an entirely new continent when Lanny’s mom got home.

Actually, Mrs. Watts went fairly easy on us, just as Judy Price seems to have been good-humored about her son’s heating the baseball. Moms are usually pretty good that way.

But sometimes I wonder. You know how guys are always complaining that they used to have a baseball-card collection that would be worth a fortune today if they still had it, but their moms threw it out? And the guys always say, “Mom just didn’t know any better.”

Well, I wonder if the moms knew exactly what they were doing. Getting even.

Sexual Intercourse

Today’s Topic for Guys is: Communicating with Women.

If there’s one thing that women find unsatisfactory about guys—and I base this conclusion on an extensive scientific study of the pile of Cosmopolitan magazines where I get my hair cut—it is that guys do not communicate enough.

This problem has arisen in my own personal relationship with my wife, Beth. I’ll be reading the newspaper and the phone will ring; I’ll answer it, listen for 10 minutes, hang up, and resume reading. Finally Beth will say: “Who was that?” And I’ll say, “Phil Wonkerman’s mom.” Phil is an old friend we haven’t heard from in 17 years. And Beth will say, “Well?” And I’ll say, “Well what?” And Beth will say, “What did she SAY?”

And I’ll say, “She said Phil is fine,” making it clear by my tone of voice that, although I do not wish to be rude, I AM trying to read the newspaper here, and I happen to be right in the middle of an important panel of “Calvin and Hobbes.”

But Beth, ignoring this, will say, “That’s all she said?”

And she will not let up. She will continue to ask district attorney-style questions, forcing me to recount the conversation until she’s satisfied that she has the entire story, which is that Phil just got out of prison after serving a sentence for a murder he committed when he became a drug addict because of the guilt he felt when his wife died in a freak submarine accident while Phil was having an affair with a nun, but now he’s all straightened out and has a good job as a trapeze artist and is almost through with the surgical part of his sex change and just became happily engaged to marry a prominent member of New Kids on the Block, so in other words he is fine, which is EXACTLY what I told Beth in the first place, but is that enough? No. She wants to hear every single detail.