Chili Dawgs Always Bark at Night. Lewis Grizzard

cholesterol. Eat stuff that really tastes good and cholesterol will clog your arteries, and one day you’ll be sitting there eating a couple of fried eggs and you’ll drop dead of a heart attack.

      “He should have watched his diet,” they’ll say at your funeral.

      You can get cancer from just about everything, it seems. We mentioned smoking. But there’s asbestos, eating smoked foods, or drinking too much coffee.

      And speaking of drinking, go right ahead and have another scotch, but you know your liver is rotting with every sip.

      Then there’s AIDS. I don’t want to talk about AIDS anymore.

      And let’s don’t forget how many near misses there are in commercial aviation. You’re sitting there in 23A and suddenly there’s a 727 coming down the aisle.

      Also, we can’t forget that the ozone layer is disappearing from our atmosphere and one day we’ll all be fried because there won’t be anything left to protect us from the sun.

      So, let’s say none of that gets you. Great, except now there’s something new to worry about—RADON!

      You quit smoking, drinking, and eating fatty foods. You exercise every day, brush regularly with tartar-control toothpaste, and have annual checkups from your doctor.

      You’ve eaten cereal until it’s coming out of your ears, you take all sorts of vitamins—and speaking of cereal, you even eat yours with prunes on top.

      You’re the best friend your colon ever had.

      But you’re still not safe because radon is here and it’s coming after you.

      It’s down there in the ground under your house. You can’t see radon, and you can’t smell it, but it’s there.

      It sneaks up through your basement. It comes up pipes and through cracks and you breathe it, and you might as well have kept sucking on those cigarettes, because radon can give you lung cancer, too.

      If you want to be safe from this newest killer, you’ve got to buy a gadget that measures radon in your house, and if you’ve got it, then you have to get some guy to come over and make an assortment of repairs, and that’s going to cost you.

      Wouldn’t we be better off if nobody told us about things like radon? Sure it might pick a few of us off, but we wouldn’t have to lie in our beds at night wondering how much radon the uranium under our condos is producing—and was that noise you just heard downstairs the Radon Monster coming to get you?

      Worry kills, too. Would somebody please mention that to the Surgeon General.

      When “The Boys” Grew Up

      “The weekly meeting of the Slim Pickens Chapter of the Beer-Swilling, Tobacco-Chewing, Possum-Eating, Card-Playing Brotherhood of America will please come to order,” announced Shorty Milsaps, club president.

      The boys gunned down the last swallows of their beer and gave Shorty their attention.

      “Men,” Shorty began, “I must bring before the brotherhood tonight a serious matter that could affect this organization as nothing before ever has.

      “As you might have heard, the Supreme Court has ruled that private clubs may no longer discriminate in accepting members.

      “I’m here tonight to tell you that the time may come when we might have to accept women into this brotherhood.”

      A hush fell over the startled listeners.

      “You serious, Shorty?” asked Cootie Carnes.

      “As your mother-in-law’s drawers, Cootie,” replied Shorty.

      There was much murmuring and cursing, and finally Gilbert Harskins said, “This is the last place we got, men.

      “You can’t get away from women at work no more. They on television giving the news and they’re all over the golf course and they’ve even got in the Rotary Club.

      “I wouldn’t be surprised to see one playin’ outfield for the Pirates before it’s over.”

      “Hell,” said Marvin Coddlemeyer, “if we get women in here, we going to have to change a lot of things.”

      “Like what?” asked Gilbert Harskins.

      “Well, for one thing, we won’t be able to spit on the floor or have the weekly belching contest. Women don’t go in for spittin’ on the floor or belching.

      “We’ll also have to quit telling nasty jokes, and Leon Caldwell won’t be able to do that funny thing where he paints eyes on his belly and uses his navel for a mouth and pantomimes ‘She Was Just a Stableman’s Daughter, but All the Horsemen Knew Her.’”

      “That’d be a shame,” said Cootie Carnes.

      “I’ll tell you what else,” said Marvin Coddlemeyer.

      “Women will want to have congealed salad and celery sticks instead of possum and sweet potatoes, and I guarantee you it won’t be a month before they’ll be sittin’ around here drinkin’ white wine and talking about their hairstylists.”

      “Marvin’s right,” said Cootie Carnes. “A man’s just got to have a place he can go now and then and just be himself and say what he wants to and scratch where it itches. Dammit, Leon, quit spittin’ on my shoes.”

      Curtis Knowles hadn’t said a word during the entire discussion. Curtis had been married four times, once to a lady lawyer, and was held as an expert on females.

      “Boys,” he said, “if a woman can sit here with us and listen to all the bull and put up with chewin’, spittin’, belchin’, cussin’, and Leon Caldwell’s navel, I say she’s what I’ve been lookin’ for all my life and hadn’t been able to find. A woman who would put up with a man just bein’ himself.”

      A hush fell over the crowd.

      “I move we put an ad in the paper,” said Cootie Carnes. “I’d like to meet a woman like that myself.”

      Let’s Get the Trains on Track

      I’ve heard enough about airlines taking care of their planes so that they break in half on landing or the top rips off in flight.

      I don’t want to know anymore about how many near-miss midair collisions there are and about how we don’t have enough air-traffic controllers.

      And I don’t want to hear anything else about unhappy airline employees. Deliver me from the guy who’s mad at his boss and is in charge of making certain all the bolts are tight for the flight to Omaha.

      I’ve been saying this for years and nobody will listen to me, but maybe now, with all the frightening things that are going on in the airline industry, somebody will.

      Bring back the train!

      All we’ve got now in this country as a passenger rail system is the government-subsidized Amtrak that is far behind the systems of other countries. So much so, it is an embarrassment.

      The French and the Germans and the Japanese know something about passenger trains. They run them at speeds over two hundred miles per hour and very few of them ever get hijacked, rerouted during bad weather, or canceled because there’s nobody to drive them.

      We need an alternative to air travel. Driving is unsafe and tiresome, and if you want to ride the bus, you’ll get a seat next to some guy with a bad cough and there’s nowhere to go to get away from him.

      But a train. If the French can build one that runs smoothly at two hundred miles an hour, certainly we can.

      Let’s say you are traveling from Chicago to Atlanta. That’s about seven hundred miles.

      To fly, you have to get to O’Hare from the Loop, which is a pain and costs you. You leave at 4:00 PM for a 5:30