Dave Barry's Money Secrets (18 page)

•                  Nosotros no tenemos tequila en nuestra nación de hogar de Scandinavia.
(We do not have tequila in our home nation of Scandinavia.)

•                  ¡Oye! ¡Hay un abigarrando GUSANO en esta botella!
(Hey! There is a freaking WORM in this bottle!)

•                  Usted mira un pleito grave, el señor.
(You are looking at a serious lawsuit, mister.)

•                  Yo no cuido si soy una tradición. Usted perderá sus calzoncillos.
(I don’t care if it’s a tradition. You are going to lose your undershorts.)

U
SEFUL
J
APANESE
P
HRASES

•
                  
(Where is the Internet?)

•
                  
(What the hell kind of food is this?)

•
                  
(You mean people actually EAT this?)

•
                  
(Do you have any entrées WITHOUT eyeballs?)

•
                  
(How do you pronounce this Japanese writing?)

•
                  
(Even in Scandinavia, which is where we come from, we are still a little ticked off about Pearl Harbor.)

U
SEFUL
C
HINESE
P
HRASES

•
                  
(Where is the Internet?)

•
                  
(We’re not from around here. We’re from Scandinavia, which is a completely different country from the United States.)

•
                  
(God, there’s like MILLIONS of you people.)

•
                  
(Seriously, how do you tell yourselves apart?)

•
                  
(I don’t get what’s so great about this wall.)

Traveling by Air

Airplanes have really changed the way we travel. In the old days, it could take you literally days to get from New York to Chicago. Now you can simply board a plane at one of the New York metropolitan area’s three convenient airports,*
 
⁵⁰
and in just a couple of hours, you will be informed that there is a problem with the warning light on the auxiliary deframbulation extrapolator, and the replacement part has to be brought in from Pittsburgh via canoe, so your flight will not be taking off during the current lunar cycle.

Mechanical delays happen a lot, because airplanes are gigantic complicated machines containing literally millions of parts. Nobody really understands how they work. Every time a flight takes off, the airline mechanics exchange high fives to celebrate the fact that (a) the plane actually got off the ground, and (b) they are not on it. A major reason why the pilots keep the cockpit door shut during flights is so you can’t see them thumbing through the airplane owner’s manual, trying to figure out what the hell all those instruments and switches
do.

In addition to mechanical problems, flights are often delayed by bad weather, as pilots often must divert the plane hundreds of miles from the planned route so that they can fly directly into violent storms and cause the plane to shake like a giant paint mixer. This is the only real fun pilots have. If they’re in a frisky mood, they’ll fly a plane through the same thundercloud four or five times.