Summer vacations and summer not
by Mad Dog

    If you were lucky like Chelsea Clinton you got to travel on your summer vacation. While most of her classmates were working, taking summer classes, or trying to break the school record for the most consecutive beers consumed without being interrupted by food, Chelsea was having a perfectly yucky summer hanging around those boring old Camp David peace talks and going to Okinawa with Dad for the Group of Eight meeting. This shows just how different Chelsea is from the average college student—most of them think Group of Eight is the new TV spin-off of “Party of Five.” In fact, Chelsea’s Summer Tour ’00 went so well she’s taking the next semester off from Stanford University to represent the First Family at the Olympics in Sydney, Australia, to help Mom run for the Senate, and to screen Dad’s interns.

    While some people spent their summer meeting world leaders, others spent it trying to meet members of the opposite sex. Lots of them. In what may be an inspired merging of “Yentl” and “Beat The Clock”, Jewish singles have taken up SpeedDating. This is an A.D.H.D. mating ritual in which men and women gather in a room, spend seven minutes talking to each other, then move on to the next person at the sound of a bell. Think of it as musical chairs which hopefully leads to musical beds.

    Not everyone thinks a summer vacation should be all fun and dating, some like to be productive. That’s why it’s good to hear that at Georgia Tech (“Polytech wanna cracker?”) some people spent their summer licensing a so-called smart shirt they created. This is a shirt which measures your body characteristics and functions while you’re wearing it. Kind of a polygraph turned into a fashion statement. This means it won’t be long before we can buy the “Will He Ralph?” shirt from Mr. Lauren, a complete line of DKNY-EKG clothing, and Educated Guess jeans.

    Meanwhile, food researchers at Oklahoma State University (“We’re the bomb”) announced this summer that they figured out how to make individually wrapped slices of peanut butter. Hopefully they’ll spend next summer figuring out why they thought anyone would want it. And not to be left out, scientists at the University of Wisconsin (“It ain’t easy being cheesy”) say they’ve discovered that some forms of obesity may be caused by a cold-related virus.

    “Hey, it’s good to see you. Say, haven’t you put on a few pounds?”

    “Yes, I caught a fat a couple of weeks ago.”

    “Isn’t that incredible? We can put a man on the moon but we can’t cure the common fat.”

    That may be true, but it doesn’t mean startling discoveries haven’t been made this summer. Take Eva Brugeura of Palo Alto, California, who wrote a letter to the San Francisco Chronicle relating how she spent her summer: turning kitchen appliances on their side. In the process she discovered that by putting her toaster on its side bread was ready in a third of the time. Hopefully she’ll use some of the time she’s saving to clean up after her experiments making smoothies with the blender turned upside down.

    Inventors aren’t the only ones being productive this summer. The South Dakota state legislature spent part of theirs debating whether the German coffee cake kuchen should be the state dessert or whether it should be kolaches, a Czech pastry. In Iowa people flocked to Nehama to watch tractor square dancing. And in Philadelphia and Los Angeles they wore stupid hats and pretended every second of the infomercials—I mean, nominating conventions—weren’t scripted to the letter. Kind of makes you miss the days of playing, sleeping, being bored, and sulking for days because you didn’t get to ride the Puke-a-Whirl a fourteenth time at Expensiveland, USA, doesn’t it?

 ©2000 Mad Dog Productions, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
These columns appear in better newspapers across the country. Read them during your summer vacation.