Men Are Stupid, Women Are Crazy: The Best Of Ruehl

By Peter Ruehl

Ruehl's irreverent wit and ability to puncture pretentiousness with a well-turned phrase gave thousands of dedicated readers a good reason to read the paper back to front on the days the column appeared.

His descriptions of growing up with teenage children are laugh-out-loud funny (well, for parents), and a younger generation of readers decided he was cool, with his constant satirical references to their music, dress and approach to life. Politicians sometimes winced but knew his hilarious descriptions of what was really going on in Canberra resonated more loudly than any press release. Peter Ruehl never lost his distinctive American style but he was able to understand Australian culture and to write about it and his views in a passionately funny and deeply personal way. Greg Hywood, chief executive of Fairfax, says he became a ‘national institution’.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Oct 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9780522861136

Book preview

Foreword

In September 1983, Peter Ruehl knew little about Australia beyond a belief that the Australians might just have a shot at winning the America’s Cup in Newport, Rhode Island, that year. He convinced his editors at The Baltimore Sun that he should temporarily leave his position as a political and legal reporter and revert to more enduring passions—writing about sailing and having fun. I met him on the press boat during the first race. As the new Washington correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald, I was looking for a friendly face to explain yacht manoeuvres. I never did get to understand much about sailing but I immediately appreciated his sense of humour and his ability to enjoy life. The wedding came just over a year later.

Pete quickly discovered his Australian wife came with a complicated family, a lot of friends and a whole new culture as ready targets for his jokes. The material only multiplied after he was persuaded to move to Perth, the other side of the world from his beloved hometown of Annapolis, Maryland, to cover the 1987 America’s Cup for the Australian Financial Review. This was an even bigger shift in personal terms.

Pete had always been a man who stuck fast to his routines and never strayed far from his favourite bar, McGarvey’s, and a small, eccentric group of friends and relaxed way of living in a beautiful and historic small town on Chesapeake Bay. Annapolis is only an hour from Washington, DC, but several time zones away from what Pete called DC’s ‘uptightness’. He loved his life. He was particularly suspicious of my tendency to be what he disparagingly referred to as an SYJ—serious young journalist. But he got over it.

I think Pete was able to leave the US partly because he was so confident about what he took with him: his own strong sense of himself, his humorous view of the world and his ability to live so happily in his rich imagination. Besides, the move away was only supposed to last a maximum of two years. I promised. Instead, the journey lasted—with regular trips ‘back home’—a quarter of a century. Along the way, Peter Ruehl became a remarkable chronicler of everything from Australian politics to the perils of parenthood to the differences between the sexes. He developed a unique and very funny take on all of it.

Politicians of all varieties came to realise that Peter Ruehl could skewer them far more effectively than any ‘proper’ journalist. But it was always done with a deft touch that left them laughing (mostly) despite themselves. That was because Peter Ruehl had a quick mind but a very big heart. He would always joke that he was an 18-year-old trapped in an older person’s body. As usual, he was underplaying his own particular version of intellectual sophistication. It was more that the youthful enthusiasm for small pleasures never left him. He loved the inanities and insanities of everyday living, regularly reporting on them as minor miracles of the absurd, which so appealed to him and to his readers.

From the beginning, one of his favourite sayings was ‘Men are stupid and women are crazy’. I was never sure who should be more insulted: him or me. His (growing) family became used to the idea that their lives and habits would become familiar to readers who experienced the more hilarious—and embarrassing—moments along with them. Readers would often laugh out loud as they devoured his columns, an unusual reaction to most newspaper articles, especially those in the AFR. It was part of a very personal response to a man who made so many people who had never actually met him feel part of an extended family, with all its foibles and mini dramas.

Our children, Mercedes, John and Tom, had their births, their schooling, their eating habits, their teenage years, their friends and their relationships with both parents related and dissected with a humour that they only belatedly came to appreciate. His relatives and friends also often discovered after the event that they had been useful as column material. And by then it was once again too late. Even the champagne-sipping, card-playing activities of my female friends became infamous as the hard partying Catholic Mothers’ Association.

I gave up any attempts at pre-censorship early on—trusting to the idea that he had too good a sense of survival to take things TOO FAR, PETE. Sometimes, I was wrong. But over all those decades of marriage, I had only reluctantly begun to accept that changing Peter Ruehl into an idealised version of a normal husband and father was just never going to be possible. Instead he remained stubbornly, lovably himself, immune to my well-intended reform measures and strong hints about the need to get up earlier and be more active. He would just use all of it as further evidence that the vagaries of life existed to be enjoyed—and written about. Our children, post the embarrassment stage, came to see that too.

Using fiendishly clever techniques of passive resistance that a succession of editors at various papers never quite grasped, Pete also managed to convince them that he really worked best from home—in his own time and in his own way. It kept him out of their way in the office and them out of his at home. It also meant he could let his imagination wander in whichever zany direction occurred to him as he stared out to sea from his study. He would jot down funny lines as they occurred to him, often while he was sunbaking in the deckchair by the pool. ‘Workin’ hard out here,’ he’d retort to raised eyebrows—usually mine—about how long he could stay lounging around when there was work to be done. His preferred pattern, perfected over years, was to read the morning papers at the much renovated kitchen bench, retreat to his study or the deck for the afternoon and then take off for a slow run along the beachfront. That would be followed, as night follows day, by a re-emergence downstairs, immaculate in one of his 300 Polo shirts and long white shorts and favourite loafers, ready for a sturdy gin and tonic or three in the early evening. I would come home from work, usually still chatting on the phone, to find him laughing about how much a woman could talk and making suggestions about ‘firing up the grill’ for dinner. And by the way, why hadn’t the kids put out the damned bins—and how could they possibly dirty so many dishes? It was a formula that worked for him brilliantly, both professionally and personally.

Most of the columns in this book are from his many years at the AFR. Some are from his few years at News Ltd. Fairfax CEO Greg Hywood said that Pete had worked for two great media groups in Australia but had developed into his own national institution. And so he had. But Pete would never have put it like that. He was horrified at any suggestion of taking himself too seriously. If others did and became offended, he just used to joke appreciatively that his fans would come out for him. And they did, in their legions, writing, phoning and emailing him. But also, most importantly to Pete, reading him and laughing.

We decided to put out this book of some of Pete’s best columns in response to that. Pete would have loved that too. He died suddenly and completely unexpectedly at home on 11 April 2011. My sister Jan Trainer took over the running of an always chaotic house to help get the family through the abrupt absence of a man who was always there. Pete’s sister Mercedes came to share her glorious memories of an imaginative American boy who grew up to surprise and delight us all. His great buddy Ted Coltman could only come for two days, but he still flew from Washington, DC, to acknowledge our mutual loss. His friends from Annapolis mourned the loss of someone they still thought of as only temporarily missing from his natural habitat. The local paper declared there would always be a bar stool at McGarvey’s for Peter Ruehl. The expanded Catholic Mothers’ Association, as fearlessly predicted by Pete, came through with everything from food to champagne to laughter along with the tears. Our friends who are journalists, especially Pam Williams, Marian Wilkinson, Colleen Ryan and Judith Hoare, helped me pull together a fraction of the vast number of columns written over so many years. Being able to read through them is a gift—a gift of looking though a window again on a wonderful, crazy life with this man we so miss. And his old friend Otis—yes, he is real but his official name is John Healy—called from Annapolis to lament that he had never made it down to Australia as planned, given Pete had made him so (in)famous. Otis is determined to come, he promises. As Pete would—and always did—say, let the good times roll.

Jennifer Hewett

Contents

Family

Life

Politics

Family

© David Rowe/Australian Financial Review

Fatherhood is anything but child’s play

1 November 1993

As you’re probably aware, I’m a family kind of guy, meaning of course that like many of you other family guys out there, I’m basically a single guy who woke up one day with a wife and the cast of Oliver in my bedroom.

Whoops, I can hear you ladies out there unsheathing the carving knives your ex-boyfriends gave you as wedding presents. I didn’t mean that first paragraph the way it sounds, although you guys can take it pretty much however you want

It’s just that for those of us who married and had kids a little later in life (and there are quite a few of us; statistics show that in ten years most teenagers’ fathers will be heavily involved in the consumer end of the Fixodent business), this can be a rude awakening. When we actually do get married and have kids we’re not ready for the responsibilities, whereas people who got married in their early 20s handled the situation much better by sending out for yeeros and scrounging off their parents.

Anyway, when you have small children, you quickly learn that it’s not just enough to feed them, clothe them and assist them in performing certain bathroom functions that involve twice the kids’ weight in toilet paper. I suspect that some guys get out of that stuff, like Prince Charles or Richard Nixon.

But another requirement is that you’re supposed to do lots of stuff with your kids, such as taking them places, so that they have a father figure around and don’t turn out like Elton John or Ross Perot or end up as a guest on Oprah Winfrey. This is supposed to show them how much you care for them and want to share stuff, although if cleaning the equivalent of 100 pounds of mulch off them every week doesn’t get the message across, I don’t know what does.

Me, I’m lucky, because I work from home and see my kids all the time. ALL the time, GEDDIT? I mean, we have a babysitter and all, but that doesn’t prevent them from breaching my crack security system and, say, getting logged into my laptop as one of them did last week and consequently it took me 15 minutes to erase approximately 1.3 million js from this cretin computer of mine.

But my wife’s been bugging me about family outings, so for the past couple of Sundays we’ve spent the morning at this beach near us. It’s called Bronte Beach, and unlike Bondi—which I prefer, because I get the feeling there’s a fair amount of drugs around—Bronte on Sundays is kind of like what you’d get if you brought the ocean to the annual Our Lady of Lourdes parish picnic.

Well, with a few exceptions. For one, most of the families with little kids look like the types who wouldn’t let their sons play with real live toy guns for fear they end up like another Charlie Manson or Burt Reynolds. I think that may have been why my wife firmly advised me to leave my six-pack in the car. Everybody was drinking cappuccinos—at 10.30 in the morning, no less.

But these little outings have been enjoyable and certainly bonding. I’ve learnt how to play in the sand and the children have learnt how to show respect for Mr Wave, because if they don’t, Mr Wave may grab them and take them to a horrible place called New Zealand.

And yesterday we learnt how to make really funny noises by popping as many of the 8000 bluebottle jellyfish that thoughtfully had come in with the last tide. Not to mention how much fun it is to chase your peers with a dead bluebottle and a beer can.

My general recollection, though, is of a mixture of sand and sugar that materialises just after a mother has bought ice cream and candy bars for small children at the beach. Not to mention the fact that this is just the stuff to get their little metabolisms really primed for those afternoon naps.

But what the heck. Don’t take my word for it. Come on down to Bronte next Sunday. I’m bringing gin and tonic in a mineral water bottle this time.

It’s quite a scene when Merce comes in

12 November 1993

So my sister Mercedes is in Australia this week hyping her movie, Lost in Yonkers, which is an adaptation of a Neil Simon play, and if you don’t see it, I’ll come over and break your legs.

Sorry, just a little tense, is all. When Auntie Merce comes to town, the noise levels in my house hit Springsteen encore territory. Three small children, whose voices in unison can sound like Edith Piaf getting a root canal over a public-address system, can crank it up even further when somebody who has absolutely no interest in discipline shows up with $2.3 million in toy trucks, dollhouse furniture and Coco Chanel’s spring collection for Barbie dolls.

This is great for Mercedes (my sister—as opposed to Mercedes my daughter. The past week, whenever I’ve shouted the name out in the house, I get ‘What?’ in two-part harmony that sounds like Richard and Karen Carpenter on gin). That’s because Merce gets to leave at night due to the fact that her minders have put her up in a really neat hotel which features, among other things, no children and a bar.

My sister actually has adapted fairly well to my current lifestyle. When I was single, she’d visit and not have to deal with much other than a few tequila bottles and beer cans rolling around, pretty much non-stop music and 24-hour cable news and my friend Otis. (He and I had keys to each other’s places in case of emergencies.)

But I mean, from her standpoint, that was more of a good time than an imposition. I think. Otis says we never got the recognition we deserved for broadening her dramatic horizons, although I don’t know how much an acting career is enhanced by watching two beanheads getting fried for the weekend and trying to sail a boat without destroying the Maryland coastline.

Anyway, Merce now has some real obstacles to put up with when she visits, such as those little metal cars and trucks that blend in with any carpet pattern known to man. When you step on one of those babies in your bare feet, you frequently teach your kids a whole lot of new words.

Due to some of the substances Otis and I were consuming in those days, we had pretty hearty appetites, but now my sister gets to see what it’s like to get dinner down the throats of four- and three-year-olds who have decided the only food they’re going to eat until they’re 35 or so is bananas. The two of them are going to start smelling like daiquiris in a month or two if this keeps up.

The result is that ‘dinner’ goes on forever. It’s what it would have been like to get invited to the White House for dinner while Reagan was President only you had to dawdle for two hours over a meat pie. After the first night of this, I could see the ‘cute’ factor was diminishing in my sister’s eyes.

As an added attraction for an adult with jet lag, we also have some toilet training going on. Hey, wait a minute—don’t look at me! It’s Jack, the three-year-old. While Jack has the general concept under control, we still have a few problems with putting it into practice—kind of like Clinton’s foreign policy. When it backfires, you need a UN peacekeeping team to clean it up. But like I say, Merce has adjusted well to all this. She’s learnt to leave the Armani back at the hotel and show up in combat fatigues and foul weather gear for bath time, although she rejected my suggestion of side-arms.

Merce has a couple more days of this before she heads back to the peace and quiet of downtown Manhattan. The kids are going to miss her so much that I’m thinking of sending them back with her for tactical toilet training. It’ll give me time to figure out why she never asked Otis for a date.

A moving experience I can do without

8 April 1994

I recently re-entered the housing market, which is another way of saying that my wife, after a two-year lull in her real-estate activity, broke out in hives and the situation could not be cured until we bought another house.

I don’t know what it is about some women. You finally get settled in a house that you already know you didn’t need in the first place. You’re at the point where you can get up in the middle of the night for an emergency, such as drinking scotch, without bumping into anything (except for stepping on tiny toy-car parts, which are lethal as hell and should be used to line the streets in Bosnia because they’d stop the war faster than 103 UN weenie peacekeeping forces).

More importantly, you can find your house, which in Sydney, where I am pretty sure I live, can be a real challenge, in that the city was laid out in 1788 by 50 thirsty cows on amphetamines.

You get to know your neighbours, such as which ones mow their lawns all the time and are probably religious fanatics too. Plus they get used to you. You’d be surprised at how many people out there take a little time getting accustomed to Velvet Underground at 3 a.m.

But after two years some alarm goes off in my wife’s head that if we don’t buy another house, we’ll be locked out of the housing market forever, which would be fine by me because then we could buy a boat and live on it. Kids like camping out, so ours could live up on deck for the next 15 years.

Actually, I inadvertently started it this time by casually remarking that our current house might be a little small at some stage in the future. By ‘casually’, I mean I was half in the bag at the time, and by the future, I meant five years or so—not right damn now.

Anyway, this got her going to the extent that every Saturday we needed an Ollie North–type shredder to get rid of all the ads she’d cut out of papers with names like the Wentworth Real Estate Thing with a Few Regular Articles Tossed in so You Can Call It a Local Paper. I refused to go along to most of them, based on the principle that you can’t drink beer and play the stereo when you’re looking at other peoples’ houses.

But she finally found one that she really liked and dragged me around to see it. I was relieved because it was so nice that I knew I couldn’t afford it (I wish she’d get this way about cars), but we went to the auction to bid on it just in case.

I hate these auctions. When you go to one, it’s kind of like being at war with Ross Perot, plus it’s easy to get swept up in the bidding, which is what we did and how we have just managed to purchase a house for $10.8 million or so. I forget. I’ll leave the numbers to my wife. I’m too busy teaching her how to stick up 7-Elevens.

We did have some assistance. Our real-estate person, Crack Agent Maureen, helped us with the bidding or else we’d probably have bought a service station in Sarajevo. She made sure we didn’t also buy the house next door.

Oh, I forgot to mention: we haven’t exactly sold our current house yet. I figure, with my luck, it’s now worth about $159.50, but I figure if I ask for $10.8 million I might get a few bucks more. There have got to be a few people out there as dumb as I am or else the Stones wouldn’t still be making albums.

So my joint is going to auction, meaning I’ve had to reinstitute my home filing system and clean out about three months’ worth of serious drinking from my study. Crack Agent Maureen says the place has to look as though human beings live there.

Bring along a copy of this column. I’ll knock five bucks off my price.

Farewell to my kind of Aussie bloke

4 May 1994

For some reason, there’s this general rule that you’re not supposed to get along too well with your father-in-law, the idea being that you took his little girl away from him, when in reality in most cases you’ve relieved him of a major economic outlay and freed up his telephones.

The other thing is that most fathers think their sons-in-law aren’t good enough for their daughters. I mean, just because you drink beer all the time and listen to Van Morrison full blast at 3 a.m. isn’t something to get judgemental about, you’d think. Well, my father-in-law didn’t. We were the exception to the rule. We didn’t just get along. We got along great.

About ten years ago, I’d just met him when I’d come down to Australia on my honeymoon. He and I were driving around Perth and I was looking out of the car window, and I observed how attractive Australian girls were. ‘And you had to marry the first one you met,’ he said. I’m gonna like this guy, I thought.

Anyway, Warren Hewett, my father-in-law, died two days ago, and I’ve lost a friend I never expected to have. And a lot of people in Perth are going to find that their lives aren’t quite the same any more.

Warren was the first and best example I’ve seen of that older generation of Aussie male that’s now fading away because of immigration, global communications and Gucci loafers. Don’t get me wrong about immigration; I’m all in favour of it. It’s just that a side effect is that you’re not going to get too many gems like Warren Hewett coming around in the future.

A beer- and scotch-drinking, football-clubbing, amateur-philosophising, bush-exploring guy is what he was. A royal commission into his business deals was his way of saying g’day. And like lots of those guys, he professed not to understand females when in reality he knew them perfectly well. But if he’d let on, he never would have gotten away with half the antics he pulled off.

On our honeymoon, my wife and I spent a week at Rottnest Island, this resort a few miles off the west coast from Perth. This also involved sharing a house with my mother-in-law (Warren’s ex-wife), sister-in-law, her husband and their 10 000 children. It turned out on closer count there were only two, but this was, after all, a honeymoon.

Warren came over for two nights, and on the first, he and I got into a long conversation which involved a bottle of scotch as a major player.

Rottnest has these indigenous animals called quokkas, which are half rat, half kangaroo and are about two feet high. They only come out at night and Warren wanted to show me how tame the things are, so we spread a little bread on the floor of the living room and left the door open, the result being a dozen of them showed up. They ate the bread while Warren and I were discussing the finer points of Reaganomics, but when we ran out of scotch we got rid of them and went to bed (read ‘passed out’). You will be really surprised to hear that we forgot to shut the door. It turned out the quokkas came back later, they deposited the bread crumbs, now in the form of quokka brown flowers, all over the floor. I awoke with a hangover to the sound of my mother-in-law, in a fairly high tone of voice for that hour of the morning, saying, ‘This is what I got a divorce for.’ Warren and I couldn’t see what the big deal was.

Over the years, we developed that kind of friendship where you can just pick up where you left off without a lot of hassles over who called or didn’t call. If he disapproved of anything I ever did or said, he never mentioned it.

His only son and the apple of his eye, who would have been my brother-in-law, died when he was only 17. His name was John, and my wife and I named our first son after him. It was something that Warren also wanted. I’ve tended to call the boy Jack, an American custom, while my wife’s family always call him John. All except Warren, who also called him Jack. That’s when I finally figured Warren out. Jack, who’s too young to know what’s been going on the past few days, will read this piece someday.

I also figured I’d better not write something like this until after Warren died. He’d have killed me.

No need to be namby-bambi, no kidding

9 May 1994

With my wife being away for the past ten days or so, I’ve had the three kids, aged four and a half, three and a half and one and a half. It’s been one of those heartwarming adventures slightly reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs, and I hope the people who made the killing on my house at $99.95 don’t mind some of the additional renovation work we’ve thrown in.

I have to admit I’ve had help with babysitting but I can’t dwell on it and embellish this at the same time. Besides, the only kind of child care that’s adequate for this kind of situation is to have the entire cast of Play School camped out in your backyard 24 hours a day. Memo to cast: bring drugs. The days are long and the nights are short.

The first thing that happened was that the youngest, Tom, got sick, or at least I thought he was sick. He wasn’t eating normally, which in his case means he wasn’t eating enough pasta to choke Pavarotti (cleaning this kid up the next morning is like hosing down Chernobyl).

But he didn’t seem quite right, so I took him to the doctor, basically for two reasons. The first is that if he had been sick, he wouldn’t have enjoyed Chick Corea and Return to Forever as much as he did the previous night, when he punched out every pre-setting on the graphic equaliser. The second is that I was hoping the doctor might take one look at me and prescribe something that would go well with gin. It didn’t work and I just got the feeling she was trying to smell my breath.

Anyway, Tom checked out OK and it wasn’t until yesterday that he actually did get sick at lunch and power-barked his yoghurt. Fortunately, I wasn’t standing in front of him when this happened, because this kid can roll a bus with a direct hit.

As most of you other parents out there would know, dealing with human beings who think the get-down funniest thing in the world is having their pyjamas on backwards, let’s come right out and say it, boring. So you have to find ways of amusing yourself while keeping them amused at the same time. Being a bit of a twink yourself also helps.

Take Bambi. You can read Bambi to kids until you need a tonsillectomy and they’ll still want to hear it again. So you have to throw in a few new riffs. The kids don’t know you’re not reading what’s in the book. They trust you. Take advantage of this because in a few years they won’t believe you even when you’re telling the truth.

Thumper, for example. I’ve finally figured Thumper out. He’s on ecstasy. Toss that one into your version of Bambi and there’s no end to the creative fun you can have with your offspring.

The hunters? They don’t have names in the Disney story (just ‘Man’, which makes it sound as though Cher wrote it), but in my version, they’re Harvey Keitel, Charlie Manson and Bronwyn Bishop. Hey, come to think of it, that’s a great strategy Hewson could use against Wild Thing—say that she’d kill Bambi. Plus, it beats listening to the two of them snorking on about economics.

For physical activities, we’ve had the Budweiser Cup. This consists of a series of races involving pushing beer cans down the hall with sticks. Like its famous predecessor, the America’s Cup, you have to jockey around the starting line for position before the race actually begins, the result being lots of fights and protests, just like the real thing. I can tell you right now those Foster’s cans run like hell downwind but it’s hard to make them tack. Whatever they’re doing at Tooheys may be good, but somebody ought to be devoting a little time to upwind performance.

We’ve also had gin and tonic mixing lessons, Bo Diddley Appreciation Night and Fear and Loathing at Sesame Street.

Their mother comes home tonight. We should have the Bud Cup course cleared by then.

Weighty issues prove women really are crazy

14 September 1995

Today we are going to have one of our periodic discussions about the difference between the sexes, which we agreed was that men are dumb and women are crazy.

Well, we didn’t all exactly agree on this but in the absence of any contrary mail from Hugh Grant, Jacques Chirac and Germaine Greer, we feel our point is fairly unassailable. And, speaking as a male, we feel secure in saying, ‘You got a problem with that?’ It has come to our attention, after reading a recent newspaper article by somebody who does a lot more research than we do, that girls and young women are increasingly influenced by magazine advertisements which portray the ‘ideal’ female as being extremely slender. You know, ‘slender’ in the sense that Marilyn Monroe would have been considered a real porker.

This has always been kind of a mystery to us males. While we don’t usually go for the Queen Victoria look, we also don’t like the idea of dating a human tail pipe. This is how your top-drawer fashion model tends to appear, especially when the ‘waif’ look was in, which eventually fell from favour after fashion designers discovered Kate Moss was actually a 12-year-old Danish boy.

But the thrust of this article was that girls, being highly impressionable (which, experts say, is the first step towards being crazy), read all these magazines with stories aimed at the modern female teen, such as ‘How to Tune a VW and Avoid Pregnancies in 10 Easy Steps’. But that’s not the problem. The advertisements are. They have all these ultra skinny models spruiking everything from blue jeans to helicopter parts, and the reason for this is that fashion designers believe their clothes look best on coathangers. But since you can’t very well have an ‘action’ scene involving a coathanger unless you’ve been drinking for the better part of the afternoon, they do the next best thing and get a human who approaches the dimensions of a coathanger.

You women out there know what we are talking about. You go out and buy these clothes in what you think is your size, only to discover that they were never meant to accommodate a number of factors, such as breasts or a steak dinner. Ha-ha. The joke’s on you. That’s because the target audience for these products is rich European women whose diet consists of bean sprouts and cocaine, and a handful of guys in California.

We try not to be conspiracy oriented, but we are pretty sure these fashion designers get together on a yacht in the Mediterranean once or twice a year and figure out how to mess with you ladies’ heads. After about the twelfth round of vodkas, they come up with an outfit you could only squeeze the late Karen Carpenter into. ‘Let’s see them get into that!’ they scream with laughter. ‘It makes Cindy Crawford look like a shopping mall!’

Teenage girls are even more susceptible because they not only want the clothes, but also want to look just like the models. And the only way they’re going to get to look like those models is with some help from a chainsaw or by power-woofing the equivalent weight of meatloaf every day. This may of course be just a passing fad.

Many years ago, women aspired to the ‘Rubenesque’ look, after the European designer Bob Rubenesque. By today’s standards, these women would be considered fat, and while by the standards of that long-ago time they were also considered fat, people just liked fat people back then.

Finally, we should note that boys do not have this problem. That’s because boys are in the early-dumb stage of becoming men and are already sure that no matter what they look like, deep down they’re Keanu Reeves with a couple of zits that will be gone by tomorrow. Plus we don’t set our goals unrealistically high in the emulation stakes. Take sports, for example. Some of the best-known yachtsmen of our time couldn’t do two sit-ups without getting a hernia and double pneumonia, but who cares if the Levis are a little snug?

Being dumb. It really helps you sleep good.

Horse kicks bucket on the American dream

17 September 1996

My wife caused me to miss the Washington Redskins game on TV the other day. My wife wasn’t raised in America so I have to overlook the fact that she doesn’t realise Sunday afternoon football games have all the religious and legal implications of marriage.

There isn’t a male jury in the country that would have convicted me if I’d shipped the woman to Iraq in a ‘United Jewish Charities’ box. It’s in the Bill of Rights section of the Constitution, titled ‘Freedom to Drink Beer and Act Like a Jerk while 22 Guys Named Vern and Lamar Try to Dislocate Each Other’s Shoulders on Sunday’. The Founding Fathers were visionaries, plus they