There is nothing like a male (guys) ["slippery spleens" LoL)

Our first example of guys doing stuff comes from the University of Washington Daily, which recently published a report written by Jeremy Simer and sent in by alert reader Donna Bellinger, headlined, ''Fraternity Game Turns Into Arrest.'' What happened, according to this report, was that some guys were up on the roof of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity house, and, as guys will do when they spend any time together in an elevated location, they began sharing their innermost feelings.

I am, of course, kidding. These guys, being guys, began dropping things off the roof, starting with smaller items, and eventually escalating -- this is when the police were summoned -- to a chair and a rowing machine.

A fraternity member is quoted as follows: ''We're frat guys. What can you say?''

Far be it from me to indulge in sex stereotyping here, but I am willing to bet that the reaction of you readers to this story is divided along gender lines, as follows:

The simple truth is that guys have this overpowering urge to watch stuff fall and crash. If you ever see an inappropriate object, such as a piano, hurtling toward the Earth from a great height, you can be virtually certain that guys are responsible.

Ask yourself this question: If you were standing in the middle of a bridge spanning a magnificent wilderness gorge, at the bottom of which was a spectacular whitewater river, what would you do?

Yes, the truth is that there are few things that a guy enjoys more than proudly watching a gob of spit -- his spit; spit that he produced -- falling a tremendous distance. This is a male impulse that females frankly cannot relate to, just as males cannot relate to the female impulse to go into greeting-card stores and spend hours shopping for greeting cards even when there is no particular occasion or person you need to send a greeting card to, which is what women frequently do when guys are out spitting.

I am not suggesting here that all guys ever do is drop stuff. Sometimes they also throw stuff, and sometimes this can lead to trouble. I have in my possession an official U.S. government memorandum, sent to me by an alert but anonymous reader, that was written by Paul E. Thompson, acting director, Western Region, Inspection Operations, Food and Safety Inspection Service, U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Here is the first paragraph of this memorandum, which I absolutely swear I am not making up:

'This is to remind all personnel of the danger and inadvisability of engaging in activities commonly referred to as 'Horseplay.' A few examples of horseplay include, but are not limited to: throwing spleens, squirting water and flipping lymph nodes.''

In professional journalism, we have an old saying that we frequently say, which goes like this: ''You do not print a story about federal employees engaging in horseplay involving spleens or lymph nodes without making a sincere effort to get the other side.'' So I contacted the USDA's Western Region office, which is located -- and let this be a lesson to those who claim that the federal government is poorly managed -- in the West.

I spoke with Dr. Bruce Kaplan, a public affairs specialist, who explained that, ''on rare occasions,'' poultry and meat inspectors, as well as plant employees, will become bored and flip meat and poultry organs at each other.

(He did not specifically state that these were guys doing this, but some things go without saying.)

''In the poultry plants, they will flip spleens,'' explained Dr. Kaplan. ''In the red-meat plants, they will flip lymph nodes.''

Dr. Kaplan stressed that ''there is absolutely no danger in terms of food safety.'' The problem, he said, is the safety of plant workers: ''When they walk on the floor where these organs fall, they could slip.''

In hopes of making the public more aware of the potential danger, I asked Dr. Kaplan to describe a poultry spleen.

''These are little small spleens,'' he explained. ''They're tiny little slippery spleens.''

1. First and foremost, ''Slippery Spleens'' would be an excellent name for a rock band.

2. Although it has become fashionable to knock ''big government,'' we must not forget that, without the quick and decisive action by the USDA in the form of acting director Thompson's memorandum, the ordinary public, in the form of food-plant workers, would have no protection from the threat of slipping on organs flipped by USDA inspectors.

3. If the USDA ever has a shortage of inspectors, it should definitely consider recruiting members of Theta Delta Chi.

You need to get the book. An excerpt from Dave Barry's A Complete Guide to Guys:

This is why I believe that Nobel Peace Prize Handing Out Committee should consider giving a large cash award to the guys belonging to the Chicagoland Corvair Enthusiasts club, for their pioneering efforts in the area of making vacuum cleaners explode.

I am not making up these efforts: I have personally viewed them on a wonderful videotape that was sent to me by Larry Claypool and Kirk Parro, who are members of the Chicagoland Corvair Enthusiasts.

(Perhaps you are thinking that people who are enthusiastic, in an organized way, about Corvairs are perhaps - to use a psychological term - several drawers shy of a file cabinet. Let me assure you that you are correct.)

Here's the background: One day Claypool and Parro were reading a publication called Corsa Communique, which is the official magazine of the Corvair Society of America, and they came across an article headlined:

VACUUM CLEANERS AND SIPHONS DON'T MIX

The article was written by a person named Chess Earman, who recounted what happened once when he was trying to siphon the gasoline out of one of his four Corvairs. He didn't want to get gasoline in his mouth, so he decided to get the suction going by holding the end of the siphon hose up against a vacuum cleaner hose. What this meant, of course, is that he was sucking gas fumes directly into an electric motor, which as you know operates by having sparks fly around inside it. So the next thing Chess Earman knew, there was an explosion inside the vacuum cleaner, and fire was coming out of the back of it "like a jet engine."

Fortunately Earman was able to unplug the vacuum cleaner before anything really bad happened. But this was indeed a chilling cautionary story about the extreme danger of messing around with gasoline and vacuum cleaners, and when Larry Claypool and Kirk Parro read it their natural reaction, as guys, was : Hey, cool.

"Such a challange must not go unmet." is how they put it in a letter to me.

And thus it came to pass that, for a number of years during the 1980s, the big attraction at the annual Fourth of July picnic of the Chicagoland Corvair Enthusiasts was the Flaming Vacuum Cleaner competition. I wish you could see the videotape, because it is difficult for me, using mere words, to convey the full flavor of the event. But I will try.

Each year, contestants brought vacuum cleaners, which were grouped into teams under signs denoting their brands (TEAM HOOVER, TEAM ELECTROLUX, etc.). One by one, these vacuum cleaners were brought out into the competition arena where they were introduced by an announcer over the public-address system. The vacuum cleaner nozzle would be placed in a shallow pan of gasoline. Then everybody would retreat to a safe distance, and the vacuum cleaner would be plugged in to a power source, causing the motor to start so the gasoline was being sucked in through the nozzle.

Usually nothing happened for a few seconds: then there'd usually be a BANG and the vacuum cleaner would jump a few inches into the air. This always got a cheer from the crowd. Various things would happen next, depending on the vacuum cleaner,. Some models would emit a cloud of black smoke and stop running, causing the crowd to boo. But other models would send out a jet flame shooting several feet out the back for several seconds. A few hardy models kept running for several minutes: the longer they'd run the more the crowd would cheer, encouraged by the announcer. Sometimes the flames would stop and inevitably you'd hear somebody - it always sounded like the same guy, a guy who has been drinking a lot of beer - shout "MORE GAS!" Certain canister models - these were the most popular with the crowd, getting wild cheers of approval - would explode violently apart with the tops flying up and out of the camera's range of view.

"The canister tops often exceeded altitudes of thirty feet." report Claypool and Parro.

After each contestant was finished, it would be dragged off and dumped onto a growing, smoking mound of charred and mangled machinery, and the announcer would say something nice about it, such as, "Not bad, Electrolux Number Two!" or "Let's hear it for the Eureka!"

On tape, between contestants, you occasionally see women walk past in front of the camera, on their way to get some more potato salad or something: they sometimes look at the guys, who are working industriously away the way guys do when they're on a Mission, getting another vacuum cleaner ready for action, and the women shake their heads in such a way as to clearly indicate that, yes, they knew guys could be idiots, but they had never realized that guys could be idiots of this magnitude.

Again, these women did not understand that the Flaming Vacuum Cleaner competition was, in fact, a relatively positive activity for guys to engage in - that if the guys didn't have this outlet, they could easily become involved in something with far more serious consequences. I am sure that none of us wants to pick up our morning newspaper and read the headline that says CHICAGO FEARED VAPORIZED IN MISHAP INVOLVING EXPERIMENTAL NUCLEAR-POWERED CORVAIR.

No, the Flaming Vacuum Cleaner competition was probably a good thing. I want to stress, however, that it was also a very dangerous thing, not to be attempted by amateurs. Remember that the guys who did it were not ordinary, untrained civilians: They were Corvair enthusiasts. And they took certain critical safety precautions, such as rigging up a public address system. You must remember that gasoline and vacuum cleaners do not mix, and under no circumstances should you attempt to do anything like this yourself. And if you do, please let me know where you are.

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