My Kid Drew This

This is a portrait of me drawn by my son, who told me this: “Daddy? You know how you’re really smart? This is how smart you are.”

He has a gifted eye for this sort of thing; this is actually a scarily good likeness, right down to my stupid cowlick. I just can’t figure out how he knew about all those unpredictable, explosive bombs I’ve handled in my time. Like his mom.

WD40 and You

If you’re like me — you pretend to be handy, but you’re really kind of a klutz, and you look things up online before pretending to be able to fix them — you probably have a grab bag of tools kicking around. Really, though, you just need a few things.

Most basic home, garden and automotive repairs can be carried out with:

• A pair of vise-grips
• A multi-headed screwdriver
• A hammer and assorted nails
• A tube of super glue
• Duct tape
• WD40

Bear in mind that when I say “repair,” I mean “Put together in such a way that it will appear to be repaired until people have forgotten it was supposed to be fixed.” You know, like when you use toothpaste to reattach the broken piece of moulding in the bathroom. It’ll fall off next week, but by then you’ll have picked up some more super glue.

Anyway, John S. Barry, the inventor of Water Displacement Formula 40, or WD40, died this week. His name isn’t as well-known as his famous product, but I thought I’d share some great uses for the miracle spray. You’ve probably heard of these before … wash windows, fix distributors in cars, repel pigeons, cure arthritis. I was all set to craft a magical list of uses, by which I mean cut and paste some stuff. Then I saw this:

Snopes dissects WD40.

So it isn’t really fish oil after all. And it’s probably not going to protect you from fire ants. It’s still a useful product. If you don’t have a can of it, pick one up. It’ll come in handy the next time you have to remove duct tape from your skin. (Please don’t leave a comment explaining why you had duct tape on your skin. Yes, I mean you, “Chuck.”)