My three-year-old son Malcolm is quite a smart young fellow. When he was around the age of two, he started recognizing the places that we frequented and can now, not only tell you the names of the places as we pass by, he can spell them as well. He is an expert when it comes to spelling such words as Wal-Mart, K Mart, Target, Food Lion, Radio Shack as well as many other retail chains. For Christmas, he was given a box of oversized chalk so that he could draw designs and whatnot out on the driveway. The driveway is now a free advertisement for all the major retail stores.

Malcolm had commandeered a pad of paper from an old game my wife and I have. He carefully tore individual sheets of paper from the pad and brought them to me, one at a time, and asked me to write a specific word on the paper. At one point he asked me to write the word "Sears" and I told him that I had already written that word for him.

Malcolm insisted, "Do it again Daddy."

"You want me to write 'Do it again?' I laughed.

"Do it again!"

I wrote the words "do it again" and handed him the paper. "What does that say?" I asked.

"Sears"

"No. It says 'do it again.'"

"No, it says 'Sears.'"

"No. It says 'do it again.'"

"Can you read what it says?"

"Then don't argue. It says 'do it again.'"

He seemed satisfied and I thought we were clear about the issue. A few minutes had passed when his mother walked by. She pointed at the paper and said, "What does that say Malcolm?"

He smiled, glanced at me and said, "Sears."

"Now Malcolm," I said, 'You know that's not what it says."

My wife looked puzzled as she said, "What do you think it says?"

Malcolm giggled as he showed me the paper. Written in my handwriting was a single word. "Sears."

A friend of mine is a state employee who works for the Marine Science Department of a major university. He repairs everything from boat motors to the electrical systems of delicate testing systems and occasionally gets to take a state owned bass boat out on a lake or river to submerge testing equipment. Recently, he stopped by my place of employment looking for a filter for a specialized marine instrument. "This device is constantly getting clogged with silt and we're looking for a material that will filter out some of the dirt from lake water."

"What does the unit test?" I asked.

"It checks for the concentration of ammonia nitrogen, phosphorus, nitrates and oxygen in the water."

"So, basically what you are saying is that it checks for fish spit."

"That's it."

According to the big yellow label, the unit was called a "Hydrochem Analyzer." My friend told me that the cost of the unit was around twenty thousand dollars. "I don't know why it's so expensive," he said. "It has a couple of small sensors, a little pump and a couple of small circuit boards. There just isn't much to it."

I pointed to the word "Hydrochem and said, "There's ten thousand." I pointed to the word Analyzer and said, "There's another ten thousand."

"Tell me something," I said to my friend. How often to you get paid for riding around in a boat?"

"Well, I don't always get to go out in the boat but when one of the usual guys can't go, they send me. I don't understand why they don't let me go more often. I always offer to buy the beer."

I said, "They probably don't want you to know where their fishing spot is."

"That reminds me of one time that we went out to retrieve an analyzer and as we were just getting into the boat, a guy walked up and started telling us that the fishing had been pretty good for him that morning. The guy looked in our boat and noticed the absence of any fishing rods. He just couldn't understand why we would get into a perfectly good bass boat without a fishing pole. He looked at us like we were crazy."

"What did you tell him you were doing?"

"When we pull one of the analyzers out of the water, we put it in a big tool box. We just pointed to the box and said, 'Actually we are going to do some fishing. This box is full of dynamite.' He just nodded his head and went on his way."

So the next time you go out to a nearby lake and happen to see a couple of guys getting into a bass boat with a big toolbox, ask them why they don't have any fishing rods. If they tell you they plan to do a little fishing with dynamite, tell them, "You can't fool me. Any idiot knows that that box is for a Hydrochem Analyzer for testing fish spit."

As I entered the infamously slow elevator on my way to the second floor drink machine, two maintenance guys entered as well. As I pushed the button for the second floor I asked, "What floor do you guys want?"

"Four please," was the reply. I promptly pushed the button for their desired floor.

I exited the elevator and walked the fifteen feet to the drink machine, fed it my money, received my beverage and returned to the elevator where I pushed the down button. The building only has four floors but the wait for the elevator was that of a lift in a high rise building. The doors opened and the same two maintenance technicians were on the elevator. "That must have been a quick fix or you guys are just riding the elevator," I said.

One of the gentlemen replied with, "We didn't get a chance to go to the carnival this year so riding the elevator is the next best thing. Besides, the admission is a lot less."

Later on in the day, I saw the same two fellows in the hall and asked them why they weren't still riding the elevator. One of the men said, "We would have ridden longer but we started to get sick."

Let this be a lesson to all you kids out there. Elevator riding isn't a game. It is a very serous business and should only be attempted be seasoned veterans like yourselves.

Since the mid 1970's when it was discovered that our ozone layer was being damaged by man made chemicals, scientists have been working to discover a way to reverse the process and repair the damage that has been done. Ozone depletion is a consequence of complicated occurrences and chemical reactions that stem from chemicals such as chlorofluorocarbons used for refrigeration, foam application and industrial cleaning. The ozone layer is the part of the stratosphere that protects us from the suns harmful ultraviolet rays, which can cause skin cancer, cataract damage and contribute to global warning.

Scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, DC have come up with a solution to the problem. Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, has been working closely with EPA scientists and believes that the solution is as simple as wrapping the atmosphere in cellophane.

"I got the idea," said MacDonald, "when I noticed how food stays fresh when wrapped in cellophane. I thought, 'Why couldn't this be used on a global scale?'"

In a recent press conference, the question of how he expected to keep the cellophane in place over the Earth was posed to MacDonald. "Massive amounts of duct tape and baling wire. Just like in industry," was MacDonald's answer.

Initial testing will begin with the ozone hole over Antarctica and will then spread to other areas of the globe. The project is reminiscent of a similar project ten years ago when scientists attempted to use plaster of paris to patch holes in the ozone layer. The experiment was abandoned when it was found that plaster of paris would totally block out the sun. In addition, major cities complained of massive fallout when millions of tons of plaster of paris fell to the ground during the drying process.