Andy Rooney_ 60 Years of Wisdom and Wit - Andy Rooney [68]
There is so much evidence that there’s more than one kind of intelligence that we can relax, believing that we have a lot of the less obvious kind. I prefer to ignore the possibility that someone with a higher I.Q. than mine might also have more of the second kind of intelligence. One person should not be so lucky as to have intelligence of both the brain and the heart.
I wish there was some way to decide who the five smartest people are in the world because I’ve always wanted to ask them the five hardest questions. I haven’t decided who the five smartest people are and I haven’t settled on all five questions, either.
Directions 145
One question I’ve considered for my list is this:
“Are people smarter than they were a thousand years ago?” It’s a hard one. Athletes are running faster, jumping farther and lifting heavier weights. This suggests our brains must also be performing better.
On the other hand, are our eyes and ears any better than the eyes and ears of the Romans who watched the lions eat the Christians in the year 200 a.d.? Probably not. My guess would be that our eyes and our ears haven’t changed for better or for worse except as we abuse them through misuse.
If our eyes and ears haven’t changed in size or improved in performance, the chances are our brains haven’t either. I forget when they invented the wheel but did it take any less intelligence to invent the wheel centuries ago than it took this century to invent the windshield wiper, the ballpoint pen or the toaster oven?
It must have been 2:30 before I finally fell asleep.
Directions
E arly next year I’m going to take a week off and read the directions for all the things I’ve bought that came with the warning read directions carefully before operating.
There’s no sense reading directions to something before you understand a little bit about it, because they don’t mean anything to you. You have to know enough about something to be confused before directions help. Once I’ve pressed some wrong buttons or tried to open something by pressing on it when I should have been pulling on it or sliding it sideways, then I can understand the directions.
I have a whole box of directions I’ve never read. Many of them are still in their plastic wrappers. When Christmas comes again, I’ll probably be getting more. Last Christmas my kids gave me a new camera. I’ve shot ten rolls of film with it and I’ve made about all the mistakes there are to be made. It will be fun now to see if the directions have any good suggestions.
It is always surprising to me to see how many issues divide our population almost in half. For example, I think it’s safe to say that we are about evenly divided between people who read directions before operating, as they’re warned to do under threat of death, and people who don’t ever read the directions. The same people who don’t read the maps in the glove compartments of their cars are the ones who don’t pore over the instructions for operating their new washing machine or video cassette player.
My wife drives a Saab and during the three years we’ve had it, I’ve used it a dozen times. For the life of me I can’t figure out how the heater works. I almost froze last winter driving into the city one day. This summer I drove in with it on a hot day and fussed with the controls the whole hour trying to get the air conditioning to work. That night I complained to my wife about how complicated the controls were. I said I was going to read the directions about how to work the air conditioning.
“Forget it,” she said. “It doesn’t have air conditioning.”
In spite of some bad experiences, I’m a firm believer in the trial and error method of learning. If I were asked to take the space shuttle into outer space, I’d first want to climb on board and start fooling with the controls before I read anything about it. If I do read the directions about something before I know a single thing about