                        LEFTIES GET THE FINAL KO PUNCH
                by Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning columnist



          I was  feeling  good  that  morning.    I  woke  up to the happy
     discovery that not  a  single  one  of  our major home appliances had
     broken during the night  and  we  still  had  running water, which is
     highly unusual in our household.    Then  I got both dogs all the way
     outside without getting the Weewee of Joy on my feet.  It looked like
     it was going to be a great day.

          Then, like a fool, I picked up  the newspaper.  You should never
     pick up a newspaper when you're feeling good, because every newspaper
     has  a  special  department,  called  the  Bummer  Desk,  which    is
     responsible  for   digging  up  depressing  front-page  stories  with
     headlines like *Doorbell  use  linked  to  Leukemia* and *Ozone layer
     completely gone directly over your house.*

          On this particular morning,  the  story that punched me right in
     the eyeballs was headlined:   *Lefties'  lives  shorter?   Study says
     so.* You probably read about this.    Researchers did a study showing
     that left-handed people live an average of  *nine  years*  less  than
     right-handed  people.    This  was very alarming to  me  because  I'm
     left-handed, along with 10 percent of the population, as well as many
     famous  historical figures such as Napolean, Leonardo da Vinci, Sandy
     Koufax, Speedy  Alka-Seltzer  and  Flipper.    President Bush is also
     left-handed, which has  raised  a  troublesome  constitutional  issue
     because every time he signs a bill into law he drags his hand through
     his signature and messes it  up.  Nobody knows whether this is legal.
     "This doesn't look like a signature,"  observed the Supreme Court, in
     one recent case.  "This looks like  somebody  killed  a spider on the
     federal Highway authorization Act."

          Because of the way we write, most of  us lefties go through life
     with big ink smears on the edges of our  left hands.  In fact, when I
     first saw the newspaper article about lefties dying sooner, I thought
     maybe  the  cause  would  be  ink absorption.  Or maybe it  would  be
     related to the fact that we spent our entire academic careers sitting
     with  our  bodies twisted clockwise so we could write on those stupid
     right-hand-only desks.   I have this daydream wherein the inventor of
     those desks is  shipwrecked on a remote island, and some natives come
     out of the jungle  and  he  waves  at  them  in  what  he thinks is a
     friendly manner, unaware that this  is the fierce Wagoondi tribe, and
     if you wave at them with your *left* hand, they treat you like a god,
     but if you wave with your right  hand, they play The Happy Snake Game
     with your intestines.


          Not that I am bitter.  Nor am  I  bitter  about  the fact that I
     always got bad grades in art class because I  couldn't  work scissors
     designed  for  right-handed people.  On Parents' Night, when all  the
     children's  art  projects were put on display, mine was the one  that
     looked as though the paper had been chewed to pieces by shrews.

          Nor am I bitter about gravy ladles.  And if you don't understand
     *why* I'm not bitter about gravy ladles, just try using one with your
     left hand.

          But  I  have  to  admit  that  I *am* a little bitter about this
     business of  dying nine years early.  According to the researchers, a
     major reason for  this is that left-handers have a lot more accidents
     than right-handers.  I  know  why  this  is:  We read books backward.
     Really.  When left-handers pick  up books, they tend to start reading
     from  the last page.  This  saves  us  a  lot  of  time  with  murder
     mysteries,  but  it's  a  bad  habit when  we're  reading,  say,  the
     instructions for operating a barbecue grill, and we begin with *"Step
     147:  ignite gas."*

          I  myself  have  always  been  accident-prone, especially when I
     attempt  to  use  tools designed for right-handed people, the extreme
     example being chain saws, which should not even be legal to  sell  to
     left-handers.    I had one back during the Energy Crisis, when I  had
     installed a  wood-burning  stove  in  our  fireplace  in an effort to
     reduce our energy consumption by covering the entire household with a
     thick, insulating layer of  soot.    Near our house was a large tree,
     which I realized could supply  our  soot needs for the better part of
     the winter.  So one day  I strode out and, drawing on my skills as an
     English major, started making strategic cuts designed  to  cause  the
     tree to fall away from the house.  I even called my wife out to watch
     the  tree  fall, and of course those of you  who  are  familiar  with
     situation comedies have already figured out what happened:  The tree,
     which  was clearly right-handed, fell in the *exact wrong direction,*
     chuckling audibly  all  the  way  down and missing the living room by
     maybe 6 inches.

          My wife, who  thought  I had *planned* to have the tree do this,
     said, "That was great!"  And  I  replied,  "Wurg,"  or  words to that
     effect, because my brain was busy trying to get my heart going again.
     Speaking of which:  Some scientists  think  that left-handed people's
     brains work completely differently from right-handed people's brains.
     I  read  an  article  once  that theorized that  left-handers  are  a
     different species from right-handers.  Isn't that silly?   As  if  we
     were *aliens* or something.  What nonsense!  Planet foolish this over
     take will we day one.
