The Best of Andy Rooney

(This classic Andy Rooney column was originally published Dec. 26, 1996.)

The following things are true, or so I believe:

-- Nothing lasts forever, but some things in the refrigerator seem to.

-- There are more interesting stories to read in the newspaper than there is time to read them.

-- There is less than meets the eye on television.

-- If the dieticians who think of new weight-loss diets are so knowledgeable about food, why don't they tell us why it's so hard to stop eating peanuts once you start?

-- Most of us look better in a mirror than in a picture.

-- No matter how bad the city or state is that people live in, they like it there better than anywhere else.

-- Computers are amazingly complex, but people put a lot of dumb stuff into them. Computers may make it easier for someone to write, but they don't make the writing any better.

-- The one thing a computer does very fast is become outdated.

-- Further proof of the fact that hope springs eternal is everyone's anticipation that the mail will bring something wonderful, even though it almost never does.

-- Most cousins are distant.

-- It takes a long while to get to the end of the basketball, football or baseball seasons.

-- Ten percent of the people read 90 percent of the books sold in stores or borrowed from libraries.

-- Wider roads don't make travel easier; they attract more cars that make the wide roads more crowded than the narrow ones were.

-- Clothes that are supposed to be the same size often fit differently.

-- No matter what state you live in, it's not worth trying to call the Motor Vehicle Bureau.

-- It's difficult to resist the temptation to say things aren't as good as they used to be, even though, quite often, they're better.

-- As much as I like Christmas, there are some aspects of it I dread.

-- The idea of having a cup of coffee is usually better than the coffee.

-- They shouldn't call it a radio show when you can't see it. It's a radio tell.

-- The paper clip and the rubber band are hard to improve on.

-- Kids were the big losers when they started making tubeless tires for cars because they could no longer play with an inner tube when swimming.

-- If there are creatures living on other planets, they wouldn't be able to communicate with us. They probably don't even have faces.

-- Very few television shows are interesting enough to keep you awake when you're tired.

-- If I decided to start a business, I'd go into bottling water.

-- When I see someone smoking a cigarette, I think of an old saying my mother used: "He's more to be pitied than censured."

-- It would be good if we could close our ears the way we close our eyes. There are a lot of things most of us don't want to hear.

-- Coffee ice cream is getting harder to find.

-- It's surprising how many pictures you see of homely men with beautiful women.

-- Adam and Eve were lucky. They never had to go to dancing school.

-- When you want to plug something in, the electrical outlet is always behind or under something that you have to move or crawl under.

-- No one makes succotash anymore because they seem to have stopped growing lima beans.

-- Wine you can afford to buy is seldom worth drinking.

-- There are no magazines as wholesome as The Saturday Evening Post used to be. "Wholesome" is now equated with dull.

-- People don't whistle as much as they used to. It's a good thing, too. There's nothing more annoying than the sound of someone else whistling.

-- Jay-walking is illegal everywhere, but in some cities it's accepted and in others it's not. You can get arrested for it in Los Angeles, but New York would come to a halt if they stopped people from crossing against the light.

-- Very few people use semicolons.

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