“Clearly you need new furniture. To select exactly what you want, you need to have some Creative Decorating Ideas, which you get by purchasing about $65 worth of glossy magazines with names like Unaffordable Home Design. Inside these magazines will be exquisite color photographs of the most wondrously perfect, profoundly clean rooms anybody has ever seen, rooms where even the air molecules are arranged in attractive patterns. How, you ask yourself, can rooms look like this? Where are the hand smudges? Where is the dark spot on the carpet where the dog threw up the unidentified reptile? And how come there are never any people in these photographs?
    The answer is: These rooms are only four inches high. The magazines have them built by skilled craftsmen solely for the purpose of making your home look, by comparison, like a Roach Motel. In fact, occasionally a magazine will slip up, and you’ll see through the window of what is allegedly a rich person’s living room, what appears to be a 675-pound thumb.”
   
—Dave Barry, Subhumanize Your Living Room, from Dave Barry’s Greatest HIts, 1988.