several semesters at Stanford University graduate school, yet giving you the sense of security and well-being that comes from knowing that everyone in your neighborhood will be instantly alerted by a horrible ear-splitting noise whenever lightning strikes anywhere within 137 miles of your home. Invariably this will happen at night when you’re out of town, so that your neighbors will get to lie in bed, listening to the piercing sound, which is only fair because it makes up for all the nights when you had to listen to their burglar alarm systems.

I do not mean to suggest that burglar alarm systems go off only when lightning strikes. No, they also go off when the electric company has problems, or when homeowners forget to turn them off upon returning. Sometimes birds set them off. “Let’s go set off some burglar alarms!” is a cry frequently heard among adolescent finches. Even air molecules, which are plentiful in the suburbs, can set off burglar alarm systems. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t set them off, as far as we can tell, is burglars. Nobody can explain this phenomenon, but police rely on it when they go on their patrols. They’ll drive through a neighborhood at 4 A.M., listening to three or four home security systems electronically whooping and shrieking into the night, and they’ll say to each other, using hand signals so they can be understood over the din:

“Everything’s fine here!”

Of course these systems are not perfect. Even the most well-designed electronic device cannot be relied upon to go off without any reason one hundred percent of the time. Thus most security experts also recommend that you have a backup system consisting of ...

A Large, Stupid Dog

I realize that in the chapter on housecleaning I specifically said you should never have a dog, on the grounds that they are filthy, but my feeling, as a professional author, is that if I go through life worrying about what I may have