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Text File | 1992-07-01 | 72.5 KB | 1,252 lines

}            -- Gifts for Children --

This is easy.  You never have to figure out what to get for children,
because they will tell you exactly what they want.  They spend months
and months researching these kinds of things by watching Saturday-
morning cartoon-show advertisements.  Make sure you get your children
exactly what they ask for, even if you disapprove of their choices.  If
your child thinks he wants Murderous Bob, the Doll with the Face You
Can Rip Right Off, you'd better get it.  You may be worried that it
might help to encourage your child's antisocial tendencies, but believe
me, you have not seen antisocial tendencies until you've seen a child
who is convinced that he or she did not get the right gift.
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}            -- Gifts for Men --

Men are amused by almost any idiot thing -- that is why professional
ice hockey is so popular -- so buying gifts for them is easy.  But you
should never buy them clothes.  Men believe they already have all the
clothes they will ever need, and new ones make them nervous.  For
example, your average man has 84 ties, but he wears, at most, only
three of them.  He has learned, through humiliating trial and error,
that if he wears any of the other 81 ties, his wife will probably laugh
at him ("You're not going to wear THAT tie with that suit, are you?").
So he has narrowed it down to three safe ties, and has gone several
years without being laughed at.  If you give him a new tie, he will
pretend to like it, but deep inside he will hate you.

If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires.  More
than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set
of tires.
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}"... I should explain that I was wearing a black velvet cape that was
supposed to make me look like the dashing, romantic Zorro but which
actually made me look like a gigantic bat wearing glasses ..."
        -- Dave Barry, "The Wet Zorro Suit and Other Turning
           Points in l'Amour"
}... Let me tell you who the actual "front-runners" are.  On one side,
you have George Bush, who is currently going through a sort of
fraternity hazing wherein he has to perform a series of humiliating
stunts to win the approval of the Republican Right.  For example, they
had him make a speech oozing praise all over William Loeb, deceased
publisher of the Manchester (N.H.) Union Leader and Slime Journalist.
Loeb had dumped viciously all over George in the 1980 New Hampshire
primary.  But when the Right held a big tribute for Loeb, George came
back to the fold, like a man with a bungee cord wrapped around his
neck.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Twinkie and the Squid"
}... Now you're ready for the actual shopping.  Your goal should be to
get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in
the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs
on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage
children emotionally.  For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a
snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn
to love him, then melts.  And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about
a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an
outcast by the other reindeer.  Then along comes good, old Santa.  Does
he ignore the deformity?  Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect
Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath?  No.  Santa asks
Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some
kind of headlight with legs and a tail.  So unless you want your
children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop
quickly.
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}... Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you
with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them.  Holiday
shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday
advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a
shopping bag.  If your children object to being tied, threaten to take
them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up.
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}... Our second completely true news item was sent to me by Mr. H. Boyce
Connell Jr. of Atlanta, Ga., where he is involved in a law firm.  One
thing I like about the South is, folks there care about tradition.  If
somebody gets handed a name like "H. Boyce," he hangs on to it, puts it
on his legal stationery, even passes it to his son, rather than do what
a lesser person would do, such as get it changed or kill himself.
        -- Dave Barry, "This Column is Nothing but the Truth!"
}... So the documentary-makers stick with sharks.  Generally, their
procedure is to scatter bleeding fish pieces around their boat, so as
to infest the waters.  I would estimate that the primary food source of
sharks today is bleeding fish pieces scattered by people making
documentaries.  Once the sharks arrive, they are generally fairly
listless.  The general shark attitude seems to be: "Oh God, another
documentary."  So the divers have to somehow goad them into attacking,
under the guise of Scientific Research.  "We know very little about the
effect of electricity on sharks," the narrator will say, in a deeply
scientific voice.  "That is why Todd is going to jab this Great White
in the testicles with a cattle prod."  The divers keep this kind of
thing up until the shark finally gets irritated and snaps at them, and
then they act as though this was a totally unexpected and very
dangerous development, although clearly it is what they wanted all
along.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
}... So this is a very confusing situation, and what makes it even worse
is, our standards keep changing.  Take Playboy magazine.  Back in the
1950s, when I started reading it strictly for the articles, Playboy was
considered just about the raciest thing around, even though all it ever
showed was women's breasts.  Granted, any given one of these breasts
would have provided adequate shelter for a family of four, but the
overall effect was no more explicit than many publications we think
nothing of today, such as Sports Illustrated's Annual Nipples Poking
Through Swimsuits Issue.
        -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
}"... the Mayo Clinic, named after its founder, Dr. Ted Clinic ..."
        -- Dave Barry
}... This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives
as well.  When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as
determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability.  Eighties people
buy imported dental floss.  They buy gourmet baking soda.  If an '80s
couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three
weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available,
they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent
restaurant.  If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of
excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going
off like crickets in the night.  An excellent restaurant wouldn't have
a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.
        -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
}A child can go only so far in life without potty training.  It is not
mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty
trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators.
        -- Dave Barry
}After a few boring years, socially meaningful rock 'n' roll died out.
It was replaced by disco, which offers no guidance to any form of life
more advanced than the lichen family.
        -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
           Do"
}After [Benjamin] Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose
names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary
Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc.  These pioneers conducted
many important electrical experiments.  For example, in 1780 Luigi
Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two
different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current
developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer
attached to the frog, which was dead anyway.  Galvani's discovery led
to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine.  Today,
skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously
injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it
hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact
that it sinks like a stone.
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
}All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can,
too, provided you use them for business purposes.  For example, if you
subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you
can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S.
Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax
decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper?  Outside?  What
if it rains?"
        -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
}Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight
Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.
        -- Dave Barry
}Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios,
mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have
any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place
to plug them in.  Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer,
Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a
serious electrical shock.  This proved that lighting was powered by the
same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely
that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A
penny saved is a penny earned."  Eventually he had to be given a job
running the post office.
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
}American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective
employees be honest and hardworking.  It has even stopped hoping for
employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference
between the men's room and the women's room without having little
pictures on the doors.
        -- Dave Barry, "Urine Trouble, Mister"
}An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch.  He
wears a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is
advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and
Rich Protestant Golfer Magazine.  The advertisements are written in
incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote
excellence:

"The Rolex Hyperion.  An elegant new standard in quality excellence and
discriminating handcraftsmanship.  For the individual who is truly able
to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting
things by hand.  Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold.  No watch
parts or anything.  Just a great big chunk on your wrist.  Truly a
timeless statement.  For the individual who is very secure.  Who
doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful.
Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high
school.  Because of his acne.  People who are probably nowhere near as
successful as he is now.  Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and
they'll see his Rolex Hyperion.  Hahahahahahahahaha."
        -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
}And so, men, we can see that human skin is an even more complex and
fascinating organ than we thought it was, and if we want to keep it
looking good, we have to care for it as though it were our own.  One
approach is to undergo a painful surgical procedure wherein your skin
is turned inside-out, so the young cells are on the outside, but then
of course you have the unpleasant side effect that your insides
gradually fill up with dead old cells and you explode.  So this
procedure is pretty much limited to top Hollywood stars for whom
youthful beauty is a career necessity, such as Elizabeth Taylor and
Orson Welles.
        -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
}Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but
television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom
and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that
offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.
        -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
           Do"
}As a professional humorist, I often get letters from readers who are
interested in the basic nature of humor.  "What kind of a sick
perverted disgusting person are you," these letters typically ask,
"that you make jokes about setting fire to a goat?" ...
        -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
}As you know, birds do not have sexual organs because they would
interfere with flight.  [In fact, this was the big breakthrough for the
Wright Brothers.  They were watching birds one day, trying to figure
out how to get their crude machine to fly, when suddenly it dawned on
Wilbur.  "Orville," he said, "all we have to do is remove the sexual
organs!"  You should have seen their original design.]  As a result,
birds are very, very difficult to arouse sexually.  You almost never
see an aroused bird.  So when they want to reproduce, birds fly up and
stand on telephone lines, where they monitor telephone conversations
with their feet.  When they find a conversation in which people are
talking dirty, they grip the line very tightly until they are both
highly aroused, at which point the female gets pregnant.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
           Teen Should Know"
}Besides the device, the box should contain:

* Eight little rectangular snippets of paper that say "WARNING"

* A plastic packet containing four 5/17 inch pilfer grommets and two
  club-ended 6/93 inch boxcar prawns.

YOU WILL NEED TO SUPPLY: a matrix wrench and 60,000 feet of tram
cable.

IF ANYTHING IS DAMAGED OR MISSING: You IMMEDIATELY should turn to your
spouse and say: "Margaret, you know why this country can't make a car
that can get all the way through the drive-through at Burger King
without a major transmission overhaul?  Because nobody cares, that's
why."

WARNING: This is assuming your spouse's name is Margaret.
        -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
}But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who
was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal
education and lived in New Jersey.  Edison's first major invention in
1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of
American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was
invented.  But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he
invented the electric company.  Edison's design was a brilliant
adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends
electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the
electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant
part) sends it right back to the customer again.

This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch
of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since
very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely.
In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United
States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it
ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate
increases.
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
}Congratulations!  You have purchased an extremely fine device that
would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that
you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer
maneuver.  Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS
OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE.  YOU ALREADY
UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU?  YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED
IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD
WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDER AND
SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH THE KNOBS,
RIGHT?  AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS,
RIGHT???  WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE
FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?
        -- Dave Barry, "Read This First!"
}Dear Mister Language Person: I am curious about the expression, "Part
of this complete breakfast".  The way it comes up is, my 5-year-old
will be watching TV cartoon shows in the morning, and they'll show a
commercial for a children's compressed breakfast compound such as
"Froot Loops" or "Lucky Charms", and they always show it sitting on a
table next to some actual food such as eggs, and the announcer always
says: "Part of this complete breakfast".  Don't that really mean,
"Adjacent to this complete breakfast", or "On the same table as this
complete breakfast"?  And couldn't they make essentially the same claim
if, instead of Froot Loops, they put a can of shaving cream there, or a
dead bat?

Answer: Yes.
        -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
}Dear Mister Language Person: What is the purpose of the apostrophe?

Answer: The apostrophe is used mainly in hand-lettered small business
signs to alert the reader than an "S" is coming up at the end of a
word, as in: WE DO NOT EXCEPT PERSONAL CHECK'S, or: NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR
ANY ITEM'S.  Another important grammar concept to bear in mind when
creating hand- lettered small-business signs is that you should put
quotation marks around random words for decoration, as in "TRY" OUR HOT
DOG'S, or even TRY "OUR" HOT DOG'S.
        -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
}    Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles,
called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you
have been drinking.  Electrons travel at the speed of light, which in
most American homes is 110 volts per hour.  This is very fast.  In the
time it has taken you to read this sentence so far, an electron could
have traveled all the way from San Francisco to Hackensack, New Jersey,
although God alone knows why it would want to.
    The five main kinds of electricity are alternating current,
direct current, lightning, static, and European.  Most American homes
have alternating current, which means that the electricity goes in one
direction for a while, then goes in the other direction.  This prevents
harmful electron buildup in the wires.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}Ever since prehistoric times, wise men have tried to understand what,
exactly, make people laugh.  That's why they were called "wise men."
All the other prehistoric people were out puncturing each other with
spears, and the wise men were back in the cave saying: "How about:
Would you please take my wife?  No.  How about: Here is my wife, please
take her right now.  No How about:  Would you like to take something?
My wife is available.  No.  How about ..."
        -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
}    Excellence is THE trend of the '80s.  Walk into any shopping
mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as
"Garfield Gets Spayed", and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you
how to be excellent: "In Search of Excellence", "Finding Excellence",
"Grasping Hold of Excellence", "Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night
So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It", etc.
        -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
}    Festivity Level 1: Your guests are chatting amiably with each
other, admiring your Christmas-tree ornaments, singing carols around
the upright piano, sipping at their drinks and nibbling hors
d'oeuvres.
    Festivity Level 2: Your guests are talking loudly -- sometimes
to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all, rearranging your
Christmas-tree ornaments, singing "I Gotta Be Me" around the upright
piano, gulping their drinks and wolfing down hors d'oeuvres.
    Festivity Level 3: Your guests are arguing violently with
inanimate objects, singing "I can't get no satisfaction," gulping down
other peoples' drinks, wolfing down Christmas tree ornaments and
placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when
the little hammers strike.
    Festivity Level 4: Your guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over
their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around the burning
Christmas tree.  The piano is missing.

    You want to keep your party somewhere around level 3, unless
you rent your home and own Firearms, in which case you can go to level
4.  The best way to get to level 3 is egg-nog.
        -- Dave Barry
            "Rating Your New Year's Eve Party"
}First, a few words about tools.

Basically, a tool is an object that enables you to take advantage of
the laws of physics and mechanics in such a way that you can seriously
injure yourself.  Today, people tend to take tools for granted.  If
you're ever walking down the street and you notice some people who look
particularly smug, the odds are that they are taking tools for
granted.  If I were you, I'd walk right up and smack them in the face.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}For my son, Robert, this is proving to be the high-point of his entire
life to date.  He has had his pajamas on for two, maybe three days
now.  He has the sense of joyful independence a 5-year-old child gets
when he suddenly realizes that he could be operating an acetylene torch
in the coat closet and neither parent [because of the flu] would have
the strength to object.  He has been foraging for his own food, which
means his diet consists entirely of "food" substances which are
advertised only on Saturday-morning cartoon shows; substances that are
the color of jukebox lights and that, for legal reasons, have their
names spelled wrong, as in New Creemy Chok-'n'-Cheez Lumps o' Froot
("part of this complete breakfast").
        -- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide"
}Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he
makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean
famous for its wild horses.  I realize that the concept of wild horses
probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you
have never met any wild horses in person.  In person, they are like
enormous hooved rats.  They amble up to your camp site, and their
attitude is: "We're wild horses.  We're going to eat your food, knock
down your tent and poop on your shoes.  We're protected by federal law,
just like Richard Nixon."
        -- Dave Barry, "Tenting Grandpa Bob"
}Have you ever wondered what makes Californians so calm?  Besides drugs,
I mean.  The answer is hot tubs.  A hot tub is a redwood container
filled with water that you sit in naked with members of the opposite
sex, none of whom is necessarily your spouse.  After a few hours in
their hot tubs, Californians don't give a damn about earthquakes or
mass murderers.  They don't give a damn about anything , which is why
they are able to produce "Laverne and Shirley" week after week.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important electrical
lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a carpet, then reach
your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one of his dental fillings.
Did you notice how your friend twitched violently and cried out in
pain?  This teaches us that electricity can be a very powerful force,
but we must never use it to hurt others unless we need to learn an
important electrical lesson.

It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works.  When you scuffed
your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons", which are very small
objects that carpet manufacturers weave into carpets so they will
attract dirt.  The electrons travel through your bloodstream and
collect in your finger, where they form a spark that leaps to your
friend's filling, then travels down to his feet and back into the
carpet, thus completing the circuit.

Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long enough without
touching anything, you would build up so many electrons that your
finger would explode!  But this is nothing to worry about unless you
have carpeting.
        -- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
}Here is the problem: for many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with
the issue of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul
Stevens came up with the famous quotation about how he couldn't define
pornography, but he knew it when he saw it.  So for a while, the
court's policy was to have all the suspected pornography trucked to
Justice Stevens' house, where he would look it over.  "Nope, this isn't
it," he'd say.  "Bring some more."  This went on until one morning when
his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under an
enormous mound of rubberized implements, and the court had to issue a
ruling stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except
that it was illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about
it because the court was going to take a nap.
        -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
}"Hi, I'm Preston A. Mantis, president of Consumers Retail Law Outlet.
As you can see by my suit and the fact that I have all these books of
equal height on the shelves behind me, I am a trained legal attorney.
Do you have a car or a job?  Do you ever walk around?  If so, you
probably have the makings of an excellent legal case.  Although of
course every case is different, I would definitely say that based on my
experience and training, there's no reason why you shouldn't come out
of this thing with at least a cabin cruiser.

"Remember, at the Preston A. Mantis Consumers Retail Law Outlet, our
motto is:  'It is very difficult to disprove certain kinds of pain.'"
        -- Dave Barry, "Pain and Suffering"
}    Home centers are designed for the do-it-yourselfer who's
willing to pay higher prices for the convenience of being able to shop
for lumber, hardware, and toasters all in one location.  Notice I say
"shop for", as opposed to "obtain".  This is the major drawback of home
centers: they are always out of everything except artificial Christmas
trees.  The home center employees have no time to reorder merchandise
because they are too busy applying little price stickers to every
object--every board, washer, nail and screw--in the entire store ...
    Let's say a piece in your toilet tank breaks, so you remove the
broken part, take it to the home center, and ask an employee if he has
a replacement.  The employee, who has never is his life even seen the
inside of a toilet tank, will peer at the broken part in very much the
same way that a member of a primitive Amazon jungle tribe would look at
an electronic calculator, and then say, "We're expecting a shipment of
these sometime around the middle of next week".
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}"How many hors d'oeuvres you are allowed to take off a tray being
carried by a waiter at a nice party?"

Two, but there are ways around it, depending on the style of the hors
d'oeuvre.  If they're those little pastry things where you can't tell
what's inside, you take one, bite off about two-thirds of it, then
say:  "This is cheese!  I hate cheese!"  Then you put the rest of it
back on the tray and bite another one and go, "Darn it!  Another
cheese!" and so on.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
}"I argue very well.  Ask any of my remaining friends.  I can win an
argument on any topic, against any opponent.  People know this, and
steer clear of me at parties.  Often, as a sign of their great respect,
they don't even invite me."
        -- Dave Barry
}I cannot overemphasize the importance of good grammar.

What a crock.  I could easily overemphasize the importance of good
grammar.  For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause
of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the
United States would have lost World War II."
        -- Dave Barry, "An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar"
}    I disapprove of the F-word, not because it's dirty, but because
we use it as a substitute for thoughtful insults, and it frequently
leads to violence.  What we ought to do, when we anger each other, say,
in traffic, is exchange phone numbers, so that later on, when we've had
time to think of witty and learned insults or look them up in the
library, we could call each other up:

     You: Hello?  Bob?
     Bob: Yes?
     You: This is Ed.  Remember?  The person whose parking space you
          took last Thursday?  Outside of Sears?
     Bob: Oh yes!  Sure!  How are you, Ed?
     You: Fine, thanks.  Listen, Bob, the reason I'm calling is:
      "Madam, you may be drunk, but I am ugly, and ..."  No, wait.
      I mean:  "you may be ugly, but I am Winston Churchill
      and ..."  No, wait.  (Sound of reference book thudding onto
      the floor.)  S-word.  Excuse me.  Look, Bob, I'm going to
      have to get back to you.
     Bob: Fine.
        -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"
}"I have come up with a sure-fire concept for a hit television show,
which would be called `A Live Celebrity Gets Eaten by a Shark'."
        -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
}"I played lead guitar in a band called The Federal Duck, which is the
kind of name that was popular in the '60s as a result of controlled
substances being in widespread use.  Back then, there were no
restrictions, in terms of talent, on who could make an album, so we
made one, and it sounds like a group of people who have been given
powerful but unfamiliar instruments as a therapy for a degenerative
nerve disease."
        -- Dave Barry, "The Snake"
}I realize that the MX missile is none of our concern.  I realize that
the whole point of living in a democracy is that we pay professional
congresspersons to concern themselves with things like the MX missile
so we can be free to concern ourselves with getting hold of the
plumber.

But from time to time, I feel I must address major public issues such
as this, because in a free and open society, where the very future of
the world hinges on decisions made by our elected leaders, you never
win large cash journalism awards if you stick to the topics I usually
write about, such as nose-picking.
        -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against
           Political Fallout"
}I realize that today you have a number of top female athletes such as
Martina Navratilova who can run like deer and bench-press Chevrolet
trucks.  But to be brutally frank, women as a group have a long way to
go before they reach the level of intensity and dedication to sports
that enables men to be such incredible jerks about it.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
}I suggest you locate your hot tub outside your house, so it won't do
too much damage if it catches fire or explodes.  First you decide which
direction your hot tub should face for maximum solar energy.  After
much trial and error, I have found that the best direction for a hot
tub to face is up.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}I think we can all agree that there is not enough common courtesy shown
... HEY!  PAY ATTENTION WHEN I'M TALKING TO YOU DAMMIT!  I said I think
we can all agree that there is not enough common courtesy shown today.
When we take the time to be courteous to each other, we find that we
are happier and less likely to engage in nuclear war.  This point was
driven home by the recent summit talks, where Nancy Reagan and Raisa
Gorbachev, each of whose husband thinks the other's husband is vermin,
were able to sit down at a high-level tea and engage in courteous
conversation ...
        -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
}If you throw a New Year's Party, the worst thing that you can do would
be to throw the kind of party where your guests wake up today, and call
you to say they had a nice time.  Now you'll be be expected to throw
another party next year.

What you should do is throw the kind of party where your guest wake up
several days from now and call their lawyers to find out if they've
been indicted for anything.  You want your guests to be so anxious to
avoid a recurrence of your party that they immediately start planning
parties of their own, a year in advance, just to prevent you from
having another one ...

If your party is successful, the police will knock on your door, unless
your party is very successful in which case they will lob tear gas
through your living room window.  As host, your job is to make sure
that they don't arrest anybody.  Or if they're dead set on arresting
someone, your job is to make sure it isn't you ...
            -- Dave Barry,  "Rating Your New Year's Eve Party"
}    If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs
around your home are too difficult to tackle.  So, when your furnace
explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it.  The
"professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on the sides and
deposits a large quantity of tools and two assistants who spend the
better part of the week in your basement whacking objects at random
with heavy wrenches, after which the "professional" returns and gives
you a bill for slightly more money than it would cost you to run a
successful campaign for the U.S. Senate.
    And that's why you've decided to start doing things yourself.
You figure, "If those guys can fix my furnace, then so can I.  How
difficult can it be?"
    Very difficult.  In fact, most home projects are impossible,
which is why you should do them yourself.  There is no point in paying
other people to screw things up when you can easily screw them up
yourself for far less money.  This article can help you.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}In America today ... we have Woody Allen, whose humor has become so
sophisticated that nobody gets it any more except Mia Farrow.  All
those who think Mia Farrow should go back to making movies where the
devil gets her pregnant and Woody Allen should go back to dressing up
as a human sperm, please raise your hands.  Thank you.
        -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
}Kids have *never* taken guidance from their parents.  If you could
travel back in time and observe the original primate family in the
original tree, you would see the primate parents yelling at the primate
teenager for sitting around and sulking all day instead of hunting for
grubs and berries like dad primate.  Then you'd see the primate
teenager stomp up to his branch and slam the leaves.
        -- Dave Barry, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly
           Do"
}Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with
was made up of idiots.  Remember?  One of them was always getting
pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the
farmhouse to alert the other ones.  She'd whimper and tug at their
sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do
you think something's wrong?  Do you think she wants us to follow her?
What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead
of every week.  What with all the time these people spent pinned under
the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops
whatsoever.  They probably got by on federal crop supports, which
Lassie filed the applications for.
        -- Dave Barry
}Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return.  Here's an often
overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of
dollars:  For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your
tax return around under your armpit.  No IRS agent is going to want to
spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document.  So even if you owe
money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will
probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit.  What does he care?
It's not his money.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
}Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history,
dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive
man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the
air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first
primitive umpire.

What inner force drove this first athlete?  Your guess is as good as
mine.  Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
}Men's skin is different from women's skin.  It is usually bigger, and
it has more snakes tattooed on it.  Also, if you examine a woman's skin
very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently
tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ...
    [EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important
     world events such as agriculture, we're going to delete the
     next few square feet of the woman's skin.  Thank you.]
... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your
cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of
billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"!  And what is even
more interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying!  This is a
fact.  Your skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the
older veteran cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and
obtained offices with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the
window head first, without so much as a pension plan, by younger
hotshot cells moving up from below.
        -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
}Most fish live underwater, which is a terrible place to have sex
because virtually anywhere you lie down there will be stinging crabs
and large quantities of little fish staring at you with buggy little
eyes.  So generally when two fish want to have sex, they swim around
and around for hours, looking for someplace to go, until finally the
female gets really tired and has a terrible headache, and she just
dumps her eggs right on the sand and swims away.  Then the male, driven
by some timeless, noble instinct for survival, eats the eggs.  So the
truth is that fish don't reproduce at all, but there are so many of
them that it doesn't make any difference.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
           Teen Should Know"
}My band career ended late in my senior year when John Cooper and I
threw my amplifier out the dormitory window.  We did not act in haste.
First we checked to make sure the amplifier would fit through the
frame, using the belt from my bathrobe to measure, then we picked up
the amplifier and backed up to my bedroom door.  Then we rushed
forward, shouting "The WHO!  The WHO!" and we launched my amplifier
perfectly, as though we had been doing it all our lives, clean through
the window and down onto the sidewalk, where a small but appreciative
crowd had gathered.  I would like to be able to say that this was a
symbolic act, an effort on my part to break cleanly away from one state
in my life and move on to another, but the truth is, Cooper and I
really just wanted to find out what it would sound like.  It sounded
OK.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Snake"
}    Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home
tool sets for under $4?"  An excellent question.
    Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell
plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where
they have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of
Raisinets and malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon
administration.  In either the hardware or housewares department,
you'll find an item imported from an obscure Oriental country and
described as "Nine Tools in One", consisting of a little handle with
interchangeable ends representing inscrutable Oriental notions of tools
that Americans might use around the home.  Buy it.
    This is the kind of tool set professionals use.  Not only is it
inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the
so-called quality tools sets: The handle will actually break right off
if you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to
direct sunlight.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that
each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his
choice.

In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians
called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka"
and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank.  People
passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy
Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could
manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that
they be installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips.  Let's
say your congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding
study on how the French government handles diseases transmitted by
sherbet.  Just when he got to the plane, his mandatory air bag,
strapped around his waist, would inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus
rendering him too large to fit through the plane door.  It could also
be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman proposed a law.  ("Mr.
Speaker, people ask me, why should October be designated as Cuticle
Inspection Month?  And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.") This would save
millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public would violently
support a law requiring airbags on congressmen.  The problem is that
your potential market is very small: there are only around 500 members
of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil, are
already too large to fit on normal aircraft.
        -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"
}Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where
the maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to
help out in case of emergency.  As far as I can tell, our second
basewoman is a pretty good baseball player, better than I am, anyway,
but there's no way to know for sure because if the ball gets anywhere
near her, a male comes barging over from, say, right field, to deal
with it.  She's been on the team for three seasons now, but the males
still don't trust her.  They know, deep in their souls, that if she had
to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she
probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever
considering whether there were men on base.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sports is a Drag"
}Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic
table.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Snake"
}    Plumbing is one of the easier of do-it-yourself activities,
requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm
into a clogged toilet.  In fact, you can solve many home plumbing
problems, such as annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the
radio.  But before we get into specific techniques, let's look at how
plumbing works.
    A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system,
except that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires,
it has pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets
and toilets.  So the truth is that your plumbing systems is nothing at
all like your electrical system, which is good, because electricity can
kill you.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have
orgasms?  The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which
is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
           Teen Should Know"
}Puns are little "plays on words" that a certain breed of person loves
to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way
to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the
cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in
fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a
lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of
the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
        -- Dave Barry, "Why Humor is Funny"
}"Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used
it."
        -- Dave Barry
}REPORTER: Senator, are you for or against the MX missile system?

SENATOR: Bob, the MX missile system reminds me of an old saying that
the country folk in my state like to say.  It goes like this: "You can
carry a pig for six miles, but if you set it down it might run away."
I have no idea why the country folk say this.  Maybe there's some kind
of chemical pollutant in their drinking water.  That is why I pledge to
do all that I can to protect the environment of this great nation of
ours, and put prayer back in the schools, where it belongs.  What we
need is jobs, not empty promises.  I realize I'm risking my political
career be being so outspoken on a sensitive issue such as the MX, but
that's just the kind of straight-talking honest person I am, and I
can't help it.
        -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics"
}Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a
big store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at
reasonable prices?  Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's
build a home center.  And before long home centers were springing up
like crabgrass all over the United States.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off
during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every
           Teen Should Know"
}So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate
your current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and
hurl it into a dumpster.  Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast
array of 8-millimeter video equipment.

... OK!  Got everything?  Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you
were gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format
that makes your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as
toenail dirt.  This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be
made available until it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a
format called "Elroy", so *order yours now*.
        -- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics
           Revolution"
}    So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark].
With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to
maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of
corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to
flop up onto the land and evolve.  Richard and I were inching toward
it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and --
I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in
the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us.
    Many people would have panicked at this point.  But Richard and
I were not "many people."  We were experienced waders, and we kept our
heads.  We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're
unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water
up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the
opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of
our feet never once went below the surface of the water.  We ran all
the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers
cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen
these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked
into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
}Some of you ... may have decided that, this year, you're going to
celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around
stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on
"The Waltons".  Well, you can forget it.  If everybody pulled that kind
of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight.  The
government would have to intervene: it would form a cabinet-level
Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and
billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which
it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming
thousands.  So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with
the Holiday Program.  This means you should get a large sum of money
and go to a mall.
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}Take the folks at Coca-Cola.  For many years, they were content to sit
back and make the same old carbonated beverage.  It was a good
beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up
drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a
nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves
and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!"  So
Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw
no need to improve ...
        -- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"
}The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than
cities.  Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and
difficult to park in.  Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots,
which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but --
here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO
RULES.  You're allowed to do anything.  You can drive as fast as you
want in any direction you want.  I was once driving in a mall parking
lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a
squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out
and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault,
his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was
neither.  This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking
lots.
        -- Dave Barry, "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"
}The basic menu item, in fact the ONLY menu item, would be a food unit
called the "patty," consisting of -- this would be guaranteed in
writing -- "100 percent animal matter of some kind."  All patties would
be heated up and then cooled back down in electronic devices
immediately before serving.  The Breakfast Patty would be a patty on a
bun with lettuce, tomato, onion, egg, Ba-Ko-Bits, Cheez Whiz, a Special
Sauce made by pouring ketchup out of a bottle and a little slip of
paper stating: "Inspected by Number 12".  The Lunch or Dinner Patty
would be any Breakfast Patties that didn't get sold in the morning.
The Seafood Lover's Patty would be any patties that were starting to
emit a serious aroma.  Patties that were too rank even to be Seafood
Lover's Patties would be compressed into wads and sold as "Nuggets."
        -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"
}    The big problem with pornography is defining it.  You can't
just say it's pictures of people naked.  For example, you have these
primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot,
and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal
saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think
you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same
time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of
Northern Mali that you may be interested in."
    So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic
publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest
naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason
naked, or whatever.  But if National Geographic were to publish an
article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System
Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography.  But
others would not.  And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev.
Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.
        -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"
}"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and
vinyl."
        -- Dave Barry
}The human race has been fascinated by sharks for as long as I can
remember.  Just like the bluebird feeding its young, or the spider
struggling to weave its perfect web, or the buttercup blooming in
spring, the shark reveals to us yet another of the infinite and
wonderful facets of nature, namely the facet that it can bite your head
off.  This causes us humans to feel a certain degree of awe.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"
}The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic
devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers,
where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with
sledgehammers.  With their devices thus permanently destroyed,
consumers would then be free to go out and buy new devices, rather than
have to fritter away years of their lives trying to have the old ones
repaired at so-called "factory service centers," which in fact consist
of two men named Lester poking at the insides of broken electronic
devices with cheap cigars and going, "Lookit all them WIRES in there!"
        -- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"
}The IRS spends God knows how much of your tax money on these toll-free
information hot lines staffed by IRS employees, whose idea of a
dynamite tax tip is that you should print neatly.  If you ask them a
real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless.

So, for guidance, you want to look to big business.  Big business never
pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big
consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes...
        -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
}THE MX IS GOOD FOR THE ECONOMY.  One important reason we have a Defense
Department is that when we give it money, it spends it, which creates
jobs, whereas if we left the money in the hands of civilians, we don't
know what they'd do with it.  Probably put it in open trenches and set
it on fire.  The MX will create an especially large number of jobs
because of the number of warheads it carries.  It carries a total of 10
warheads.  This creates a great deal of employment, because you have
your Warhead Makers, your Warhead Lifters, your Persons Who Tap the
Warheads Gently with Rubber Mallets to Wedge Them All Snugly Into the
Nose Cone, your Persons Who Just Walk Around Playing Soothing Cassettes
by Recording Artists such as Perry Como So We Don't Have Any More
Episodes Where a Worker Who is Experiencing Some Strain Sticks a
Warhead in the Employee Cafeteria Microwave and Sets It On Roast, etc.
We are talking about a lot of jobs.
        -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against
           Political Fallout"
}The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber
has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture,
finished, and put inside boxes.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}The primary cause of failure in electrical appliances is an expired
warranty.  Often, you can get an appliance running again simply by
changing the warranty expiration date with a 15/64-inch felt-tipped
marker.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}The problem ... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with.
Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil
using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle
Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats,
etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous
bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons.  None
of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats
developed cancer.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
}The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president?  What is
it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television,
that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of
industrial waste?
        -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics"
}The reason it's called "Grape Nuts" is that it contains "dextrose",
which is also sometimes called "grape sugar", and also because "Grape
Nuts" is catchier, in terms of marketing, than "A Cross Between Gerbil
Food and Gravel", which is what it tastes like.
        -- Dave Barry, "Tips for Writer's"
}The reason we need the MX missile system is that the missiles we
currently have in the ground are the Minuteman model, which is very
old.  The Defense Department can't even remember where half of them
are.  Insects have built nests in them.  People have built houses
directly over the silos.  What this means, of course, is that if we
ever needed them to help obliterate all human life on the planet, they
could be a real embarrassment.  I mean, maybe YOU'RE comfortable with
the prospect of missiles that are supposed to represent you barging
over the North Pole trailing shreds of polyester carpeting from some
recreation room in South Dakota, but your strategic defense planners
are not.
        -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against
           Political Fallout"
}        The Three Major Kind of Tools

* Tools for hittings things to make them loose or to tighten them up or
  jar their many complex, sophisticated electrical parts in such a
  manner that they function perfectly.  (These are your hammers, maces,
  bludgeons, and truncheons.)

* Tools that, if dropped properly, can penetrate your foot.  (Awls)

* Tools that nobody should ever use because the potential danger is far
  greater than the value of any project that could possibly result.
  (Power saws, power drills, power staplers, any kind of tools that
  uses any kind of power more advanced than flashlight batteries.)
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect
the sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the
sunlight that hits your neighbors' homes, too.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
}This is an especially good time for you vacationers who plan to fly,
because the Reagan administration, as part of the same policy under
which it recently sold Yellowstone National Park to Wayne Newton, has
"deregulated" the airline industry.  What this means for you, the
consumer, is that the airlines are no longer required to follow any
rules whatsoever.  They can show snuff movies.  They can charge for
oxygen.  They can hire pilots right out of Vending Machine Refill
Person School.  They can conserve fuel by ejecting husky passengers
over water.  They can ram competing planes in mid-air.  These
innovations have resulted in tremendous cost savings which have been
passed along to you, the consumer, in the form of flights with
amazingly low fares, such as $29.  Of course, certain restrictions do
apply, the main one being that all these flights take you to Newark,
and you must pay thousands of dollars if you want to fly back out.
        -- Dave Barry, "Iowa -- Land of Secure Vacations"
}To understand this important story, you have to understand how the
telephone company works.  Your telephone is connected to a local
computer, which is in turn connected to a regional computer, which is
in turn connected to a loudspeaker the size of a garbage truck on the
lawn of Edna A. Bargewater of Lawrence, Kan.

Whenever you talk on the phone, your local computer listens in.  If it
suspects you're going to discuss an intimate topic, it notifies the
computer above it, which listens in and decides whether to alert the
one above it, until finally, if you really humiliate yourself, maybe
break down in tears and tell your closest friend about a sordid
incident from your past involving a seedy motel, a neighbor's spouse,
an entire religious order, a garden hose and six quarts of tapioca
pudding, the top computer feeds your conversation into Edna's
loudspeaker, and she and her friends come out on the porch to listen
and drink gin and laugh themselves silly.
        -- Dave Barry, "Won't It Be Just Great Owning Our Own
           Phones?"
}Today's scientific question is: What in the world is
electricity?

And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"
}"Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word
except in major motion pictures."
        -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"
}USER, n.:
    The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."
        -- Dave Barry, "Claw Your Way to the Top"
}We have the flu.  I don't know if this particular strain has an
official name, but if it does, it must be something like "Martian Death
Flu".  You may have had it yourself.  The main symptom is that you wish
you had another setting on your electric blanket, up past "HIGH", that
said "ELECTROCUTION".

Another symptom is that you cease brushing your teeth, because (a) your
teeth hurt, and (b) you lack the strength.  Midway through the brushing
process, you'd have to lie down in front of the sink to rest for a
couple of hours, and rivulets of toothpaste foam would dribble sideways
out of your mouth, eventually hardening into crusty little toothpaste
stalagmites that would bond your head permanently to the bathroom
floor, which is how the police would find you.

You know the kind of flu I'm talking about.
        -- Dave Barry, "Molecular Homicide"
}We ought to be very grateful that we have tools.  Millions of years ago
people did not have them, and home projects were extremely difficult.
For example, when a primitive person wanted to put up paneling, he had
to drive the little paneling nails into the cave wall with his bare
fist, so generally the paneling wound up getting spattered with
primitive blood, which isn't really all that bad when you consider how
ugly paneling is to begin with.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from
the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging
you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right
in his bowl full of jelly.
        -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
}WE'RE GOING TO THROW THE MX AWAY AFTER WE BUILD IT.  The MX is really
[Don't tell anybody!] just a "bargaining chip" in the nuclear-arms-
reduction talks with the Russians.  See, we have a problem with the
Russians.  They look at our leaders and they see, for example, George
Bush, who is really a fine and brave man but who happens to have this
unfortunate physical characteristic whereby when he talks he sounds as
though he just inhaled a helium party balloon.  If he ever becomes
President, the Russians will deliberately create nuclear crises just so
they can gather around the Hot Line with refreshments and listen to
George talk.
        -- Dave Barry, "At Last, the Ultimate Deterrent Against
           Political Fallout"
}Well, here it is, 1983, so it won't be long before you start reading a
lot of boring stories about people like Vance Hartke.  Hartke is a
governor or mayor or something from one of the flatter states, and the
reason you'll be reading about him is that he's one of the 50 top
contenders for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination.  These men
will spend the next 18 months going around the country engaging in the
most degrading activities imaginable, such as wearing idiot hats and
appearing on "Meet the Press".  "Meet the Press" is one of those Sunday
morning public interest shows that the public is not the least bit
interested in.  It features a panel of reporters who ask questions of a
guest politician, who wins an Amana home freezer if he can get through
the entire show without answering a single question ...
        -- Dave Barry, "On Presidential Politics"
}What I do, first thing [in the morning], is I hop into the shower
stall.  Then I hop right back out, because when I hopped in I landed
barefoot right on top of See Threepio, a little plastic robot character
from "Star Wars" whom my son, Robert, likes to pull the legs off of
while he showers.  Then I hop right back into the stall because our
dog, Earnest, who has been alone in the basement all night building up
powerful dog emotions, has come bounding and quivering into the
bathroom and wants to greet me with 60 or 70 thousand playful nips, any
one of which -- bear in mind that I am naked and, without my contact
lenses, essentially blind -- could result in the kind of injury where
you have to learn a whole new part if you want to sing the "Messiah",
if you get my drift.  Then I hop right back out, because Robert, with
that uncanny sixth sense some children have -- you cannot teach it;
they either have it or they don't -- has chosen exactly that moment to
flush one of the toilets.  Perhaps several of them.
        -- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"
}"What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-
sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up
with a terrifically witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always
came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at
parties.
        -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"
}What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which
nobody really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday
Morning Time, whereby at 7 a.m. every weekday we go into a space-
launch-style "hold" for two to three hours, during which it just
remains 7 a.m.  This way we could all wake up via a civilized gradual
process of stretching and belching and scratching, and it would still
be only 7 a.m. when we were ready to actually emerge from bed.
        -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"
}When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a
year.  I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire
winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
}Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year?
Just picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your
children open their old-fashioned presents.

Your 11-year-old son: "What the heck is this?"

You:    "A spinning top!  You spin it around, and then eventually it
    falls down.  What fun!  Ha, ha!"

Son:    "Is this a joke?  Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer
    with two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory,
    and I get this cretin TOP?"

Your 8-year-old daughter: "You think that's bad?  Look at this."

You:    "It's figgy pudding!  What a treat!"

Daughter: "It looks like goat barf."
        -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
}Wood is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource.  If
you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place.  And if you cut
down the new tree, still another will grow.  And if you cut down that
tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with
long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit
there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you
come back.

Wood heat is not new.  It dates back to a day millions of years ago,
when a group of cavemen were sitting around, watching dinosaurs rot.
Suddenly, lightning struck a nearby log and set it on fire.  One of the
cavemen stared at the fire for a few minutes, then said: "Hey!  Wood
heat!"  The other cavemen, who did not understand English, immediately
beat him to death with stones.  But the key discovery had been made,
and from that day forward, the cavemen had all the heat they needed,
although their insurance rates went way up.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
}You always introduce the younger person to the older person, using the
wording:  "Miss Brown, I'd like to introduce you to an older person"
(unless her name is not "Miss Brown").  If you do not know a person's
age, ask for a driver's license and a major credit card.  If you are
introduced to a member of a minority group, use the "high-five" style
handshake, followed by a remark designed to show you don't mind a bit,
such as "I see you are a (name of a minority group)!  Good!"
        -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
}You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting
incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail.
Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable
to find a way to damage them.  They last forever, largely because
nobody ever eats them.  In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes
they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year;
some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years.

The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then
pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet.  Be sure to wear
safety glasses.
        -- Dave Barry, "Simple, Homespun Gifts"
}You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form.
The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified",
which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears
tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last
names.  Here's the complete text:

    "(1) How much did you make?  (AMOUNT)
    "(2) How much did we here at the government take out?  (AMOUNT)
    "(3) Hey!  Sounds like we took too much!  So we're going to
         send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF
         THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME)
         household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way
         you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST
         NAME), that it pays to file the short form!"

The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your
money.  So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long
form.
        -- Dave Barry, "Sweating Out Taxes"
}You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for
success.  You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits
or white plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume
party disguised as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World.
        -- Dave Barry, "How to Dress for Real Success"
}You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that,
contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from
houses.  Really, that's what scientists believe.  In fact many
scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the
summer.  If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day,
you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist
sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.
        -- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"
}You should tip the waiter $10, minus $2 if he tells you his name,
another $2 if he claims it will be His Pleasure to serve you and
another $2 for each "special" he describes involving confusing terms
such as "shallots," and $4 if the menu contains the word "fixin's."  In
many restaurants, this means the waiter will actually owe you money.
If you are traveling with a child  aged six months to three years, you
should leave an additional amount equal to twice the bill to compensate
for the fact that they will have to take the banquette out and burn it
because the cracks are wedged solid with gobbets made of partially
chewed former restaurant rolls saturated with baby spit.

In New York, tip the taxicab driver $40 if he does not mention his
hemorrhoids.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"
}    Your home electrical system is basically a bunch of wires that
bring electricity into your home and take if back out before it has a
chance to kill you.  This is called a "circuit".  The most common home
electrical problem is when the circuit is broken by a "circuit
breaker"; this causes the electricity to back up in one of the wires
until it bursts out of an outlet in the form of sparks, which can
damage your carpet.  The best way to avoid broken circuits is to change
your fuses regularly.
    Another common problem is that the lights flicker.  This
sometimes means that your electrical system is inadequate, but more
often it means that your home is possessed by demons, in which case
you'll need to get a caulking gun and some caulking.  If you're not
sure whether your house is possessed, see "The Amityville Horror", a
fine documentary film based on an actual book.  Or call in a licensed
electrician, who is trained to spot the signs of demonic possession,
such as blood coming down the stairs, enormous cats on the dinette
table, etc.
        -- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"
}[District Attorneys] learn in District Attorney School that there are
two sure-fire ways to get a lot of favorable publicity:

(1) Go down and raid all the lockers in the local high school and
    confiscate 53 marijuana cigarettes and put them in a pile and hold
    a press conference where you announce that they have a street value
    of $850 million.  These raids never fail, because ALL high schools,
    including brand-new, never-used ones, have at least 53 marijuana
    cigarettes in the lockers.  As far as anyone can tell, the locker
    factory puts them there.
(2) Raid an "adult book store" and hold a press conference where you
    announce you are charging the owner with 850 counts of being a
    piece of human sleaze.  This also never fails, because you always
    get a conviction.  A juror at a pornography trial is not about to
    state for the record that he finds nothing obscene about a movie
    where actors engage in sexual activities with live snakes and a
    fire extinguisher.  He is going to convict the bookstore owner, and
    vote for the death penalty just to make sure nobody gets the wrong
    impression.
        -- Dave Barry, "Pornography"