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"

***

"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, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"

***

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?"

***

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"

***

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"

***

                        -- 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"

***

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

***

After all, what is your hosts' purpose in having a party?  Surely not
for you to enjoy yourself; if that were their sole purpose, they'd have
simply sent champagne and women over to your place by taxi.
                -- P. J. O'Rourke

***
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"

***

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"

***

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, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"

***

  int i;  int j;

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

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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!"

***

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"

***

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, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

        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"

***

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?"

***

                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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

I don't want to alarm anybody, but there is an excellent chance that
the Earth will be destroyed in the next several days.  Congress is
thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists
broadcast signals to alien beings.  This would be a large mistake.
Alien beings have nuclear blaster death cannons.  You cannot cut off
their federal programs as if they were merely poor people ...
                -- Davy Barry, "THE ALIENS ARE COMING, THE ALIENS ARE
                   COMING!"

***

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"

***

        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"

***

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"

***

monI 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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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?"

***

REPORTER: Senator, are you for or against the MX missile system?
 
kSENATOR: 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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

        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"

***

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?"

***

... 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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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!"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

"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"

***

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?"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

... 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"

***

        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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

        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"

***

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"

***

                        -- 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"

***

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"

***

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"

***


... 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"

***

        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"

***

"... 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"

***

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"

***

]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"

***

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"

***

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"

***

        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, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"

***

"Calories are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes.  Fud
ge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really
 a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so
 that we would have a way to get onion dip into our mouths at parties, has none
."
                                          -Dave Barry

***

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"

***

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?"

***

This is clearly a scientific result, because it contains a
decimal point.

***

        AIDES: Mr. President, it turns out that the federal budget deficit is
very big.
        CLINTON (shocked): No!
        AIDES: Also, the pope is Catholic.
        CLINTON: This is unbelievable!
        In the interest of the President's cardiac safety, they decided to
hold off on telling him about the Easter Bunny.

***

...although in all candor the queen does occasionally appear in
public wearing what appears to be motel furniture on her head.

***

        OK, so I do not harbor a great fondness for cats. But I intend to
change my ways, because I sincerely, in my heart, want to cash in on the
wave of Cat Mania that is sweeping the nation.

***

Beth and I
were attempting to ski, as a family, with our son, Rob, who, being 12,
is not legally required to obey the laws of gravity.

***

I looked back and saw her
lying on the slope directly under a chairlift, in great pain, with two
ski-patrol guys kneeling next to her, administering First Aid to her
knee and building a little shelter to protect her from the thick storm
of business cards being dropped from the chairlift by personal-injury
attorneys.

***

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic
table.
                -- Dave Barry, "The Snake"

***

Excerpt from "Dave Barry's Greatest Hits" published 1988:

"Recently, I was on a show where the other two guests were - this is true
- a police officer who explained how to avoid getting your purse snatched,
and a woman named 'Chesty Morgan' who once served in the Israeli army and
currently dances topless and has the largest natural bosom in the world.
She said she wears a size double-P bra.  She says she has it specially
made in WACO, Texas.  She has a very interesting and tragic life story,
and I wouldn't be surprised, if, in the near future, she comes out with a
book."

***

"Today, of course, it is considered very poor taste to use the F-word
except in major motion pictures."
                -- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"

***

Juan Ponce de Leon came to Florida seeking the mythical Fontainebleau Hotel,
where, according to legend, if you had one drink, you could have another
one for half price on weekdays between 4:00 and 5:30 PM.     (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?"

***

    In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken 
to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can 
learn to fix things just as well as men.  These articles are 
apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that _men_ know how 
to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is _look_ at 
things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in 
Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are 
broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another 
home.  
                - Dave Barry

***

        "NAFTA" is an antonym standing for "North Atlantic
Treaty Organization." This agreement, hammered out by the United
States, Canada, Mexico and Belgium, would enable the nations to
trade freely with one another. For example, the United States
could trade North Dakota, Kansas and a state to be named later to
Canada in exchange for Toronto and Montreal; many economists
believe this would create jobs in the moving industry and
guarantee that Canada would never again win the World Series.
        Leading the support for NAFTA is President Clinton, who
favors it because it is a humongously boring government thing that
only he understands. Leading the opposition is "H." Ross Perot,
the feisty, popular, plain-spoken maverick billionaire space
alien, who believes that the real purpose of NAFTA is -- and he
can prove this with charts -- to disrupt his daughter's wedding.
               -- Dave Barry, "Issues of the Day"

***

        As an example of bureaucratic inefficiency, Gore noted
that the government agencies go through an absurdly complex
procedure simply to purchase ashtrays.
        "It's ridiculous," he pointed out.  "The agencies should
just steal them from motels, like everybody else."
               -- Dave Barry, "Issues of the Day"

***

        What's wrong with this country, aside from "light" beer, 
is that Americans don't know anything about foreign affairs. Your 
average American can't even answer basic questions about 
geography, such as.' 
        1. In which direction does the Nile River flow? 
        2. What can the letters in "Great Britain" be rearranged 
to spell? 
        (Answers: 1. Downhill; 2. "Big Titan Rear.")
               -- Dave Barry, "The Gods Must Be Crazy"

***

Tragically, we Americans are too busy sitting around watching worthless 
juvenile mind-rotting TV situation comedies such as "Dave's 
World" (Monday nights, CBS, check your local listings) to learn 
about foreign affairs. This is bad, because what happens abroad 
can greatly affect our lives. For example, if tensions were to 
mount again in the Middle East, fighting could break out, and it 
could escalate to, God forbid, nuclear war, and this would almost 
definitely affect our TV reception. 
               -- Dave Barry, "The Gods Must Be Crazy"

***

        "Rob," I tell him, as he is eating his breakfast in 
extreme slow motion with his eyes completely closed, so that he 
sometimes accidentally puts food into his ear,  "I want you to go 
to sleep earlier." 
        "DAD," he says, using the tone of voice you might use 
when attempting to explain an abstract intellectual concept to an 
oyster,  "you DON'T UNDERSTAND. I am NOT tired. I am SPLOOSH 
(sound of my son passing out face-down in his Cracklin' Oat 
Bran)." 
        Of course, psychologists would tell us that falling 
asleep in cereal is normal for young teenagers, who need to 
become independent of their parents and make their own life 
decisions, which is fine, except that if my son made his own life 
decisions, his ideal daily schedule would be: 
        Midnight to 3 a.m. -- Read suspense novels. 
        3 a.m. to 3 p.m. -- Sleep. 
        3:15 p.m. -- Order hearty breakfast from Domino's Pizza 
and put on loud, hideous music recorded live in hell. 
        4 p.m. to midnight -- Blow stuff up. 
        Unfortunately this schedule would leave little room for, 
say, school, so we have to supply parental guidance ("If you 
don't open this door RIGHT NOW I will BREAK IT DOWN and CHARGE IT 
TO YOUR ALLOWANCE"), the result being that our relationship with 
our son currently involves a certain amount of conflict, in the 
same sense that the Pacific Ocean involves a certain amount of 
water. 
               -- Dave Barry, "A Failure to Communicate"

***

        At least he doesn't wear giant pants. I keep seeing young 
teenage males wearing ENORMOUS pants; pants that two or three 
teenagers could occupy simultaneously and still have room in 
there for a picnic basket; pants that a clown would refuse to 
wear on the grounds that they were too undignified. The young men 
wear these pants really low, so that the waist is about knee 
level and the pants butt drags on the ground. You could not be an 
effective criminal wearing pants like these, because you'd be 
unable to flee on foot with any velocity. 
        POLICE OFFICER: We tracked the alleged perpetrator from 
the crime scene by following the trail of his dragging pants 
butt. 
        PROSECUTOR: And what was he doing when you caught up with 
him? 
        POLICE OFFICER: He was hobbling in a suspicious manner. 
        What I want to know is, how do young people buy these 
pants? Do they try them on to make sure they DON'T fit? Do they 
take along a 570-pound friend, or a mature polar bear, and buy 
pants that fit HIM? 
        I asked my son about these pants, and he told me that 
mainly "bassers" wear them.  "Bassers" are people who like a lot 
of bass in their music. They drive around in cars with 
four-trillion-watt sound systems playing recordings of what sound 
like above-ground nuclear tests, but with less of an emphasis on 
melody. 
        My son also told me that there are also people called 
"posers" who DRESS like "bassers," but are in fact, secretly, 
"preppies." He said that some "posers" also pose as 
"headbangers," who are people who like heavy-metal music, which 
is performed by skinny men with huge hair who stomp around the 
stage, striking their instruments and shrieking angrily, 
apparently because somebody has stolen all their shirts. 
        "Like," my son said, contemptuously,  "some posers will 
act like they like Metallica, but they don't know ANYTHING about 
Metallica." If you can imagine. 
        I realize I've mainly been giving my side of the parent-
teenager relationship, and I promise to give my son's side, if he 
ever comes out of his room. Remember how the news media made a 
big deal about it when those people came out after spending two 
years inside Biosphere 2? Well, two years is NOTHING. Veteran 
parents assure me that teenagers routinely spend that long in the 
BATHROOM. In fact, veteran parents assure me that I haven't seen 
ANYTHING yet. 
        "Wait till he gets his driver's license," they say. 
"That's when Fred and I turned to heroin." 
               -- Dave Barry, "A Failure to Communicate" 

***

        I am sick and tired of all this lawyer-bashing. When I
hear somebody say something bad about lawyers, it makes me want to
walk up and spit in his face, thereby causing him to shove me, so
I can fall down and file a $17 million personal-injury lawsuit
against him.
        Because I happen to think lawyers are great. I am darned
grateful that I live in a country that has, pound for pound, more
lawyers than any other country in the entire world. We NEED a lot
of lawyers, to protect all these rights we have as Americans,
including -- but not limited to -- the rights to life, liberty,
the pursuit of happiness, job security, decent housing, affordable
health care, the capture of happiness, a non-smoking section, a
joke-free work environment, a smoking section, cable TV, a team
that makes the playoffs, rain-free outdoor weddings, risk-free
bungee-jumping, warning labels on everything including spiders,
self-esteem and a choice of low-fat desserts.
               -- Dave Barry, "Sue Me!"

***

        And of course SmithKline, to avoid the hassle and
publicity and legal expense of a trial, settled out of court.
Three groups got money in the settlement:
        1. MR. DUBOFF. He got $25,000. Fair enough. It was his
idea in the first place.
        2. THE OTHER DENTURE-ADHESIVE VICTIMS. They were notified
of their victimhood via newspaper advertisements and direct
mailings, paid for by SmithKline. About 650 people sent in proof
that they had purchased Orafix Special or Brace; each of these
people received $7. Another 2,800 people -- who did not have proof
of purchase -- filled out forms certifying that they had purchased
at least one tube of either product; each of these people received
a package of discount coupons for SmithKline products.
        3. THE LAWYERS FOR THE PLAINTIFF. If you are a fan of
Justice, American Style, you will be very excited when I tell you
what the lawyers got, in expenses and legal fees.
        They got $954,934.57.
        "It's a lot of money," said Cohen. "But there's also a
lot of money that goes into these cases."
               -- Dave Barry, "Sue Me!"

***

        If you look at any list of great modern writers such as
Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll
notice two things about them:
        1. They all had editors.
        2. They are all dead.
        Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors
are fatal. I was made intensely aware of this recently when, as
the direct result of an idea conceived of by my editor, I wound up
flailing around up to my armpits in the Swamp of Doom.
               -- Dave Barry, "The Swamp of Doom"

***

The following items were taken from a newspaper column called Dave Barry's
Year In Review:

February 12--Keeping a campaign promise, President Clinton signs the Family
Leave Bill, granting employees who have new babies the legal right to leave
their families and come to work to get some sleep.

March 4--In Ohio, a 15 year-old boy sues for the right to leave his parents
and live with Michele Pfeiffer.

March 20--Scientists for the Tobacco Institute, citing a 17-year study,
release a report stating that there is "absolutely no scientific evidence"
that people buy cigarettes with the intention of actually smoking them.

June 29--NBC, after a lengthy search for a wacky and zany replacement for
David Letterman, announces that it has settled on Ross Perot

September 16--The reinvention of the federal government continues apace as
President Clinton signs an order that would eliminate the 250,000 jobs
currently held by federal employees that are legally dead.

September 18--President clinton rescinds his order under pressure from the
powerful Deceased Federal Employees Union.

December 15--A school board in Georgia votes to ban the alphabet after
concerned parents point out that it can be used to spell "Satan" as well as
"penis".

***

My car has been named something like Rugged Macho Stud Hombre 4x4
of the Century by an outfit with a name like Magazine Writers Who
No Not Personnally Own This Type of Car But Get to Drive New Ones
for Free.  My car needs to be rugged, because it takes a constant
pounding from the tow truck dragging it back to The Mechanic Who
Never Actually Fixes the Problem.

                                -- Dave Barry, in his calendar 1994
***

If you're apprehensive about flying, let me assure you, as a
frequent flier, that few experiences are more enjoyable than
being seven miles above the earth's surface in a crowded ag-
ing piece of machinery held aloft by principles of physics 
that you do not even begin to grasp while giant invisible 
gravity waves pound relentlessly on the roof.

                        -- from Dave Barry's calendar 1994
***

New York traffic is so dense that drivers have no hope of 
ever reaching home within their own lifetimes, which is 
just as well because there would be no place to park and 
their families probably moved to the suburbs years ago 
anyway.  So the traffic has become their entire world, the 
only meaning left in their lives, as they inch their cars 
relentlessly forward, maneuvering, scheming, grimly rejoic-
ing in tactical triumphs that get them one car length ahead 
of you in a honking, grinding, million-car mass moving to-
wards Queens at .0000000003 miles per hour.

                                D Barry & his 1994 calendar
***

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, 
informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without 
lives."  We don't care.  We have each other, on the Internet.  
"Geek pride," that is our motto.
                                         -- Dave Barry
***

    Men, brace yourselves, the Wonderbra soon will invade the U.S.

            by Dave Barry

        NOTE: The following column deals with a Mature Subject
Matter that may be highly offensive to some readers, so we are
asking editors to please just put it in the newspaper without
reading it. Thank you.
 
        I wish to discuss a serious threat to our national
security now being posed by a foreign brassiere.
        It's called the "Wonderbra." I found out about it via an
article in The New York Times written by Emily Prager, who comes
right out and states that she does not have any cleavage ("I have
no cleavage" are her exact words).
        This is why she was interested in the Wonderbra, which is
apparently a legend in the fashion community. It has been
manufactured and sold for over 30 years in Great Britain, where it
is extremely popular because it makes women appear to have a
larger, more uplifted set of fashion accessories. (The article
doesn't say how the Wonderbra works, or who invented it. Maybe,
after World War II, Great Britain was able to obtain the services
of German scientists who had been working on the Nazis' top-secret
Atomic Brassiere Project.)
        The Wonderbra is not yet sold in the United States, but it
will be soon, so Emily Prager got hold of one and took it out for
a test drive. Her goal, which she freely admits, right in The New
York Times, was to get men to talk to her breasts -- not in the
sense of walking up to them and saying, "Hi! How do you breasts
like this weather we're having?"; but in the sense of talking to
her while looking down at her breasts, the way guys often do, as
though the breasts had urgent safety information written on them.
Emily Prager wanted this to happen.
        This is why life is so complicated for men in the 1990s.
On the one hand, if you DO look at a woman's breasts while you
talk to her, she could conclude that you're a Neanderthal
testosterone-oozing slimebag or a U.S. senator, and she could call
the police, and you could end up being arrested for Sexual
Harassment and Being A Creep. On the other hand, if you DON'T look
at her breasts, it could turn out that she's a reporter for The
New York Times, and you are actually hampering her efforts to
carry out her journalistic duties, which are protected by the U.S.
Constitution, which means you could wind up in federal prison
awaiting trial on charges of Failure To Take A Gander.
        It is not easy, being a guy.
        Emily Prager did eventually get a man to talk to her
breasts ("The Wonderbra and I had done our work," she reports).
I am not surprised. Males have a lot of trouble not looking at
breasts. What is worse, males cannot look at breasts and think at
the same time. In fact, scientists now believe that the primary
biological function of breasts is to make males stupid. This was
proved in a famous 1978 laboratory experiment wherein a team of
leading male psychological researchers at Yale deliberately looked
at photographs of breasts every day for two years, at the end of
which they concluded that they had failed to take any notes.
        "We forgot," they said. "We'll have to do it again."
        I've been aware of this ever since my early adolescence,
when my friends and I would spend hours gaping idiotically at
pictures of breasts in somebody's older brother's collection of
Playboy magazines, which were always stored under his mattress.
(The primary cause of spinal problems in American males is that
they spent their formative years sleeping on piles of Playboys.)
What was ironic about those magazines was that they also contained
endless droning essays by Hugh Hefner, outlining the various
tenets of the intellectual philosophy of the Playboy Man;
meanwhile, several pages away, the Playboy Man, who was actually
in ninth grade, was staring at the various tenets of Miss August
with lust-engorged eyeballs and a functional IQ in the rutabaga
range.
        So we have three facts to consider:
        1. Breasts make men stupid.
        2. The Wonderbra makes breasts even more noticeable.
        3. The Wonderbra is coming here.
        This is very bad for the United States. Look at what
happened to Great Britain. At one time, there was no Wonderbra,
and Great Britain ruled the richest and most powerful empire on
Earth. Now, there is a Wonderbra, and Great Britain is a pathetic,
shrunken nation with an economy based almost entirely on selling
blurred photographs of Princess Diana working out.
        Coincidence? I think not.
        Imagine what will happen to this nation if large numbers
of American women start using the Wonderbra. It will be
catastrophic. The male half of the population will be nothing but
mindless drooling Zombies of Lust. Granted, this is also true now,
but it will be even worse.
        What can we do about this threat? A nuclear strike against
Great Britain would probably be overreacting at this point. A
better idea would be to send over a delegation of top leaders to
look into the Wonderbra, so to speak, and if we don't hear from
them in a week, then we launch a nuclear strike. That is my
primary recommendation. My secondary recommendation is that this
delegation, with all due respect, should NOT include the
President.
 
(C) 1994 THE MIAMI HERALD
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

***

The Democrats believe that the only solution to the budget deficit
is to raise taxes.  This is the standard Democratic solution for 
everything, including nasal congesyion.  The Republicans, on the
other hand, believe that the solution is "fiscal responsibility,"
which means "blaming the Democrats."

                        -- the 1994 calendar of Dave Barry
***

The guest before me on the Larry King radio show is US Drug Czar
Bob Martinez.  Because we are both Floridians, Larry King insists
on introducing us, which is uncomfortable for me because when Mar-
tinez was governor of Florida, I wrote an article proving, with
photographic evidence, that he is a vampire.  Fortunately, Martin-
ez is too professional to say anything abouth this, and we have a
very nice chat, after which he swirls his cape around him and flies 
off into the night.
    Dave Barry's calendar 3/21/94

***

One day we reporters came to work and discovered that our old, slow,
horse-drawn typewriters had been replaced by sleek, efficient computers
with keys that said "BREAK" and "NUM LOCK."  Fortunately we were trained
by highly skilled professional computer personnel who spoke no English.
"Before you macro your ASCII, you have to format your RAM," they would
advise us, in a tone of voice clearly suggesting that any member of the
vegetable family should know this instinctively.

                                        dave barry's famous calendar 6/8/4

***

Pony is a misunderstood word.  Many young people, having grown
up watching the "My Little Pony" cartoon show, believe that a
pony is a cute little pastel-colored critter with a perky voice
and a nuturing personality and a 1973 Farrah Fawcett hair style.
Whereas in fact a typical pony is the same weight as an Oldsmo-
bile Cutlass Supreme but with no controls or moral code.

                                Dave Barry's calendar 4/7/4

***

Rollerblade Barbie is basically a standard Barbie, which is to say, she
represents the feminine beauty ideal, if your concept of a beautiful female is
one who is six feet, nine inches tall and weighs 52 pounds (37 of which are in
the bust area) and has a rigidly perky smile, and eyeballs the size of beer
coasters and a one-molecule nose and enough hair to clog the Lincoln Tunnel.
  -- from Dave Barry's column, 7/17/94

***


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"

***