Boogers Are My Beat

by Dave Barry

Unfortunately, the only weapon I had was a broom. And to get it, I had to get to the other side of the kitchen, which meant going directly under the bat. You know how, in John Wayne war movies, when it's time to go into battle, John Wayne gives out a mighty whoop and charges boldly forward with his head held high? Well, that is not how I crossed the kitchen. I scooted with tiny mincing steps, hunched over, emitting a series of high-pitched whimpers designed to assure the bat that not only was I harmless, but I was also willing, if necessary, to bear its young.

  Reaching the other side, I grabbed the broom and turned to face the bat, at which point I made a shocking discovery: The bat was a butterfly. It was totally black, except that it had, I swear, red eyes, which were GLOWING. I realize that you may not believe me, so at this point I am going to bring in a trusted American icon to corroborate my story.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: Dave is telling the truth. It was a large black butterfly, and it had glowing red eyes.

  When Abraham Lincoln and I say that this butterfly was “large,” we are not whistling “Dixie.” This was by FAR the largest butterfly I have ever encountered. Are you familiar with the 1961 Japanese movie Mothra, in which downtown Tokyo is attacked by a 230-foot-long, 20,000-ton moth, played by the late Ethel Merman? Well, the butterfly in my kitchen could have used Mothra as an ear plug. (Assuming that butterflies have ears.)

  So anyway, when I saw that the bat was, in fact, a butterfly, I knew exactly what to do. Specifically, I yelled: “It's a butterfly!” This was for the benefit of my wife. I'm sure the butterfly already knew it was a butterfly.

  “Oh! Then don't harm it!” answered my wife, in an alternate universe. In the present universe, she answered, “Well, KILL IT!” Women have a reputation for being gentle and nurturing, but in my experience, they pretty much want to wipe out every creature on the Great Tree of Life below the level of poodle.

  So there, alone in the kitchen, armed only with a broom, I went head-to-head with the Giant Demon Butterfly from Hell. It clearly was not afraid of me. It flitted right at me in the aggressive, confident manner of a creature that, in the wild, preys on wolverines.

  How well did I handle myself? I certainly don't want to toot my own horn.

  ABRAHAM LINCOLN: Dave was very, very brave.

  In the end, I broke the broom, but I also sent the butterfly to that Big Cocoon in the Sky. So now our house is quiet again. But I am uneasy. I find myself wondering: Where did that thing COME from? What if there's ANOTHER one out there?

  I frankly don't know how anyone can think about global warming at a time like this.

  There's No Denying Nature's Wake-up Call

  A man—we'll call him “Harvey”—went to see a doctor, complaining of tiredness, bruises all over his body, shooting pains, and quotation marks around his name. The doctor immediately recognized these symptoms: “Harvey” had a snoring problem. At night, he was being jabbed repeatedly by his wife, trying to make him shut up. Also, somebody had apparently been shooting him.

  Yes, snoring is a serious health problem, one that affects more Americans than shark attacks and Rep. Gary Condit combined. Yet many people—and here I am in no way referring to my wife—refuse to admit that they snore. Even if they routinely emit nocturnal noises that cause shingles to fly off the roof, they will be outraged that you would leap to the conclusion that they are the source of the snoring, without considering other explanations, such as that a third party, unknown to either of you, is sleeping in your bed.

  Women—and once again I am NOT referring to my wife—tend to be the worst snoring-deniers, because women are taught from an early age that it is not feminine to emit any noise or aroma that would indicate that they are biological organisms. Men, on the other hand, consider bodily functions to be a highly masculine form of manliness. That's why men are not afraid to haul off and let go of a hearty burp, often as a way to emphasize a rhetorical point (Four score and seven BWOOOOOOOOOOORP years ago . . .).

  Men also take pride in another, even more basic, bodily emission, which, because this is a family newspaper, I will refer to by its technical name, “making a tooter.” This is a popular thing to do whenever males gather together. As a youth, I was a Boy Scout, and while I know that scouting is a fine activity that has taught countless young men important leadership and character-building skills, the major activity in my particular troop was slicing the Muenster. We'd go on a camping trip, and for dinner we'd consume huge quantities of Campbell's brand Pork 'n' Mainly Beans, and by nightfall the hills were alive with the sound of tooting. Eventually the entire area would be blanketed by a giant mushroom cloud of Boy Scout gas that caused flocks of migrating geese to reverse course (“Turn back! We're spending the winter in Canada!”).

  Medical science tells us that, one way or another, the average man releases 6,000 metric quarts of gas per day, and significantly more if he is in an elevator. Meanwhile, the average woman, striving to be feminine, is keeping all that gas bottled up inside her body. This results in an enormous pressure buildup that can, later in life, cause an explosive and embarrassing medical condition known as “The Mount Vesuvius Syndrome.” This is precisely why one well-known woman—who, out of respect for her privacy, I will refer to here only as “The Queen of England”—is accompanied at all times by men with bagpipes.

  At this point, it might be a good idea for all of us to go back to the beginning of this column to see what our topic is. Okay, there it is, snoring. As I was saying, most of us snore, even though—and I am STILL not in any way referring to my wife—we refuse to admit it.

  But what is snoring? Medically, it is when air has trouble getting past the uvula, which is a part of your body that sounds like a dirty word but is actually not. You are free to say it in polite company, in sentences such as: “I hear Todd has a huge uvula.”

  How serious is snoring? To answer that question, I consulted my colleague Gene Weingarten, who happens to be one of the nation's most respected hypochondriacs. Gene is the author of an excellent book, The Hypochondriac's Guide to Life and Death, which has a chapter entitled “Hiccups Can Mean Cancer.”

  Needless to say, Gene's opinion is that snoring can, and probably does, indicate a seriously fatal problem. The good news, he told me, is that snoring can be cured by a surgical procedure “that basically shears off the entire back of your throat.” Gene adds: “It doesn't always solve the problem.”

  But what do you care? YOU don't snore.

  Grab Your Pajamas, It's World Series Time

  This is the time of year when Americans make a sincere effort to care about the World Series, which determines which baseball team will be the champion of the entire world, except for the part of the world located outside the United States and southeastern Canada.

  But the heck with that part. This is OUR national pastime, and that's why the World Series arouses our passion, even if we stopped paying attention to pro baseball some years ago, when it started adding mutant teams with names like the Tampa Bay Area Fighting Seaweeds.

  Why is baseball our national pastime? Because it is a metaphor for life itself. As George Will put it: “In life, as in baseball, we must leave the dugout of complacency, step up to the home plate of opportunity, adjust the protective groin cup of caution, and swing the bat of hope at the curve ball of fate, hoping that we can hit a line drive of success past the shortstop of misfortune, then sprint down the basepath of chance, knowing that at any moment we may pull the hamstring muscle of inadequacy and fall face-first onto the field of failure, where the chinch bugs of broken dreams will crawl into our nose.”

  Yes, baseball is very deep, although this is not obvious from looking at it. If you don't grasp the nuances, baseball appears to be a group of large, unshaven men standing around in their pajamas and frowning, as if thinking: “My arms are so big that I can no longer groom myself!” Yet show the same scene to serious baseball fans, and they will see a complex, fascinating, almost artistic tableau. Why? Because they have consumed huge quantities of the drug “Ecst
asy.”

  No, seriously, it's because these fans appreciate the subtleties of baseball. To help you perceive these subtleties during the World Series, here's a quick “refresher course,” starting with:

  THE ORIGINS OF BASEBALL: Mankind has played games involving sticks and balls for hundreds of thousands of years. Meanwhile, Womankind had her hands full raising Childrenkind, but whenever she asked Mankind to lend a hand, he'd answer, “Not now! We have a no-hitter going!” That was true, because numbers had not been invented yet.

  Then, in 1839, along came a man named Abner Doubleday, who as you can imagine took a lot of ribbing because his name could be rearranged to spell not only “A Barely Nude Bod” but also “Lure Dad By A Bone.” Nevertheless, he invented a game that included virtually all of the elements of modern-day baseball, including Bob Costas and the song “Who Let the Dogs Out?” This led to the Civil War.

  BASEBALL TODAY: Baseball today is very much the same as it was 150 years ago, except that, for security reasons, the games take place after the public has gone to bed. The rules are simple: Each team sends nine players onto the field, except for one team, which sends one—the “batter”—plus two elderly retired players called “coaches,” who constantly touch themselves on various parts of their bodies to communicate, via Secret Code, the message: “Tobacco juice has corroded my brain into a lump of dead tissue the size of a grape.”

  The object of baseball is for the “pitcher” to throw the “ball” into the “strike zone.” This is almost impossible, because the only person who knows the location of the strike zone is the “umpire,” and he refuses to reveal it because of a bitter, decades-old labor dispute between his union and Major League Baseball. On any given day, the strike zone may not even be in the stadium; there's simply no way to tell. The umpire communicates solely by making ambiguous hand gestures and shouting something that sounds like “HROOOOT!,” which he refuses to explain.

  Eventually, the pitcher throws the ball at the batter, in case the strike zone is located somewhere on his body. This is the signal for all the players to run to the middle of the field and engage in a form of combat similar to professional wrestling, except that sometimes professional wrestlers, by accident, actually hit each other. This never happens in baseball, where the last player to land a punch was Babe Ruth, who in the 1921 World Series, knocked out his own self. Instead of punching, baseball players fight by grabbing each other's shirts and exchanging fierce glares, as if to say: “You're gonna get a PERMANENT WRINKLE IN YOUR PAJAMAS, BUSTER!”

  After nine “innings” of this, the team with the most “runs” wins. I don't know how the runs happen, because by then I'm asleep. But I sleep in front of the TV, in a rooting position. My body language clearly says: “I may not know who's playing, but if they don't win, it's a shame.”

  Burger King Puts Workers' Feet to the Fire—Literally

  A while back I read a fascinating business-related article in my newspaper, the Miami Herald (official motto: “The Person Who Was Supposed to Think Up Our Motto Got Laid Off”). This article, which was written by Elaine Walker, concerned an incident wherein employees of the Burger King marketing department walked barefoot over hot coals.

  If you're unfamiliar with modern American corporate culture, you're probably assuming that somebody spiked the Burger King coffee machine with LSD. Nope. The firewalking was a planned activity on a corporate motivational retreat, supervised by a professional fire-walking consultant to whom Burger King paid thousands of actual U.S. dollars.

  According to the Herald article, the consultant also had the Burger King marketing people bend spoons, break boards, smash bricks, bend steel bars with their throats, and walk over a bed of sharp nails. American corporate employees are required to do this kind of thing all the time, and for a sound business reason: Their management has lint for brains.

  No, seriously, these are motivational activities that make employees self-confident and unafraid to tackle tough business challenges. The employees think: “Hey, if I can bend a steel bar with my throat, there's no reason why I can't change the toner cartridge in the printer!”

  The Burger King people got off easy. Some corporations motivate their employees by shipping them off to rugged wilderness survival programs, where they learn vital lessons that help them excel in the business world. Like, if they need to impress an important client, they could use their survival training to, I don't know, catch him a squirrel.

  The point is that subjecting employees to physical abuse is a standard corporate motivational technique that has proven, in study after study, to be a highly effective means of transferring money to consultants. Still, you might think that employees would draw the line at walking on hot coals, on the grounds that they could, theoretically, burn their feet. This would seem to be especially obvious to employees of Burger King, a company whose main product is a graphic example of what happens to flesh that is exposed to high temperatures.

  Nevertheless, at the Burger King marketing retreat, more than one hundred employees walked across an eight-foot strip of white-hot coals, and—in an inspirational triumph of mind over matter that shows the amazing miracles that the human spirit, when freed of self-doubt, can accomplish—about a dozen of them burned their feet. One woman had to be taken to the hospital. Several people were in wheelchairs the next day.

  Now, you may feel that an employee-motivation event that actually injured some employees could not be described as a total success. That is why you are not are not a marketing executive. The Herald article quotes Burger King's vice president of product marketing, Dana Frydman—whose personal feet were among those burned—as saying: “It was a great experience for everyone.”

  The article also quotes the firewalking consultant, Robert “Cork” Kallen, as saying: “The majority of the people get through it without a nick or a blister. When you see over one hundred people and only ten to fifteen people have blisters, I don't term that unusual. Some people just have incredibly sensitive feet.”

  There you have the REAL problem: employees with sensitive feet. It's high time that corporations did something about this problem. Here's my proposal: When you apply for a job, at the end of your interview, you would be required to take off your shoes and socks, and the interviewer would snap the bottoms of your feet sharply with a rubber band. For particularly important jobs, the interviewer might staple a document to your insole, to see if you truly have the foot toughness it takes to succeed in the modern corporate environment.

  What do you think? I think it's a great idea. In fact, I think I would be an excellent motivational consultant. You can be my first client! Here's what you do: (1) Tear this column out of the newspaper. (2) Wad it into a ball. (3) Insert the ball into your left nostril and jam it in there as far as you can with a pencil. (4) Send me thousands of dollars.

  Ha ha! I'm just kidding, of course. I know you're not THAT stupid. Hardly anybody is!

  NOTE TO MARKETING EXECUTIVES: I would prefer cash.

  A Truly Terrifying Act: Doing the Hokey Pokey for Airport Security

  Air travel sure is a big old laundry hamper of fun these days. That's what I was thinking as I was removing my clothing in front of hundreds of people at the Denver airport (which is located in Wyoming).

  For some reason, my traveling party had been singled out by the security people for a near-proctological level of scrutiny. This surprised me, because my party consisted of me, my wife, and our twenty-month-old daughter.

  I cannot imagine terrorists getting anything done if they were traveling with a baby. Every few steps they'd have to change the baby, feed the baby, snatch lethal objects out of the baby's mouth, etc. They'd have no time for anything else. At the end of the day, they'd be going: “Did you commit the act of terror?” “NO! I was wiping chocolate off her Snow White doll! I thought YOU were going to commit the act of terror!”

  Nevertheless, we were singled out. This meant that while the other travelers—all of whom, frankly, looked suspicious to me�
��zipped through security, we were ordered off to the side, where a man told me to remove my shoes, belt, and wallet, which he handed to a woman, who, without a word, walked off with them. I was hoping that these were security personnel, as opposed to wallet thieves who had figured out that, these days, air travelers will do anything they are ordered to do (“Okay, Mr. Smith, I'm going to ask you to put your left hand in, take your left hand out, do the Hokey Pokey, and shake it all about”).

  Next, the man told me to hold my arms out so he could scan me. This meant I had to let go of my pants, which, being beltless, began to slide down, an occurrence that I am sure had been recorded in my Terrorist Suspect Profile on some computer somewhere (“USE EXTREME CAUTION. KNOWN MOONER.”)

  While I was performing as the World's Oldest Chippendale Dancer, other security people were insisting that my daughter toddle alone through the metal detector. But first they made her give up her Cow Baby doll, so they could put it through the scanner. I imagine the Cow Baby doll got their attention because it looks like a cow, but when you lift up the head, you see it's actually a baby wearing a cow costume. This is clearly suspicious (“LOOKS LIKE COW, BUT ACTUALLY IS BABY”).

  They finally let us pass, but when we got to our gate, they called out our names—only our names—and ordered us to hold out our arms to be scanned again, while all the other passengers looked on, no doubt wondering what kind of lowlife terrorists we were to be lugging around a baby. It was embarrassing, but I have to admit that it gave me the security of knowing that if anything remotely suspicious had occurred on the flight, our fellow passengers would have beaten us senseless with their in-flight dinner rolls.

  IRRELEVANT CLOSING ANECDOTE: We were traveling as part of a tour with a rock band called the Rock Bottom Remainders. This is a group of authors who raise money for a literacy charity called America Scores by playing amplified instruments in such a way as to bring audiences to their feet, shouting: “Okay, okay, we'll donate! Stop playing!”