Dave Barry Talks Back

by Dave Barry

  We also saw the famous Bonzai Pipeline, where brave or possibly just insane surfers ride on waves the size of Central American nations. My wife and son and I were standing on the beach, marveling at these waves, saying things like “Look at the SIZE of these waves! Look at this wave right HEEEAAAIIIEEEEE” and the next thing we knew we were being washed up the beach like the Jetsam Family, tourists in Full Bozo Mode.

  This is why we were so wet when we ran into Imelda Marcos. This really happened. We were driving by the memorial park where Ferdinand was staying temporarily until Imelda could figure out a way to get him back to the Philippines, and we thought we’d stop and take a quick, unobtrusive gander. But when we got into Ferdinand’s little private building, our shoes squishing as we walked, there was Imelda and her retinue. It was pretty awkward because they were dressed in full mourning attire and we were dressed like we just got off the Log Flume Ride at Disney World. Fortunately I am a trained journalist who knows how to handle himself in the presence of a major world figure. “Guck,” I said, or some noise like it, way down in my throat, as I grabbed my son, who was wandering cheerfully over to the casket, and we squished the hell out of there. So I can’t give you a detailed report on the Marcos situation, except to say that Ferdinand seems to be doing as well as can be expected, under the circumstances.

  Satisfied that our trip now contained a very high percentage of business-related activity, we returned to Waikiki Beach, where we relaxed with a few tax-deductible drinks and watched the gorgeous sunset Pacific sky change colors behind the silhouettes of gently swaying dental professionals. Aloha. And I mean it.

  THIS TAKES GUTS

  Today we present the exciting results of a Scientific Taste Test that we ran recently here at the Institute of Scary Foods. This test was inspired by alert consumers Ken Weidner and Eric Simonson, who sent us a label from a canned food named—we are not making this up—“Armour Potted Meat Food Product.” The ingredients listed on the label include: Beef Tripe, Beef Hearts, Cooked Fat Tissue Solids, and Partially Defatted Beef Fatty Tissue, which is always a popular family favorite (“Mom, I’d like another heaping mound of Partially Defatted Beef Fatty Tissue!”)

  Also on the label is a color picture labeled “SERVING SUGGESTION,” which shows a brownish substance with parsley and an olive sitting on it. Here at the Institute of Scary Foods we are highly suspicious of olives, which, in our opinion, are the eyeballs of giant frogs. We believe that if you stood outside an olive factory, you’d hear the unmistakable tragic sound (RIBBETT-THUMP; RIBBETT-THUMP) of terrified sightless frogs leaping into things.

  So we were not exactly insane about the Potted Meat Food Product label. However, our job is to keep you, the food-eating consumer, informed, so we called up the manufacturer’s Consumer Information Center, where we spoke with a perky and helpful person named Barbara.

  “What is ‘beef tripe’?” we asked.

  “Well, it’s a part of the cow,” said Barbara. “I’m trying to think of what part it is.”

  She put us on musical hold for a few minutes, then came back with a solid answer.

  “The tripe is part of around the stomach area of the cow,” she said.

  Thus reassured, we set off for the convenience store. This is the same store where we once bought an amazing digital wristwatch that cost only $1.99, yet told the time. And when we say “the time,” we mean it. If you set this watch at 2:14, it would keep saying “2:14” until you changed it to another time. This watch was so convenient that you didn’t even have to wear it, because you always knew what it said.

  Sure enough, this store had Armour Potted Meat Food Product, so we bought some, as well as another brand, Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product. In addition to the beef tripe, the Libby’s label says it contains pork stomachs, which could be a real selling point (“Now With TWO KINDS Of Stomachs!”).

  To round out our Taste Test, we purchased:

  A can of Spam;

  A can of Mighty Dog–brand dog food;

  A can of Bonton-brand “natural” snails;

  A can of something called “Beanee Weenees.”

  We also bought some tortilla chips, because we were concerned about an article we received from alert reader Stuart Ritter about a woman who ate an improperly chewed chip, which ripped a five-inch gash in her esophagus. The article quotes the woman’s doctor as saying: “A poorly chewed tortilla chip can produce serious injury.”

  For the Taste Test, we offered the various food products to a five-member Expert Taste Panel, consisting of me; my wife, Beth; our son, Robert; our large main dog, Earnest; and our small emergency backup dog, Zippy. The results were as follows:

  Spam ranked highest, earning the title of “The Rolls-Royce Car Product of Canned Meat Products.”

  The Potted Meat Food Products had the same appetizing look and texture of internal-organ-colored wood filler, but did not taste as good. They were definitely a cut below the Mighty Dog, which was grainy but at least tasted as though it had once been organic matter.

  Robert spat everything into the garbage except Spam and Beanee Weenees.

  Earnest licked everything a LOT and continued to lick the floor for several minutes after all detectable food molecules had disappeared.

  Nobody except Beth and Earnest would eat the snails, which look like little Jabba the Hutts and are clearly being sold as a prank.

  Zippy got so excited about the sudden unforeseen onslaught of food products that he had a little accident in the kitchen.

  For safety reasons, we did not attempt to eat the Tortilla Chips of Doom. But we did establish, in a chilling experiment, that a single’ chip is capable of ripping a large, ugly gash in a personally computerized fund-raising letter we got from the Rev. Oral Roberts. Our advice to you consumers is: Don’t try these experiments at home. Not without plenty of carbonated malt beverage product.

  READER ALERT

  DOGS

  I’ve learned to live with the fact that my two dogs, Earnest and Zippy, are way more popular than I am. I always get a lot of mail when I write about them, and people are always asking me to write more, which is kind of puzzling inasmuch as all of my dog columns basically boil down to the following statement: “Boy, are dogs ever stupid!” Perhaps this reassures people. Perhaps they say, “Well, I may have missed out on that big promotion, and I may have screwed up my personal life, but at least I’ve never run headfirst into a tree at 37 miles per hour while chasing a squirrel. At least not while I was sober.”

  TAKING THE ZIP OUT OF ZIPPY

  I regularly get letters from irate MacNeil-Lehrer-watching readers who ask: “With all the serious problems facing the world, how come you write about your dogs?” To which I answer: Because I don’t know anything about your dogs. Also—you can call me an idealist if you want, but this is my opinion—by writing about my dogs, I believe that I can bring my readers—rich and poor, young and old, intelligent and “lite”-beer drinking—to a greater awareness of, and appreciation for, my dogs. I want my dogs to someday be at least as famous as Loni Anderson. I want them to receive lucrative offers for major motion pictures based on their True Life Adventures.

  This week, for example, our adventure is entitled:

  ZIPPY AND EARNEST GET OPERATED ON

  This adventure began when Zippy went through puberty, a biological process that a small dog goes through in less time than it takes you to throw away your Third Class mail. One minute Zippy was a cute little-boy puppy, scampering about the house playfully causing permanent damage to furniture that is not yet fully paid for, and the next minute he was: A Man. When the new, mature version of Zippy sauntered into a room, you could almost hear the great blues musician Muddy Waters in the background, growling:

  I’m a MAN

  (harmonica part)

  Yes I AM

  (harmonica part)

  A FULL-GROWN man.

  Of course in Zippy’s case, “full-grown” means “the size of a Hostess Sno-Ball, yet somehow less impressive.�
�� But in his own mind, Zippy was a major stud muffin, a hunk of burnin’ love, a small-caliber but high-velocity Projectile of Passion fired from the Saturday Night Special of Sex. And his target was: Earnest.

  Earnest is a female dog, but she was not the ideal choice for Zippy, because all of her remotely suspicious organs had been surgically removed several years ago. Since that time she has not appeared to be even dimly aware of sex, or much of anything else. Her lone hobby, besides eating, is barking violently at nothing. Also she is quite large; when she’s standing up, Zippy can run directly under her with an easy six inches of clearance. So at first we were highly amused when he started putting The Moves on her. It was like watching Tommy Tadpole hit on the Queen Mary.

  But shortly the novelty wore off and we started feeling sorry for Earnest, who spent the entire day staring glumly off into dog hyperspace while this tireless yarn-ball-sized Lust Machine kept leaping up on her, sometimes getting as high as mid-shin, and emitting these presumably seductive high-pitched yips (“What’s your sign? What’s your sign?”). So we decided it was time to have the veterinarian turn the volume knob of desire way down on the stereo system of Zippy’s manhood. If you get my drift.

  The next morning Earnest was limping, so we decided to take both dogs to the vet. They bounded enthusiastically into the car, of course; dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear. When we got to the veterinarian’s office they realized they had been tricked and went into Full Reverse Thrust, but fortunately the floor material there is slippery enough to luge on. So when we last saw Zippy and Earnest that morning, they were being towed, all eight legs scrabbling in a wild, backward, futile blur, into: the Back Room.

  When we picked them up that night, they were a pair of hurtin’ cowpokes. Earnest, who had a growth removed, was limping badly, plus we had to put a plastic bag on her leg so she wouldn’t lick her stitches off. And Zippy, to keep him from getting at his stitches, was wearing a large and very comical round plastic collar that looked like a satellite dish with Zippy’s head sticking out in the middle. He had a lot of trouble getting around, because his collar kept hitting things, such as the ground.

  For the next week, if you came to our front door, here’s what happened: You heard the loud barking of two dogs going into Red Alert mode, but you did not see any immediate dogs. Instead you heard a lot of bumping and clunking, which turned out to be the sound of a large dog limping frantically toward you but suffering a major traction loss on every fourth step because of a plastic bag, combined with the sound of a very small dog trying desperately to keep up but bonking his collar into furniture, doorways, etc. And then, finally, skidding around the corner, still barking, there appeared the dynamite duo: Bagfoot and Satellite Head.

  During this week we were not the least bit worried about burglars, because if anyone had tried to break into our house, we would have found him the next morning, lying in a puddle of his own drool. Dead from laughter.

  YELLOW JOURNALISM

  If you were to ask me, “Dave, what are the two words that summarize everything that you truly believe in, other than that beer should always be served in a chilled glass?” I would have to respond: “Dog obedience.” I own two dogs, and they have both been trained to respond immediately to my voice. For example, when we’re outside, all I have to do is issue the following standard dog command: “Here, Earnest! Here, Zippy! C’mon! Here, doggies! Here! I said come HERE! You dogs COME HERE RIGHT NOW!! ARE YOU DOGS LISTENING TO ME?? HEY!!!” And instantly both dogs, in unison, like a precision drill team, will continue trotting in random directions, sniffing the ground.

  This is of course exactly what I want them to do. Dogs need to sniff the ground; it’s how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard. We live next to an aircraft-carrier-sized dog named Bear, who is constantly committing acts of prize-winning journalism around the neighborhood, and my dogs are major fans of his work. Each morning, while I am shouting commands at them, they race around and scrutinize the most recent installments of the ongoing Bear oeuvre, vibrating their bodies ecstatically to communicate their critical comments (“Bear has done it AGAIN!” “This is CLASSIC Bear!” etc.).

  Of course you cannot achieve this level of obedience overnight. You have to take the time to understand dogs as a species, to realize that they have not always been peaceful domesticated animals who fulfill their nutritional requirements primarily by sidling up to the coffee table when you’re not looking and snorking taco chips directly out of the bowl. Millions of years ago dogs were fierce predators who roamed in hungry packs; if some unfortunate primitive man got caught out in the open, the dogs would surround him, knock him to the ground, and, with saliva dripping from their wolflike jaws, lick him to within an inch of his life. “Dammit, Bernice!” he would yell to primitive woman. “We got to get these dogs some professional obedience training!” This is still basically the situation today.

  We had our larger dog, Earnest, professionally trained by a very knowledgeable woman who came to our house and spent several hours commanding Earnest to “heel.” Wouldn’t it be funny if it turned out that animals actually had high IQs and understood English perfectly, and the only reason they act stupid is that we’re always giving them unintelligible commands? Like, maybe at night in the stable, the horses stand around asking each other: “What the hell does ‘giddyap’ mean?”

  But the trainer had no trouble getting Earnest to comprehend “heel.” Her technique was to give commands in a gentle but firm voice; to consistently praise Earnest for obeying properly; and to every now and then, as a reminder, send 75,000 volts of electricity down the leash. At least that’s how I assume she did it, because in no time she had Earnest heeling like Vice President Quayle. Whereas when I take Earnest for a “walk” I am frequently yanked horizontal by dog lunges of seminuclear force—Earnest could tow a bulldozer across Nebraska—so that my body, clinging desperately to the leash, winds up bouncing gaily down the street behind Earnest at close to the federal speed limit, like a tin can tied to a newlywed couple’s car.

  But “heel” is not the only obedience skill our dogs have mastered. They also know:

  ANSWER THE DOOR—When a person, real or imagined, comes to our house, both dogs charge violently at the front door barking loudly enough to shatter glass, because they know, through instinct, that there is a bad guy out there and they must protect the house. So when we open the door, no matter who is standing there—a neighbor, a delivery person, Charles Manson holding a four-foot machete—the dogs barge right past him and race outside, looking for the bad guy, who for some reason is never there, a mystery that always causes the dogs to come to skidding four-legged stops and look around with expressions of extreme puzzlement. Foiled again! He’s a clever one, that bad guy!

  GO TO SCHOOL—The highlight, the absolute pinnacle, of our dogs’ entire existence is riding in the car when we drive our son to school, an activity that gives them the opportunity to provide vital services such as barking at policemen and smearing dog snot all over the rear window. So every morning they monitor us carefully, and the instant we do something that indicates to them that our departure is imminent, such as we wake up, they sprint to the garage door and bark at it, in case we’ve forgotten where it is, then they spring back to us and bark some more, to let us know they’re ready to go, and then they spring back to the garage door, then back to us, and so on, faster and faster, until they become barely visible blurs of negative-IQ canine activity rocketing through the house at several hundred revolutions per minute, and you can just imagine how difficult it can be for us to make them understand the concept of “Saturday.” One nonschool morning my wife felt so sorry for them that she went out in her bathrobe and drove them around the neighborhood for a while, looking for thin
gs they could bark at. So don’t try to tell me dog training isn’t worth it, OK? I can’t hear you anyway, because there’s a bad guy at the door.

  JUST SAY NO TO RUGS

  Everybody should have a pet. And I’m not saying this just because the American Pet Council gave me a helicopter. I’m also saying it because my family has always owned pets, and without them, our lives would not be nearly so rich in—call me sentimental, but this is how I feel—dirt.

  Pets are nature’s way of reminding us that, in the incredibly complex ecological chain of life, there is no room for furniture. For example, the only really nice furnishing we own is an Oriental rug that we bought, with the help of a decorator, in a failed attempt to become tasteful. This rug is way too nice for an onion-dip-intensive household like ours, and we seriously thought about keeping it in a large safe-deposit box, but we finally decided, in a moment of abandon, to put it on the floor. We then conducted a comprehensive rug-behavior training seminar for our main dog, Earnest, and our small auxiliary dog, Zippy.

  “NO!!” we told them approximately 75 times while looking very stern and pointing at the rug. This proven training technique caused them to slink around the way dogs do when they feel tremendously guilty but have no idea why. Satisfied, we went out to dinner.

  I later figured out, using an electronic calculator, that this rug covers approximately 2 percent of the total square footage of our house, which means that if you (not you personally) were to have a random diarrhea attack in our home, the odds are approximately 49 to 1 against your having it on our Oriental rug. The odds against your having four random attacks on this rug are more than five million to one. So we had to conclude that it was done on purpose. The rug appeared to have been visited by a group of specially bred, highly trained Doberman Poopers, but we determined, by interrogating both dogs, that the entire massive output was the work of Zippy. Probably he was trying to do the right thing. Probably, somewhere in the Coco Puff—sized nodule of nerve tissue that serves as his brain, he dimly remembered that The Masters had told him something about the rug. Yes! That’s it! To the rug!