Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

by Dave Barry

  ENTIRE SWISS ARMY FOUND STABBED TO DEATH WITH OWN LITTLE FOLDING KNIVES Pedestrians Step Right over Rotting Corpses

  So I’m afraid that, appealing as the idea may be, we can’t reduce the deficit by selling New York.

  What the government desperately needs is an innovative new concept for getting money from people, and we can all be grateful that such a concept appears to be oozing over the fiscal horizon at this very moment: a national lottery game. A number of congresspersons have already proposed that we start one. It would be similar to the lotteries currently operating in the really advanced states. Here’s how they work:

  1. First you pass strict laws that say it is totally illegal for private citizens to operate lotteries, because they encourage the poor and the stupid to gamble away their money against ludicrously bad odds. If you find private citizens operating such lotteries, you call them “numbers racketeers” and you throw them in prison.

  2. Next you set up an official state lottery with even more ludicrous odds. You give it a perky name like the “Extremely Lucky Digits Game,” and you run cheerful upbeat ads right on television strongly suggesting that the poor and the stupid could make no wiser investment than to spend their insulin money on lottery tickets. A nice touch is to say you’re using the lottery proceeds to fund a popular program that the state would have to pay for anyway, such as senior citizens or baby deer. In Pennsylvania, for example, they drag an actual senior citizen in front of the camera to perform the ritual televised Daily Number drawing. The senior citizen usually looks kind of frightened, like a hostage being displayed by the Red Brigades. The clear implication is that if the viewers don’t purchase Daily Number tickets, Pennsylvania will have to throw old Mrs. Beasley out into the snow headfirst.

  The news media help out by regularly running heartwarming front-page stories about how a man who was broke and starving won $800 million in his state lottery and suddenly could afford nice teeth and many new friends.

  So anyway, the plan now is to run something like this on a nationwide scale, which I think would be great, especially if it keeps the federal government from doing something really desperate to raise money, such as selling drugs or making snuff movies. The only potential problem with a national lottery, as some states have pointed out, is that it might siphon off a lot of poor and stupid from the state lotteries. But if this happens, we could have a bailout system, where the federal government would step in and purchase so many million dollars worth of lottery tickets from the troubled state. I mean, hey, why do we have governments in the first place, if not to help each other out?

  The Columnist’s Caper

  I figured out why I’m not getting seriously rich. I write newspaper columns. Nobody ever makes newspaper columns into Major Motion Pictures starring Tom Cruise. The best you can hope for, with a newspaper column, is that people will like it enough to attach it to their refrigerators with magnets shaped like fruit.

  So I have written a suspense novel. It has everything. Sex. Violence. Sex. Death. Russians. Dead Russians. Here’s what the newspaper critics are saying:

  “A very short novel.”-the Waco, Texas, Chronic Vegetable “This is it? This is the entire novel?”-the Arkansas Dependent-Statesperson “Not enough sex.”-the Evening Gonad

  No doubt you motion-picture producers out there would like to see the novel these critics are raving about, so you can send me lucrative film offers. Here it is:

  Chapter One

  Carter Crater strode into the Oval Office. He looked like Tom Cruise, or, if he is available, Al Pacino.

  Behind the desk sat the president of the United States. To his left, in the corner, stood the secretary of state. Crater sensed that something was wrong.

  “Unless we act quickly,” the president said, “within the next few hours the world will be blown to pieces the size of Smith Brothers cough lozenges.”

  Crater frowned. “We had better act quickly,” he said.

  The president looked thoughtful. “That just might work,” he said. “Use whatever means you consider necessary, including frequent casual sex.”

  Chapter Two

  In the Kremlin, General Rasputin Smirnov frowned at Colonel joyce Brothers Karamazov Popov.

  “It is absolutely essential that the Americans do not suspect anything,” Smirnov said.

  “Yes, agreed Popov.

  Smirnov frowned.

  “Shouldn’t we be speaking Russian?” he asked.

  Popov looked thoughtful.

  “We should at least have accents,” he said.

  Chapt1er Three

  Suddenly, it struck Crater: The Oval Office doesn’t have corners.

  Chapter Four

  Some 2,347 miles away in East Berlin, a man and a woman walked briskly eastward on Volkswagen-kindergarten-pumpernikel-strasse. Talking intently, they did not notice the sleek black Mercedes sedan, its windows tinted almost black, as it turned off Hamburgerfrankfurterwienerschnitzelstrasse and came toward them from behind, picking up speed until, traveling at 130 kilometers per microgram, it roared into a parked garbage truck.

  “Too much window tint,” the woman said.

  Chapter Five

  Some 452.5 miles away, Crater had sex.

  Chapter Six

  “Ach,” said General Smirnov. “Zees American agent, ve must keel heem.”

  “Dat’s de troof,” agreed Popov. “Les’n we do, he gon’ mess up de plan to blow up de worl’.”

  Chapter Seven

  Crater handed the microfilm to crack intelligence expert Lieutenant Ensign Sergeant Commander Monica Melon.

  She studied it carefully for about 15 minutes. Finally she spoke.

  “There’s something written on here,” she said, frowning, “but it’s really teensy.”

  Chapter Eight

  Smirnov frowned at Popov.

  “Blimey,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  In the darkened room, Crater could see the shadowy figure who threatened to destroy the world, who had led Crater on this desperate chase across nine continents, a race filled with terror and death and women whose thighs could have been the basis for a major world religion, and all leading to this moment, Crater and the shadowy figure, alone in the gloom. Slowly, almost reluctantly, Crater reached for the light switch. He flicked it on. The shadowy figure turned, slowly, slowly. At last, Crater could see the figure’s face.

  It was a big surprise.

  Chapter Ten

  “Good job of saving the entire world, Crater,” the president said. “But I have one question: How did you know Miss Prendergast never heard the cathedral bell?”

  “Easy, sir,” answered Crater. “You see, Lord Copperbottom is left-handed, so the gardener couldn’t possibly have taken the key from the night stand.”

  “I never thought of that,” said the president. He frowned at the names coming up out of the floor and drifting toward the ceiling so the audience would know who had played what parts.

  “Hey,” the president said. “These names are backwards.”

  A Rash Proposal

  Lately I have been thinking a lot about the defense of Western Europe. It keeps my mind off this rash in my right armpit. When I think about it, I reach the point where all I want to do is quit my job and move to an isolated cave so I can devote full time to scratching myself. Eventually it reached the point where I threw caution to the winds and went to an actual skin doctor. I was hoping he’d give me one of those hand-held garden implements with the three sharp prongs. I forget what you call them, and say: “Dave, I want you to rake this implement across your rash every 10 seconds or as needed.” But no, he gave me some wimpy little white pills and came up with a bizarre treatment program under which—this is the truth—I was supposed to try to grow a new rash. Really. He thinks my rash is caused by a rash-causing chemical that large corporations put in deodorants, apparently out of sheer hatred for the consumer, and to test this theory he wants me to rub some of this very same chemical onto my arm and see
if I develop a new rash. I’m not going to do it, of course, because (a) I don’t even want the rash I brought him in the first place, let alone a new one, and (b) if he thinks I’m stupid enough to deliberately rub rash-causing chemicals on myself, his next move will b to ask me to rub them on my family and friends.

  Sometimes you have to wonder what’s happening to the medical profession. A recent edition of the Weekly World News, which I feel is probably the best newspaper your money can buy in a supermarket, carried a story headlined “HUMAN HEAD TRANSPLANT.” The story concerns an operation performed by doctors in Communist China who got hold of this unfortunate man with a large brain tumor, and they treated him by amputating his head and replacing it with one they got from a person who had lost his body in a factory accident and consequently died. I would very much like to know how the doctors explained this operation to the patient (“The only possible side effect we can foresee, Loo Ping, will be some neck stiffness, plus the fact that you will have the head of a dead factory worker.”)

  Of course you have an entirely different set of problems to confront when you talk about defending Western Europe. The main one is that it is filled with Western Europeans, who are not in the least bit interested in defending themselves. They have discovered, over the past thousand years or so, that every time they get military, they wind up having a lengthy and extremely complicated war in which the various countries have tremendous trouble remembering whose side they’re on:

  BRITISH SOLDIER: Taste my sword, French person!

  FRENCH SOLDIER: No! Wait! We are allies! This is World War I!

  BRITISH SOLDIER: I’m terribly sorry! I thought it was the Hundred Years War! Does this mean I can kill Italians?

  FRENCH SOLDIER: (Consulting manual): No, I’m afraid not. Not until World War II.

  So eventually the Western Europeans stopped forming armies altogether and decided to become third-rate powers, which means we have to defend them from the Russians. We’re available to defend foreign continents because we have no urgent need to defend our own. I mean, the Mexicans certainly aren’t going to attack us, seeing as how most of them already work here. I suppose the Canadians could attack us, but the entire population of Canada is maybe the size of the audience on “Donahue,” only quieter, so even if they did attack, nobody would know, especially if it was during rush hour.

  So we’re over there defending Western Europe, which is very, very expensive. For one thing, we have to get up an army, which means we have to pay for all those commercials wherein we suggest to young people that the whole point of the army is to teach them valuable electronics skills, with no mention whatsoever of getting shot at or getting cretin haircuts and being ordered to do pushups by a person who has never read anything longer than a Dr Pepper bottle. For another thing, to defend Western Europe we have to let the Pentagon buy all these tanks and guns and things, and the Pentagon is unable to buy any object that costs less than a condominium in Vail. If the Pentagon needs, say, fruit, it will argue that it must have fruit that can withstand the rigors of combat conditions, and it will wind up purchasing the FX-700

  Seedless Tactical Field Grape, which will cost $160,000 per bunch, and which will have an 83 percent failure rate.

  So I have come up with this plan for defending Western Europe much more economically, which is to pull our armed forces out of there altogether. They could come home and fix our videocassette recorders. In their place we would send over all our state highway departments and tell them we want them to repair the roads between Western Europe to Russia. Think about it: First they’d have their Cone Placement Division strew millions of traffic cones randomly all over the roads, then they’d have their Sign Erection Department put up signs explaining that all the lanes would be really messed up for the next 17 years to Help Serve You Better, then the Traffic Direction Division would get all kinds of lowlife derelicts out there waving flags and directing motorists right into oncoming trucks, and within a few months it would be absolutely impossible for any vehicle, including Communist tanks, to get from Russia to Western Europe.

  So that’s my plan. What do you think? I think those wimpy little pills are starting to kick in.

  He Knows Not What He Writes

  The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes. So I am going to be very sensitive, here, which is not easy, because the thing about religion is that everybody else’s always appears stupid.

  For example, if you read about some religious sect in India that believes God wants people to drink their own urine, you don’t say to yourself, “Isn’t that amazing, the diversity of belief systems Man has developed in his neverending quest to understand and cope with the intricate moral dilemmas posed by a complex and uncertain world?” No, what you say to yourself ;s, “These people have the brains of trout.”

  Meanwhile, over in India, the sect members are getting a major chuckle over the fact that some American basketball players cross themselves before they take foul shots. “As if God cares about foul shots,” the sect members howl, tears streaming down their faces. “Say, is this my urine or yours?”

  That’s the basic problem, of course: figuring out what God wants us to do. I will admit right up front here that I don’t have the vaguest idea. All my religious training was in Sunday school maybe 25 years ago, and the main thing I remember was that God was always smiting the Pharisees. At least I think it was the Pharisees. It seemed that hardly a day went by when they didn’t get the tar smitten out of them, which is probably why you see so few of them around any more.

  My wife, who has bales of religious training, tells me that this was the Old Testament God, who was very strict, whereas the New Testament God is a genuinely mellow deity, the kind of deity who would never smite anybody or order you to smear goat’s blood on your first-born son, which is the kind of thing the Old Testament God was always doing.

  NOTE: The preceding paragraph is in no way intended to suggest that there is anything wrong with smearing goat’s blood on your first-born son. As far as I’m concerned, this is an excellent ritual, and I would do it myself if not for the fact that my son might tell the school authorities. Please put away your machetes. Thank you.

  It used to be much worse. Back in ancient Greece and Rome they had gods all over the place, and it was no fun at all being a mortal, as you know if you ever read any myths:

  “One day two young lovers, Vector and Prolix, were walking in a garden. This angered Bruno, the god of gardens, so he turned Vector into a toad. Saddened, Prolix picked up her lover and squeezed him to her bosom, which caused him to secrete a toad secretion upon her garment. This angered Vito, the god of fabric, who turned Prolix into an exceedingly unattractive insect. Saddened, Vector hopped to his lover, which angered Denise, who was the goddess of municipal water supply and just happened to be in the neighborhood, so she hit them both with a rock.”

  And so on. So things are better now. Today most of us believe in just the one God, and He never turns people into toads or anything, unless you count Spiro Agnew. All He wants us to do is what He wants us to do, which is clearly revealed in the Bible.

  (Sound of the machetes being unsheathed.)

  And the Talmud and the Koran and the Book of Mormon and the works of L. Ron Hubbard. These holy writings tell us what God wants us to do, often in the form of revealing anecdotes:

  “And Bezel saideth unto Sham: ‘Sham,’ he saideth, ‘Thou shalt goest unto the town of Begorrah, and there shalt thou fetcheth unto thine bosom 35

  talents and also shalt thou fetcheth a like number of cubits, provideth that they are nice and fresh.”

  The problem is that many of us don’t have the vaguest idea what these anecdotes reveal. This is why we have broadcast preachers, who can take a religious anecdote and explain it over the course of a half-hour in such a manner that if you listened all the way through you would have no questions at all:

  BROADCA
ST PREACHER: And so we can see that it was BEZEL who told SHAM to go to Begorrah. It was not SHAM who told BEZEL: It was BEZEL who told SHAM. Now people ask me, they say, “Brother Ray Bob Tom, what do you mean, it was Bezel who told Sham?” And I say, “What I mean is that when we’re talking about who told who to go to Begorrah, we must understand that it was BEZEL who told ...”

  And so on. It can take upwards of a week to get through an entire sentence, which is why you often have to send in a Love Offering to get cassettes so you’ll remember what it is that God wants you to do. This sometimes seems too complicated, so a lot of people have switched over to the more relaxed style of the Merv Griffin-type of broadcast preachers, who have bands and potted plants and sofas and everything. (“Our next guest is not only one of the top Christians in the business, but also a close personal friend of mine.”)

  So we have a number of ways of finding out what God wants us to do, and each of us must decide what the answer is in this wonderful country where we are free to believe as we choose, and where there are strict laws against assaulting people just because we don’t like something they wrote.

  Man Bites Dog

  Today we begin a popular feature wherein we will address the major ethical questions of the day, starting with: Is it OK to eat your dog?