Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

by Dave Barry

  GERMAN: “Ach du lieber!” (“Darn it!”) SPANISH: “Caramba!” (“Darn it!”) FRENCH: “Zut alors!” (“Look! A lors!”)

  Also you should bear in mind that foreign persons for some reason believe that everyday household objects and vegetables are “masculine” or “feminine.” For example, French persons believe that potatoes are feminine, even though they (potatoes) do not have sexual organs, that I have noticed. Dogs, on the other hand, are masculine, even if they are not. (This does not mean, by the way, that a dog can have sex with a potato, although it will probably try.)

  PRONUNCIATION HINT: In most foreign languages, the letter “r” is pronounced incorrectly. Also, if you are speaking German, at certain points during each sentence you should give the impression you’re about to expel a major gob.

  OK? Practice these techniques in front of a mirror until you’re comfortable with them, then go to a country that is frequented by foreigners and see if you can’t increase their international understanding, the way jimmy Carter did during his 1977 presidential visit to Poland, when he told a large welcoming crowd, through an official State Department translator, that he was “pleased to be grasping your secret parts.”

  When You Grotto Go

  The travel rule I wish to stress here is: Never trust anything you read in a travel article. Travel articles appear in publications that sell large expensive advertisements to tourism-related industries, and these industries do not wish to see articles with headlines like:

  URUGUAY: DON’T BOTHER

  So no matter what kind of leech-infested, plumbing-free destination travel writers are writing about, they always stress the positive. If a travel article describes the native denizens of a particular country as reserved, this means that when you ask them for directions, they spit on your rental car. Another word you want to especially watch out for is “enchanting.” A few years back, my wife and I visited The Blue Grotto, a Famous Tourist Attraction on the island of Capri off the coast of Italy that is always described in travel articles as “enchanting,” and I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one Travel Adventure that will forever remain a large stone lodged in the kidney of my memory.

  We never asked to see The Blue Grotto. We had entered Italy in the firm grip of one tour, which handed us over to another in such a way that there was never any clear chance to escape, and the next thing we knew, they were loading us into this smallish boat and telling us we were going to see The Blue Grotto. They told us it was Very Beautiful. “But what is it?” we said. “It is Very Beautiful,” they said.

  So our boat got into this long line of boats, each containing roughly 25 captured tourists sitting in the hot sun, bobbing up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down, and soon we were all thinking how truly wonderful it would be to go sit in a nice, quiet, shady sidewalk cafe somewhere and throw up. We were out there in the sun for two hours, during which time—I cannot emphasize this point too strongly—we continued to bob up as well as down. We agreed that this had damn well better be one tremendous grotto they were taking us to.

  When we got close to it, all we could see was this hole in the rock at the bottom of a cliff, and it became clear that they intended to put us into even smaller boats, boats that would bob violently on dry land, and take us into this hole. So at this point an elderly woman on our tour told the tour leader that maybe she and her husband better not go along, as her husband, a very nice man named Frank, was a stroke victim who had some trouble getting around, but the tour leader said, in a word, no. He said the way the system was set up, you had to see The Blue Grotto. He said there was no other way out. He said it was Very Beautiful.

  At this point I am going to interject a seemingly irrelevant fact, which you will see the significance of later on: Also on the boat with us were three recently divorced women from California who had been drinking wine.

  So finally our boat was next to the hole, and they had us climb down, four at a time, into the tiny boats, which were rowed by surly men with low centers of gravity who smelled like the Budweiser Clydesdales. The rowers were in a great impatient hurry to load us into the boats, such that if my wife and I had not been right there to grab Frank, the stroke victim, by his shirt, he would have been—this is not an exaggeration—pitched right directly into what travel writers traditionally refer to as the Sparkling Blue Mediterranean Waters. So we scrambled in after him, and so did his wife, and we all went bobbing off, away from the main boat, toward The Hole.

  I have since read, in travel articles, that because of the way the sunlight bounces off the bottom, or something, The Blue Grotto is a Natural Wonder Transfused with a Blue Light of Almost Unearthly Beauty. It looked to us more like a dank cave transfused with gloom and rower-perspiration fumes and the sound of the official Blue Grotto Rower’s Spiel bouncing off the walls. The spiel has been handed down through the generations of rowers from father to son, neither of whom spoke English. The part I remember is: “You pudda you handa inna da wadda, you handa looka blue.” We didn’t want to put our hands in the water, but we were about to do it anyway, just so we could get out. This was when our boat got hit by the wave that ensued when one of the recently divorced California women decided that it might be fun, after being out in that hot sun, to leap out of her boat and go swimming in the famous Blue Grotto.

  Well. You cannot imagine the stir of excitement this caused. This was clearly a situation that had not been covered in Blue Grotto Rowers Training School. Some of the rowers attempted to render assistance to the woman’s boat, which was sort of tipping over; some of them were trying to get the woman out of the water, which she was against (“Stop it!” she said. “You’re hitting me with your goddam oar.”); and some of them continued to announce, in case anybody was listening, that if you pudda you handa inna the wadda, you handa looka blue. I think I speak for all the passengers on my boat when I say I felt exactly the way Dorothy did when she realized that all she had ever really wanted was to go back to Kansas.

  We finally got out of there, back into the sunlight. Frank’s skin was the color of Aqua-Velva. His wife was saying, “Are you OK, Frank?” and Frank, who could not talk, was clutching the side of the boat with his good hand and giving her what he probably hoped was a reassuring smile, but which came out looking the way a person looks when he pulls a hostile Indian arrow out of his own shoulder. You could just tell that, no matter what his doctor gave him permission to do, he was never, ever again, for the rest of his life, going to travel more than 15 feet from his BarcaLounger. The rower wouldn’t let us out of the boat—he literally blocked our path with his squat and surly body—until we gave him a tip.

  Someday, this rower is going to come to the United States, and I will be waiting for him. I am going to take him to Disney World, which any travel writer will tell you is a Fantasy Come True, and I am going to put him on the ride where you get into a little boat and nine jillion dolls shriek at you repeatedly that It’s a Small World after All, and when he is right in the middle of it I am going to hurl Fodor’s Guide to Florida into the machinery so he will be stuck there forever. Wouldn’t that be enchanting?

  Ground Control To Major Tomb

  I have good news and bad news on the death front. The good news is that within a very short time, sooner than you dared hope, you can have your ashes leave the immediate solar system. The bad news is that it may soon be impossible to purchase your casket needs wholesale in Wendell, Idaho.

  We’ll start with the good news. I don’t know about you, but I was starting to wonder if the space program was ever going to produce any practical benefits. Oh, I realize it produced Tang, the instant breakfast drink, but my feeling about Tang is that I would consider consuming it only if I were stuck in space and had already eaten everything else in the capsule, including my fellow astronauts.

  So I was very pleased when the Reagan administration gave the OK to an outfit called the Celestis Group, which plans to send up a special reflective capsule filled with the ashes of dece
ased persons, each packed into a little container about the size of a tube of lipstick. Your container would have your name on it, and of course your Social Security number. God forbid you should be in a burial orbit without your Social Security number, in case there should be some kind of tax problems down the road and the IRS needs to send an unintelligible and threatening letter to your container.

  What I like about this plan is, it’s a chance for the common person, a person who does not happen to be a United States senator or a military personnel with a nickname such as “Crip,” “Buzz,” or “Deke,” to get into the space environment. And the negative aspect, which is to say the aspect of being in a lipstick tube, is I believe more than outweighed by the fact that, according to the Celestis Group people, if you take the Earth orbit package, you’ll be up there for 63 million years. Plus, your capsule, as I pointed out earlier, will have a highly reflective surface, which means your Loved Ones will be able to watch you pass overhead. “Look,” they’ll say. “See that little pinpoint of light? That’s the capsule containing Uncle Ted! Either that or it’s an early Russian satellite, containing a frozen experimental dog!”

  And that’s just for the Earth Orbit Package. If you can wait a couple more years, and pony up $4,600, you can get the Escape Velocity Package, which will take you right out of the Solar System, such that your remains, as Celestis Group Vice President james Kuhl explained it to me, “will be sailing forever through deep space, etc.”

  My only concern here is this: Let’s just say this particular capsule, a couple of billion light years from Earth, gets picked up by those alien beings Carl Sagan is always trying to get in touch with. And let’s say they open it up, and they see all these tubes resembling lipstick, which is a concept they would be familiar with from intercepting transmissions of “Dynasty,” and they naturally assume we are sending them, as a friendly gesture, a large supply of cosmetics. I don’t know about you, but where I come from, we like to think of our dear departed ones as being with their maker at last and resting in eternal peace. We are not comfortable with the concept of their being smeared upon the humongous lips of jabba the Hutt.

  But other than that, I think the whole idea is terrific, and I urge all of you who feel that you or a loved one may at some future date be dead, to look into it. Please note that you should not contact the Celestis Group directly, because, as Mr. Kuhl explained it to me, “We enter the picture after the cremation has taken effect.”

  This means you have to deal with your local funeral director, which you will find a very interesting experience, because funeral directors, at least the ones I’ve dealt with, generally manage to make you feel like a Nazi war criminal if you don’t purchase one of the better caskets. Never mind that they’re just going to set fire to it; somehow, you’ll get the message that, OK, sure, they can use a plain old el cheapo $900 pine box, if you’re comfortable with the idea of having your loved one’s ashes spend 63 million years mixed in with the ashes from a common, sap-filled softwood of the same type used to make Popsicle sticks, whereas all the other loved ones in the entire reflective capsule will be mixed with, at the very least, walnut. If that’s what you want, fine.

  So I think those of us who are not bog scum will want to purchase a higher-quality casket. This is why it’s such a shame about the situation out in Wendell, Idaho. That’s where Roger King, who’s a woodworker, has got himself into this big hassle with the funeral directors because he’s trying to sell caskets directly to the consumer. He has a showroom, right in Wendell, where he has some caskets on display, in addition to furniture, and he claims he charges a third to half as much per casket as a funeral director. “We’ve got a pine for $489,” he said, “and a solid walnut for $1,500.”

  So naturally the Idaho funeral directors association fired off a letter to the state, claiming that King was selling caskets without a license. This of course would be a violation of the law designed to protect the public from buying caskets from unlicensed people, which as you can imagine would lead to who knows what kind of consumer tragedies. I don’t even want to think about it. And I’m not making this up.

  So then King sued the funeral directors, claiming they were discouraging people from buying his caskets. When I talked to him, he had sold only two in about six months, and he sounded kind of desperate. He had even started running radio casket advertisements, which is something you might look forward to if your travel plans call for you to be in the Wendell area. But to be brutally frank, I doubt that Roger’s going to make it in the direct-to-the-consumer casket business. This means you’re going to have to continue purchasing your caskets retail, from your local funeral director. Be sure to ask him about the space burial plan. My guess is he’ll somehow manage to suggest that, if you really cared for the deceased person, you’ll want the Escape Velocity Package.

  Where Saxophones Come From

  Today’s science topic is: The Universe

  The universe has fascinated mankind for many, many years, dating back to the very earliest episodes of “Star Trek” when the brave crew of the starship Enterprise set out, wearing pajamas, to explore the boundless voids of space, which turned out to be as densely populated as Queens, New York. Virtually every planet they found was inhabited, usually by evil beings with cheap costumes and Russian accents, so finally the brave crew of the Enterprise returned to Earth to gain weight and make movies.

  To really understand the mysteries of the universe, you should look at it first-hand. The best time to do this is at night, when the universe is clearly visible from lawns. As you gaze at it, many age-old questions will probably run through your mind, the main one being: Are you wearing shoes? The reason I ask is, recently I was standing barefoot on my lawn, and I got attacked on the right big toe by a fire ant. This is an extremely ungracious style of insect that was accidentally imported into the southern United States from somewhere else, probably hell. I once saw a TV documentary wherein a group of fire ants ate a cow. When a fire ant attacks your toe, he is actually hoping you’ll fight back, so the other fire ants can jump you, after which the documentary makers will beat you senseless with their camera tripods. They all work together.

  But we are getting off the track. When we gaze upward at the boundless star-studded reaches of space, we should be thinking about more than ants in our lawn: We should also be thinking about snakes.

  FEDERAL PORNOGRAPHY WARNING: The Attorney General Has Determined That the Following Paragraph Contains Explicit Sexual Words, Which Could Cause Insanity and Death.

  I used to think snakes were bad, until I got this document from an alert reader named Rob Strait, who is a member of the Chicago Herpetological Society (“herpetologist” is Greek for “alert reader”). This document is a sales brochure from an outfit in Taiwan that I am not making up called “Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House” (Cable address: “SNAKE”). Do not be misled by the name. The folks at the Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House do not think that you would be so stupid as to purchase a poisonous snake. They think you might be so stupid as to purchase snake penis pills.

  To quote the brochure: “Made of 5 species of the penises, livers, and galls of the snakes processed by modern scientific ways. The pills possess the efficacy to strengthen the kidney in order to increase the ability of reproductive function and keep the energy as well as the physical healthy, is a kind of good nutriment.”

  Sold me! My only question would be: “What?” I mean, until I got this document, I was unaware that snakes had penises. Where do they keep them? In special little cases? Then how do they carry them? These are some of the mysteries that make it so fascinating to think about today’s Science Topic, which is: The Universe. (Really! Go back and check!)

  The big mystery, of course, is: Where did the universe come from? Although this question baffled mankind for thousands of years, we now know, thanks to reading science books to our son, that the universe was actually formed 4.5 billion years ago this coming Saturday when an infinitesimally small object, smaller th
an an atom, smaller even than the “individual” butter servings they give you in restaurants, suddenly exploded, perhaps because of faulty wiring, in a cataclysmic event that caused the parts of the universe to go shooting out in all directions and expand at an incredibly rapid rate, an expansion that continues to this day, especially in the case of Raymond Burr. According to this hypothesis, after a couple of million years, various weensy particles began clumping together to form stars, planets, saxophones, etc., which is why we refer to this as the “Big Band” theory.

  The Big Band theory is now widely accepted in the scientific community, although it still has a few technical bugs in it, such as that anybody who took it seriously would have to have the IQ of soup. There is no way you could fit everything in the universe into a little dot. I base this statement on my garage, which contains approximately one-half of the things in the universe, because my wife refuses to throw them out, scrunched together at the absolute maximum possible density, so that if you try to yank any one thing out, all the other things, attracted by gravity, fall on your head. From this we can calculate that the universe was roughly twice the size of my garage when it (the universe) exploded.

  We certainly hope this has cleared up any lingering questions you may have had regarding the universe. We are looking forward to bringing you equally thoughtful discussions of other interesting Science Topics. We are also looking forward to receiving our order from the Kaneda Snake Poisonous Snake House.

  The Secrets Of Life Itself

  I propose that we pass a federal law stating that the government will no longer pay for any scientific research if taxpayers cannot clearly see the results with their naked eyes. I don’t know about you, but I’M getting tired of reading newspaper articles like this: