by Dave Barry
That is correct: There was a shootout, featuring assault rifles, at a baby shower. It is not uncommon for tempers to flare at ceremonial gatherings in Miami; there was once a shootout in a funeral home here during a wake. Other events that can be “iffy” from a safety standpoint in Miami include birthday parties, football games, proms, nightclubs, Halloween, July Fourth, Christmas, and of course New Year’s Eve, which in Miami involves more gunfire than the Battle of the Bulge, although to be fair most of it is happy gunfire.
But as long as you avoid these dangerous situations, you’ll be perfectly safe in Miami, provided that you watch out for traffic. This is not as easy as it sounds. In Miami, traffic can appear anywhere—on the streets, of course, but also on sidewalks, as well as in parks, front yards, restaurants, hotel lobbies, and swimming pools. You may think I’m exaggerating, but that’s only because you don’t watch the local TV news in Miami, which routinely features images of cars that have been driven into what we usually think of as non-automotive environments such as buildings. At risk of reinforcing an unfortunate stereotype, I have to point out that many of these cars, at the time of impact, were being piloted by senior citizens possessing the same level of awareness of their surroundings as a salami sandwich.
To cite just one example: In 2008, police in Miami stopped a seventy-three-year-old man who was driving a Chevrolet Cobalt. This in itself is not unusual; police often, for one reason or another, stop older drivers. What was unusual was where they stopped this man:
Runway 9 of Miami International Airport.
Really. The man had somehow, without noticing it, burst through an airport-perimeter gate, and when the police caught up with him, he was driving on the runway, apparently unaware that he was doing anything wrong. (“Is there a problem, Officer?”) This incident really makes me wonder about the priorities of our airport-security people. I mean, when I go to an airport, they won’t let me near an airplane with shampoo. And this guy was out there with a Cobalt.14
My point is, when you’re in Miami, you should be very alert if you’re in a place where a car might hit you, which is pretty much anywhere below the fourth floor. And you definitely shouldn’t attempt to drive yourself in Miami, because odds are you’d make some foolish tourist mistake such as stop for a red light, which means you’d be rear-ended by a vehicle going upwards of eighty miles per hour driven by a motorist with no insurance but a minimum of two firearms.
That leaves public transportation. Here there is good news and bad news. The good news is, Miami does have public transportation. The bad news is, if you ride on it, there is a chance that you will encounter dangerous marine life. I say this because of an incident that occurred in 2009 on Miami’s Metromover, which is a free automated “people mover” that makes a loop around downtown Miami. One evening at rush hour, two men boarded the Metromover with a live, six-foot-long nurse shark. The men had apparently caught the shark in Biscayne Bay and were using public transportation to take it downtown to sell it.
One of the people who saw the shark, according to the story in the Miami Herald, was a twenty-four-year-old musician named Mae Singerman, who was getting ready to do a show on the Metromover platform. The Herald quoted Singerman as saying:
“The door opened and the shark was sitting by the front of the door. I didn’t see a reason to call police. It’s Miami. Stranger things have happened.”
True. Still, not everybody was blasé about the shark. One of the commuters who boarded the Metromover, Sandy Goodrich, sent me an e-mail stating that, as a native Miamian, she thought she had seen everything, until she saw the shark.
“Unbelievable,” she wrote. “Only in Miami!” Attached to her e-mail was a photo she’d taken with her cell phone, “so that my son would believe that there was actually a shark on the train.”
She said the shark was definitely alive, although it was not doing well. Sharks are hardy creatures, but they do not thrive on public transportation. The men got off the Metromover a few stops later and took the shark to a fish wholesaler, offering to sell it for $10. The wholesaler declined, and the men left the shark—which at this point had kicked the bucket—on a downtown Miami street, where it lay for hours before the authorities removed it. It attracted some attention, but not as much as if it had been lying on a street in, say, Des Moines. The Herald quoted a local resident as saying: “It was a relief that it was a shark. When I first saw it, I thought it was a body because of all the shootings that have been going on. I was surprised and happy because of my concern for human life.”
So this was actually a feel-good story, Miami-style: Against all odds, it wasn’t a human body! Still, the fact remains that—this bears repeating—there was a live shark on the Metromover. And had it been a little more alive, there is a very real possibility that it could actually have bitten somebody. We could have had a shark attack on a commuter train! Wouldn’t that have been great?
No, wait, I mean: Wouldn’t that have been tragic? Yes it would, which is why I’m recommending that you exercise caution when boarding public transportation, and by “exercise caution” I mean “carry a speargun.”
You should also watch out when you leave public transportation, because then you will be in one of the most dangerous areas in all of South Florida, namely: outdoors. We have a lot of extreme wildlife here. Over the years I have personally encountered, just in my neighborhood, several alligators, hundreds of poison toads, mutant, heavily armored five-inch grasshoppers that cannot be killed with a hammer, irate, hissing, needle-toothed lizards the size of Chihuahuas, and huge spiders that appear to be wearing the pelts of raccoons. I have also had numerous sphincter-disrupting encounters with snakes, including one that, when I noticed it, was coiled up approximately six inches away from me on my office desk, which is how my office chair came to have a stain.
We also have a growing population of unwelcome out-of-town wildlife species that have come here and clearly intend to stay. Two invasive species in particular have caused serious concern: Burmese pythons, and New Yorkers.
The New Yorkers have been coming for years, which is weird because pretty much all they do once they get to Florida is bitch about how everything here sucks compared to the earthly paradise that is New York. They continue to root, loudly, for the Jets, the Knicks, the Mets, and the Yankees; they never stop declaring, loudly, that in New York the restaurants are better, the stores are nicer, the people are smarter, the public transportation is free of sharks, etc.
The Burmese pythons are less obnoxious, but just as alarming in their own way. These are snakes that started out as pets of Miami residents, until one day these residents stopped smoking crack and said, “Jesus H. Christ! We’re living with a giant snake!” So they let the pythons go, and a lot of them ended up out in the Everglades, which is basically Las Vegas for pythons. They’ve been engaging in wild python reproductive sex out there for years; wildlife biologists estimate that there are now more than one hundred thousand of them. They can grow to be longer than twenty feet, and they don’t have any natural enemies, so they’re eating all the other Everglades animals. The wildlife authorities are desperately trying to figure out what to do about this. My preference would be to use tactical nuclear weapons, but this would never fly with the wildlife community, which regards the Everglades as a precious ecosystem, even though to the naked civilian eye it is a giant festering stinkhole of rotting muck.
The more ecological alternative would be to introduce some kind of predator that would counteract the pythons. The question is, what kind of creature would be able to hold its own against these monstrous snakes? The obvious answer, which I’m sure has already occurred to you, is: New Yorkers. You’d take a batch of them out to the dead center of the Everglades and release them, and they’d immediately start complaining, loudly, about how there was no decent pizza out there, and how if New York had a vast trackless swamp, it would be WAY better than the Everglades, and so on. Pretty soon the pythons would get tired of this, and leave. Or, eat the Ne
w Yorkers. Either way is fine with me.
So to summarize your tips for visiting Miami:• Don’t fly here.
• Don’t drive.
• Don’t take public transportation.
• Don’t walk.
• Don’t go outside.
• Avoid human contact in general, especially baby showers.
• Whatever you do, do NOT come during hurricane season, which runs from June through the following June.
Other than these basic safety precautions, my only advice is: Have fun! Because Miami really is a fun town, once you adjust to it. I moved here in 1986 from the United States, and I’ve come to love it. In fact, if you visit, you might find yourself in my “neck of the woods.” You might even see me outside, picking up my newspaper!
If so, duck.
Dog Ownership for Beginners
Introduction
Becoming a first-time dog-owner is a big step. It’s like getting married, except that your new spouse will want to have sex with you, whereas your new dog will want to have sex with you and your furniture.
But make no mistake: When you get a dog, you’re entering into a serious long-term relationship. A dog is a companion that, if you feed it and pet it and pretend that you sincerely want to take away its ball, will give you, in return, totally unqualified love. You could be Charles Manson, or Hitler, or even a lawyer who advertises on television, and your dog will still think you’re the greatest thing ever. This tells you something very important about dogs: They are not very bright.
This is actually good. The last thing you want is a smart dog. My friends Buzz and Libby Burger once had a smart dog, and it was a nightmare. She was an Afghan hound named Doodle, and she did not care to take orders or be in any way confined. This was a problem because not only was she more intelligent than anybody in reality television, but she was also capable of land speeds in excess of three hundred miles per hour. If Libby and Buzz wanted to go out for dinner at 7 P.M., they had to start at 3 P.M. attempting to lure Doodle into the house using elaborate charades involving treats, fake departures, disguises, professional actors, computers, helicopters, holograms, live chickens, etc. Doodle would watch these goings-on, clearly amused, until Buzz or Libby had crept within one step of being close enough to grab her, then whoosh she’d dematerialize, Wile-E.-Coyote style, leaving Buzz or Libby grasping a cloud of Doodle-shaped dust as Doodle herself disappeared into the woods to manage her global hedge fund or whatever the hell she did in there.
That’s not the kind of dog you want. You want a dog that will run headfirst at full speed into a wall chasing a ball that you have only pretended to throw. You want a dog that will do this ten consecutive times, and still, on your eleventh fake throw, launch itself at the wall with undiminished enthusiasm. You want a dog that considers you brilliant because of all the amazing things you can do, such as open a door; a dog that worships you as a treat-dispensing god; a dog that, when you have an intestinal flu and reek like a Hong Kong dumpster because you have not showered or changed pajamas or brushed your teeth in four days, and you are crouched in the bathroom spewing random fluids and semi-solids from every orifice you possess, your dog is right there next to you, wagging its tail and licking you and just generally doing everything it can to communicate the message: “Wow! You have never smelled more interesting!”
Smell is very important to dogs. They have extremely sensitive noses, and they use their sense of smell to gather and process important information about the world around them, as follows:
“Hey! A smell!” “Hey! Another smell!” “Hey! ANOTHER smell!” etc. You’d think that, at some point, the dog would grasp the fact that there are a lot of smells in the world, and move on. But that’s because you don’t have a dog yet.
What Kind of Dog Should You Get?
This is a complex question, and you need to consider many factors before you arrive at the correct answer, which is: A big dog.
What do I mean by “a big dog”? I mean “a dog that can knock over a standard-sized elderly woman it has never seen before because it is so happy to meet her.” You do not want one of those yappy gerbil-sized dogs that travel as carry-on luggage and are always nervous because at any moment they could be eaten by grasshoppers. These are unhappy, angry dogs, because they know in their tiny gerbil hearts that everybody except their immediate owners hates them.
The sole advantage of small dogs is that they are portable. My wife and I once attended a New Year’s Eve party at a swank private club on South Beach, and as we entered we saw a woman in a pretty much nonexistent dress carrying a small dog in the cleavage of her breasts, which I suspect were artificial inasmuch as any given one of them was the size of a Toyota Camry. The dog was a Yorkshire terrier, although this particular woman had enough capacity for a mature Rottweiler. You would think that a cleavage-dwelling dog would be happy, but this one was just as neurotic as any other small dog. I know, because I observed it closely until my wife made me stop.
But unless you have reason to transport your dog in your bazoomage, you want a large dog. You should get it at a rescue shelter, where it has been sitting around building up a huge throbbing storehouse of love, which it will lavish on you in a lifelong outpouring of affection, loyalty, and—above all—drool.
Preparing Your Home for Your New Dog
Dogs are descended from wolf-like animals that roamed in packs millions of years ago, when most of North America was covered by thick virgin forest, which is gone now because the dogs chewed it into spit-covered splinters. Modern dogs have retained this powerful chewing instinct, and will spend countless hours chewing on random objects. It’s basically their hobby, kind of like Sudoku, only not as pointless.
So before you introduce your new dog to your home, you need to remove all chewable objects, including shoes, clothing, rugs, draperies, chairs, sofas, slow-moving children, and anything that has a plug. In fact it might be a good idea, before introducing the dog to your home, to introduce it, late at night, to somebody else’s home; you can visit it there until it gets over the chewing phase, which typically lasts until about fifteen minutes before the dog’s death.
If you’re feeling crazy and decide to bring the dog into your own personal home, you need to learn:
How to Train Your Dog
You should start with house-training, which is important because dogs will try to “mark” your house as their territory by urinating on it, much as members of Congress put their names on buildings that taxpayers have paid for.
The key to successful house-training is to lead by example. Wait until your dog is watching you, then declare, in a calm yet authoritative voice: “Time to drain the lizard!” Immediately stride outside, urinate on your lawn, and reward yourself with a treat. Repeat these steps until the dog grasps the concept or you run out of beer.
Other useful commands to teach your dog are “stay,” “heel,” “remove your snout from that person’s groin,” “stop humping the Barcalounger,” “do not bark violently for two straight hours at inanimate objects such as a flowerpot,” “do not eat poop,” and “if you must eat poop, then at least refrain from licking my face afterward.”
To teach these commands to your dog, you need three things: (1) patience; (2) consistency; and (3) a dog from another planet. Earth-based dogs, at least in my experience, lack the requisite number of brain cells to learn them. The only trick I’ve ever been able to teach any of my dogs is “shake hands,” which is not particularly useful. If Lassie were one of my dogs, when little Timmy got trapped in the quicksand and shouted, “Go get help, girl!,” Lassie would sit at the edge of the quicksand pit and give Timmy high fives on the top of his head with her paw until he disappeared beneath the muck. Then, her work done, she’d trot briskly away, on the alert for her next mission. (“Hey! A smell!”)
Feeding Your Dog
What kind of dog food is best for your dog? Many dog owners have strong views on this subject, which is one way you can tell they are insane. The best food f
or your dog is: brown dog food. Oh, sure, you’ll see TV ads claiming that a certain brand is superior, as evidenced by the fact that the dog in the commercial is enthusiastically chowing down on it. But what these ads fail to tell you is that the same dog would chow down, with equal enthusiasm, on any other brand of dog food, or any brand of cat food, or an actual cat, or a pair of soiled underpants, or the Declaration of Independence, or a clarinet.
Dogs did not get where they are today by being picky eaters. Back in prehistoric times, they were competing with the rest of their pack for food, and if they came across, say, the decaying carcass of a mastodon, they had to snatch whatever piece they could, because if they didn’t, some other dog would. They’d swallow the piece quickly, and then, if it didn’t agree with them, they’d simply throw it back up later, and some other dog would eat it. Or maybe the same dog would eat it again, because, as we have established, dogs are not the nuclear physicists of the animal kingdom. In this manner a pack of dogs could transport a single rancid mastodon rectum thousands of miles.
In modern times dogs still operate on the principle that you should eat first and worry later about whether what you ate was edible. My current dog, Lucy, eats, among many other things, photo albums. The first time she did this, we told her she was Bad, which made her feel very sorry and press herself into the floor like a big hairy remorseful worm. But a few days later she ate another photo album. Again she felt terribly guilty, but she obviously believed, in what passes for her mind, that she had no choice, because if she didn’t eat the album, another dog might, and that was a chance she simply could not afford to take.
