Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus

by Dave Barry

  So the Cartoonists’ Dinner usually provides some entertaining interaction between cartoonists and Washington dignitaries, such as the time a couple of years ago when a cartoonist, doing a heartfelt impersonation of Elvis in concert giving away a Cadillac, hurled a set of car keys behind his back, through the air, directly into the forehead of the wife of a Cabinet official. She took this graciously, but you could tell that henceforth she was going to stick to cartoonist-free gatherings.

  As a maturity-impaired individual, I have had the honor of being invited to the Cartoonists’ Dinner on several occasions, which, as I mentioned, is how I came to meet Dick Cheney. I actually met him about six times. You know those situations where you have consumed a few unnecessary beers and think you’re being the funniest thing on two feet, whereas in fact you’re just being stupid? This was one of those situations. We were mingling before dinner, and for reasons that I cannot explain now, whenever I encountered Cheney, which was fairly often because this was a smallish room, I’d thrust out my hand and say, “Hi, Dick! Dave Barry!” There he was, the secretary of defense, probably trying to think about the Persian Gulf, and every 45 seconds he was shaking hands with the same grinning moron. It’s a good thing I didn’t have car keys.

  But humiliating yourself in front of the secretary of defense, as impressive as it is, is not on a par with being invited to a private luncheon with the first lady. I was especially eager to share my views on health care, assuming I could think some up. Also I wanted to find out what it was like to be a first lady. Once, at a dinner, I sat next to a very funny first lady of a large state that shall remain nameless. She told me that she and some other governors’ wives had once come up with the idea of getting lifesize smiling photographs of themselves and mounting them on pieces of cardboard to be used as portable first ladies. Thus the real first lady could have a life, while the portable one would be carried around to political events and propped up behind the governor.

  “That’s all they really need to represent us,” the governor’s wife told me, “because all we ever do is stand there and smile, and they introduce the governor, and then they say, ‘And here is his lovely wife.’ That’s what they always say, ‘Here is his lovely wife,’ even if she is actually a dog.”

  So we see that first ladies can be pretty entertaining, and I was fired up about my impending luncheon with Mrs. Clinton. We had set a date and a time, and everything seemed set—until Mrs. Clinton’s staff person, Lisa Caputo, informed me that the luncheon was going to be “off the record.” I asked what that meant.

  “Mrs. Clinton would like to meet you,” Caputo said. “This is a chance for you to get together and have a good time. But you can’t write about it.”

  My crest fell when I heard those words, because I knew I could not accept this restriction. I am a professional journalist, and if I’m going to have luncheon with one of this nation’s most powerful political figures, then I feel a deep moral obligation to provide you, my readers, with an irresponsible and highly distorted account of it.

  I explained this to Caputo, but it was no use; either the luncheon had to be off the record, or there would be no luncheon. So there was no luncheon. I think this is a shame, be cause I bet it would have been a fun occasion, possibly culminating, if we really hit it off, in my showing the first lady how to make comical hand noises. So in closing, I want to say: Mrs. Clinton, if you’re reading this, I sincerely appreciate the invitation, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out, and someday I hope we can sit down and have fun on the record, and if it would make you feel more comfortable, you’re certainly welcome to also invite you-know-who (Dick Cheney).

  THE LOBSTER

  REBELLION

  I am pleased to report that the scientific community has finally stopped wasting time on the origins of the universe and started dealing with the important question, which is: Are lobsters really just big insects?

  I have always maintained that they are. I personally see no significant difference between a lobster and, say, a giant Madagascar hissing cockroach, which is a type of cockroach that grows to approximately the size of William Howard Taft (1857-1930). If a group of diners were sitting in a nice restaurant, and the waiter were to bring them each a freshly killed, steaming-hot Madagascar hissing cockroach, they would not put on silly bibs and eat it with butter. No, they would run, retching, directly from the restaurant to the All-Nite Drive-Thru Lawsuit Center. And yet these very same people will pay $24.95 apiece to eat a lobster, despite the fact that it displays all three of the classic biological characteristics of an insect, namely:

  It has way more legs than necessary.

  There is no way you would ever pet it.

  It does not respond to simple commands such as “Here, boy!”

  I do not eat lobsters, although I once had a close call. I was visiting my good friends Tom and Pat Schroth, who live in Maine (state motto: “Cold, but Damp”). Being generous and hospitable people, Tom and Pat went out and purchased, as a special treat for me, the largest lobster in the history of the Atlantic Ocean, a lobster that had probably been responsible for sinking many commercial vessels before it was finally apprehended by nuclear submarines. This lobster was big enough to feed a coastal Maine village for a year, and there it was, sprawling all over my plate, with scary insectoid legs and eyeballs shooting out in all directions, while Tom and Pat, my gracious hosts, smiled happily at me, waiting for me to put this thing in my mouth.

  Remember when you were a child, and your mom wouldn’t let you leave the dinner table until you ate all your Brussels sprouts, and so you took your fork and mashed them into smaller and smaller pieces in hopes of eventually reducing them to individual Brussels-sprout molecules that would be absorbed into the atmosphere and disappear? That was similar to the approach I took with the giant lobster.

  “Mmmm-MMMM!” I said, hacking away at the thing on my plate and, when nobody was looking, concealing the pieces under my dinner roll, in the salad, in my napkin, anywhere I could find.

  Tom and Pat: I love you dearly, and if you should ever have an electrical problem that turns out to be caused by a seven-pound wad of old lobster pieces stuffed into the dining-room wall socket, I am truly sorry.

  Anyway, my point is that lobsters have long been suspected, by me at least, of being closet insects, which is why I was very pleased recently when my alert journalism colleague Steve Doig referred me to an Associated Press article concerning a discovery by scientists at the University of Wisconsin. The article, headlined GENE LINKS SPIDERS AND FLIES TO LOBSTERS, states that not only do lobsters, flies, spiders, millipedes, etc., contain the exact same gene, but they also are all descended from a single common ancestor: Howard Stern.

  No, seriously, the article states that the ancestor “probably was a wormlike creature.” Yum! Fetch the melted butter!

  And that is not all. According to articles sent in by alert readers (this was on the front page of the New York Times), scientists in Denmark recently discovered that some lobsters have a weird little pervert organism living on their lips. Yes. I didn’t even know that lobsters HAD lips, but it turns out that they do, and these lips are the stomping ground of a tiny creature called Symbion pandora (literally, “a couple of Greek words”). The zoology community, which does not get out a lot, is extremely excited about Symbion pandora, because it reproduces differently from all other life forms. According to various articles, when Symbion pandora is ready to have a baby, its digestive system “collapses and is reconstituted into a larva,” which the parent then gives birth to by “extruding” it from its “posterior.” In other words—correct me if I am wrong here—this thing basically reproduces by pooping.

  So to summarize: If you’re looking for a hearty entree that (1) is related to spiders; (2) is descended from a worm; and (3) has mutant baby-poopers walking around on its lips, then you definitely want a lobster. I myself plan to continue avoiding them, just as I avoid oysters, which are clearly—scientists should look into this next—members
of the phlegm family Have you ever seen oysters reproduce? Neither have I, but I would not be surprised to learn that the process involves giant undersea nostrils.

  And don’t get me started on clams. Recently I sat across from a person who was deliberately eating clams; she’d open up a shell, and there, in plain view, would be this stark naked clam, brazenly showing its organs, like a high school biology experiment. My feeling is that if a restaurant is going to serve those things, it should put little loincloths on them.

  I believe that Mother Nature gave us eyes because she did not want us to eat this type of food. Mother Nature clearly intended for us to get our food from the “patty” group, which includes hamburgers, fish sticks, and Mc-Nuggets—foods that have had all of their organs safely removed in someplace far away such as Nebraska. That is where I stand on this issue, and if any qualified member of the lobster, clam, or phlegm-in-a-shell industry wishes to present a rebuttal, I hereby extend this offer: Get your own column.

  ANIMAL RIGHTS

  A question that more and more Americans are asking, as they become increasingly fed up with crime, is: What, exactly, are the legal rights of accused snakes?

  Consider the case of a snake that recently ran afoul of the law in Virginia. According to a story in the Fredericksburg, Virginia, Free Lance-Star, written by Keith Epps and sent in by alert reader Venetia Sims, this particular snake, a four-foot Burmese python identified only as “a Spotsylvania County snake,” was apprehended by an Alcoholic Beverage Control agent and the Spotsylvania Sheriff’s Office in connection with a liquor-store robbery.

  I am not, of course, suggesting here that the police thought the snake ROBBED the store. They thought it drove the getaway car.

  No, seriously, the snake belonged to one of the robbery suspects, and according to the story the police had received information that the snake had money from the robbery “stashed inside of it.”

  The story doesn’t say how a person would go about stashing money inside a snake, nor how this person would get the money back out. But for the record, most financial advisers do not recommend that you put your money into snakes. Let me add, from personal experience, that real estate is not such a hot investment either. Some friends and I once put some money into a small apartment building, and we never did get it back out. What we got was a constant stream of tenant complaints, including every conceivable kind of toilet blockage and—this is the absolute truth—an infestation of bats that made the local TV news. Looking back, I think we would have been better off with a snake.

  But getting back to “a Spotsylvania County snake”: The police took it into custody (presumably in a handcuff) and held it without bail for a week, during which time they X-rayed it. According to the story, the X ray “revealed something suspicious inside the snake, but police weren’t sure what it was.” It turned out to be snake poop, which—and this is exactly what is wrong with our society today, if you want my and Pat Buchanan’s opinion—is still legal in Virginia.

  So the police were forced to release the snake, although NOT on its own recognizance. (One of the unique things about snakes is that they don’t even HAVE a recognizance; biologists still have no idea how they reproduce.)

  At this point you are saying: “Dave, no offense, but it is just SO typical of media scum like you to make a big deal about one snake who is connected to a liquor-store robbery, while totally ignoring the millions of law-abiding, taxpaying snakes, not to mention ferrets.”

  You make a strong point, which is why at this time I wish to present an inspiring story, which I am not making up, concerning a courageous ferret in Morton Grove, Illinois. According to an item from the Northbrook Star, written by Kathy Routliffe and alertly sent in by Janet Kolehmainen, police received an emergency 911 call from a home in Morton Grove; upon arriving on the scene, they broke into the home and discovered that the call had been made by a pet ferret named “Bandit.”

  Unfortunately, this did not turn out to be one of those heartwarming cases wherein a loyal and quick-thinking ferret, seeing that its master was having a heart attack, called police and then administered snout-to-mouth resuscitation until help arrived. This was simply a case of Bandit, while walking around the house alone, stepping on the telephone speed-dial button for 911. But the point is that there could have been a medical problem, and if there had, Bandit would be a hero today, perhaps even making a personal appearance on the Jerry Springer show.

  Speaking of crustaceans, it’s time for a:

  Lobster Update—I have been deeply gratified by the tremendous outpouring of letters from you readers supporting my courageous decision to come out of the closet and state that I think lobsters are big insects. Some of you also sent me an alarming news item stating that researchers at Harvard Medical School are—I swear I’m not making this up, either—giving Prozac to lobsters. The researchers say the drug “makes lobsters more docile, and less likely to snap when fished out of a tank at a restaurant.”

  The article states that the researchers hope their work will ultimately benefit humans. This raises some alarming questions:

  Are there restaurants that keep humans in tanks?

  Are these humans forced to wear rubber bands on their hands?

  Do the restaurant owners claim that they taste “just like chicken”?

  I think that every concerned American should telephone federal authorities at random until we get answers to these and other questions. I also think that, for the time being, we should all be extremely cautious when we leave our homes. Remember: “a Spotsylvania County snake” is out there somewhere.

  Here I am performing the difficult “Walking the Dog” maneuver with the Lawn Rangers, a world-famous precision lawnmower-and-broom drill team to which I belong. We perform each year at the Areola, Illinois, Broom Corn Festival. Our membership ranks are strictly limited to anybody who shows up. (Photo by David H. Spencer)

  OUR NATIONAL

  PASTIME

  As I ponder the start of yet another baseball season, what is left of my mind drifts back to the fall of 1960, when I was a student at Harold C. Crittenden Junior High (“Where the Leaders of Tomorrow Are Developing the Acne of Today”).

  The big baseball story that year was the World Series between the New York Yankees and the Pittsburgh Pirates. Today, for sound TV viewership reasons, all World Series games are played after most people, including many of the players, have gone to bed. But in 1960 the games had to be played in the daytime, because the electric light had not been invented yet. Also, back then the players and owners had not yet discovered the marketing benefits of sporadically canceling entire seasons.

  The result was that in those days young people were actually interested in baseball, unlike today’s young people, who are much more interested in basketball, football, soccer, and downloading dirty pictures from the Internet. But in my youth, baseball ruled. Almost all of us boys played in Little League, a character-building experience that helped me develop a personal relationship with God.

  “God,” I would say, when I was standing in deep right field—the coach put me in right field only because it was against the rules to put me in Sweden, where I would have done less damage to the team—”please please PLEASE don’t let the ball come to me.”

  But of course God enjoys a good prank as much as the next infallible deity, which is why, when He heard me pleading with Him, He always took time out from His busy schedule to make sure the next batter hit a towering blast that would, upon reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, come down directly where I would have been standing, if I had stood still, which I never did. I lunged around cluelessly in frantic, random circles, so that the ball always landed a minimum of forty feet from where I wound up standing, desperately thrusting out my glove, which was a Herb Score model that, on my coach’s recommendation, I had treated with neat’s-foot oil so it would be supple. Looking back, I feel bad that innocent neats had to sacrifice their feet for the sake of my glove. I would have been just as effective, as a fielder,
if I’d been wearing a bowling shoe on my hand, or a small aquarium.

  But even though I stunk at it, I was into baseball. My friends and I collected baseball cards, the kind that came in a little pack with a dusty, pale-pink rectangle of linoleum-textured World War II surplus bubble gum that was far less edible than the cards themselves. Like every other male my age who collected baseball cards as a boy, I now firmly believe that at one time I had the original rookie cards of Mickey Mantle, Jackie Robinson, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Jim Thorpe, Daniel Boone, Goliath, etc., and that I’d be able to sell my collection for $163 million today except my mom threw it out.

  My point is that we cared deeply about baseball back then, which meant that we were passionate about the 1960 Pirates-Yankees World Series matchup. My class was evenly divided between those who were Pirate fans and those who were complete morons. (I never have cared for the Yankees, and for a very sound reason: The Yankees are evil.)

  We followed every pitch of every game. It wasn’t easy, because the weekday games started when we were still in school, which for some idiot reason was not called off for the World Series. This meant that certain students—I am not naming names, because even now, it could go on our Permanent Records—had to carry concealed transistor radios to class. A major reason why the Russians got so far ahead of us, academically, during the Cold War is that while Russian students were listening to their teachers explain the cosine, we were listening, via concealed earphones, to announcers explain how a bad hop nailed Tony Kubek in the throat.

  That Series went seven games, and I vividly remember how it ended. School was out for the day, and I was heading home, pushing my bike up a steep hill, listening to my cheapo little radio, my eyes staring vacantly ahead, my mind locked on the game. A delivery truck came by, and the driver stopped and asked if he could listen. Actually, he more or less told me he was going to listen; I said okay.