by Dave Barry
Fort Collins, Colorado—Why Fort Collins? I’ll answer that question by quoting verbatim the first paragraph of a story from the February 22 Fort Collins Coloradoan, written by Dan Haley and alertly sent in by Glenn Gilbert:
“About 200 human gonads are sitting in a freezer at Colorado State University as researchers wait for funding to test them for plutonium.”
I called Colorado State (“Home of the Frozen Gonads”) and spoke with Dr. Shawki Ibrahim, an associate professor in the Department of Radiological Health Sciences. He told me that the gonads were removed during hospital autopsies; researchers want to find out if their plutonium levels correlate with how close their former owners lived to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant. (The researchers need money for this project, so if you’re a wealthy organization, please send them some.)
Dr. Ibrahim told me that the gonads are very valuable, and are kept in a locked freezer in a secure area. “We are sitting on a gold mine here,” he said. (Really.)
I definitely see the need for security. You cannot have unsecured gonads in an environment frequented by college students; the potential for pranks is too great. This means you will NOT be able to actually see anything during your visit to Fort Collins. You will, however, be able to say, “Kids, we’re standing within a mile or so of about two hundred frozen human gonads!”
Trust me, it will be a vacation memory that will remain in their minds for the rest of their lives. Even after electroshock therapy.
My SON THE
TEENAGE DRIVER
My son is learning to drive. This terrifies me. He’s four years old.
Well, okay, technically he’s fifteen. But from the perspective of the aging parent, there is no major difference between four and fifteen, except that when your child is four, his motoring privileges are restricted to little toy Fisher-Price vehicles containing little toy Fisher-Price people who are unlikely (although I would not totally rule it out, in America) to sue you.
Whereas when your child turns fifteen, the state of Florida lets him obtain a permit that allows him to drive an actual car on actual roads, despite the fact that you can vividly remember when he slept on Return of the Jedi sheets. Of course there are restrictions: He must be accompanied by a licensed driver age eighteen or over. But that does not reassure me. What that means to me is that, in the eyes of the state of Florida, it is perfectly okay for my son to be driving around accompanied only by Ted Kennedy.
I want tougher restrictions than that. I want the law to say that if my son is going to drive, he must be accompanied by a licensed paramedic and at least two Supreme Court justices. Also I believe that, as a safety precaution, his car should be attached via a stout chain to a restraining device such as the Pentagon.
It’s not that I think my son is a bad driver. He’s actually a pretty good driver, careful to signal his turns. That’s what worries me: He’ll be driving in Miami, where nobody else, including the police, does this. If Miami motorists were to see a turn signal, there’s no telling how they’d react. They could become alarmed and start shooting.
And what if my son actually believes the official Florida state driver’s manual when it says that the left lane is for passing only? Not here in Miami, it isn’t! The driving public here apparently believes that there is some kind of deadly voodoo curse on the right lane, so everybody drives in the left lane here, at speeds ranging all the way from Indianapolis 500 down to Car Wash. This means that if you get behind somebody traveling at, say, Funeral Procession, and you want to pass, you have to disregard the driver’s manual, risk the voodoo curse, and use the right lane, UNLESS the driver in front of you is talking on a cellular telephone, because these people frequently receive urgent mandatory instructions from whoever they’re talking to, such as “SWERVE ACROSS ALL AVAILABLE LANES IMMEDIATELY!” So when you’re behind cell-phone drivers, it’s generally wise to wait patiently for a few moments until they ram into a bridge abutment; then you can pass safely on whichever side has the least amount of flame spewing out.
We veteran Miami drivers know this, just as we know that, in Miami, it’s considered acceptable to park on any semi-level surface including roofs, and to go through a red light as long as you can still remember when it was yellow. But how is my son supposed to know these things?
What really scares me is, he’ll want to drive a LOT. I know this, because I remember exactly how I felt when I got my driver’s license, in 1963.1 was a student at Pleasantville (New York) High School, where, if you were a male, cars were extremely important. There were two major religions: Ford and Chevy. Ford guys would carve “FoMoCo” (for “Ford Motor Company”) on desks; Chevy guys—this was considered extremely witty—would change it to read “FoNoGo.” We found great wisdom in Beach Boys car songs, which are just like love songs to a woman, except they’re (a) more passionate, and (b) more technically detailed, as in these lyrics from “Little Deuce Coupe”:
She’s ported and relieved and she’s stroked and bored;
She’ll do a hundred and forty in the top end floored…
At lunchtime we stood next to the circle in front of the high school and watched guys drive around slowly, revving their engines. Sometimes, if we were especially impressed with a car, we would spit.
I applied for my New York state driver’s license the instant I was old enough, and the day it arrived—finally!—in the mail, I borrowed my mother’s car, which was a Plymouth Valiant station wagon that could attain a top speed of 53 miles per hour if dropped from a bomber. I didn’t care: I had wheels. I drove around at random for approximately the next two years. It made no difference to me where I was going. I was happy simply to be in motion, with the AM radio turned up loud and tuned to WABC in New York City, which would be playing, say, “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons:
He’s so fine (Doo-long doo-long doo-lang)
Wish he were mine (Doo-long doo-long doo-long)
That handsome boy over there…
And behind the wheel, with my arm draped casually out the window, I imagined that I WAS that handsome boy, not some dweeb driving his mom’s Valiant. I was cool. I was driving.
These days when I’m driving I rarely listen to music. I do listen to traffic reports, because I’m always late for some obligatory grown-up thing. I’m never driving just to be driving.
But my son will be, soon. He’ll be out there every chance he gets, feeling so fine, cruising to nowhere, signaling his turns, playing his music, cranking it up when a good song comes on, maybe exchanging high-fives with the Supreme Court justices.
Yup, he’ll be on the road a lot—a teenager, but still, in many ways, a human being. Please watch out for him.
INVASION OF THE
KILLER LAWYERS
Could alien beings from another galaxy come here and obliterate human civilization? If so, would this be covered by our homeowners’ insurance?
These troubling questions are on the minds of the millions of people who are being exposed this summer to the spectacle of grotesque, repulsive, inhuman creatures that would stop at nothing in their determination to dominate the Earth. I am referring, of course, to the Democratic and Republican conventions.
But the public was also troubled by the blockbuster motion picture Independence Day. It definitely had a powerful effect on me. I had been skeptical about all the “hype,” but when the two-and-a-half-hour movie was over, I found myself sitting pensively in the theater for quite a while, pondering the question: How am I going to get out of here when my shoes are bonded in place by one of the most powerful adhesives known to science, Movie Floor Crud, which is a mixture of Pepsi, Milk Duds, and year-old nasal secretions snorted out by distraught moviegoers during the ending of The Bridges of Madison County? A lot of people just leave their shoes on the theater floor and walk out barefoot.
But getting back to Independence Day: What happens is, these aliens from millions of light-years away arrive in our solar system in a fantastically huge spaceship manufactured by the Winnebago Corp
oration. When they reach Earth, they are in a bad mood, possibly because their luggage has not arrived, so they attack New York City, causing the population to panic and run around screaming.
In my opinion, this is the only unrealistic part of the movie. I mean, we’re talking about New Yorkers, here. These are tough people. These are people who, every day, without even thinking about it, voluntarily go down into dark, steaming, noisy, extremely aromatic holes containing the New York City subway system. People who do that are not going to get bent out of shape just because an alien invasion force is obliterating their city. They are merely going to shrug and continue reading the New York Post (front-page headline: UFO ATTACK DESTROYS BUTTAFUOCO HOME).
At the same time as they hit New York, the aliens destroy Los Angeles—a clear indication that they had been monitoring the O.J. Simpson trial. They also wipe out Washington, D.C., apparently believing—this just shows that even a highly advanced species can be stupid—that wiping out the federal government would somehow make it more difficult for the country to function.
While millions of Americans take to the streets to celebrate the fact that they will probably not have to file income-tax returns for several years, the president of the United States, played by a weenie, escapes, along with several key actors, to an ultra-secret government installation.
There they learn that scientists have been trying to repair an alien flying saucer that crashed in 1947, which means the warranty has expired. (This crash was hushed up, except for a brief statement from the Federal Aviation Administration assuring the public that flying-saucer travel is perfectly safe.) The secret installation also contains the bodies of deceased aliens, which have likewise been kept completely hidden away except for one brief incident in 1977 when one of them showed up as part of a science-fair project submitted by Amy Carter.
The plot thickens when Jeff Goldblum, who plays a brilliant cable-TV scientist, discovers, by analyzing signals coming from the extraterrestrial Mother Ship, that the aliens are the source of all “infomercials.” This makes the Earth so mad that it decides to fight back. There is a spectacular aerial battle between a fleet of scale-model alien saucers and a fleet of scale-model Air Force fighters, led by President Weenie. Meanwhile, Jeff Goldblum, flying in the crashed enemy saucer, which is piloted by the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, gets inside the mother ship and uses his laptop computer to put a virus into the aliens’ main computer system. He can do this because the aliens, like every other life form in the galaxy, have basically no choice but to use the Windows 95 operating system; in fact the whole reason why they have attacked the Earth is to destroy Bill Gates.
Goldblum’s virus easily disables the aliens’ main computer. Perhaps you’re wondering why aliens who can travel millions of light-years can’t fix a computer virus. The answer is that, like any large organization, the Mother Ship has only one individual who actually understands the computer system, and that individual is not available. The alien computer nerd is hiding in the bowels of the Mother Ship, playing the alien version of Space Invaders, in which the object is to kill little attacking figures that look like Keanu Reeves.
So, the alien ships, their defenses disabled, are all shot down, and the movie ends with people all over the world celebrating. Of course the cheering will stop soon enough, when millions of attorneys crawl out of the smoking rubble of America’s cities, contact the surviving aliens, put neck braces on them, and start suing the Earth in general for trillions of dollars. THAT’S when we should really get worried.
BOY GENIUS
To be honest, I had completely forgotten that in a former life I was Mozart. You know how certain things tend to slip your mind, like where you left your car keys, or the fact that you used to be a brilliant Austrian composer who died in 1791? Well, that’s exactly what happened to me.
I was reminded of my former life recently when I received a book called Spirit at Work, by Lois Grant, who has had a number of former lives. (I realize that some of you may be skeptical about the idea of reincarnation, but there’s a lot of evidence that it’s real. Exhibit A is Vice President Al Gore, who obviously, at some point in his previous existence, was a slab of Formica.)
Besides having been reincarnated, Lois Grant is in close personal touch with many spiritual entities, including her deceased cat, Fluffernut, and the Archangel Michael, who has written a nice blurb for the cover of Spirit at Work, which he calls “a key to the rebirth of the planet.” (I myself have never gotten a blurb quite that positive, although one of my books was described as being “heavy on the booger jokes,” which is similar.)
Anyway, it turns out that one whole chapter of Spirit at Work is devoted to some correspondence that Lois Grant and I had back in 1991. It began when she wrote me a long letter, in which she said that she had been asking herself the question—I bet you’ve asked this question many times—“Where is Mozart now?” So she decided to contact Joya Pope, who serves as a “channeler” for a spiritual entity named Michael, who is “a group of 1,050 souls who have completed their cycle of lives on the Earth.” (Sounds like the U.S. Congress!)
Through Joya—who according to the book “is available for channeling by telephont”—Lois Grant asked Michael about the current whereabouts of Mozart. The answer was: “He is a writer living in Florida.” On a hunch, Lois Grant sent Joya a photograph of me from the newspaper, and the answer came back that the current reincarnation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is none other than—you guessed it—Wayne Newton.
No, seriously, according to Lois Grant, Joya/Michael says that I used to be Mozart. I was quite surprised to learn this, and you would have been, too, if you had seen me take piano lessons. This was in 1956, when the piano teacher, a woman named Mrs. Ugly Old Bat, used to come to my house every Saturday on her broom and point out to my mother that I apparently had not been practicing.
This was of course true. I was nine years old, and I had better things to do with my time than sit around staring at a music book filled with tiny inscrutable black marks and trying to figure out which ones corresponded with which specific keys on the piano. As far as I was concerned, our piano had WAY too many keys on it anyway. I would have much preferred a piano with a total of two large keys, one white and one black; or maybe even just one really large gray key, so you’d never have any doubt which one you were supposed to hit.
But our piano had THOUSANDS of keys, stretching out for approximately a mile in either direction, and if I didn’t hit exactly the right one, Mrs. Bat would make a federal case out of it. She’d stand over my shoulder and harangue me about sharps and flats for an HOUR—and in those days a Saturday hour was the equivalent of 53 weekday hours—until finally she’d give up and go outside to catch moths for dinner.
In other words, I was not a natural piano student, in stark contrast to Mozart, a brilliant musical prodigy who by age nine had already composed his classic work Porgy and Bess. I did eventually take up the guitar, and I even played in a band in college, but we didn’t play complicated music. We played songs like “Land of 1,000 Dances,” which only has one chord, namely, “E.” In fact, a lot of our songs basically consisted of “E.” Usually we’d play “E” for an hour or so, then we’d take a fifteen-minute break, during which we’d change over to “A.”
So even though Lois Grant seemed to be a nice, sincere person, I frankly doubted that I had ever been Mozart, and I pretty much forgot about our correspondence until I received my copy of Spirit at Work and saw the chapter in there about me. I began to wonder: What if I really was the reincarnation of Mozart? I mean, I don’t want to get too spiritual here, but if Joya/Michael is correct—if I really am the embodiment of one of the greatest musical minds in history—then anytime anybody plays any Mozart music, I should get royalties, right? So just to be on the safe side, if you use any of my songs—The Marriage of Figaro, The Magic Flute, “Summertime,” “Happy Birthday,” “Mony Mony,” etc.—I’d appreciate it if you’d send me a check. Make it out to Dave “Wolfgang” Barry.
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This photo of me with my son, Rob, was taken on the day I picked him up at junior high school in the Wienermobile, which the Oscar Mayer company had let me drive for a day. This was probably the most embarrassing moment of Rob’s life. As a parent, I really enjoyed it.
NO RESPECT
A while ago the New York Times printed an item concerning an eleven-year-old girl who was overheard on the streets of East Hampton, New York, telling her father, “Daddy, Daddy, please don’t sing!”
The daddy was Billy Joel.
The irony, of course, is that a lot of people would pay BIG money to hear Billy Joel sing. But of course these people are not Billy Joel’s adolescent offspring. To his adolescent offspring, Billy Joel apparently represents the same thing that all parents represent to their adolescent offspring: Bozo-Rama. To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.
When I was an adolescent, my dad wore one of those Russian-style hats that were semi-popular with middle-aged guys for a while in the early sixties. You may remember this hat: It was shaped kind of like those paper hats that some fast-food workers have to wear, only it was covered with fur. Nobody—and I include both Mel Gibson and the late Cary Grant in this statement—could wear this hat and not look like a complete dork.
So naturally my dad wore one. The fur on his was dark and curly; it looked as though this hat had been made from a poodle. My dad was the smartest, most decent, most perceptive person I’ve ever known, but he was a card-carrying member of the Fashion Club for Men Who Wear Bermuda Shorts with the Waist up Around Their Armpits, Not to Mention Sandals with Dark Socks.
