Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus

by Dave Barry

  Calm down: There is no need to think in capital letters. But you are correct: I am currently running dead even, state for state, with the man who has been shown in poll after poll to be the nation’s first choice for president.

  Why are Colin and I so hugely popular? I can answer that in one simple word: “The Issues.” Here is where I stand on them as of 8:35 P.M. yesterday:

  Crime—You can call me courageous if you want, but I am against crime. I favor the death penalty for everything, including zoning violations. In the case of really, really bad criminals—especially murderers and whoever is responsible for putting ketchup in those little packets they give you at fast-food restaurants—I support a massive government project to develop a way to bring them back to life after we execute them, so we can execute them again.

  The Budget Deficit—For far too long, politicians have been “sugar-coating” the truth about the deficit, telling us only what they think we want to hear. Well, I say it’s time we acted like grown-ups and “faced the music.” If you really want to know who’s responsible for the budget deficit, go to a mirror, look yourself straight in the eye, and say: “I’M sure as hell not responsible!” Of COURSE you’re not! Neither am I! I was hitting golf balls with O.J. at the time.

  Taxes—A lot of my opponents have been going around spouting harebrained “pie-in-the-sky” tax schemes that promise “something for nothing.” Well I say it’s time for a “reality check.” I favor a practical, fiscally sound, two-pronged “flat-tax” system, as follows:

  Prong One—Everybody would pay less.

  Prong Two—You, personally, would pay nothing.

  Unlike my opponents, however, I am not suggesting that there is such a thing as a “free lunch.” (Under my administration, you will still have to pay for your lunch, although dinner would be free, unless they serve it with those little ketchup packets, in which case they would have to pay YOU.) I fully realize that if everybody paid lower taxes, then the government would not have the money it needs to carry out its vital constitutional function of shutting down every other week. Therefore, to offset my tax break, I am proposing a special tax of $10,000 on everybody who gets:

  The “Jennifer Aniston Model” Haircut—Jennifer Aniston, for the benefit of those of you who have just arrived here from the fourteenth century, is an actress on the TV sitcom Friends, which is about six ordinary young people who lead ordinary lives doing ordinary things just like you—working, watching TV, dating Julia Roberts, etc. This show is hugely popular, and one result has been that roughly 80 percent of American women have decided to do their hair in the same style as Aniston, often with unfortunate results. It’s like the seventies, when millions of women got the Farrah Fawcett model hairstyle, thinking this made them look like Farrah Fawcett, when in fact it made them look like French poodles that had fallen into vats of hydrogen peroxide.

  Get real, women! Copying somebody’s hairstyle doesn’t make you look like that person! If I wore my hair like Brad Pitt, would I suddenly look exactly like Brad Pitt? Of course not! I would look exactly like Mel Gibson! But that is something I have learned to live with. Because I happen to be a realist, which is why I know that I will never be president of this great nation unless I can persuade you, the people, to give me your trust in the form of U.S. currency. I’m going to need a LOT of your trust, because I want to present my Vision for America’s Future by means of TV commercials suggesting that my opponents are guilty of, at minimum, molesting livestock. So help me out, voters! Let’s all do our part, as patriotic citizens, to make this great nation an even better place in which for me to live. You’d better act now, because there are only so many spaces on the Supreme Court.

  And speaking of presidents: It has been brought to my attention that I am a stupid idiot because in a recent column I attributed the statement “We have nothing to fear but fear itself” to Winston Churchill. This statement was of course made by Franklin D. Roosevelt, inventor of the phonograph.

  DAVE MEETS

  THE DEATH

  TREE

  There is a simple explanation for why I wound up dangling from a rope 75 feet in the air over a beaver dam somewhere in Idaho: I was a house guest.

  You know how it is, when you’re a house guest: If your host suggests an activity, you, as a polite person, tend to say “sure.”

  My host in this case was my good friend Ridley Pearson, who makes his living writing thriller novels, which means he spends his days thinking up sentences like: “Roger awoke in a dark room and sensed immediately that his body had been surgically removed from his head.”

  What I’m saying is that Ridley has some spooky closets in the mansion of his mind. This is why I should have been suspicious when, the night I arrived at his house, he casually said, “I thought that tomorrow we could climb a tree.”

  This struck me as an odd activity for a couple of guys in their forties. Guys our age generally prefer a more mature type of recreation, such as scratching. It was as if Ridley had said, “I thought that tomorrow we could play hide-and-seek.” But I was a house guest, so all I said was “sure.”

  The next morning we had breakfast with Ridley’s brother, Brad, and a friend named Amos Galpin, and then the four of us set off in Ridley’s car to find a tree to climb. This enabled me to see some of Idaho (official motto: “Nobody Knows Where It Is”). It’s a nice state, containing a tremendous quantity of scenery as well as several roads and at least one city named “Ketchum.” The state license plate says “IDAHO” on the top, and on the bottom it says—I am not making this up—”FAMOUS POTATOES.” Apparently this was judged to be the most alluring possible license-plate slogan, narrowly edging out “IDAHO—A WHOLE LOT OF ROCKS” and “IDAHO—YOU’LL SMELL THE COWS.”

  Most of Idaho is outdoors, the result being that local residents are able to enjoy year-round interaction with the natural environment, which gradually drives them insane. At least that’s apparently what happened to Ridley, Brad, and Amos, because they have turned tree-climbing into a serious, full-fledged sport, with special equipment and everything.

  They do not climb just any tree. We drove past several million normal, sturdy, vertical trees before stopping at what had to be the most unsafe-looking tree in North America. I could not believe that the tree authorities even permitted this tree to exist. It was next to a beaver pond, and it was leaning WAY over at a stark angle, looking as though it would crash to the ground if a beetle climbed up it, let alone four middle-aged guys who had recently consumed large omelets.

  “Is this tree safe?” I asked the guys.

  “Ha ha!” they reassured me. They then helped me put on the special tree-climbing equipment, which they call a “harness,” although what it looks like is an enormous green athletic supporter. It has a pair of ten-foot safety straps attached to it; the idea is that you clip these to the branches as you climb, so that if you fall, instead of smashing into the ground and getting killed, you fall only until your safety strap becomes taut, at which point you turn into a human pendulum and slam into the side of the tree and get killed.

  At least that’s what I was thinking as I inched higher and higher up the Death Tree. The other guys seemed oblivious to the danger.

  “Look at that view!” they’d remark.

  “Huh!” I’d reply, admiring the scenic vista of the two square inches of bark directly in front of my face. I hate heights. I was clinging to this tree so passionately that I might very well have committed an act of photosynthesis with it. And it did not help my mood any to know that the area was infested with beavers. At any moment I expected to hear a tail slapping on the water, which is the beaver signal for “COME QUICKLY! DORKS IN GIANT JOCKSTRAPS HAVE CLIMBED AN EASY-TO-GNAW-DOWN TREE!”

  But beavers did not gnaw down our tree. What happened was much worse: When we got near the top of the tree, Ridley informed me that we were going to get down by “rappelling,” a technique that was invented by mountain climbers who had spent a lot of time at high altitudes with no oxyg
en getting to their brains.

  The way rappelling works is, you close your eyes, jump out of the tree, and slide down on a slim, unsafe-looking rope, which is attached to your harness via a metal fittings that enables you to slide WAY faster than would be possible under the influence of gravity alone, so that you reach speeds estimated at 450 miles per hour as you hurtle toward the ground, crashing through branches while your fellow climbers shout helpful instructions that you cannot hear because you’re devoting all of your mental energy to sphincter control. At least that’s how I handled it.

  All in all, it was an extremely memorable experience that I will devote the rest of my life to trying to forget. I’m looking forward to the day when Ridley is my house guest, so that I can plan an equally fun activity for him. I’m thinking maybe we could play tag.

  With chain saws.

  UP A TREE

  When my friend Ridley Pearson invited me back to Idaho, I said to myself: He is NOT getting me up another tree.

  I was still combing sap out of my hair from a trip to Idaho last fall, when Ridley talked me into—this is an Idaho sport—climbing way up into a blatantly hostile tree and then getting back to Earth by “rappelling,” which means “sliding down at the Speed of Fear on a rope approximately the same width as a strand of No. 8 spaghetti.”

  I frankly don’t know why I let Ridley talk me into anything. He writes thriller novels, which means that he spends most of his time thinking up newer and better ways to murder people. He’s always leaving himself little reminder notes with plot ideas like: “Killer is beautician-herpetologist who puts coral snake in hair dryer.”

  Here’s a true story: I was staying at Ridley’s house, and we went to the market for groceries, and I was grinding up a bag of coffee when Ridley wandered over. After watching me for a moment, he said: “A murderer could put poison into the grinding machine, so the next person to use it would grind poison into the bottom of his coffee bag. It could be weeks before the poison got into the coffee. There’d be no way to trace it.” Then, smiling contentedly, he wandered off to buy cold cuts. My host.

  So anyway, when I went back to Idaho, I vowed that Ridley was absolutely not, no way, forget about it, going to get me up in another tree. I saw no reason to risk getting killed by falling. Instead, I elected to risk getting killed by drowning.

  Specifically, I went “whitewater rafting” on the Salmon River, which gets its name from the fact that it has virtually no salmon in it. It used to have a lot, but then a bunch of dams got built, which is bad for the salmon, who frankly are not rocket scientists. Despite the fact that they spend most of their lives in the Pacific Ocean, they have decided that the only place they can spawn is smack dab in the middle of Idaho. So every year they try to swim hundreds of miles upstream past all these dams, and only a few make it, and by that point the female salmon have severe headaches, so precious little spawning occurs.

  In an effort to correct this situation, the federal government has wildlife rangers trying to help the salmon by roping off the spawning areas, playing Julio Iglesias music underwater, etc. I’ve been critical of government programs in the past, but as a person concerned about the environment, I have to admit, in all honesty, that the federal salmon effort is stupid. It would make a WHOLE lot more sense to have the rangers fly low over the Pacific Ocean in planes with loudspeakers blaring the announcement: “SPAWN RIGHT HERE, YOU MORONS!” Of course you run the risk that one of the planes would fly over a cruise ship, and the passengers, mistaking the announcement for an order from the captain, would suddenly start engaging in mass carnal behavior right in the buffet line, but that is the price you pay to protect the environment.

  Anyway, speaking of vessels, I went Whitewater rafting, which is a little scary inasmuch as some idiot—the authorities should look into this—has placed rapids right in the river. Fortunately, the rafting company requires you to wear a life jacket, which means that in the event that you get tossed out of the boat, you’ll stay safely afloat long enough to freeze to death. The Salmon River is extremely cold, consisting primarily of recently melted snow rushing down from the mountains; this is nature’s way of cleansing the slopes of deceased skiers.

  But I made it through the rapids okay, and I was starting to think my Idaho trip was going to be casualty-free, when Ridley invited me to spend a night in a “yurt” that he built out in the mountains. I said sure, not realizing that “yurt” is a Mongolian word meaning “small dome-shaped structure that gets so cold at night you would be warmer if you slept in the Salmon River.”

  But the cold was not the problem. The problem was that (1) my son, Rob, was with me, and (2) there were trees near the yurt. Rob is fourteen, so naturally he wanted to engage in the most life-threatening possible activity, and here’s what the ever-obliging Ridley came up with: He strung a rope between two trees, at an altitude of approximately 150,000 feet, the plan being to dangle from this rope, on a pulley, and slide from one tree to the other. My feeling was that, if you needed to get from one tree to the other—even a salmon would figure this out—you could just walk. But no, Ridley and Rob had to take the Batman route, and Ridley decided that, when Rob went across the rope, there had to be an adult on each end.

  And thus, once again, I found myself way up in an Idaho tree, embracing the trunk with a passion normally associated with Bob Packwood. Fortunately everything worked out: Rob came zipping across on the rope and claimed to enjoy it, although for several hours he remained the color of vanilla yogurt. I finally got back down to Earth and vowed to never again get up on anything higher than a medium-pile carpet. We went back to the yurt and spent a relaxing night watching our breath turn instantly to sleet. The next morning, Ridley made us a hearty breakfast. I made my own coffee.

  ONE POTATO,

  TWO POTATO…

  Note from the Legal Department: The activities described in this column are dangerous and stupid and possibly illegal and should be performed only by trained humor professionals who are good at sneaking around. The newspaper assumes no responsibility or liability for any injuries, deaths, maimings, cripplings, eyes getting poked out, pregnancies, fires, riots, ointments, or suppositories that may or may not occur as a result of some moron attempting any of these activities or any other actions, forfeitures, debentures, indemnifications, and such other big scary legal words as we may or may not think up at some future point in time. Thank you.

  For more than a year now, alert readers have been sending me alarming newspaper articles about the “potato gun,” a bazooka-sized device that can shoot a potato several hundred yards at speeds up to 1,000 feet per second. To give you an idea of how fast that is, an ordinary potato, on its own, will rarely travel more than four feet per day, even during the height of mating season.

  Potato guns—which have already been banned in some municipalities—can be easily made from plastic pipe available in any plumbing-supply store; the explosive force comes from ordinary hair spray, which is ignited by an electrical spark. Needless to say I will not provide any specific details concerning how to construct these devices, because a great many young people read this column, and they already know how to construct these devices.

  Anyway, I recently got a fax from an individual whom I will identify here only as Buzz Fleischman. Buzz, who makes his living performing humor at corporate meetings and other functions, and who by the way currently has some openings on his calendar, informed me that he had constructed a potato gun, and was willing to demonstrate it for the purpose of helping me, as a responsible adult, better understand just how alarming this menace is.

  We decided to fire the potato gun from the roof of my place of employment, the Miami Herald (motto: “We Are Still Keeping an Eye on Gary Hart”). Let me stress that the Miami Herald is a responsible institution that does NOT ordinarily allow people to shoot potatoes from its premises. We were able to do it only because we met the very strict requirement of not asking for permission. It was a Covert Operation, during which we addressed each
other only by code names except when we forgot. (For ease of memorization, we both used the code name “Eagle One.”)

  Once we got up on the Herald roof, we decided to fire the potato gun toward Biscayne Bay. Our other option was to fire it toward the city of Miami, which would have been a serious mistake because hundreds of local residents would undoubtedly have fired back (and not with potatoes, either).

  To load the gun, Buzz stuffed a potato into the barrel and shoved it down with a pole, then sprayed some Aqua Net Super Hold hair spray into the detonation chamber. He then aimed the gun at the bay and pressed the ignition device, and FWOOOM, the potato came blasting out of the gun and went way way WAAAAY out over the water and landed approximately in Portugal.

  As responsible adults, Buzz and I were very alarmed by this demonstration. We shot off a bunch more potatoes to see if we would continue to be alarmed, and we were. We also got excellent results with an onion.

  But as any reputable scientist will tell you, the “acid test” of the alarmingness of this type of device is what happens when you shoot a Barbie doll out of it. We used the “Gymnast Barbie” model, which comes with a little gold medal. First we loaded a potato into the gun, then we put Gymnast Barbie into the end of the barrel, with just her head and hairstyle sticking out. Then we pointed the potato gun straight up and FWOOOM up went Barbie, high in the sky, smiling perkily, waving her arms and legs gymnastically around inside a cloud of potato atoms before finally landing in a really unladylike pose.

  Needless to say these results were extremely alarming. Because if the potato gun can be used to shoot Barbie dolls, then it is only a matter of time before some fiendish criminal mind thinks of using one to shoot a Kellogg’s Strawberry Pop-Tart. So we tried that, too. It was pretty disappointing. The gun made a noise like “phoo” and spat Pop-Tart fragments a short, non-alarming distance.