Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up - Hardcover

Dave Barry

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0517595745 ISBN 13: 9780517595749

Publisher: Crown, 1994

Synopsis

Since Dave Barry writes about weird things, you might be tempted to think he has a weird brain. He does, of course, but that's not the whole explanation: A lot of the things he writes about -- exploding Pop-Tarts, for example -- are real. In fact, Dave's main job as a humor columnist -- aside from playing Stealth Fighter on his computer to avoid writing humor columns -- is to point out what is already funny in a world that is seriously bonkers.

In Dave's world, amazing but true adventures occur every day, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist investigates a ground-breaking anti-flatulence product recommended to him by a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; the ecologically dangerous shellfish attacking women's undergarments; and the epidemic of snakes and woodland creatures currently appearing in people's toilets. Dave's bad song contest required him to read thousands of entries from people like you; now, people like you could have the pleasure of being badgered all the bad songs that badger Dave.

Dave also participates in real-life form of investigative journalism that actually require him to leave the house: marching with the Lawn Rangers precision lawnmower drill team of Arcola, Illinois; playing lead guitar in an extremely mediocre rock band with Stephen King and other literary lights; and taking his little boat Buster from its happy berth in the Barry garage onto Miami's high seas, only to run it aground. He's even appeared in an episode of "Dave's World," the CBS television show based on his real life -- only taller -- in which he bids for an air conditioner.

Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up includes longer feature pieces by Dave in which many of the featured facts happen to be accurate. Now you can read Dave Barry on UFO thrillseekers and the Elvis lovers who hang out at Graceland -- all articles that show Dave at his best and smartest. Complete with illustrations by Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, Dave Barry is Not Making This Up brings you straight into the truly twisted center of Dave's world.

On Buying His Son Sneakers: The salesperson's tone of voice carried the clear implication that he was going to call the Child Abuse Hotline if I didn't care enough, as a parent, to take out a second mortgage so I could purchase sufficient sneakerage for my son.... We need Congress to pass a law requiring the sneaker industry to return to the system we had when I was growing up, under which there was only one kind of sneakers, namely U.S. Keds, which were made from Army surplus tents and which cost about $10, or roughly $1 per pound.

On Being Left-Handed: According to the researchers, left-handers die sooner than right-handers because they have more accidents. I know why this is: We read books backward...This saves us a lot of time with murder mysteries, but it's a bad habit when we're reading, say, the instructions for operating a barbecue grill, and we begin with "Step 147: Ignite Gas."

On The Uses Of Exploding Pop-Tarts: When we detected incoming missiles, we'd simply hold the toaster levers down via some method (possibly involving Tom and Roseanne Arnold) and within a few minutes Whoom the country would be surrounded by a protective wall of flames, and the missiles would either burn up or get knocked off course and detonate harmlessly in some place like New Jersey.

On Readers' Reaction To The Bad Song Contest: Sometimes the voters were so angry that they weren't even sure of the name of the song they hated. There were votes against "These Boots Are Made for Stomping"; the Beach Boys' classic "Carolina Girls"; "I'm Nothing But a Hound Dog"; and "Ain't No Woman Like the One-Eyed Gott."

About this title

About the Author

Dave Barry is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Miami Herald. He is the author of numerous bestsellers, including Dave Barry Turns 50 and the novel, Big Trouble. He lives in Miami, Florida.


From the Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

arry writes about weird things, you might be tempted to think he has a weird brain. He does, of course, but that's not the whole explanation: A lot of the things he writes about -- exploding Pop-Tarts, for example -- are real. In fact, Dave's main job as a humor columnist -- aside from playing Stealth Fighter on his computer to avoid writing humor columns -- is to point out what is already funny in a world that is seriously bonkers.<br><br>In Dave's world, amazing but true adventures occur every day, as the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist investigates a ground-breaking anti-flatulence product recommended to him by a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court; the ecologically dangerous shellfish attacking women's undergarments; and the epidemic of snakes and woodland creatures currently appearing in people's toilets. Dave's bad song contest required him to read thousands of entries from people like you; now, people like you could have the pleasure of being badgered all the bad songs that badger Dave.<

Reviews

Barry ( The Taming of the Screw ) is in top form in his latest collection of essays from the Miami Herald. He introduces readers to his teenage son, who rarely leaves his room except to demand new sneakers; to his two dogs, Earnest and Zippy, so fearsome to intruders that Barry had to install an alarm system; to certain Florida UFOlogists, who sound like prospective candidates for psychiatric study. There are several pieces about Barry's contest to pick the worst modern pop song, which drew 10,000 responses, with "MacArthur Park" the clear winner. Exceptionally good are the travel articles about China and Bimini. Other topics involve lefthandedness, the hazards of air travel (principally the other passengers) and masochistic consumers.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami Herald columnist and funny guy Barry (Dave Barry Does Japan, 1992, etc.) has once again collected a bunch of goofy anecdotes. Barry and colleague Calvin Trillin are confronted by a stupid mugger, of whom Barry writes: ``The criminal's silliest move, in my opinion, was threatening to blow both our heads off. That would be an absurd waste of bullets. A much more efficient way to gain our cooperation would have been to simply blow Calvin's head off. I would then have cooperatively handed over Calvin's wallet.'' Barry knows exactly where he stands in the ranks of American journalists, noting that things like facts can get in the way of what he does, ``which is sitting around and thinking stuff up. This is what I mainly do, which is why I have been able to achieve a level of high-quality journalistic productivity, as measured in booger jokes, that a guy like David Broder can only dream about.'' -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

More columns from the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Miami Herald columnist Barry is making up large chunks of his latest collection, but that's par for Barry's best-selling course. From "Father Faces Life: A Long-Overdue Attack on Natural Childbirth," which first earned him visibility, through off-kilter takes on sneakers, UFOs, ubiquitous health hazards, "Consumers from Mars," and radio's not-so-golden oldies, Barry blends fact and fiction, family frustrations and cultural anomalies, sarcasm and sentimentality. The current collection includes several longer Herald articles along with Barry's usual column-length pieces. With Dave's World now a fixture on CBS-TV's highly rated Monday night schedule, expect requests from Barry fans old and new. Mary Carroll

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

People often say to me: "Dave, you are a leading journalism professional and not as short as I expected. What is your secret of success?"

The answer is that, throughout my career, I have always kept one vital journalistic principle foremost in my mind: Try not to leave the house. A journalist who leaves his or her house can run into all kinds of obstacles, including:

• Editors.

• Members of the public.

• News events involving actual facts.

All of these obstacles can seriously interfere with the basic work of journalism, which is sitting around and thinking stuff up. This is what I mainly do, which is why I have been able to achieve a level of high-quality journalistic productivity, as measured in booger jokes, that a guy like David Broder can only dream about.

Nevertheless, every now and then a situation will come up wherein a story of major importance is breaking somewhere other than in my office, and I have no choice but to go and cover it. For example, in this book you will find a column concerning an incident in 1992 when I left my house and traveled, without regard for my personal convenience or safety, all the way to my yard, to see the World's Fastest Lawn Mower. That's the kind of dedicated professional I am.

The result is that this book contains a number of columns based on real events. There are also some longer articles, most of which originally appeared in the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic; these also contain an unusually high (for me) level of factual content. That's why this book is called Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.*

I want to stress, however, that this title does not mean that this is a serious book. This book also contains a lot of "tongue-in-cheek" social commentary and satire, by which I mean lies. I hope you don't find this mixture of fact and fiction to be confusing. If, in reading the following pages, you are uncertain as to whether a specific statement is meant seriously or not, simply apply this rule of thumb: If the statement makes you consider filing a lawsuit, I was kidding. Ha ha!

* In an effort to boost up sales, we were going to call it Rush Limbaugh Is Not Making This Up, but there was some kind of legal problem.

READER ALERT

The following section, which is mostly about family stuff, contains the article that pretty much launched my writing career: the story of my son's "natural" birth. When I wrote it back in 1981, Beth and I were living in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, and I had a job teaching effective business-writing seminars.* I wrote the article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it got reprinted in many other newspapers, including the Miami Herald, which ended up hiring me. So in a way you could say that I owe my job to my son. Although if you consider the amount of money I wound up spending just on He-Man action figures, I have more than paid him back.

* This could be why we got so far behind Japan. FOOD FOR THOUGHT

It's getting late on a school night, but I'm not letting my son go to bed yet, because there's serious work to be done.

"Robert!" I'm saying, in a firm voice. "Come to the kitchen right now and blow-dry the ant!"

We have a large ant, about the size of a mature raccoon, standing on our kitchen counter. In fact, it looks kind of like a raccoon, or possibly even a mutant lobster. We made the ant out of papier-mâché, a substance you create by mixing flour and water and newspapers together into a slimy goop that drips down and gets licked up by your dogs, who operate on the wise survival principle that you should immediately eat everything that falls onto the kitchen floor, because if it turns out not to be food, you can always throw it up later.

The ant, needless to say, is part of a Science Fair project. We need a big ant to illustrate an important scientific concept, the same concept that is illustrated by all Science Fair projects, namely: "Look! I did a Science Fair project!"

(I know how we can solve our national crisis in educational funding: Whenever the schools needed money, they could send a letter to all the parents saying: "Give us a contribution right now, or we're going to hold a Science Fair." They'd raise billions.)

Our Science Fair project is due tomorrow, but the ant is still wet, so we're using a hair dryer on it. Science Fair judges hate a wet ant. Another problem is that our ant is starting to sag, both in the front (or, in entomological terms, the "prognosis") and in the rear (or "butt"). It doesn't look like one of those alert, businesslike, "can-do" ants that you see striding briskly around. It looks depressed, like an ant that has just been informed that all 86,932 members of its immediate family were crushed while attempting to lift a Tootsie Roll.

While Robert is drying the ant, I get a flashlight and go outside to examine the experiment portion of our project, which is entitled "Ants and Junk Food." On our back fence we put up a banner that says, in eight-inch-high letters, welcome ants. Under this is a piece of cardboard with the following snack substances scientifically arranged on it: potato chips, a spicy beef stick, a doughnut, a Snickers candy bar, chocolate-filled cookies, Cheez Doodles, Cocoa Krispies, and Screaming Yellow Zonkers. If you were to eat this entire experiment, you would turn into a giant pimple and explode.

We figured this experiment would attract ants from as far away as Indonesia, and we'd note which junk foods they preferred, and this would prove our basic scientific point ("Look! I did a Science Fair project!"). Of course you veteran parents know what actually happened: The ants didn't show up. Nature has a strict rule against cooperating with Science Fair projects. This is why, when you go to a Science Fair, you see 200 projects designed to show you how an electrical circuit works, and not one of them can actually make the little bulb light up. If you had a project that was supposed to demonstrate the law of gravity using heavy lead weights, they would fall up. So when the ants saw our banner, they said: "Ah-hah! A Science Fair project! Time for us to act in a totally unnatural manner and stay away from the food!"

The irony is, I knew where some ants were: in my office. They live in one of the electrical outlets. I see them going in there all day long. I think maybe they're eating electrons, which makes me nervous. I seriously considered capturing one of the office ants and carrying it out to the science experiment, and if necessary giving it broad hints about what to do ("Yum! Snickers!"). But I was concerned that if I did this, the ants might become dependent on me, and every time they got hungry they'd crawl onto my desk and threaten to give me electrical stings if I didn't carry them to a snack.

Fortunately, some real outdoor ants finally discovered our experiment, and we were able to observe their behavior at close range. I had been led to believe, by countless public-television nature shows, that ants are very organized, with the colony divided into specialized jobs such as drones, workers, fighters, bakers, consultants, etc., all working together with high-efficiency precision. But the ants that showed up at our experiment were total morons. You'd watch one, and it would sprint up to a Cocoa Krispie, then stop suddenly, as if saying: "Yikes! Compared with me, this Cocoa Krispie is the size of a Buick!" Then it would sprint off in a random direction. Sometimes it would sprint back; sometimes it would sprint to another Cocoa Krispie and act surprised again. But it never seemed to do anything. There were thousands of ants behaving this way, and every single time two of them met, they'd both stop and exchange "high-fives" with their antennas, along with, I assume, some kind of ant pleasantries ("Hi Bob!" "No, I'm Bill!" "Sorry! You look just like Bob!"). This was repeated millions of times. I watched these ants for two days, and they accomplished nothing. It was exactly like high- way construction. It wouldn't have surprised me if some ants started waving orange flags to direct other insects around the area.

But at least there were ants, which meant we could do our project and get our results. I'd tell you what they were, but I really think you should do your own work. That's the whole point of a Science Fair, as I keep telling my son, who has gone to bed, leaving me to finish blow-drying the ant.


From the Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0517595745
• ISBN 13: 9780517595749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Jeff MacNelly
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 244