by Dave Barry
There's a Hoover Dam . . . and Now, the Dave Sewage Lifter
North Dakota is calling me. “Come on up!” it says. And then it adds: “Bring thermal underwear!”
This invitation resulted from a column in which I poked fun at North Dakota for wanting to drop the word “North” from its name, so that people will stop thinking of it as a cold, frigid, freezing, subzero, arctic, polar, wintry place characterized by low temperatures. My column also made fun of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, for marketing themselves as “The Grand Cities” and proclaiming that they are “where the earth meets the sky.” My feeling was that there are a LOT of places where the earth meets the sky, including most municipal landfills, but you don't see them bragging about it.
Anyway, that column got a BIG response. I got mail from every resident of North Dakota (a total of almost 150 letters). Many of these letters proudly defended North Dakota and its citizens (sample quote: “The people are friendly and warm-hearted. We don't usually shoot tourists like some other states”).
Several Grand Cities political and civic leaders invited me to visit. They sent me information about the area, as well as gifts of typical North Dakota things, including a plastic baggie filled with peat. Peat is a substance that looks like frog poop but is actually formed from decayed swamp plants and is used as a fuel. Either that, or the North Dakotans, as a prank, sent me a baggie full of frog poop, hoping that I would set fire to it.
Another traditional North Dakota item I received was buffalo jerky, which is a delicacy made from the jerky of a buffalo. If you are ever, at gunpoint, forced to choose between eating buffalo jerky and eating peat, my advice is: Go with the peat.
The jerky was sent by the mayor of Grand Forks, Mike Brown, who also made this generous offer: If I visit his city, he will name a sewage lift station after me. Really. According to the mayor, this is a major honor in Grand Forks. “That system moves eight million gallons of sewage a day,” he said, in a statement that tells us more than perhaps we want to know about the effects of jerky consumption on the human digestive system.
But having my name on a sewage lifter is not the only reason why I am attracted to the Grand Cities. There are a LOT of exciting things going on up there. It's like Paris, Disney World, and Las Vegas all rolled into one, minus the hotels, restaurants, attractions, Louvre museum, roads, etc.
But who needs attractions, when you have . . . Cats Incredible! This is a HUGE annual summer event in the Grand Cities, judging from the Grand Forks Herald, which covers Cats Incredible in front-page stories with headlines the height of Bette Midler. As well it should. Because Cats Incredible is nothing less than the largest catfish tournament in the entire Grand Cities region, attracting thousands of spectators. When that many people turn out to watch other people fish, then you know you're talking about an area with poor TV reception.
No, seriously, Cats Incredible looks very exciting. The Herald ran a front-page photo of this year's winning team—two men holding a fish that is WAY uglier than the thing that's always chasing Sigourney Weaver around the spaceship. The Herald article describes one of the winning anglers as “a catfish guide, seminar speaker, and author.”
Yes! Catfish seminars! Don't tell ME this is not a great country.
If you think Cats Incredible is the only excitement going on up there, think again. Because the Grand Cities also play host to—this is a real event—the Frosty Bobber. In a stark departure from the concept of Cats Incredible, which is a summer fishing tournament, the Frosty Bobber is . . . a winter fishing tournament! It gets its name from the fact that, if you spend enough time sitting next to a hole in the ice, eventually your bobber gets frosty. This is why there are so few Canadians.
And there is much, much more to the Grand Cities. There is also the annual Potato Bowl, which I am sure is everything the name implies. And the mayor of East Grand Forks, Minnesota, Lynn Stauss, informs me that his city also boasts some powerful attractants, including “the largest beet sugar processing plant in the United States.”
So call me crazy, but I'm seriously pondering a trip up to Dakota. I could use some excitement, not to mention some fresh air. Because this peat smoke is disgusting.
N.D.'s New Barry Building Takes Your Breath Away
My advice to aspiring humor columnists is: Never make fun of North Dakota. Because the North Dakotans will invite you, nicely but relentlessly, to visit, and eventually you'll have to accept. When you get there, they'll be incredibly nice to you, treating you with such warmth and hospitality that before long you feel almost like family. Then they will try to asphyxiate you with sewer gas.
I found this out when I went to Grand Forks, North Dakota, in January. I had made fun of Grand Forks and its sister city, East Grand Forks, Minnesota, for calling themselves the Grand Cities and declaring that they are “where the earth meets the sky.” (This turns out to be slightly inaccurate: In between the earth and the sky, there's a layer of really hard ice.)
I arrived at Grand Forks International Airport on a sub-zero Tuesday night. I have never been so cold in my life. And that was inside the terminal. Outside it was much worse. I'm pretty sure wolves were stalking me as I staggered across the wind-whipped parking lot, wondering if there could be a colder place on the planet. Unfortunately, there was: the interior of my rental car, which had liquid oxygen on the seats.
The way the North Dakotans deal with this is to leave their cars running. The state fuel-economy average must be around .000003 miles per gallon, because everywhere you go, you see unattended cars with the motors running. Many people start their cars with remote-control devices, but I believe that some of the smarter cars also spontaneously start themselves to keep warm.
The thing is, nobody steals the unattended cars, or anything else. During my visit, roughly once every four minutes a North Dakotan would remind me, in a nice way, that they have hardly any crime up there, in stark contrast to my city, Miami, where, as the North Dakotans understand it, you can't hear yourself think for all the machine-gun fire. But I can't argue with them: It does feel very safe up there, and everybody does seem to get along, despite the fact that the population is quite diverse, ranging all the way from people whose ancestors immigrated from Norway, to people whose ancestors immigrated from a different part of Norway.
I spent part of a day driving around the Greater Grand Forks area, where you can see many breathtakingly spectacular vistas if you have taken hallucinogenic drugs. Otherwise you'll see a lot of really flat agriculture covered by snow. But the people, as I may have mentioned, are very nice, and I saw absolutely no crimes committed, even though there were many cultivating machines sitting around unattended.
The Grand Cities themselves are more urban, featuring stores, restaurants, and other buildings, with the occasional unattended car running outside. The Grand Cities are trying hard to attract more tourists and businesses, so I urge everybody to go up there and check it out. There is PLENTY of parking.
Without question the most memorable experience I had in Grand Forks was a public ceremony in which a municipal sewage pumping station was formally named after me. I am not making this up. They took me in a limousine to the station, where more than one hundred people had gathered, despite the fact that the temperature was an estimated 8,500 degrees below zero.
The mayor of Grand Forks, Mike Brown, who is also an obstetrician/gynecologist, read a nice speech in which he flatteringly compared my work to the production of excrement. Then came the big moment when I unveiled a big sign on the side of the building, with large letters stating: DAVE BARRY LIFT STATION NO. 16.
Words cannot convey what it feels like to look at a building with your name on it—a building capable of pumping 450,000 gallons of untreated sewage per day—and at the same time hear the unmistakable WHUPWHUPWHUP of North Dakotans enthusiastically applauding with heavy gloves. It was a wonderful occasion, until they took me on an official tour of the pumping station. When they opened the door, WHOOSH, we were engulfed by a c
loud of pent-up fumes from the Outhouse from Hell. Trees wilted as far away as Wisconsin.
Fortunately I survived, and went on to have several more memorable experiences in the Grand Cities. Next week I'll tell you about the sport of ice fishing, which is irrefutable proof that prolonged exposure to cold causes brain damage. I'll also describe a tradition called the “potluck supper,” which poses a serious threat to the world's dwindling reserves of Jell-O. Until then, keep your engines running.
Steve's Schnapps Kept the Frost Off Dave's Bobber
In last week's column, I described my January visit to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, which are also called “The Grand Cities” by about six people who are hoping this name will attract more humans to the area.
I went to the Grand Cities because I had poked some good-natured fun at the residents. They responded by good-naturedly inviting me up and formally naming a sewage pumping station after me in a ceremony that will forever remain a vivid memory in my mind, even though I have burned my clothes.
But that was not the end of their hospitality. They also exposed me to the popular northern sport of ice fishing, which gets its name from the fact that “ice fishing” sounds better than “sitting around drinking.”
The idea behind ice fishing is that the northern winter, which typically lasts forty-three months, eventually starts to make a guy feel cooped up inside his house. So he goes out to the Great Outdoors, drills a hole in a frozen body of water, drops in a line, and then coops himself up inside a tiny structure called a “fish house” with a heater and some fishing buddies and some cigars and some adult beverages and maybe a TV with a satellite dish. It's basically the same thing as drilling a hole in the floor of your recreation room, the difference being that in your recreation room you'd have a better chance of catching a fish.
I started my ice-fishing trip at the Cabela's outdoor-supply store, which is close to the biggest thing in East Grand Forks, and which has huge tanks inside with fish swimming around. There I met a guy named Steve Gander, who had two snowmobiles running outside in the subzero cold. We hopped on and drove them at a high rate of speed, right through the East Grand Forks traffic. (By “the East Grand Forks traffic,” I mean, “a car.”)
We snowmobiled down to the Red River, which divides East Grand Forks from Grand Forks, and which gets its name from the fact that the water is brown. There we met Cabela's employee Matt Gindorff, who had drilled some holes in the ice. Matt dropped a fishing line into a hole, and within just fifteen minutes—talk about beginner's luck!—nothing happened. Nothing ever happens in ice fishing, because—this is my theory—there are no fish under the ice. Fish are not rocket scientists, but they are smart enough to spend the winter someplace warm, like Arizona. The only fish anywhere near me and Matt were the ones in the tanks at Cabela's; they were probably looking out the window at us, thinking, “What a pair of MORONS.”
TRUE FACT: Every January, The Grand Cities hold a day-long ice-fishing tournament called “The Frosty Bobber.” The first year it was held, the total number of fish caught was zero. The second year, one person actually did catch something. It was a salamander.
So Matt and I sat there, “fishing,” until our body temperatures had dropped to about 55 degrees. Fortunately, Steve had brought along a traditional beverage called “schnapps,” which can be used, in a pinch, to fuel your snowmobile.
After the “fishing,” Steve and I snowmobiled up to the Sacred Heart School, where the Grand Cities honored me with a benefit potluck supper, to which the entire community had been invited. It was a big deal. The Grand Forks Herald published a color-coded map that divided the Grand Cities into three sectors, and assigned the residents of each sector to bring one of the three basic potluck food groups: (1) Hotdish; (2) Jell-O salad; and (3) Bars, which are desserts cut into bars, and which often feature, as a key culinary ingredient, Rice Krispies.
The potluck supper was almost a disaster, because the people who showed up first were all from the east side, which had been assigned to bring bars. This meant that for a while there, there were hardly any hot dishes. This story was reported the next day on the front page of the Grand Forks Herald, under the headline (I am not making any of this up) “HOTDISH SCARE.”
Fortunately, the hot dish people showed up. So did the Jell-O people, big time. I have never seen that much Jell-O in my life. Most of it had things suspended in it: fruits, vegetables, office supplies, you name it. But the food was delicious, and the people were wonderful to me. As I sat there in the Sacred Heart gym, surrounded by these good-hearted, hard-working, Jell-O-eating people, I felt, despite my big-city cynicism, a warm glow inside. You have GOT to try schnapps.
Send in Your Weasel Jokes (Unless You're Canadian)
The scientific community, having run out of things to clone, is now trying to identify the World's Funniest Joke. I refer to a project called Laugh Lab, being conducted by Dr. Richard Wiseman of the University of Hertfordshire (pronounced “Scotland”).
Dr. Wiseman has set up an Internet site, www.laughlab.co.uk/ home.htm, that has received more than 10,000 jokes, which have been rated by more than 100,000 people, most of them wrong. I say this because the joke they have so far rated as the funniest is this:
“Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson are going camping. They pitch their tent under the stars and go to sleep. Sometime in the middle of the night Holmes wakes Watson up. ‘Watson, look up at the stars, and tell me what you deduce.' Watson says, ‘I see millions of stars and even if a few of those have planets, it's quite likely there are some planets like Earth, and if there are a few planets like Earth out there, there might also be life.' Holmes replied: ‘Watson, you idiot, somebody stole our tent!' ”
Now, I'm not saying this is a bad joke. I'm just saying this is not even close to being the funniest joke in the world. It would be funnier if Holmes woke Watson up and said, “Watson, there's a weasel chomping on my privates!” I'm not sure where the joke would go from there, but you can't go wrong with a setup like that.
Of course, some would disagree. And when I say “some,” I of course mean “women.” Women generally dislike groinular humor; this is one of the startling findings—and when I say “startling” I mean “not startling”—of the Laugh Lab project. I have been listening to people—and when I say “people,” I mean “men”—tell jokes for longer than fifty years (I don't mean the jokes take longer than fifty years to tell, although some of them come close) and I can state for a scientific fact that the funnier a joke is, the more likely a woman is to react by saying: “That's disgusting!” As if that's a BAD thing.
According to a Laugh Lab press release, women don't like jokes that involve aggression, sexuality, or offensiveness—also known as “the three building blocks of humor.” The release states that women prefer “jokes involving word plays.” It gives the following example of a joke that women like, but men dislike:
“A man had a dog called Minton. One day Minton ate two shuttlecocks. When the owner found out he said ‘Bad Minton!!' ”
Whoo-HOO! “Bad Minton!!” Get it? Here, sniff these smelling salts.
I'll tell you who else has a serious humor deficiency: Canada. I say this because, according to Laugh Lab, the following joke was rated highest by Canadians: “What do you call a woman who can balance four pints of beer on her head? Beatrix.”
Get it? “Beatrix!” Which sounds sort of, but not quite enough, like “Beer Tricks!” Ha ha! Maybe it would be funnier if they called her “Minton.”
Laugh Lab also had people rate jokes that were generated by a computer. This is important research, because if computers can produce workable jokes, humanity may finally see the long-awaited day when humor columnists have to work even less than they do now. Unfortunately, the highest-rated joke that the computer produced was: “What kind of murderer has fiber? A cereal killer.”
Granted, that's better than what Canada came up with. But it's not up to the standards of, say, Yemen.
&nbs
p; Anyway, if you want to participate in the Laugh Lab project, you can go to the Internet site and rate some jokes. But I warn you: Don't have food in your mouth! Because the hilarity level of these jokes is sure to make you go: “Huh!” For example, here's one I was asked to rate: “Why do elephants have big ears? Noddy wouldn't pay the ransom.” Allegedly this joke is funny in England, which uses metric humor.
But here's the good part: You can also SUBMIT a joke to the Laugh Lab. In the interest of improving the overall joke quality, I urge everybody reading this column to submit a joke incorporating some variation of the phrase: “There's a weasel chomping on my privates.” (Example: “Why do elephants have big ears? Because there's a weasel chomping on their privates.”) Also, if you see this phrase in a joke you're being asked to rate, give that joke the highest rating. Do it now. Do it for humanity. Do it for the most noble of all possible reasons: To get to the other side.
Penelope Cruz Is NOT Having Dave's Baby
Before all these rumors and innuendos get out of hand, I want to set the record straight regarding me and Penelope Cruz.
In case you have not heard, Penelope and I recently were both on the Today show on exactly the same day. As I am sure you are aware, Penelope is a top female star who has been romantically linked to Tom Cruise. Prior to that, she was romantically linked to Matt Damon and Nicolas Cage. Penelope is just one of those female celebrities who are natural linkers. Whenever she gets into a confined space with a male celebrity, boom, they become linked, and nothing can separate them, until another male celebrity comes within range.
So as you can imagine, the Today show created a potentially torrid situation when it booked both me and Penelope to appear on the show only minutes apart. She was there to promote her latest movie by being glamorous and charming; I was there to promote my latest book by making flatulence noises with my hands. You could have cut the sexual tension with a meat cleaver.