by Dave Barry
In fact, that’s how I got the idea for the ground-breaking experiment. I had received a large batch of Humor Impaired letters responding to a column I wrote about Mister Language Person, and I was asking myself: How can I respond to these people in a humor column, when they don’t understand that it’s supposed to be humorous? That’s when I came up with my ground-breaking idea. You know how some TV shows are “closed-captioned for the hearing impaired,” meaning that if you have a special TV set, you can get subtitles? Well, I thought, why couldn’t you do that with humor?
So the rest of this ground-breaking column will be closed-captioned for the Humor Impaired. After each attempted joke, the humor element will be explained in parentheses, so that you Humor Impaired individuals can laugh right along with the rest of us. Ready? Here we go:
Many readers were upset about a recent column by “Mister Language Person,” the internationally recognized expert (NOT TRUE) who periodically answers common language questions submitted by imaginary readers (HE MAKES THE QUESTIONS UP). All of Mister Language Person’s answers are intended to be as accurate (NOT TRUE) and informative (NOT TRUE) as is humanly possible while still containing words such as “booger.” (“BOOGER” IS FUNNY.) No item is ever allowed to appear in Mister Language Person until trained grammarians have indicated their approval by barking at it in an excited manner. (THOSE ARE NOT GRAMMARIANS. THOSE ARE HIS DOGS.)
Although I had thought that the Mister Language Person column met the usual high standards of accuracy (EVERYTHING IN IT WAS WRONG), it contained an item that attracted a very large amount of mail from astute readers (SARCASM: THESE PEOPLE APPEAR TO BE MISSING KEY BRAIN LOBES) (NOT LITERALLY) who saw that, in one of the items, something was wrong. Yes! In a column that was basically a teeming, writhing mass of wrong answers, these keen observers were somehow able to detect: a wrong answer. (HEAVY SARCASM.)
The item that virtually all of these readers focused on was the one where an imaginary airline employee asked whether it was correct to say “A bomb has been placed on one of you’re airplanes” or “A bomb has been placed, on one of you’re airplanes,” (THIS IS NOT REALLY HOW AIRLINES HANDLE BOMB THREATS) (AS FAR AS WE KNOW) and Mister Language Person replied that the correct wording was “A bomb has been placed IN one of you’re airplanes.” (GET IT? IT’S STILL WRONG!! HA HA!) Many readers felt this answer was incorrect and took time out from their busy and rewarding careers in the demanding field of food chewing (PROBABLY NOT TRUE) to write letters containing quotes such as—I am not making these up (HE IS NOT MAKING THESE UP)—“I was shocked with the grammar” and “Never have I seen such a mistake in grammer” and “I sure hope you remember this small bit of information, being as you are a writer you should have known it already.”
Well, readers, I’ve researched this issue carefully (NOT TRUE: HE DRANK A BEER), and although this is not easy for me to say, I have to admit it: Your right. Thanks for “straightening me out.” This job would not be the same without you. I mean it. (HE MEANS IT.)
READER ALERT
EXPLODING THINGS
I don’t wish to toot my own horn, but I definitely deserve to win several Nobel Prizes for the ground-breaking scientific work I’ve done in the field of exploding things. Since I wrote my first report, several years ago, about a snail that exploded in a restaurant in Syracuse, New York, I have received literally thousands of letters from alert readers sending me newspaper clippings about exploding ants, pigs, trees, yogurt containers, potatoes, television sets, finches, whales, municipal toilets, human stomachs, and of course cows. In accordance with standard journalism accuracy procedures, I never pass any of these reports on to the public without first reading it, saying to myself, quote, “Huh!” Using this process, I’ve determined that we have a worldwide exploding-thing epidemic on our hands, and until further notice we should all take the sensible precaution of avoiding things whenever possible. For example, you should never have bought this book.
BLOW-UP
Here at the Consumer Command Post (“Working To Make Your World More Threatening”) we continue to receive alarming news items clipped out by alert readers who have somehow obtained scissors from their ward attendants. In accordance with our rigorous standards of accuracy, we have checked all of these submissions carefully to determine whether they contain any money, and now we are passing them along to you, the public, in hopes that you will be better able to make wise consumer choices and live a safer, healthier, and happier existence until such time as you burst into flames.
This is a very real possibility, according to a Science Digest article alertly mailed to us by Thomas Miller of Des Moines, Iowa (“More Than Just Pigs”). The article concerns spontaneous human combustion, which is when people, with no apparent cause, suddenly start burning like campfire marshmallows, reaching temperatures of thousands of degrees and being completely reduced to ashes. This is often fatal.
There are more than 200 reported cases of spontaneous human combustion, which can happen to anybody, anytime. “Persons have ignited while walking, driving, boating, and even dancing,” notes Science Digest, reminding us of a number of evenings in the ninth grade when we, personally, came extremely close to erupting in flames right in the Harold C. Crittenden Junior High School cafeteria while dancing the Dirty Dig with Barbara Smayda to the song “Unchained Melody.” Strangely, in many spontaneous human combustion cases, the area immediately around the victim is unaffected by the fire, although the ceiling and walls of the room are covered with oily soot.
No doubt you are asking yourself: “Is there anything that I, as an individual consumer, can do about this alarming problem?” Fortunately, there is. We’ve done some tests here at the Consumer Command Post, and we’ve found that you can get those walls looking “spick-and-span” again simply by scrubbing them with a mixture of detergent and warm water.
We feel we should warn you, however, that it is not a wise idea to put too many beauty products in your hair. We base this warning on a news article from The State of Columbia, South Carolina, sent in by Phyllis Wainscott, concerning a South Carolina woman who has filed a lawsuit claiming that her hair burst into flames because of the effect of the sun shining on two hair-care products that she was wearing. One of her attorneys is quoted—we are not making this up—as offering the following explanation:
“The whole thing is that she just put them on her head, both products, and—it was a hot day that day—and her head just spontaneously combusted.”
Here’s what gets our goat: Right now, the world scientific community is having multiple laboratory orgasms, just because some scientists might have discovered a “cold fusion” process whereby if you put atoms into a jar according to a certain recipe you might get a reaction that might someday be an important new energy source, but not until—trust us on this—the scientific community obtains a large amount of tax money donated by interested consumers. Meanwhile, here we have a South Carolina woman who, acting on her own, has apparently stumbled upon a proven energy-producing reaction requiring only a couple of readily available personal-grooming substances plus a human head! Think of the possibilities! We could see the day, in our lifetimes, when a city the size of Baltimore, such as San Francisco, could have all of its electrical power needs met for a decade simply by harnessing the latent hairstyle energy of a single Republican Women’s Club.
But we must not start rejoicing yet, not while we still face an ongoing epidemic of exploding items, a story we have been covering relentlessly for several months now in an unselfish effort to win a large cash journalism prize. So far we have reported the mysterious explosions of a snail, a cow, numerous pigs, and a human stomach, and we were asking ourselves: What next? And sure enough the answer was: municipal toilets. These were located in a courthouse in Seattle, where, according to news items sent in by approximately 40,000 alert readers, somebody connected an air compressor to the water line, so that when people attempted to flush, they were suddenly attacked by the Geyser From Hell. We can only hope
that these people were not attorneys about to make important court appearances. (“Your Honor, may I approach the bench?” “No.”)
And if you think that this is just an isolated incident, you are, no offense, an idiot. According to an Associated Press article alertly sent in by Lisa Hoffman, three people in Fordyce, Arkansas, were injured when somebody accidentally allowed propane to get into the city water supply, thus essentially transforming some toilets into bombs. Here is an actual quote from one of the victims: “Whomp, the commode burst into flames.”
Well, consumers, we’re out of space here, so unfortunately we can’t report some of our other items, such as the one sent in by Charles Popelka concerning the woman in Ottumwa, Iowa (“It’s Flat, But It’s Quiet”), who encountered the exploding potato. But rest assured that, in the months ahead, we will continue to provide you consumers with information that will enable you to become sufficiently alarmed about the lethal threats that are all around us in everyday objects such as this keyboard that we are typing on, which we notice seems to be emitting some kind of WHOM.
MOBY YUCK
Here at the Exploding Animal Research Institute we have received two very alarming news items that we are passing along today in the hopes that you, the generalized public, will finally break out of your apathetic, selfish, materialistic life-styles and send us some large cash contributions.
Item One, submitted by numerous alert readers, concerns the recent criminally insane vote by the U.S. Senate AGAINST having the federal government monitor methane emissions from cows. I am not making this vote up. As you may be aware, cows emit huge quantities of methane, which contributes to global warming, which has gotten so bad in some areas that brand-new shirts are coming out of the factory with armpit stains already in them. So the U.S. Senate (motto: “White Male Millionaires Working For You”) was considering an amendment to the Clean Air Act, under which the government would monitor methane emissions from various sources, including “animal production.”
Well, as you can imagine, this did not sit well with the senators from those states where cow flatulence is a cherished way of life. Leading the herd of opposition senators was Senator Steve Symms of Idaho (“The Exploding Potato State”), who took the floor and stated that the amendment would—this is an actual quote—“put the nose of the federal government in almost every place it does not belong.”
So the Senate took out the part about monitoring animal methane, which means there will be no advance warning when, inevitably, there is some kind of cow-interior blockage, causing a potentially lethal buildup of flammable gasses and transforming one of these normally docile creatures into a giant mooing time bomb which, if detonated, could cause the dreaded Rain of Organs. Have you ever, in a supermarket, accidentally encountered a cow tongue—a large sluglike slab of gray flesh that you couldn’t imagine anybody purchasing for any purpose other than to nail it to the front door in hopes of scaring off evil spirits? Well, I’d like to know what Senator Symms would say if one of those babies came hurtling out of the sky and struck him at upwards of 100 miles per hour. “Yuck,” would be my guess.
I base this statement on a similar situation in Oregon where innocent civilians were struck by falling whale parts. I am absolutely not making this incident up; in fact, I have it all on videotape, which I obtained from the alert father-son team of Dean and Kurt Smith. The tape is from a local TV news show in Oregon, which sent a reporter out to cover a 45-foot, eight-ton dead whale that washed up on the beach. The responsibility for getting rid of the carcass was placed upon the Oregon State Highway Division, apparently on the theory that highways and whales are very similar in the sense of being large objects.
So anyway, the highway engineers hit upon the plan—remember, I am not making this up—of blowing up the whale with dynamite. The thinking here was that the whale would be blown into small pieces, which would be eaten by sea gulls, and that would be that. A textbook whale removal.
So they moved the spectators back up the beach, put a half-ton of dynamite next to the whale, and set it off. I am probably guilty of understatement when I say that what follows, on the videotape, is the most wonderful event in the history of the universe. First you see the whale carcass disappear in a huge blast of smoke and flame. Then you hear the happy spectators shouting “Yayy!” and “Wheee!” Then, suddenly, the crowd’s tone changes. You hear a new sound, the sound of many objects hitting the ground with a noise that sounds like “splud.” You hear a woman’s voice shouting “Here comes pieces of … my GOD!” Something smears the camera lens.
Later, the reporter explains: “The humor of the entire situation suddenly gave way to a run for survival as huge chunks of whale blubber fell everywhere.” One piece caved in the roof of a car parked more than a quarter of a mile away. Remaining on the beach were several rotting whale sectors the size of condominium units. There was no sign of the sea gulls, who had no doubt permanently relocated to Brazil.
This is a very sobering videotape. Here at the Institute we watch it often, especially at parties. But this is no time for gaiety. This is a time to get hold of the folks at the Oregon State Highway Division and ask them, when they get done cleaning up the beaches, to give us an estimate on the U.S. Capitol.
THE BOVINE COMEDY
We do not wish to create a panic, but we are advising those of you who live in the Midwest to evacuate the area immediately and stay out until we can get to the bottom of this matter concerning the exploding cow.
We found out about this thanks to alert reader Dale Clemens, M.D., who sent us a very troubling article from the Sun. This is the same publication that broke the story three years ago about the rampage of the Giant Vampire Fleas, which were mutant fleas capable of sucking all the blood from small dogs within minutes and jumping 50 feet straight up, as the Sun put it, “without warning.”
But as alarmed as we were by that article, we were even more alarmed by this new one, which is headlined: COW EXPLODES, HORRIFIED FARMER SUES. The story concerns a New Zealand farmer who purchased a cow, which he and his family were admiring, when suddenly—without warning, we bet—the cow “exploded before their eyes, spattering into a million bits of flesh and bone and drenching them all in blood.”
Now, for most of us, when we hear of a shocking tragedy of this nature, our natural reaction is extreme sorrow that we were not able to observe it firsthand while wearing goggles. We estimate that, just from our immediate circle of friends, we could fill a municipal stadium with people willing to pay $50 apiece to see a cow spontaneously explode. But apparently this family prefers a cow that engages in more traditional cow behavior, such as a standing around exhibiting the intelligence of coleslaw, because the farmer is suing the breeder for selling him a “defective” cow. The article quotes a veterinarian as saying that cows produce up to three quarts of gas per minute. “If it can’t burp,” the veterinarian says, “its stomach can explode within the hour.”
This is exactly the kind of story the Founding Fathers had in mind when they put the clause in the Constitution stating that the press has the right to run up enormous long-distance telephone charges. So we called up New Zealand, which is in the Mars Time Zone, but we were unable to locate any of the people named in the exploding cow story. We were actually starting to wonder if the Sun story was untrue when suddenly, without warning, an alert reader named Donald McEwan sent us another frightening cow-related news item. This one came from the Washington Post, and it stated—we are not making any of this up—that a Colorado State University animal-nutrition professor named Donald Johnson has been studying cow flatulence for 20 years, and has determined that the average cow emits 200 to 400 quarts of methane per day, resulting in a total annual world cow methane output of 50 million metric tons.
(Campers: This is yet another argument for NEVER allowing a cow inside your sleeping bag.)
So, of course, we called Professor Johnson, who seemed remarkably normal considering his chosen field, and we asked him whether cows can explode.
“I’ve never heard of it,” he said. “It’s rather unlikely that a cow would actually explode, although there is considerable methane gas and in some cases it could be present in concentrations that could ignite.”
In fact, Professor Johnson revealed that on more than one occasion, in college classrooms, he has used a candle to set fire to emissions being emitted by live cows, one of whom was able to sustain the flame without the candle.
Ask yourself this question: What if such a cow were to fall into the wrong hands? Picture this: You’re on a seemingly routine commercial airline flight, rummaging around your breakfast tray in search of an implement sharp enough to penetrate your “omelet,” when suddenly, without warning, from back in the smoking section, you hear sharp cries of:
“Look out!”
And:
“He’s got a cow!”
You whirl around, and there, in the aisle, stands: a terrorist. In one hand he holds a Bic lighter; in the other he holds a fuse, which is attached to Professor Johnson’s high-output cow—which by the way would not be detected by any airport metal detector currently in use—and in the next instant the entire cabin is filled with the chilling, unmistakable sound of: The Death Moo.
What can we do to prevent this chilling scenario from becoming a reality or—even worse—a made-for-television “docu-drama”? Clearly what is called for is a federal task force, ideally headed by Dan Quayle, who seems to have a lot of spare time, assuming that he is not called upon to suddenly, without warning, become president of the United States. We urge you to write a letter about this to your congressperson, bearing in mind that if he is an average adult, he produces, according to the Washington Post, about one liter of methane per day.