by Dave Barry
I found out about this thanks to several alert readers who sent me a Manchester Guardian article that begins: “Killer flatworms from New Zealand which drug earthworms and devour them are invading Britain.” The article quotes a scientist as saying: “They’re weird; it is like something out of science fiction. They excrete an enzyme that paralyzes the worm like a narcotic drug. Then they excrete another one that dissolves the worm before your eyes like soup, then they suck it up. In about 30 minutes all that is left is a trace of old soil from the worm’s stomach.”
It is not definitely known how the killer flatworms got from New Zealand to England. Possibly they smuggled themselves aboard a commercial airplane disguised as attorneys. We can only imagine what might have happened if they had become hungry en route:
FIRST AIRLINE PASSENGER: Have you seen Nigel?
SECOND AIRLINE PASSENGER: No, but what’s this on his seat?
FIRST AIRLINE PASSENGER: Hey! That looks like Nigel’s complimentary breakfast omelet!
You don’t want this kind of tragedy to spoil your Vacation Adventure. So this year you should take an old-fashioned Family Fun Vacation, wherein you get into the family car and drive and drive and drive until you come to an interesting local attraction, and then you drive past it at 78 miles per hour. I’m assuming here that Dad is driving. Dad likes to cover a lot of ground on a vacation. His ideal vacation itinerary would look like this:
6 to 6:15 A.M.—Eat breakfast.
6:15 to 6:30—Yellowstone National Park.
6:30 to 7—Canada.
And so on. Dad wishes he had auxiliary gas tanks so he could vacation all the way to, say, Argentina and back without ever stopping the car. Unfortunately, he has to refuel roughly every 600 miles, so sometimes Mom and the kids are able to escape and, running with their foreheads almost touching the ground because their bodies have been permanently molded into the shape of a car seat, flee into the underbrush in search of a local attraction.
For my money, the best attractions are small arts and crafts fairs. We once stopped at a fair in Pennsylvania Dutch country where a grim-looking woman was demonstrating how to make an authentic local dish from—this is true—the stomach of a pig. It was the scariest-looking thing I have ever seen that was not featured in a major motion picture, and the woman was gripping it with both hands, as if she were afraid that it might get loose and attack the other crafts. People would stop by, stare at it for a while, and ask, “What does it taste like?” And the grim-looking woman, not looking up, would reply, “A lot of people don’t like it.”
There are thousands of equally attractive attractions all over the country, but if you asked me, as a travel authority, which was No. 1, I would have to say it was the maggot races at the Town Club Bar in Three Forks, Montana. I am not making this up. Alert readers Bill and Julie Hudick sent me an article about it from the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, with a photograph of men hunched over a miniature racetrack, watching maggots race.
I immediately called the Town Club Bar and spoke to one of the people who conceived of this concept, Darrel Raffety, owner of Raffety’s Fishbait Company, which sells maggots for bait. He explained that one day in the bar, a customer complained that there weren’t enough maggots in the container he had bought, so they poured them out and counted them right on the bar, and some of the maggots (possibly disguised as attorneys) started crawling away, and suddenly, eureka (Greek, meaning “They probably had a few beers in them”), the maggot-racing idea was born.
So they held a race to raise money for charity, and it was a large success. Town Club Bar owner Phil Schneider told me he’d do it again if enough tourists come by and create a popular demand. So you will definitely want to include Three Forks in your summer vacation plans. Fortunately, it’s only 357,000 miles from wherever you live. Dad is very excited.
THEY MIGHT BE GIANTS
OK, fans. Time for Great Moments in Sports. The situation is this: The Giants are playing a team whose name we did not catch in the hotly contested Little League Ages 6 and 7 Division, and the bases are loaded. The bases are always loaded in this particular Division for several reasons.
First off, the coach pitches the ball to his own players. This is because throwing is not the strong suit of the players in the Ages 6 and 7 Division. They have no idea, when they let go of the ball, where it’s headed. They just haul off and wing it, really try to hurl that baby without getting bogged down in a lot of picky technical details such as whether or not there is now, or has ever been, another player in the area where the ball is likely to land. Generally there is not, which is good, because another major area of weakness, in the Ages 6 and 7 Division, is catching the ball.
Until I became a parent, I thought children just naturally knew how to catch a ball, that catching was an instinctive biological reflex that all children are born with, like knowing how to operate a remote control or getting high fevers in distant airports. But it turns out that if you toss a ball to a child, the ball will just bonk off the child’s body and fall to the ground. So you have to coach the child. I go out in the yard with my son, and I give him helpful tips such as: “Catch the ball!” And: “Don’t just let the ball bonk off your body!” Thanks to this coaching effort, my son, like most of the players on the Giants, has advanced his game to the point where, just before the ball bonks off his body, he winces.
So fielding is also not the strong suit of the Giants. They stand around the field, chattering to each other, watching airplanes, picking their noses, thinking about dinosaurs, etc. Meanwhile on the pitchers’ mound, the coach of the opposing team tries to throw the ball just right so that it will bounce off the bat of one of his players, because hitting is another major area of weakness in the Ages 6 and 7 Division.
The real athletic drama begins once the opposing coach succeeds in bouncing the ball off the bat of one of his players, thus putting the ball into play and causing the fielders to swing into action. It reminds me of those table-hockey games, where you have a bunch of little men that you activate with knobs and levers, except that the way you activate the Giants is, you yell excitedly in an effort to notify them that the ball is headed their way. Because otherwise they’d probably never notice it.
“Robby!” I’ll yell if the ball goes near my son. “The ball!” Thus activated, Robby goes on Full Red Alert, looking around frantically until he locates the ball, which he picks up and—eager to be relieved of the responsibility—hurls in some random direction. Then, depending on where the ball is headed, some other parent will try to activate his child, and the ball will be hurled again and again, pinball-style, around the field, before ultimately bonking off the body of the first baseman. Of course at this point the batter has been standing on the base for some time. Fortunately, in this league, he is required to stop there; otherwise, he could easily make it to Japan.
This is why the bases are always loaded, which is what leads us to today’s Sports Moment. Standing on third base is James Palmieri, who is only 5, but who plays for the Giants anyway because his older brother, T.J., is on the team. James got on base via an exciting play: He failed to actually, technically, hit the ball, but the Giants’ wily coach, Wayne Argo, employed a classic bit of baseball strategy. “Let’s let James get on base,” he said. And the other team agreed, because at this point the Giants were losing the hotly contested game by roughly 143–57.
So here it is: James is standing on third, for the first time in his entire life, thinking about dinosaurs, and next to him, ready to activate, is his mom, Carmen. And now Coach Wayne is throwing the pitch. It is a good pitch, bouncing directly off the bat. Bedlam erupts as parents on both teams try to activate their players, but none is shouting with more enthusiasm than Carmen. “Run, James!” she yells, from maybe a foot away. “Run!”
James, startled, looks up, and you can almost see the thought forming in his mind: I’m supposed to run. And now he is running, and Carmen is running next to him, cheering him on, the two of them chugging toward the plate, only 15 feet to go, James abo
ut to score his first run ever. Then suddenly, incredibly, due to a semirandom hurl somewhere out in the field, there appears, of all things: the ball. And—this is a nightmare—an opposing player actually catches it, and touches home plate and little James is OUT.
Two things happen:
Carmen stops. “S-word,” she says, under her breath. A mom to the core.
James, oblivious, keeps running. Chugs right on home, touches the plate smiling and wanders off, happy as a clam.
You can have your Willie Mays catch and your Bill Mazeroski home run. For me, the ultimate mental picture is James and Carmen at that moment: the Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat. A Great Moment in Sports.
READER ALERT
ENGLAND
I happen to like England a lot, and when I wrote this column, I thought it was clear that I was just poking some good-natured fun at one of our best international buddy countries. However, I got a lot of mail from angry Englishpersons, who made the following points:
I am a jerk.
The food in England isn’t so bad.
What about the food at McDonald’s?
England hasn’t decapitated any members of royalty for a long time.
What about American crime?
Why don’t I just shut up?
Boy, am I ever a jerk.
And so on. I was genuinely surprised by this hostile reaction, and all I can say to these people, in all sincerity, is: I humbly apologize for offending you, and I promise that I will never, ever again, even in jest, say anything remotely insulting about England, and I especially will not make note of the obvious defects in the royal gene pool.
BLIMEY!
FROGNAL COCKFOSTERS!
Recently my family and I spent a week in London, which is a popular foreign place to visit because they have learned to speak some English over there. Although frankly they have a long way to go. Often, when they get to the crucial part of a sentence, they’ll realize that they don’t know the correct words, so they’ll just make some silly ones up. I had a lot of conversations that sounded like this:
ME: Excuse me. Could you tell us how to get to Buckingham Palace?
BRITISH PERSON: Right. You go down this street here, then you nip up the weckershams.
ME: We should nip up the weckershams?
BRITISH PERSON: Right. Then you take your first left, then you just pop ’round the gorn-and-scumbles, and, Jack’s a doughnut, there you are!
ME: Jack’s a doughnut?
BRITISH PERSON: Right.
Also they have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can’t move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed. Remember when you were in junior high school, and sometimes the cafeteria workers would open up a large Army-surplus food can left over from the Spanish-American War and serve you a scary-looking dish with a name like “Tuna Bean Prune Cabbage Omelet Casserole Surprise”?
Well, they still have a lot of food like that over in England, on permanent display in bars, called “pubs,” where people drink for hours but nobody ever eats. We saw individual servings of pub food that we recognized from our last visit, in 1978. Some dishes—no effort is made to conceal this fact—contain kidneys. We also saw one dish with a sign next to it that said—I swear I am not making this up—“Spotted Dick.”
The English are very good at thinking up silly names. Here are some actual stations on the London underground: Marylebone, Tooting Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, Cockfosters, Frognal, Goodge Street, Mudchute, Barking, and East Ham. Londoners are apologetic about their underground, which they believe has become filthy and noisy and dangerous, but which is in fact far more civilized than the average American wedding reception. At the height of rush hour, people on the London underground actually say “excuse me.” Imagine what would happen if you tried an insane stunt like that on the New York City subway. The other passengers would take it as a sign of weakness, and there’d be a fight over who got to keep your ears as a trophy.
Our primary cultural activity in London was changing money. We had to do this a lot because the dollar is very weak. Europeans use the dollar primarily to apply shoe polish. So every day we’d go to one of the money-changing places that are all over London, and we’d exchange some dollars for British money, which consists of the “pound” and a wide variety of mutant coins whose sizes and shapes are unrelated to their values, and then we’d look for something to eat that had been invented in this country, such as pizza, and we’d buy three slices for what we later realized was $247.50, and then we’d change some money again. Meanwhile the Japanese tourists were exchanging their money for items such as Westminster Abbey.
In the interest of broadening our ten-year-old son’s cultural awareness, we visited some important historic sites, including the Tower of London, the London Dungeon, and Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, all of which are devoted to explaining in clinical detail how various historic members of royalty were whacked into small historic pieces. English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off, which is why members of the royal family now wear protective steel neck inserts, which is why they walk the way they do.
Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son. He especially enjoyed the guided “Jack the Ripper” tour that we took one dark night with a very intense guide. “Right on this spot is where they found the victim’s intestines,” she’d say. “And right here is where they found the liver, which is now part of the food display of that pub over there.”
Another cultural activity we frequently engaged in was looking the wrong way before attempting to cross streets. The problem is that in America, people drive on the right side of the street, whereas in London, they drive on both sides of the street, using hard-to-see cars about the size of toaster ovens. The best way to handle this, as a tourist, is to remain on one side of the street for your entire visit, and see the other side on another trip.
But I definitely recommend London for anybody who enjoys culture and could stand to lose a few pounds. I learned many things that will be of great value to me, not just personally, but also professionally, and I’m not saying that just to be polite to the English. I’m saying it because of Internal Revenue Service regulations.
DENTISTS IN PARADISE
I want to stress that I did not go to Hawaii just to sit around the beach drinking giant comical drinks with names like the Wahine Martini that arrive at your table festooned with six kinds of fruit and a live parrot. No, I went to Hawaii for sound journalism reasons. Hawaii happens to be a hotbed of important news topics (FERDINAND MARCOS: HAS DEATH CHANGED HIM?), and as a trained journalist I felt it was my duty to “get the story,” even though I knew I was running the very real risk that my entire trip would be tax-deductible.
First, some background. The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm-tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse. We flew on Halloween. “Never Fly on Halloween,” this is my new aviation motto, because it took us 21 hours to get from Miami to Honolulu. We had two planes develop mechanical problems, one of them well out over the Pacific Ocean, which is famous for not having places to land on. At one point, just before we took off from San Francisco for Honolulu the first time, the pilot—I am not making this up—said, “Hopefully, this one will fly all the way.” Of course it didn’t. The second time we took off from San Francisco, the flight attendant said, I swear, “If you gotta go, go with a smile.” The flight was violently bumpy, and the movie was—this is still true—The Dead Poets Society. To apologize for all the inconvenience, the airline gave us coupons good for discounts on future flights, although they knew full well that we were all planning to return to the mainland via primitive canoe and never go near a
n airplane again.
But I don’t want to dwell on the flight. I want to talk about Hawaii, “The Aloha State.” “Aloha” is an all-purpose Hawaiian phrase meaning “hello,” “good-bye,” “I love you,” and “I wish to decline the collision damage waiver.” The Hawaiian language is quite unusual because when the original Polynesians came in their canoes, most of their consonants were washed overboard in a storm, and they arrived here with almost nothing but vowels. All the streets have names like Kal’ia’iou’amaa’aaa’eiou, and many street signs spontaneously generate new syllables during the night. This confuses the hell out of the tourists, who are easily identifiable because they’re the only people wearing Hawaiian shirts.
Things were very exciting when we were in Honolulu because the American Dental Association was holding a giant convention there. “Dentists in Paradise,” is how I would describe it. There were 25,000 dental professionals wandering around, wearing shirts that appeared to be radioactive and looking at dental exhibits featuring large color illustrations of wonderful technical advances in dentistry that make you get down on your knees and pray they will never happen to you. I imagine the dentists probably also had some kind of large formal dental ceremony, where they gave out awards and took large ceremonial hits of nitrous oxide and drank a special wine toast and, in a solemn and moving tribute to those dental professionals no longer with us, spat the wine out into a giant ceremonial dental spittoon.
We missed this, but we did attend a “luau,” which is Hawaiian for “a beach picnic featuring a large cooked pig who still has his eyeballs and stares at you while you’re trying to eat him.” Our pig’s name was Bob. “Never eat anything that still has its eyeballs,” that’s my new culinary motto.