Dave Barry Talks Back

by Dave Barry

  Without question the most thoughtful vote came from eight-year-old David Affolter, a student at the Spruce Street School in Seattle, who wrote: “I want the National Insect to be the ladybug, because the ladybug can do about everything a bug should do. It can be a board-game piece.”

  It’s hard to argue with that. But it’s also hard to argue with the numbers, and there were 213 votes for the monarch butterfly, versus 87 for the ladybug, 72 for the praying mantis, 65 for the bee, 43 for Senator Jesse Helms, and 37 for the cockroach. Beetles, as a group, got 261 votes, but the beetle vote was badly divided, with no clear “take-charge” beetle emerging.

  This is a shame, because one beetle, which received several dozen votes, clearly deserves further consideration. This is the bombardier beetle, which—I am not making this up—has an internal reaction chamber where it mixes chemicals that actually explode, enabling the beetle to shoot a foul-smelling, high-temperature jet of gas out its rear end with a distinct “crack.” It reminds me of guys I knew in college. The Time-Life insect book has a series of photographs in which what is described as “a self-assured bombardier beetle” defeats a frog. In the first picture, the frog is about to chomp the beetle; in the second, the beetle blasts it; and in the third, the frog is staggering away, gagging, clearly wondering how come it never learned about this in Frog School. I would be darned proud, as an American, to be represented by this insect. An engraving of a bombardier beetle emitting a defiant blast from his butt would look great on a coin.

  My point is that, although the monarch butterfly is clearly the frontrunner and has a slick, well-financed campaign, we need to give this National Insect thing a lot more thought. Maybe, as reader James Buzby (his real name) suggests, Congress should appoint a Stopgap National Insect while we make our final determination.

  But whatever happens, I intend to follow this story, even though I may irritate the powerful Entomological Society of America, which for all I know could try to … hey, what are these things crawling out of my keyboard? OUCH! HEY!! OUCH!!!

  TAX FAX

  Income-tax time is here again, and I’m sure that the Number One question on the minds of millions of anxious taxpayers is: Do we have a new Internal Revenue Service commissioner named “Fred”?

  I am pleased to report that yes, we do. In fact, if you look of your IRS Form 1040 Instruction Booklet Written by Nuclear Physicists for Nuclear Physicists, you’ll find a nice letter from Commissioner Fred, in which he states, on behalf of all the fine men and women and attack dogs down at the IRS: “Let us know if we can do more.”

  I know I speak for taxpayers everywhere when I say: “NO! Really, Fred! You’ve done enough!” I am thinking of such helpful IRS innovations as the Wrong Answer Hotline, wherein, if you’re having trouble understanding a section of the IRS Secret Tax Code, all you have to do is call the IRS Taxpayer Assistance Program, and in a matter of seconds, thanks to computerized electronics, you are placed on hold for several hours before finally being connected to trained IRS personnel dispensing tax advice that is statistically no more likely to be correct than if you asked Buster the Wonder Horse to indicate the answer by stomping the dirt.

  Ha ha! Speaking as a married person filing jointly, let me stress that I am JUST KIDDING here, because I know that the folks at IRS have a terrific sense of humor. Down at headquarters they often pass the time while waiting for their cattle prods to recharge by sending hilarious tax-related jokes to each other in triplicate on IRS Humorous Anecdote Form 1092-376 SNORT.

  IRS HUMOR EXAMPLE A: “A lawyer, a doctor, and a priest were marooned on a desert island. So we confiscated their homes.”

  IRS HUMOR EXAMPLE B: “What do you get when you cross Zsa Zsa Gabor with a kangaroo?” “I don’t know, but let’s confiscate its home.”

  What a wacky bunch of personnel! But all kidding aside, it’s very important that taxpayers be aware of recent mutations in the tax law. For example, this year everybody connected with the savings-and-loan industry gets a free boat. Also there are strict new regulations concerning how taxpayers should cheat. “If a taxpayer wishes to deduct an imaginary business expense,” states the IRS instruction booklet, “then he or she MUST create a pretend financial record by clumsily altering a receipt from an actual transaction such as the rental of the videotape Big Nostril Mamas.

  When preparing your return, you should be sure to avoid common mistakes. The two most common taxpayer mistakes, states the IRS booklet, are (1) “failure to include a current address,”and (2) “failure to be a large industry that gives humongous contributions to key tax-law-writing congresspersons.”

  All of us, at one time or another, have been guilty of these mistakes, but I’m sure that this year we’ll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail. Also we know that our government cannot serve us unless it gets hold of our money, which it needs for popular federal programs such as the $421,000 fax machine. I am not making this program up. I found out about it from alert readers Trish Baez and Rick Haan, who faxed me an article by Mark Thompson of Knight-Ridder newspapers concerning a U.S. Air Force contract to buy 173 fax machines from Litton Industries for $73 million, or about $421,000 per machine. Just the paper for this machine costs $100 a roll.

  If you’re wondering how come, when ordinary civilian fax machines can be bought for a few hundred dollars, the Air Force needs one that costs as much as four suburban homes, then you are a bonehead. Clearly, as any taxpayer can tell you, the Air Force needs a special kind of fax machine, a combat fax machine. The article quotes an Air Force spokesperson as making the following statement about it:

  “You can drag this through the mud, drop it off the end of a pickup truck, run it in a rainstorm, and operate it at 30 below zero.”

  The spokesperson also said (I am still not making this up): “I was looking at a picture of a squirrel it produced this morning, and if you wanted to sit there long enough you could count the hairs on the squirrel.”

  The Air Force is using a $421,000 fax machine to send pictures of squirrels?

  Are these enemy squirrels?

  Or does the combat fax just start spontaneously generating animal pictures after you drop it off the end of a pickup truck?

  The answers are: None of your business. You’re a taxpayer, and your business is to send in money, and if the Air Force wants a special combat fax machine, or a whole combat office with combat staplers and combat potted plants and combat Muzak systems capable of playing Barry Manilow at 45 degrees below zero, then it will be your pleasure to pay for them. Because this is America, and we are Americans, and—call me sentimental, but this is how I feel—there is something extremely appealing about the concept of Barry Manilow at 45 degrees below zero.

  READER ALERT

  MISTER LANGUAGE PERSON

  I like writing Mister Language Person columns, because I always get wonderful mail from irate people who have detected errors in Mister Language Person’s grammar. Yes! “Perhaps, Mr. Barry,” these letters say, “before you set yourself up as an ‘expert,’ you should make sure that your OWN grammar is correct.” Often the letter-writer rips my column out of the newspaper and sends it back to me with angry corrections written all over it in red ink. You can just imagine how I feel.

  ENGLISH, AS IT WERE

  Once again we are pleased to present Mister Language Person, the internationally recognized expert and author of the authoritative Oxford Cambridge Big Book o’ Grammar.

  Q. What is the difference between “criteria” and “criterion”?

  A. These often-confused words belong to a family that grammarians call “metronomes,” meaning “words that have the same beginning but lay eggs underwater.” The simplest way to tell them apart is to remember that “criteria” is used in the following type of sentence: “When choosing a candidate for the United States Congress, the main criteria is, hair.” Whereas “Criterion” is a kind of car.

  Q. What is the correct way to spel
l words?

  A. English spelling is unusual because our language is a rich verbal tapestry woven together from the tongues of the Greeks, the Latins, the Angles, the Klaxtons, the Celtics, the 76ers, and many other ancient peoples, all of whom had severe drinking problems. Look at the spelling they came up with for “colonel” (which is actually pronounced “lieutenant”); or “hors d’oeuvres” or “Cyndi Lauper.” It is no wonder that young people today have so much trouble learning to spell: Study after study shows that young people today have the intelligence of Brillo. This is why it’s so important that we old folks teach them the old reliable spelling rule that we learned as children, namely:

  “I” before “C,”

  Or when followed by “T,”

  O’er the ramparts we watched,

  Not excluding joint taxpayers filing singly

  EXCEPTION: “Suzi’s All-Nite E-Z Drive-Thru Donut Shoppe.”

  Q. What the heck are “ramparts,” anyway?

  A. They are parts of a ram, and they were considered a great delicacy in those days. People used to watch o’er them.

  Q. How do you speak French?

  A. French is very easy to speak. The secret is, no matter what anybody says to you, you answer, “You’re wrong,” but you say it with your tongue way back in gargle position and your lips pouted way out like you’re sucking grits through a hose, so it sounds like this: “Urrrrooonnngggg.” Example:

  FRENCH PERSON: Où est la poisson de mon harmonica? (“How about them Toronto Blue Jays?”)

  YOU: Urrrrooonnngggg.

  FRENCH PERSON: Quel moron! (“Good point!”)

  Q. I know there’s a difference in proper usage between “compared with” and “compared to,” but I don’t care.

  A. It depends on the context.

  Q. Please explain punctuation?

  A. It would be “my pleasure.” The main punctuation marks are the period, the coma, the colonel, the semi-colonel, the probation mark, the catastrophe, the eclipse, the Happy Face, and the box where the person checks “yes” to receive more information. You should place these marks in your sentences at regular intervals to indicate to your reader that some kind of punctuation is occurring. Consider these examples:

  WRONG: O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?

  RIGHT: O Romeo! Yo! Romeo!! Wherethehellfore ART thou? Huh??

  ROMEO: I art down here! Throw me the car keys!

  Q. Does anybody besides total jerks ever use the phrase “as it were”?

  A. No.

  Q. What is the correct form of encouraging “chatter” that baseball infielders should yell to the pitcher?

  A. They should yell: “Hum babe hum babe hum babe HUM BABE HUM BABE.”

  Q. May they also yell: “Shoot that ball in there shoot it shoot it SHOOT SHOOT SHOOT WAY TO SHOOT BABE GOOD HOSE ON THAT SHOOTER”?

  A. They most certainly may.

  Q. What is the difference between “take” and “bring”?

  A. “Take” is a transitory verb that is used in statements such as “He up and took off.” “Bring” is a consumptive injunction and must be used as follows: “We brung some stewed ramparts to Aunt Vespa but she was already dead so we ate them ourselfs.”

  Q. What is President Bush’s native language?

  A. He doesn’t have one.

  TODAY’S LANGUAGE TIP: A good way to impress people such as your boss is to develop a “Power Vocabulary” by using big words. Consider this example:

  YOU: Good morning, Mr. Johnson.

  YOUR BOSS: Good morning, Ted.

  (Obviously you’re not making much of an impression here. Your name isn’t even “Ted.” Now watch the difference that a couple of Power Vocabulary words can make:)

  YOU: Good morning, Mr. Johnson, you hemorrhoidal infrastructure.

  YOUR BOSS: What?

  YOU GOT A QUESTION FOR MISTER LANGUAGE PERSON? We are not surprised.

  IT’S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD

  TODAY’S SELF-HELP TOPIC IS:

  Coping with Anger.

  There is definitely too much anger in the world today. Pick up almost any newspaper, and the odds are you’ll get ink smeared all over your hands. We use a special kind of easy-smear ink, because we know how much it irritates you.

  But that’s not my point. My point is that if you pick up almost any newspaper, you’ll see stories of anger raging out of control, of people actually shooting each other over minor traffic disputes. Can you imagine? Can you imagine feeling so much hostility that just because you’re in a traffic jam on a hot day, and you’ve been stuck for an hour waiting in a long line of cars trying to exit from a busy highway, and along comes one of those line-butting jerks, some guy who’s talking on his cellular phone and figures he’s too important to be waiting in a line with common rest-room bacteria like yourself, so he barges past the entire line and butts in right in front of you, so you honk your horn, and he shows you his Mister Digit hand puppet, so you haul out a pistol large enough for antiaircraft purposes and LET THE SCUMBALL HAVE IT HAHAHAHAHAHA-HAHA WOULDN’T THAT BE GREAT??

  I mean terrible. “Wouldn’t that be terrible,” is what I mean. And this is why it’s so important that we learn to understand what anger is, and how we can cope with it. As you know if you ever studied the famous Greek philosopher Aristotle, he was easily the most boring human being who ever lived. Thousands of college students suffer forehead damage every year from passing out face-forward while attempting to read his books. But it was Aristotle who identified anger as one of the Six Basic Human Emotions, along with Lust, Greed, Envy, Fear of Attorneys, and the Need to Snack.

  We know that primitive man felt anger, as is evidenced by the deep kick marks that archeologists have found in prehistoric vending machines. We also see evidence of anger in the animal kingdom. The great white shark, for example, periodically gets furious at the small seaside resort town of Amity and tries to eat all the residents, possibly in an effort to prevent another sequel. And dogs are for some historical reason extremely angry at cats. I once watched a dog named Edgar spot a cat roughly a hundred yards away and go tearing after it, faster and faster, gaining ground with each step until he was just inches away, at which point the cat made a very sharp right turn, leaving Edgar to run directly, at Dog Warp Speed, into the side of a house. Fortunately he absorbed the entire impact with his brain, so there was no damage, but this incident teaches us that anger is very self-destructive, and that we must learn to control it.

  Let’s take the case of the line-butting driver. The trick here is to put things into perspective. Ask yourself: Does it really matter, long-term, if this guy butts in front of you? Is it really more important than serious world problems such as Ethiopia or the Greenhouse Effect? Yes. No question. You don’t even know where Ethiopia is. This is why psychologists recommend, when you feel your anger getting out of control, that you practice a simple yoga technique: Imagine that you’re in a peaceful, quiet setting such as a meadow, then take a deep breath, then exhale slowly, then gently s-q-u-e-e-z-e that trigger. See how much better you feel? In Advanced Yoga we use grenades.

  Aside from traffic, the leading cause of anger is marriage. No matter how much you love somebody, if you spend enough time with that person, you’re going to notice his or her flaws. If Romeo had stayed long enough under the balcony staring up worshipfully at Juliet, he’d have become acutely aware of her nasal hairs. So most married couples, even though they love each other very much in theory, tend to view each other in practice as large teeming flaw colonies, the result being that they get on each other’s nerves and regularly erupt into vicious emotional shouting matches over issues such as toaster settings.

  Professional marriage counselors agree that the most productive and mature way to deal with marital anger is to stomp dramatically from the room. The key here is timing. You want to make your move before your opponent does, because the first person to stomp from the room receives valuable Argument Points that can be redeemed for exciting merchandise at the
Marital Prize Redemption Center. Of course you have to be on the alert for defensive maneuvers. A couple I know named Buzz and Libby were once having a Force Ten argument in their kitchen, and Buzz attempted to make a dramatic exit stomp, but Libby, a former field-hockey player, stuck her foot out as he went past and tripped him, so he wound up stumbling from the room, trying desperately to look dignified but actually looking like a man auditioning for Clown School. Libby won 5,000 bonus points, good for a handsome set of luggage.

  Ultimately, however, anger benefits nobody. If you keep it bottled up inside, it eats away at you, until eventually you turn into a bitter, spiteful, hate-ridden person working in Customer Service. So take my advice: Lighten up. Don’t let your anger get the best of you. Don’t lose your humanity, or your sense of humor. Don’t ever try to butt in front of me.

  GETTING M*A*S*H*E*D

  Recently my wife, Beth, was ravaged by a sudden, unexpected outbreak of modern medical care.