by Dave Barry
Nobody is safe. Can you imagine what would happen to our democratic system of government if, just before election day, one of the leading presidential contenders, while speaking at an outdoor rally, were to be struck on the head by a cow afterbirth traveling at 120 miles per hour?
Nothing, that’s what would happen. First off, your presidential contenders do not ever stop speaking for any reason, including unconsciousness. Second, they’re used to wearing ridiculous headgear to garner support from some headgear-wearing group or another. It would be only a matter of time before ALL the leading contenders were sporting cow placentas.
But a direct hit could have a disastrous effect on ordinary taxpayers. That is why we are issuing the following urgent plea to the personnel at the Hubbard Ranch and every other calving operation within the sound of our voice: PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE UNATTENDED PLACENTAS LYING AROUND. This is especially important if you see eagles loitering nearby, trying to look bored, smoking cigarettes, acting as though they could not care less. Please dispose of your placentas in the manner prescribed by the U.S. Surgeon General; namely, mail them, in secure packaging, to The Ricki Lake Show. Thank you.
We wish we could tell you that the Imnaha attack was an isolated incident, but we cannot—not in light of a news item from the Detroit Free Press, written by Kate McKee and sent in by many alert readers, concerning a Michigan man who was struck in an extremely sensitive area—you guessed it; his rental car—by a five-pound sucker fish falling from the sky. I am also not making this up. The man, Bob Ringewold, was quoted as saying that the fish was dropped by a “young eagle.” (The article doesn’t say how he knew the eagle was young; maybe it was wearing a little baseball cap backward.) The fish dented the roof of the car, although Ringewold was not charged for the damage (this is why you car renters should always take the Optional Sucker Fish Coverage).
And here comes the bad news: This is NOT the scariest recent incident involving an airborne fish. We have here an Associated Press item, sent in by many alert readers, which begins:
“A Brazilian fisherman choked to death near the remote Amazon city of Belem after a fish unexpectedly jumped into his mouth.”
The item—we are still not making any of these items up—states that “the six-inch-long fish suddenly leapt out of the river” while the fisherman “was in the middle of a long yawn.”
Of course this could be simply a case of a fish—possibly a young fish, inexperienced or on drugs—not paying attention to where it was going and jumping into somebody’s mouth. On the other hand, it could be something much more ominous. It could be that fish in general, after thousands of years of being hounded by fishermen and dropped on rental cars, are finally deciding to fight back in the only way they know how.
If so, there is trouble ahead. You know those Saturday-morning professional-bass-fishing programs on TV? We should start monitoring those programs closely, because the fish on those programs are probably SICK AND TIRED of always playing the role of victims. It is only a matter of time before there is a situation where a couple of televised angling professionals are out on a seemingly peaceful lake, casting their lures, and they happen to yawn, and suddenly the water erupts in fury as dozens of vengeful bass launch themselves like missiles and deliberately lodge themselves deep into every available angler orifice. And we would NOT want to miss that.
BRAIN SLUDGE
Today, as part of our series “The Human Brain, So to Speak,” we explore the phenomenon of: Brain Sludge.
“Brain sludge” is a term coined by leading scientists to describe the vast collection of moronic things that your brain chooses to remember instead of useful information.
For example: Take any group of 100 average Americans, and sing to them, “Come and listen to my story ‘bout a man named Jed.” At least 97 of them will immediately sing: “A poor mountaineer, barely kept his family fed.” They will sing this even if they are attending a funeral. They can’t help it.
This particular wad of sludge—known to scientists as The Beverly Hillbillies Theme Song Wad—is so firmly lodged in the standard American brain lobe that it has become part of our national DNA, along with the Gilligan’s Island wad. If a newborn American infant were abandoned in the wilderness and raised by wolves without any human contact or language, there would nevertheless come a day when he or she would blurt out, without having any idea what it meant: “A THREE-hour tour!” And the wolves would sing along. That’s how pervasive brain sludge is.
What is the root of this problem? Like most human defects, such as thigh fat, the original cause is your parents. Soon after you were born, your parents noticed that you were, functionally, an idiot, as evidenced by the fact that you spent most of your waking hours trying to eat your own feet. So they decided to put something into your brain, but instead of information you’d actually need later in life—for example, the PIN number to your ATM card—they sang drivel to you, the same drivel that parents have been dumping into their children’s brains since the Middle Ages, such as “Pop Goes the Weasel,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider,” and “Jeremiah Was a Bullfrog.” Your parents thought they were stimulating your mind, but in fact they were starting the sludge-buildup process, not realizing that every cretinous word they put into your brain would stay there FOREVER, so that decades later you’d find yourself waking up in the middle of the night wondering: Why? WHY did she cut off their tails with a carving knife?
But your parents aren’t the real problem. The REAL problem, the nuclear generator of brain sludge, is television. Here’s a little test for those readers out there who are approximately forty-eight years old. How many of you know what the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution says? Let’s see those hands … one … two … Okay, I count nine people. Now, how many of you remember the theme song to the 1950s TV show Robin Hood? Thousands of you! Me too! Everybody join in:
Robin Hood, Robin Hood riding through the glen!
Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men!
Feared by the bad! Loved by the good!
Robin Hood! Robin Hood! Robin Hood!
My brain also contains theme songs to early TV shows about Daniel Boone (“Daniel Boone was a man, yes a BIG man!”); Zorro (“The fox so cunning and free! He makes the sign of the Z!”); and Bat Masterson (“He wore a cane and derby hat! They called him Bat!”).
I am not proud of this, but I can name only five Supreme Court Justices (one of whom sticks in my mind solely because of the term “pubic hair”); whereas I can name six Mousketeers.
Of course the densest layer of sludge consists of commercial jingles for products that no longer exist. Your brain assigns the highest priority to these. That’s why, although I honestly cannot name the current secretary of defense, I can sing:
Pamper, Pamper, new shampoo!
Gentle as a lamb, so right for you!
Gentle as a lamb? YES, ma’am!
Pamper, Pamper, new shampoo!
My brain also loves to remind me that my beer is Rheingold, the dry beer; think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer! Brush-a, brush-a, brush-a! New Ipana toothpaste! With the brand-new flavor! It’s dandy for your teeeeeeth!
Here’s how pathetic my brain is: If it forgets some worthless piece of brain sludge, it drops everything else and becomes obsessed with recalling it. For example, right now my brain is devoting all available resources to remembering the name of the candy featured in the following jingle:
(NAME OF CANDY) goes a long, long way!
If you have one head, it lasts all day!
This is currently my brain’s Manhattan Project; it will think of nothing else. A lot of people have this problem, and society pays a price for it:
Control Tower: Flight 8376, you’re descending way too …
Pilot: Tower, could you settle something? Was it (singing) “Brylcreem, a little bit’ll do ya?”
Tower: No, it was (singing) “a little dab’ll do ya.”
Co-Pilot: Hah! Told you so!
Pilot: Tower, are you sure?
Yes, brain sludge is a leading cause of needless tragedy, which is why I’m asking you to join in the fight against it. How? Simple: Write a letter to senators and congresspersons DEMANDING that they appropriate $500 million for a study to for God’s sake find out what kind of candy lasts all day if you have one head. And if there is any money left over, we should hire professional assassins to track down whoever wrote:
My bologna has a first name! It’s…
BANG
Thank you.
DUDE,
READ ALL
ABOUT IT!
Here in the newspaper industry (official motto: “For Official Motto, Please Turn to Section F, Page 37”) we are seriously worried. Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there’s a good chance that nobody is reading this column. I could write a pornographic sex scene here and nobody would notice.
“Oh Dirk,” moaned Camille as she writhed nakedly on the bed. “Yes yes yes YES YES YES YES YESSSSSSSSSS!”
“Wait up!” shouted Dirk. “I’m still in the bathroom!”
It was not always this way. There was a time in America when everybody read newspapers. Big cities had spunky lads standing on every street corner shouting “EXTRA!” These lads weren’t selling newspapers: They just shouted “EXTRA!” because they wanted to irritate people, and boomboxes had not been invented yet.
But the point is that in those days, most people read newspapers, whereas today, most people do not. What caused this change?
One big factor, of course, is that people are a lot stupider than they used to be, although we here in the newspaper industry would never say so in print.
Certainly another factor is that many people now get their news from television. This is unfortunate. I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV news people, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the “bare bones” of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.
But if we want to identify the “root cause” of the decline in newspaper readership, I believe we have to point the finger of blame at the foolish decision by many newspapers to stop running the comic strip Henry. Remember Henry? The bald boy who looks like Dwight Eisenhower? I believe that readers liked the Henry strip because, in times of change and uncertainty, it always had the same plot:
Panel One: Henry is walking along the street. He is wearing shorts, even if it is winter.
Panel Two: Suddenly Henry spies an object. You can tell he’s spying it, because a dotted line is going from his eyeball to the object. Often the object is a pie cooling on a windowsill (pies are always cooling on windowsills on the planet where Henry lives).
Panel Three: Things get really wacky as Henry eats the pie.
Panel Four: The woman who baked the pie comes to the window and discovers that—prepare to roll on the floor—the pie is gone. The woman is surprised. You can tell because exclamation points are shooting out of her head.
This timeless humor has been delighting readers for thousands of years (Henry strips have been found on prehistoric cave walls), but for some reason, a while back most newspapers stopped running the strip, and readership has been in the toilet ever since. I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
Whatever the cause, the readership decline is producing major underarm dampness here in the newspaper industry. We’re especially concerned about the fact that we’re losing young readers—the so-called Generation X, which gets its name from the fact that it followed the so-called Generation W. We’re desperate to attract these readers. Go to any newspaper today and you’ll see herds of editors pacing around, mooing nervously, trying to think up ways to make newspapers more relevant to today’s youth culture. This is pretty funny if you know anything about newspaper editors, the vast majority of whom are middle-aged Dockers-wearing white guys who cannot recognize any song recorded after “Yellow Submarine.”
But they’re trying. If you read your newspaper carefully, you’ll notice that you’re seeing fewer stories with uninviting, incomprehensible, newspaper-ese headlines like PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, and more punchy, “with-it” headlines designed to appeal to today’s young people, like PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, DUDE.
I applaud this effort, and as a middle-aged Dockers-wearing white guy, I want to do my part by making my column more “hep” and appealing to young people. So I’m going to conclude by presenting the views of some students of Daniel Kennedy’s English class at Clearfield (Pennsylvania) Area High School. I recently wrote a column in which I said that some young people today have unattractive haircuts and don’t know who Davy Crockett was. Mr. Kennedy’s class read this column and wrote me letters in response; here are some unretouched excerpts, which I am not making up:
“Maybe one of these days, you should look in the mirror, Dave. Dave, you need a new hairstyle, man! You have a puff-cut, Dave.”
“Without hair I think every guy in the world would just die of imbarresment. I know I would, but I am a girl.”
“You say that I don’t no any thing about Davy Crockett. Well I no that he fought at the Alamo. He also played in several movies.”
Let me just say that we in the newspaper industry totally agree with you young people on these points and any other points you wish to make, and if you will please please PLEASE start reading the newspaper we’ll be your best friend, okay? Okay? Young people? Hello?
You’re not even reading this, you little twerps.
“Oh Dirk,” moaned Camille, “I am overcome by desire at the sight of your … your … What do you call those?”
“Dockers,” said Dirk.
INVASION OF THE
TREE SHEEP
Call me paranoid, but my first reaction, upon learning about the dead sheep being found in treetops in New Zealand, was that something unusual was going on.
I found out about this thanks to alert reader Steven Moe, who sent me an article from The Press of Christchurch, New Zealand, concerning “the discovery of several dead sheep high in the trees of Tunnicliffe Forest.”
Right away I said to myself: “Hmm.” I base this statement on the well-known fact that sheep are not tree-dwelling animals. Zoologically, sheep are classified in the same family as cows: Animals That Stand Around and Poop. On very rare occasions, a single sheep or cow will climb a tree in an effort to escape a fierce natural predator such as a wolf or (around lunchtime) Luciano Pavarotti. But The Press article states that “four or five decomposing sheep were high in the branches.” That is too many sheep to be explained by natural causes. Which leads us to the obvious explanation: namely, supernatural causes.
I realize that many of you laugh at stories of the paranormal. “Ha ha,” you say. But the truth is that the world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example. There are many other documented cases of baffling supernatural occurrences. Consider these examples:
Early in the morning of October 8,1991, Mrs. Florence A. Snegg of Uvula, Michigan, was having an extremely vivid dream in which her son, Russell, was involved in a terrible automobile accident. Suddenly she was awakened by the ringing of her telephone. On the line was a Missouri state trooper, calling long distance to remind Mrs. Snegg that she had never had children.
On the afternoon of March 13,1993, Winchester B. Fleen of Toad Sphincter, Arkansas, was abducted by hostile, large-brained beings who drilled holes in his head, probed him with giant needles, pumped chemicals into his body, took samples of his organs, and removed most of his bodily fluids before they found out that he did not have health insurance, at which point they released him back into the hospital waiting room.
On the morning of July 3, 1994, seven-year-old Jason Toastwanker fell off his tricycle, hit his head, and was knocked o
ut. When he regained consciousness, he spoke to his parents in fluent German. This did not surprise them, because they were Germans and this happened in Germany. What surprised them was that, before the accident, he had cleaned up his room without being asked.
On February 12 of this year, Thelma Crumpet-Scone of New York City purchased a Whopper at Burger King; when she started to eat it, she bit her own finger, causing a painful red mark for several minutes. Incredibly, she decided that this was totally her fault, and she did not sue anybody.
Impossible, you say? Perhaps so, but all of these incidents, along with hundreds more that have not occurred to me yet, have been thoroughly documented by the Institute for Documenting Things Thoroughly The lesson is this: Before you say something is “impossible,” you would be wise to remember the old saying: “Truth is stranger than fiction, especially when ‘truth’ is being defined by the O.J. Simpson defense team.” And thus when you consider the New Zealand tree-sheep article, the question you must ask yourself is: “How can I, keeping an open mind, best explain what happened?”
The answer is: “Read the rest of the article, you moron.” It turns out that the sheep had fallen from a helicopter. The pilot had been transporting—I am not making up this quote—”some ewes that had died from sleepy sickness,” and the wire that was holding the sheep under the helicopter broke. Incredibly, the pilot had been warned about this the night before in a telephone call from a Missouri state trooper.