Boogers Are My Beat Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Introduction

  Part One

  A Wacky Path for Politics

  Wrong! It Wasn't Humphrey

  Why Not Poke a Hole in a Candidate's Eyeball?

  Now It's Time to Say Thanks for the Chads

  That Don't Count

  Party Time, Texas-Style

  Part Two

  It's Party Time, As Philly Gets Phunky

  Party Politics

  “Rolling Roll Call” Makes Bad Idea Last Even Longer

  Encounter with Falwell Gets Surprisingly Intimate

  George W. Survives His GOP Convention Speech

  Real People, Real Issues, Full Nudity

  There's Glitz, Glamour, the Clintons—but Where's Al?

  Campaign Trail, Freeways, Finally Lead to a

  Vast Parking Lot

  Joe Goes Hollywood As Al Plans to Be “Riveting”

  Now It's Safe to Do Some Unconventional Thinking

  Part Three

  Call Security

  Frozen Lips, Barefoot Skaters—and Who Let

  All Those Dogs Out?

  For a Weird Cult, They're Pretty Friendly

  Competitive Ski Jumping Is a Weighty Issue

  Gosh! Heck! Utahans Angry About Skating

  Don't Trust Any Judge with Two First Names

  Buses and Mucus

  Part Four

  In a Battle of Wits with Kitchen Appliances, I'm Toast

  Camping at Wal-Mart Parking Lot Is Survival

  of Fittest

  War on Smoking Always Has Room for Another Lawyer

  Fill Out the Census and Win Your Own Bureaucracy

  Choice Between Death and Taxes Gets Easier

  and Easier

  Don't Forget to Consider Feng Shui—and

  Other Deck Tips

  Important

  Was It “Hi-ho” or “Hi-yo,” or Did the Lone Ranger

  Have a Lisp?

  Who Was That Masked Social Security Recipient?

  He Didn't Just Buy a House—He Bought a

  Home Repair Industry

  How to Drive a Man Wild with Desire?

  Even a Stiff Breeze Works

  Your Child Deserves a Halloween Costume

  by Calvin Klein

  100 Years of Solitude, Waiting for Customer Service

  Don't Fear to Tread

  Terror on Flight 611—There's a Baby on Board,

  Ready to Shriek

  Humvee Satisfies a Man's Lust for Winches

  Dead or Alive, Turkeys Can Fowl Up Your Life

  By the Way, Those Turkey Snakes Have Giant

  Fangs, Too

  A GPS Helps a Guy Always Know Where His

  Couch Is

  Road to Romantic Ruin Paved with Chain Saws

  Nice Words About the IRS on the Way to Leavenworth

  Daddy's Little Girl a Republican Barbie

  Onward, Upward Go the Sherpa and Schlepper

  Considerate Guests Use the Gas Station Bathroom

  Ban Cellphones—Unless You're Attacked

  by a Giant Squid

  Quality! Craftsmanship! Service Contract!

  At 17 (Months), Her Music Tastes Match Dad's

  He's Got a Broom and He's Not Afraid to Use It

  There's No Denying Nature's Wake-up Call

  Grab Your Pajamas, It's World Series Time

  Burger King Puts Workers' Feet to the Fire—Literally

  A Truly Terrifying Act

  Owner's Manual Step No. 1

  Cap 'n' Gown? I'll Take the Burger 'n' Fries

  Fitting Into That Bikini Is Easy As (Eating) Pie

  Don't Mean a Thing If It Ain't Got That Swing

  Get the (Birthday) Party Started

  It's Oscar Time—Prepare the Blow Darts

  Supersize Your Fries with This Column?

  North Dakota Wants Its Place in the Sun

  There's a Hoover Dam . . . and Now, the

  Dave Sewage Lifter

  N.D.'s New Barry Building Takes Your Breath Away

  Steve's Schnapps Kept the Frost Off Dave's Bobber

  Send in Your Weasel Jokes (Unless You're Canadian)

  Penelope Cruz Is NOT Having Dave's Baby

  Learning to Love the Computer, Warts and All

  It's All About Cloning, Not Clowning

  Book-Tour Blues

  Part Five

  Just for Being Americans . . .

  Hallowed Ground

  Conclusion

  About the Author

  By the same author

  Copyright Page

  Introduction: Boogers Are My Beat

  I'm not a real journalist. I'm a humor columnist. When real journalists are out interviewing experts about important issues such as terrorism and the economy, I'm at home, sitting in front of my computer in my underwear, trying to decide which animal name is funnier, “hamster” or “gerbil.”1

  But because I work for a major newspaper, The Miami Herald,2 I sometimes get to go to major news events, such as political conventions, the Olympics, Elizabeth Taylor fragrance launches, etc. My usual tactic at such events is to lurk among the real journalists as they interview a newsmaker. I frown thoughtfully at the newsmaker and write stuff in my notebook, just like my media colleagues; the difference is that they're writing down what the newsmaker is saying, whereas I'm writing notes like, “GREEN THING STUCK IN TEETH” or “NOSE SIZE OF EGGPLANT.”

  Over the past two decades, I've used this tactic to cover dozens of major national and international news events, and I've written hundreds of columns about them. When my editor, Betty Prashker, and I were putting this book together, we decided to take a look back at those older columns to see if any of them were worth including here. What we found, frankly, surprised us: Despite the fact that those columns concerned, in some cases, events that took place years ago, a surprising number of them, when viewed from the perspective of recent events, are—and I say this in all modesty—complete gibberish. They're filled with obscure references to people who, at one time, apparently were quite famous for some reason, but whose names no longer ring a bell. “Al Gore,” for example.

  So Betty and I threw most of the columns out. But there were some that we thought would be worth including, and we've started the book with those. Toward the end of the book we've included some more recent columns, so you can judge how much I have matured as a writer. Actually, I can just tell you here: I have not matured at all. Thank God. Maturity is a crippling handicap for humor columnists. It's like height for jockeys, or ethics for lawyers.

  The first section of this book presents some columns I wrote about presidential politics, which, in my professional opinion, is the mother lode of humor material. We have a lot of funny institutions in this country—infomercials, California, Al Sharpton, organized religion—but for consistently wacky hijinks, you cannot beat the way we go about choosing our maximum leader.

  I've been covering presidential politics since 1984, when the Herald sent me to New Hampshire to write about the presidential primaries. I went up there and wrote about what goes on in the New Hampshire primary; namely, a bunch of candidates in dark suits, accompanied by dark-suited entourages, race frantically around the state, grasping voters' hands and telling them—with all the sincerity of a guy in a bar declaring his love to a woman he met three drinks earlier—how deeply they care about New Hampshire.

  I thought my reports were pretty accurate, but not everybody at the Herald liked them. I was especially criticized for one column about a campaign appearance by Sen. John Glenn, in which I pointed out that he was not an electrifying speaker. I believe my exact words were: “He could not electrify a fish tank if he threw a toaster into it.”

  Thi
s column angered a member of the Herald's editorial board.3 He was a serious journalist, and he wrote a serious memo to our executive editor, objecting to my coverage of the primary campaign. The memo said: “When we treat so prominently such serious business as if it were pratfall comedy, I believe that we demean our reputation as a serious newspaper. I seriously believe that such treatment reassures the public that cynicism about politics is smart.”

  Well, heaven forbid that we journalists should make the public cynical about politics. But having covered five presidential campaigns, I frankly do not know what you could write about our political process that would make it appear any stupider than it actually is.

  Of course when we think about the words “stupid” and “politics” together, we naturally think about the 2000 presidential election, especially the role played by my state, Florida.4 We'll begin this book with some columns I wrote during that hideous period when the entire world was waiting to find out who the next U.S. president would be, while haggard Florida election officials squinted at chads, and squadrons of lawyers dropped from the sky.5

  What follows is a series of columns I wrote for the Herald about that election. The first one, which appeared the day after Election Day, was an “analysis” of the election results. The joke was supposed to be that I wrote this analysis without knowing who the winner was. Little did I realize that this would still be a mystery weeks after this column appeared.

  That column is followed by some more about the election mess, followed by one on the inauguration of George W. Bush, an event that gave a new definition6 to the word “fun.”

  —Dave Barry

  Part One

  A Wacky Path for Politics

  Memo: ELECTION 2000

  Before I analyze the presidential election, I want to make a statement, on behalf of South Florida, to the state and local candidates who ran all those TV ads, especially Elaine Bloom, Clay Shaw, Bill McCollum, and Bill Nelson: We hope that you and all your media advisers rot in Campaign Hell, okay? We hope that demons tape your eyelids open and force you to watch your own TV commercials. We hope that every thousand years, the demons hold an election to decide which one of you should be allowed to leave Campaign Hell, and the winner is always: None of the Above.

  There! I feel better! Now, let's analyze the presidential election. As you can imagine, I was up all night scrutinizing the returns. (NOTE TO EDITOR: The truth is, I'm writing this while the polls are still open. I don't plan to watch the returns. I plan to watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer and be asleep by 9:15 P.M. So I need some help finishing this analysis.)

  The key to presidential elections is the Electoral College, an institution created by the Founding Fathers so that Tim Russert would have something to talk about. Under this system, each state receives a certain number of electoral votes, based on how stupid the state's motto is. Thus, New York (motto: “Driver Carries No Cash”) has 33 electoral votes; whereas North Dakota (motto: “Coming Soon—Plumbing!”) has none.

  This system can produce some quirky results. In 1884, the Electoral College declared that Grover Cleveland was the winner, even though it turned out that there was no such person. Later, the Electoral College got a bee in its bonnet and elected Franklin D. Roosevelt president twenty-seven times in a row. Still later, it elected Richard M. Nixon, despite abundant documented evidence that he was Richard M. Nixon.

  So the Electoral College may seem to be a wacky way to elect a president. But it's better than any other system on earth, except the system we use to fill every other office. And because of this system, one of the keys to Tuesday's election was the 25 electoral votes of Florida (motto: “Drugs Are Legal, but God Help You If You Get Caught with a Citrus Tree!”).

  To win Florida, both candidates needed the support of our 398 million elderly residents, all of whom vote. Voting is one of their major forms of entertainment, along with eating dinner at 4:30 P.M. and failing to notice green lights while sitting behind the wheels of their 1986 Oldsmobiles. To win the votes of these people, both Al Gore and George W. Bush promised that, if elected, they would have the government give the elderly huge quantities of drugs. So one definite outcome of the election is that, for the next four years, our seniors, God bless them, will be stoned out of their gourds. This will probably improve their driving.

  But the elderly vote was only one of many factors that determined the outcome of the election, which is why all the experts said it was “too close to call.” What a bunch of morons. I predicted the outcome of this election right on the money in a column I wrote on April 17, 1997. My exact words were: “The next president of the United States will definitely be (NOTE TO EDITOR: Please insert the winner's name here).”

  The question now is: What lies ahead for the nation, with this man at the helm? What kind of a man IS this man, assuming that he is, in fact, a man? The answers will determine the future of this great nation, and we all, as Americans, must think about them very hard. But right now, Buffy is starting.

  Wrong! It Wasn't Humphrey

  We in the news media have an announcement to make.

  It turns out we made a few teensy mistakes in our coverage of the presidential election. Oh, we were correct on the big stuff, such as what day the election was held, the names of the candidates, and how many total states there are. But we messed up on some of the minor details, such as who, technically, got elected president.

  This happened because, here in the news media, our focus is on speed. When we get hold of some new and possibly inaccurate information, our highest priority is to get it to you, the public, before our competitors do. If the news media owned airlines, there would be a lot less concern about how many planes crashed, and a lot more concern about whose plane hit the ground first.

  Nowhere is the speed competition more fierce than in TV news. This is why if you decided—God help you—to stay informed on election night by watching television, you saw the following sequence of events:

  • First, the major networks confidently declared, based on a careful analysis of the voting patterns of approximately four people, that Al Gore had won Florida.

  • A little while later, the networks announced that—Whoops!—Gore had NOT won Florida.

  • Still later, the networks confidently declared that George W. Bush had won Florida, and the presidency.

  • Next, the networks explained, in some detail, how Bush had done it, and what he would do as forty-third president of the United States.

  • Then the networks declared that—Whoops again!—Bush had NOT won Florida.

  • Then the networks declared that the World Series was actually won by the Mets.

  Okay, I made that last one up. But all the other stuff actually happened. In other words, if you had hoped to inform yourself about the most important story in the world by watching network TV news—the most expensive and sophisticated news-gathering operation in history—you actually wound up less informed than if you had spent the night staring at your refrigerator.

  I am not saying the newspapers did any better. Oh, we tried to get you the story. We were in constant contact with our news sources. The problem is, our news sources are (Don't tell anybody!) the TV networks. So we were just as confused as anybody else, which is why an early edition of the Herald had a front-page headline declaring that the election had been won by the late Hubert Humphrey.

  In fact, as I write these words, NOBODY knows who won the presidential election, because nobody knows who won Florida. We're having a recount, which should be pretty entertaining, because Florida's No. 3 industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud. Here in Miami, we've had elections where the dead voters outnumbered the live ones. Elsewhere in the state there have been reports of irregular voting procedures, including one Palm Beach County precinct where the “ballots” given to voters were actually pizza coupons. (As of right now, Extra Cheese holds a slim lead over Pepperoni, but Tim Russert says it is “still too close to call.”)

  So this election, which t
he nation had desperately hoped would be over by now, is going to drag on—nobody knows how long—and all because of Florida. We are a REALLY popular state right now. It wouldn't surprise me if, after this is all over, we get voted out of the union. That really would be a shame. Because I think Humphrey is going to make a damned good president.

  Why Not Poke a Hole in a Candidate's Eyeball?

  I think it's an arrow thing.

  I'm talking about this deal with the ballots in Palm Beach County.

  As the whole world knows by now, thanks to Florida, the presidential election has come to a grinding halt. Lawsuits are being filed. People are marching in the streets. Political pundits are so excited that they have to change their underwear on an hourly basis. Jesse Jackson has taken time out from his busy schedule of garnering publicity elsewhere so he can devote all his efforts to garnering publicity here.

  And the scary part is, nobody knows how long this will drag on. We may not know who our forty-third president is until it's time to elect our forty-fourth.

  At the heart of all this mess is Palm Beach County, where many people are now saying they didn't know whom they were voting for. Every time you turn on the news you see distraught Palm Beach voters saying that they accidentally voted for the wrong person, or two people, or nobody, or Queen Elizabeth II.

  These people blame the ballot, which they say was very confusing. The way they talk, it sounds as though to understand this ballot, you would need, at minimum, a degree in nuclear physics. Now, I have seen pictures of this ballot. And although I think the design could have been better, it doesn't seem all THAT complicated. I mean, for each candidate's name, there's an arrow pointing to a punch hole. If you follow the arrow, you get to the correct hole, right?

  And that's where I think the problem arises. Because, for whatever reason, many people in Florida do NOT understand arrows. If you have ever driven down here, you know what I mean. You'll be at an intersection, waiting in the left-turn lane, with a big painted arrow on the street, pointing left; and a sign overhead saying LEFT TURN ONLY with an arrow pointing left; and then the light will change, and there will be a green arrow, pointing left, and 50 percent of the time the driver in front of you will do . . . nothing! It's as if this driver has NO IDEA what the arrows mean! Sometimes—and if you don't believe me, then you have never driven in South Florida—the driver will attempt to turn RIGHT.