DAVE BARRY IS NOT TAKING THIS SITTING DOWN Read online

  Also Curt has some ladies who work with him—and again, these are charming people—who belong to some kind of Druid-style cult that has very strict beliefs under which they are not allowed to let you leave the office with any of your blood. They get you in a chair and distract you with charming conversation while they subtly take your arm and insert a needle attached to a long tube that goes outside to a 50,000-gallon tanker truck with a big sign that says “BLOOD.” When they’re done draining you, they don’t even have to open the door to let you out; they just slide you under it.

  Somehow I got through my physical OK. But then, about a week later, Curt was working late one night at his office—perhaps going through the Official Catalog of Supplies for Doctor’s Offices, which lists needles in sizes ranging all the way from Extra Large to Harpoon, as well as an extensive selection of pre-1992 magazines with the last page of every article torn out—and he happened to glance up at his framed copy of the Hippocratic oath. This is an oath that is named after an ancient Greek philosopher, Aristotle, who is considered the Father of Medicine because he invented the following phrases, without which modern medical care would be impossible:

  —“Do you have insurance?”

  —“We’re going to have to run some tests.”

  —“You may experience some discomfort.”

  —“We’re going to have to run some more tests.”

  —“The tests were inconclusive.”

  Anyway, Curt was looking at the Hippocratic oath, which all doctors are required to take, and he noticed the sentence that says:

  “And I swear by my Lexus that if a person comes into my office for any reason, whether it be for a physical examination or simply to deliver the mail, I will find something medically wrong with that person.”

  And so Curt, realizing that if he let me get out of my physical scot-free, burly agents of the American Medical Association Ethics Unit would come and yank his stethoscope right out of his ears, called me and told me that the cholesterol level in my blood was a little high. I tried to argue that this was no longer my problem, since all my blood was in the possession of the Druid ladies, but Curt insisted that I had to change my dietary habits.

  To help me do this, Curt sent me some informative medical pamphlets that explain to the layperson, via cartoons, what cholesterol is. Technically, it is a little blob-shaped guy with buggy eyes and a big nose who goes running through your blood vessel, which is a tube going to your heart, which can be seen smiling in the background. Sometimes the blob guy gets stuck, causing him to get a grumpy expression and have a balloon come out of his mouth saying, “I’M STUCK.” If too many cholesterols get stuck, your blood vessel looks like a New York subway train at rush hour, and your heart gets a sad face, and surgeons have to go in there with a medical device originally developed by Roto-Rooter.

  To prevent this from happening, you need to be very careful about your diet, as follows:

  FOOD GROUPS YOU CANNOT EAT: Meat, milk, cheese, butter, desserts, processed foods, fried foods, foods with skins, restaurant foods, foods your mom made, foods from packages, foods shown in commercials, foods containing flavor, foods being carried around on trays at wedding receptions, appetizers, snacks, munchies, breakfast, lunch, dinner, take-out, drive-thru, piña coladas, any food with a phrase such as “GOOD LUCK HERB!” written on it in frosting.

  FOOD GROUPS YOU CAN EAT: Water (unsweetened), lowfat celery, wood chips.

  This diet has been difficult for me to follow. The worst part has been giving up cheese. I love cheese. I’m the kind of person who, merely while rummaging through the refrigerator to see what else is available, can easily gnaw his way through a hunk of cheddar the size of the late Sonny Liston. But I’ve been pretty good so far, and I’m hoping that my blood cholesterol will be a lot lower, if I ever develop blood again. Curt wants me to come back in and have it checked. He’ll never take me alive.

  My Final Answer Is . . . Go Back to Your Spaceship, Regis

  REGIS PHILBIN: Welcome to Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, the dramatic hit quiz show that has all America on the edge of its seat wondering how, exactly, I became famous in the first place. Let’s get started with some irritating theme music!

  MUSIC: BOM BOM BOM BOMMM!

  REGIS: To select our first contestant, we’re going to ask our 10 finalists to rank these four things in the order of how much you would not want to have them inserted deep into your ear: (A) A lima bean; (B) A spider; (C) A harmonica; (D) Rosie O’Donnell.

  MUSIC: DEEDEEDEEDEEDEEDEE

  FINALISTS (shouting over the music): Did you say “ear” or “rear”?

  REGIS: Too late! The correct answer is: “(E) It depends on what kind of spider.” Our winner is . . . Walter Gweemble of Toledo, Ohio! Come on out here, Walter!

  (Walter runs out and shakes hands violently with Regis.)

  REGIS: So Walter, tell us about yourself.

  WALTER: Well, Regis, I’m . . .

  REGIS: Nobody cares, Walter. What loved one have you brought along so that we can heighten the drama by showing his or her reaction as tension mounts?

  WALTER: Regis, I brought my dog, Boomer.

  (Boomer wags his tail.)

  REGIS: OK! Let’s play for a MILLION DOLLARS!

  MUSIC: DUMDUMDUMDUMDUMDUM!

  REGIS: Here we go. For $100, which of the following letters is NOT really a letter? (A) “A”; (B) “B”; (C) “C”; or (D) The Grand Canyon.

  MUSIC: AAAAAAAAAAAOOOOOOO

  (Walter frowns with deep concentration.)

  MUSIC: OOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEE

  REGIS: God, this is dramatic, isn’t it?

  (The reaction camera shows Boomer, who is engaged in an act of personal hygiene.)

  MUSIC: OOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAA

  WALTER: Regis, I am just not sure what the answer is. But I am really getting off on calling you Regis, Regis.

  REGIS: As you know, Walter, you have three lifelines: You can poll the audience; you can make a phone call; or you can have me shout the correct answer out loud, like this: “IT’S ‘D,’ YOU MORON!”

  WALTER: Regis, I’m going to call my mother.

  REGIS: We’re getting her on the line now. (Sound of phone ringing.)

  WALTER’S MOTHER: Hello?

  REGIS: Mrs. Gweemble, this is Regis Philbin, with ABC’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire!

  WALTER’S MOTHER: I told you damn people a million times, we don’t want MCI.

  WALTER: Mom! It’s me! Walter!

  WALTER’S MOTHER: Walter?

  WALTER: Yes!

  WALTER’S MOTHER: You call your mother DURING THE X-FILES?? (click)

  WALTER: Mom?

  REGIS: Walter, please give your final answer, so I can ask you if your final answer is in fact your final answer. I get paid $25,000 for every time I say “final answer.”

  MUSIC: OOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEEE

  WALTER: Gosh, Regis, I just don’t . . . (He looks over at Boomer, who is drawing a “D” on the floor with his paw.) Regis, I’m going to say . . . “D.”

  REGIS: Is that your final answer? Final answer? Final answer?

  WALTER: Regis, yes.

  REGIS: “D” is correct! You’ve won $100!

  MUSIC: BOM BOM BOM BA-DOMMMMM

  (Walter collapses. The audience cheers wildly. Boomer makes the Weewee of Triumph on the studio floor.)

  REGIS: Whew! Talk about drama! Only 14 more questions to go for a MILLION DOLLARS! Are you nervous, Walter?

  WALTER: Well, Regis, I . . .

  REGIS: Shut up. Your next question, for $200, is: How many legs are there on a standard cow? (A) None; (B) One; (C) More than one; (D) The Grand Canyon.

  MUSIC: OOOOOOOOEEEEEEEEE

  REMOTE CONTROL: Click.

  Rubber-Band Man

  If you are a regular reader of this column, you know that I make it my business to report on Stuff That Guys Do.

  A good example is the sport of snowplow hockey, in which guys driving trucks use their snowplow blades to knock a bowling b
all past trucks driven by opposing guys. This is not to be confused with car bowling, in which guys in low-flying airplanes try to drop bowling balls onto junked cars. I’ve also reported on guys going off a ski jump in a canoe, and on guys trying to build a huge modernized version of a catapult-like medieval war weapon and then using it to hurl a Buick 200 yards.

  These are guy activities. These are activities that, when you describe them to a group containing both males and females, provoke two very different reactions:

  MALE REACTION: “Cool!”

  FEMALE REACTION: “Why?”

  The answer, of course, is: Because guys like to do stuff. This explains both the Space Shuttle and mailbox vandalism.

  Today I want to report on another inspiring example of guys doing stuff. There is a guy in Van Nuys (rhymes with “guys”), California, who is planning, one day soon, to roll down an airport runway and become the first human in recorded history to take off in an airplane that is powered by a rubber band.

  I am not making this up. I have met this guy, a 44-year-old stunt pilot whose name happens to be George Heaven. I have also seen his plane, which he designed, and which is called the Rubber Bandit. Do you remember the little rubber-band planes that you used to assemble from pieces of balsa? This plane looks a lot like those, except that it’s 33 feet long, with a wingspan of 71 feet and an 18-foot-long propeller. The body is made from high-tech, super-lightweight carbon fiber, so it weighs only 220 pounds without the rubber band, which weighs 90 pounds.

  This is not your ordinary rubber band such as you would steal from the supply cabinet at your office. This is made from a continuous strand of rubber that is a quarter inch wide and 3½ miles long; if you stretched it out, it would extend for 24 miles, which means that—to put this in scientific terms—if you shot it at somebody, it would sting like a mother.

  The rubber band has been folded back over itself 400 times, so now it forms a fat, 25-foot-long python-like rubber snake on the hangar floor at the Van Nuys Airport. When the big day comes, a winch will wind the rubber band 600 to 800 times, and everybody involved will be very, very careful. You have to watch your step when dealing with your large-caliber rubber bands. I know this from personal experience, because one time a friend of mine named Bill Rose, who is a professional editor at The Miami Herald and who likes to shoot rubber bands at people, took time out from his busy journalism schedule to construct what he called the Nuclear Rubber Band, which was 300 rubber bands attached together end to end.

  One morning in The Miami Herald newsroom, I helped Bill test-fire the Nuclear Rubber Band. I hooked one end over my thumb, and Bill stretched the other end back, back, back, maybe 75 feet. Then he let go. It was an amazing sight to see this whizzing, blurred blob come hurtling through the air, passing me at a high rate of speed and then shooting WAYYYY across the room, where it scored a direct bull’s-eye hit smack dab on a fairly personal region of a professional reporter named Jane.

  Jane, if you’re reading this, let me just say, by way of sincere personal apology, that it was Bill’s fault.

  The thing is, Bill’s rubber band was nothing compared with the one that will power George Heaven’s Rubber Bandit. If that one were to snap when fully wound, in the words of Rubber Bandit crew chief Tom Beardsley, “it has the potential to kill someone.”

  Then there is the whole question of what will happen if the Rubber Bandit—with Heaven sitting on a tiny seat hanging below the fuselage, between the wheels—actually takes off. I keep thinking about all the balsa model planes I had when I was a boy. I’d wind the propeller until my finger was sore, then I’d set the plane down on the street, let the prop go, and watch as the plane surged forward, became airborne, and then—guided by some unerring homing instinct that balsa apparently possesses—crashed into the nearest available object and broke into small pieces.

  I discussed this with Heaven, who nodded the nod of a man who has heard it all many times. He told me he was not worried at all.

  “You’re out of your mind,” I said.

  “I know it,” he said.

  So there you have it: A Guy on a Mission. Heaven (who looks and sounds a little like the late Robert Mitchum, although he denies this) hopes to make his historic flight around the end of this month. He’s trying to raise money so that he and his crew can finish the Rubber Bandit. Naturally you are wondering if he has approached the Trojan condom company about a sponsorship; the answer is yes, he did, and—incredibly—Trojan turned him down.

  But he and his volunteers have been working on this project for two years, and I don’t think they’re going to quit. So keep an eye out for news on the Rubber Bandit. If you live near Van Nuys, you should also keep an ear out, and if you hear a really loud twanging sound, duck.

  From Now On, Let Women Kill Their Own Spiders

  From time to time I receive letters from a certain group of individuals that I will describe, for want of a better term, as “women.” I have such a letter here, from a Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina, who asks the following question:

  “Why do men open a drawer and say, ‘Where is the spatula?’ instead of, you know, looking for it?”

  This question expresses a commonly held (by women) negative stereotype about guys of the male gender, which is that they cannot find things around the house, especially things in the kitchen. Many women believe that if you want to hide something from a man, all you have to do is put it in plain sight in the refrigerator, and he will never, ever find it, as evidenced by the fact that a man can open a refrigerator containing 463 pounds of assorted meats, poultry, cold cuts, condiments, vegetables, frozen dinners, snack foods, desserts, etc., and ask, with no irony whatsoever, “Do we have anything to eat?”

  Now I could respond to this stereotype in a snide manner by making generalizations about women. I could ask, for example, how come your average woman prepares for virtually every upcoming event in her life, including dental appointments, by buying new shoes, even if she already owns as many pairs as the entire Riverdance troupe. I could point out that, if there were no women, there would be no such thing as Leonardo DiCaprio. I could ask why a woman would walk up to a perfectly innocent man who is minding his own business watching basketball and demand to know if a certain pair of pants makes her butt look too big, and then, no matter what he answers, get mad at him. I could ask why, according to the best scientific estimates, 93 percent of the nation’s severely limited bathroom-storage space is taken up by decades-old, mostly empty tubes labeled “moisturizer.” I could point out that, to judge from the covers of countless women’s magazines, the two topics most interesting to women are (1) Why men are all disgusting pigs, and (2) How to attract men.

  Yes, I could raise these issues in response to the question asked by Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina, regarding the man who was asking where the spatula was. I could even ask WHY this particular man might be looking for the spatula. Could it be that he needs a spatula to kill a spider, because, while he was innocently watching basketball and minding his own business, a member of another major gender—a gender that refuses to personally kill spiders but wants them all dead—DEMANDED that he kill the spider, which nine times out of 10 turns out to be a male spider that was minding its own business? Do you realize how many men arrive in hospital emergency rooms every year, sometimes still gripping their spatulas, suffering from painful spider-inflicted injuries? I don’t have the exact statistics right here, but I bet they are chilling.

  As I say, I could raise these issues and resort to the kind of negativity indulged in by Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina. But I choose not to. I choose, instead, to address her question seriously, in hopes that, by improving the communication between the genders, all human beings—both men and women, together—will come to a better understanding of how dense women can be sometimes.

  I say this because there is an excellent reason why a man would open the spatula drawer and, without looking for the spatula, ask where the spatula is:
The man does not have TIME to look for the spatula. Why? Because he is busy thinking. Men are almost always thinking. When you look at a man who appears to be merely scratching himself, rest assured that inside his head, his brain is humming like a high-powered computer, processing millions of pieces of information and producing important insights such as, “This feels good!”

  We should be grateful that men think so much, because over the years they have thought up countless inventions that have made life better for all people, everywhere. The shot clock in basketball is one example. Another one is underwear-eating bacteria. I found out about this thanks to the many alert readers who sent me an article from New Scientist magazine stating that Russian scientists—and you KNOW these are guy scientists—are trying to solve the problem of waste disposal aboard spacecraft, by “designing a cocktail of bacteria to digest astronauts’ cotton and paper underpants.” Is that great, or what? I am picturing a utopian future wherein, when a man’s briefs get dirty, they will simply dissolve from his body, thereby freeing him from the chore of dealing with his soiled underwear via the labor-intensive, time-consuming method he now uses, namely, dropping them on the floor.

  I’m not saying that guys have solved all the world’s problems. I’m just saying that there ARE solutions out there, and if, instead of harping endlessly about spatulas, we allow guys to use their mental talents to look for these solutions, in time, they will find them. Unless they are in the refrigerator.

  Here’s Mud in Your Eye

  Recently I spent several days touring the California wine country, and I must say that it was a wonderful experience that I will remember until long after I get this mud out of my ears.