Free Republic

Just call me Studboy.com Dave Barry Miami Herald I started lifting weights. But not for the reason you think. You think I want to look ''cut'' and ''ripped'' and have bulging muscles like the ones on male underwear models, who for some reason are always shown posing outdoors, looking sullen, as if a group of even more-muscular models stole their pants. You think I want to have muscles like that, so women will look at me and think: ``Wow! I would like to see HIS syndicated column!'' But you are wrong. I'm lifting weights for sensible medical reasons, which I...

John Kerry gave a fire-breathing speech at Temple University in Philadelphia on Friday. In it he announced what will be his themes for the balance of the campaign, subject of course to 180-degree changes at any time. There was one problem with the speech. It was largely “fact-free,” as Dave Barry is wont to say. Here are the claims, and the relevant facts to each claim: “The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy -- Al Qaeda -- ...” Kerry may not have noticed, but your average college student ought to know that...

Nothing Fishy About Trout Dave Barry Sept. 19, 2004 There comes a time when a man must go into the wilderness and face one of Mankind's oldest, and most feared, enemies: trout. For me, that time came recently in Idaho, where I go every summer. Many people think Idaho is nothing but potato farms, but nothing could be further from the truth: There are also beet farms. No, seriously, Idaho is a beautiful state that offers -- to quote Emerson -- ''nature out the bazooty.'' This includes many rivers and streams that allegedly teem with trout. I say ''allegedly'' because...

Low-carb Leader Will Get My Vote Dave Barry/Miami Herald Sept. 12, 2004 Pretty soon you, the American voter, will enter the sacred sanctity of the voting booth and cast your ballot for the next U.S. president. Or, not. It's also possible that your ballot will go back in time and participate in the election of 1848, or wind up in a distant galaxy, helping to elect an alien being with 73 eyeballs (slogan: ``A Being of Vision''). The truth is, you don't know WHAT will happen to your ballot, because you might be using one of the new electronic voting...

GOP, Bush, blah, blah . . . now to the Panty Flash! BY DAVE BARRY Sept. 3, 2004 NEW YORK -- The Republican convention lunged to a triumphant climax Thursday night as President George W. Bush, acting on the advice of advisors, accepted his party's nomination for a second term in which he pledged to, quote, ``pay more attention to stuff.'' Then, as the delegates cheered, 150,000 red, white and blue balloons dropped from the rafters of Madison Square Garden to the convention floor, where they were arrested by New York police officers for falling without a permit. Today, the...

Truth or Dare DAVE BARRY Sept. 5, 2004 When you've been writing a column for as long as I have -- six billion years this Tuesday -- you get used to receiving a certain type of letter. It's known in journalism as the ''I Dare You To Print This!'' (IDYTPT for short) letter, because the letter-writer challenges you, the columnist, to print the letter, implying you lack the courage. Generally you don't print it, for two reasons. One is, you get a lot of these letters (at least I do) and if you printed them all, your column would consist...

NEW YORK — This is turning out to be WAY more exciting than the Democratic convention. At the Democratic convention, the only dramatic tension came from wondering, when you went to a party, whether Ben Affleck would be there, or Ben Affleck plus a Baldwin brother. But here in New York, a LOT of stuff is happening. Maybe too much stuff. This is what I was thinking when I was having my right kidney probed by a billy club, at the other end of which was a New York City police officer the size of a Humvee. This happened in...

Helping wife's a sporting life Dave Barry My wife is a sportswriter. This is good and bad. The good part is this: Say I'm lying on the sofa watching pro football, and my team, the Miami Dolphins, have the ball, and it's third and four, a situation in which the Dolphins, after considering all 3,487 of their offensive plays, always decide to send the running back into the middle of the line for a gain of two yards. ALWAYS. The other team expects it, as does everybody else watching the game, including stadium-dwelling cockroaches, who wave their feelers to indicate:...

Thirst-quenching Sponsorships are Aplenty in Athens DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- As you've watched these Olympic games unfold, a nagging question you have no doubt asked yourself many times, as an American, is: Does the U.S. water polo team have an Official Bottled Drinking Water? Don't be an idiot. This is the Olympics! Of course our water polo team has an Official Bottled Drinking Water. According to a press release, the team chose ''Penta'' brand bottled water, because, quote, ``They gave us money.'' No, sorry, that's the real reason, which is never actually stated. The press-release reason is that Penta --...

Indoor cycling: It's a learning experience DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- Today, in our ongoing exploration of Olympic Sports That Americans Don't Get, we present: indoor bicycle racing. This is taking place at yet another of the dozens of large, spanking-new facilities built expressly for the Olympics by the Greeks over the course of about two frenzied weeks in late July. If you have a wedding or bar mitzvah coming up, and you'd like to hold it in a large, almost-new building with plenty of seats and just the faintest whiff of world-class-athlete b.o., come on over here and make Greece...

Drug-free losers embarrassing to United States By DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- The Olympics were canceled Sunday after the authorities determined that everybody involved, including the guy who shoots the starting pistol, is on drugs. OK, it's not that bad. But it's not good, either. There have been many subtle yet disturbing signs that the use of performance-enhancing substances is widespread: • Both the track and the field are littered with syringes. • Urine samples routinely burst into flames. • Slow-motion videotape analysis of sprint races has shown that some top runners are using as many as five legs. • One...

Allow me to burden you with weightlifting facts BY DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- If you like confident women, defined as ''women who could pick up your refrigerator unassisted,'' you would love Olympic women's weightlifting. Competitive weightlifting is hugely popular in Greece. This dates back to ancient times, when the Greeks had to be very strong because pretty much all their possessions were made of marble. A single salad fork could weigh 50 pounds. Just to get through a meal you needed biceps like basketballs. Today, competitive weightlifting is not a big deal in the United States, where people mainly lift...

This Olympic Shuttlecock is no Poppycock DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- They don't play badminton at the Olympics the way you play it at home. The way you play it at home is, once every three to six years, usually on the Fourth of July, you dig out your cheesy drugstore badminton set, which is buried deep in the closet with your cheesy drugstore croquet set, the two sets having intermingled over the years to form a new sport, ''crominton,'' or maybe ``badquet.'' You spend the next hour and a half trying to assemble the poles and untangle the net, which...

Life's a beach at volleyball venue DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- If there are two words that, over the centuries, have become virtually synonymous with the phrase ''Olympic Games,'' those two words are ``beach volleyball.'' This exciting sport got its start in ancient Greece, when some ancient Greeks found an inflated goat bladder on a beach and had the idea of hitting it across a net. Fortunately, they realized that this would be disgusting, so they used a volleyball instead, which is why today the sport is called ''beach volleyball'' instead of ''beach goat bladder.'' (Although beach goat bladder has been...

Taking a taxi in Athens is taxing DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- Without question, this city's most exciting mode of transportation -- and I include, in this category, skydiving without a parachute -- is to take a taxi. The thing is, Greek taxis are cheap. You can go a looonnnnng way, kilometer after kilometer, and the fare will be only a few euros centigrade. That's the good news. The bad news is, to make any money, the taxi drivers must cover a lot of distance, so they go very, very fast. Q: How fast do they go? A: Their taxis frequently...

At Hot-Hot-Hot Sailing, a search for inner yngling DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- I went down to the sea to see the hot Olympic sailing action. I knew the action would be hot because the Olympic organizers put out a press release headlined, quote, ''Hot action predicted for sailing.'' The sailing action takes place in the Saronic Gulf, which is perfect because (a) it is located right next to Athens, and (b) it consists almost entirely of water, which is the preferred sailing environment. It's also good for swimming, and from the bus on the way to the sailing action I...

Fifty years ago, it was 1954. (Research is the heart of journalism.) Many important things happened in 1954. Dean Martin sang That's Amore, and the French surrendered in Vietnam (these two events were probably unrelated). On TV, the new hit was Lassie, a show about a really smart dog who belonged to a family with the IQ of mushrooms. (''What's Lassie trying to tell us?'' ''I don't know, although the last 29 consecutive times she acted like this, it was because Jeff fell into the well!'' ''Well, I'm baffled! What's wrong, girl?'') But for lasting cultural significance, the most important...

Take the bus? Yeah, if only it were that easy BY DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- I intend to go to some Olympic competitions, really, just as soon as I figure out the Greek bus system. I'm staying in a suburb of Athens, and I've been attempting to use public buses to get from Point A to Point B, although sometimes I end up at Point C, and occasionally I find myself, after many scenic kilometers, back at Point A. This is because Greece, like many foreign nations, uses the Mystery Bus System, developed as a security measure to guard against...

No naked athletes in modern times BY DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- The Olympics formally got under way Friday with an opening ceremony that is almost impossible to describe using mere words because I'm writing this before it actually happened. But I'm sure it was spectacular because the Greeks are so proud to be staging these Olympics, just as they staged the very first Olympic Games in 776 BC (27.3 Celsius). Those first Olympics were quite different from the modern Games. There was only one sponsor (Samsung) and the competitors had to inject their drugs with primitive bamboo syringes. Also, of...

Looking for ruins? Pick a Tipiyokti and start climbing DAVE BARRY ATHENS -- Greece today is a modern nation, defined as ''a nation where pretty much everybody is talking on a cellular telephone.'' But there are ghosts of another Greece here: the ancient civilization that gave the world such precious gifts as democracy, philosophy, water, television, Greek salad and the Pythagorean theorem, without which -- incredible as it seems -- we would not have the hypotenuse today. The most visible symbol of the glory that was ancient Greece is the Acropolis, a great big rocky hill that looms above downtown...