Free Republic

The Power to Embarrass DAVE BARRY Jan. 30, 2005 (This classic Dave Barry column was originally published on Aug. 11, 1996.) A while ago The New York Times printed an item concerning an 11-year-old girl who was overheard on the streets of East Hampton, N.Y., telling her father, "Daddy, Daddy, please don't sing!" The daddy was Billy Joel. The irony, of course, is that a lot of people would pay BIG money to hear Billy Joel sing. But of course these people are not Billy Joel's adolescent offspring. To his adolescent offspring, Billy Joel apparently represents the same thing that...

Now this one's a classic BY DAVE BARRY Posted on Sun, Jan. 23, 2005 [Week 3, and Dave's still not returning our calls. Even when we leave messages as Booger T. Jones from the Institute of Nasal Technology. This would almost *always* work. So for now, here's another classic Dave Barry column, originally published on March 6, 1994.] Why don't regular people like classical music? This is the question that was posed to me recently in a letter from Timothy W. Muffitt, the music director of the University of Texas Symphony Orchestra, which has gained international acclaim for its rendition...

Road warriors: Why guys act macho DAVE BARRY Jan. 16, 2005 [It's week two of the Dave Barry hiatus and frankly, we don't know how we're going to last another day, let alone 50 more weeks. (Support group, anyone?) In the meantime, here's another classic column, originally published on February 8, 1998.] If you do much driving on our nation's highways, you've probably noticed that, more and more often, bullets are coming through your windshield. This is a common sign of Road Rage, which the opinion-makers in the news media have decided is a serious problem, currently ranking just behind...

The last word, for now; humorist gives jokes a rest By DAVE BARRY Sun, Jan. 02, 2005 There comes a time in the life of every writer when he asks himself -- as Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Hemingway all surely asked themselves -- if he has any booger jokes left in him. For me, that time has come. I've been trying to entertain newspaper readers since the '60s, when I wrote ''humor'' columns for the Haverford College News. I put ''humor'' in quotation marks because when I go back and read those columns today, I don't get any of the jokes....

Dave Barry is going on an "indefinite hiatus" only to attract attention to himself. Not famous enough, Dave? Why don't you go on hiatus! Oh, and make it indefinite. That'll grab some headlines. Dave says he wants to spend more time with his family. But I hesitate to tell you that Dave's family is a hash pipe and some old Playboy magazines. Yes, Dave has written many funny essays that have appeared in our nation's newspapers. However, most of his material is plagiarized from his own mind. Often, a funny idea will come to Dave, and then he will use...

Dispatches from a year that was lower than a snake LOOKING BACK ON 2004, we have to conclude that it could have been worse. "How??" you ask, spitting out your coffee.Well, okay, a giant asteroid could have smashed into the Earth and destroyed all human life except Paris Hilton and William Hung. Or Florida could have been hit by 20 hurricanes, instead of just 17. Or the Yankees could have won the World Series. But, no question, 2004 was bad. Consider: -- We somehow managed to hold a presidential election campaign that for several months was devoted almost entirely to...

A Christmas Poem By Dave Barry (First published in the Miami Herald in 1995) 'Twas the night before Christmas Or Hanukkah or Kwanzaa or whatever religious holiday your particular family unit celebrates at this time of year via mass retail purchases And all through the house Not a creature was stirring Except Dad, who was stirring his third martini in a losing effort to remain in a holiday mood as he attempted to assemble a toy for his 9-year-old son, Bobby It was a highly complex toy A toy that Dad did not even begin to grasp the purpose of...

Can't we all just get along? By DAVE BARRY I thought that, in today's column, I would heal the nation. The nation suffered a wound during the recent presidential election as a result of the rift between the red states -- defined as 'states where `foreign cuisine' pretty much means Pizza Hut'' -- and the blue states, defined as ``states that believe they are smarter than the red states, despite the fact that it takes the average blue-state resident 15 minutes to order a single cup of coffee.'' Some blue-state residents are so upset about the election that they're talking...

Who named these guys Wise Men? DAVE BARRY Christmastime is a festive time -- a time of parties and presents and songs that we all love, except for Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer, which I for one got tired of in approximately 1958, and which now causes me to dislocate my forefinger stabbing the car-radio button. I prefer traditional Christmas carols, such as Ding Dong Merrily on High. I am not making this carol up. The lyrics are: ''Ding dong merrily on high!'' (Something something something) I don't know the rest, because I never got past the first line without...

Dave Barry's Gift Guide Dec.5,2004 From crib to grave, we've got your butt covered this holiday season This year, for our Holiday Gift Guide, we thought we'd try something different. Usually we just hurl together a bunch of stupid, useless items that no sane human would ever actually buy. But this year we thought, ''Why not, for once, do something positive? Why not do a REAL gift guide, with items that people might actually WANT to receive?'' But just then our medication wore off. So once again this year we have followed our standard Gift Guide formula. First, we scour...

A childish dream -- to kick the ball DAVE BARRY/Miami Herald It's game night, and the Pinecrest Wolverettes are getting ready. The Wolverettes are my daughter's soccer team. They're all 4 years old, and they're all girls. They've been practicing under their Coach, Coach Susanna. They're learning the fundamentals of soccer, which are: 1. You're supposed to kick the ball. 2. You're not supposed to pick up the ball. 3. Even if you really really want to pick up the ball, you're not supposed to. 4. If you have to go potty, try to wait for a water break instead...

Thanksgiving is that very special holiday when we take a break from our hectic everyday lives to spend quality time with our loved ones, rediscovering all the reasons why we don't actually live with them. But Thanksgiving is also a spiritual time of quiet reflection - a time when we pause to remember, as generations have remembered before us, that an improperly cooked turkey is - in the words of the U.S. Department of Agriculture - "a Ticking Meat Bomb of Death." Yes, it is a tragic but statistical fact that every Thanksgiving, undercooked turkeys claim the lives of an...

All the News Not Fit to Print DAVE BARRY Today we have some urgent breaking news, defined as ''news that happened at some point in the past year and we just now found out because we're way behind in our mail.'' Our first breaking item, brought to our attention by alert reader Don Bovaird, is an alarming report in the May 28 Erie (Pa.) Times-News, which devoted most of its front page, and an entire inside page, to this story. What happened, in brief, was that an 18-year-old male got sick and defecated in . . . well, in his...

Event could be in deep doo-doo Nov. 7, 2004 I am often criticized for writing immature ''bathroom'' humor, and not enough about important topics. So today I'm going to write about a major international event that is going to take place Nov. 17-19 in Beijing, China: The World Toilet Summit. I am not making up the World Toilet Summit. It was brought to my attention by alert reader Marc Howell, who alerted me to the World Toilet Organization, a group dedicated to improving the world's public toilets, with a website at worldtoilet.org. (''Org'' is a sound made by many of...

Preschool panicking BY DAVE BARRY So my wife and I went to this meeting at our daughter's preschool. The purpose was to give us helpful information about our kindergarten options. Let me just say, as a parent: AIEEEEEEEEEEE. Centuries ago, when I was a small hairless preschool child in Armonk, N.Y., kindergarten was simple. When you turned 5, you enrolled in Wampus Elementary and attended Miss Gregory's kindergarten class, where you made hideous refrigerator art from construction paper and paste. There were no other curriculum options, unless you count the option of, when Miss Gregory was not looking, eating the...

In defense of a man's-eye view BY DAVE BARRY Oh, swell: We have yet another survey showing that men, when compared to women, are scum. Just once, I'd like to see some survey asking questions that would highlight areas where men are more likely to be superior, such as: 1. If it was an emergency, could you open a beer bottle with your teeth? 2. How many hours per week, total, do you spend fretting about your thighs? 3. Do you have the emotional stability to make a meaningful lifelong commitment, through good times and bad, to a set of...

Miami Herald humor columnist Dave Barry to take indefinite leave Associated Press MIAMI - Dave Barry, The Miami Herald's Pulitzer Prize-winning humor columnist, plans to take an indefinite leave of absence from the newspaper starting in January. Barry, 57, said Tuesday he wanted to spend more time with his family after a hectic summer covering the Democratic and Republican national conventions and the Olympics in Greece. He said he may return in 2006. "I've never not had a column in a week in all of 30 years, even when I went on vacation," Barry said. "At some point I said,...

Traffic woes drive us crazy Dave Barry/ Our traffic problems are getting worse, according to a recent study by the Institute of Discovering Things That Make You Go ``Duh.'' How bad is our traffic mess? Consider these alarming facts: FACT: Commuting by automobile now takes so long that many workers have no time to do any actual work. When they reach their place of employment, they grab a cup of coffee, spend a few minutes discussing the previous night's episode of The Apprentice with their co-workers, and immediately start the long commute home, unaware that their jobs were outsourced to...

A Tall Order, Grammatically BY DAVE BARRY Oct. 10, 2004 Join us now for another rendition of ''Ask Mister Language Person,'' the only grammar column mentioned by name in the Bible, as well as the official grammar column of the American Association of English Teachers in the Staff Lounge Counting the Days Until Retirement. We begin today with a disturbing escalation in the trend of coffee retailers giving stupid names to cup sizes. As you know, this trend began several years ago when Starbucks (motto: ''There's one opening right now in your basement'') decided to call its cup sizes ''Tall''...

Sex, Guys and Fruit Flies Dave Barry Oct. 3, 2004 Over the years I have been harshly critical of the scientific community for wasting time researching things nobody cares about, such as the universe. I don't know about you, but I'm tired of reading newspaper stories like this: ``Using a giant telescope, astronomers at the prestigious Crudwinkle Observatory have observed a teensy light smudge that they say is a humongous galaxy cluster 17 jillion light years away, which would make it the farthest-away thing that astronomers have discovered this week. However, astronomers at the rival Fendleman Observatory charged that what...