dave barry quotes

Several years ago, some smart businessmen had an idea: Why not build a big
store where a do-it-yourselfer could get everything he needed at reasonable
prices? Then they decided, nah, the hell with that, let's build a home
center. And before long home centers were springing up like crabgrass all
over the United States.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

There are two kinds of solar-heat systems: "passive" systems collect the
sunlight that hits your home, and "active" systems collect the sunlight that
hits your neighbors' homes, too.
-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"

If you're like most homeowners, you're afraid that many repairs
around your home are too difficult to tackle. So, when your furnace
explodes, you call in a so-called professional to fix it. The
"professional" arrives in a truck with lettering on the sides and deposits a
large quantity of tools and two assistants who spend the better part of the
week in your basement whacking objects at random with heavy wrenches, after
which the "professional" returns and gives you a bill for slightly more
money than it would cost you to run a successful campaign for the U.S.
Senate.
And that's why you've decided to start doing things yourself. You
figure, "If those guys can fix my furnace, then so can I. How difficult can
it be?"
Very difficult. In fact, most home projects are impossible, which
is why you should do them yourself. There is no point in paying other
people to screw things up when you can easily screw them up yourself for far
less money. This article can help you.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

Plumbing is one of the easier of do-it-yourself activities,
requiring only a few simple tools and a willingness to stick your arm into a
clogged toilet. In fact, you can solve many home plumbing problems, such as
annoying faucet drip, merely by turning up the radio. But before we get
into specific techniques, let's look at how plumbing works.
A plumbing system is very much like your electrical system, except
that instead of electricity, it has water, and instead of wires, it has
pipes, and instead of radios and waffle irons, it has faucets and toilets.
So the truth is that your plumbing systems is nothing at all like your
electrical system, which is good, because electricity can kill you.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

Our [softball] team usually puts the other woman at second base, where the
maximum possible number of males can get there on short notice to help out in
case of emergency. As far as I can tell, our second basewoman is a pretty good
baseball player, better than I am, anyway, but there's no way to know for sure
because if the ball gets anywhere near her, a male comes barging over from, say,
right field, to deal with it. She's been on the team for three seasons now, but
the males still don't trust her. They know, deep in their souls, that if she
had to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she
probably would elect to save the infant's life, without ever considering whether
there were men on base. - Dave Barry, "Sports Is A Drag"

The idea there was that consumers would bring their broken electronic
devices, such as television sets and VCR's, to the destruction centers,
where trained personnel would whack them (the devices) with sledgehammers.
With their devices thus permanently destroyed, consumers would then be free
to go out and buy new devices, rather than have to fritter away years of
their lives trying to have the old ones repaired at so-called "factory
service centers," which in fact consist of two men named Lester poking at
the insides of broken electronic devices with cheap cigars and going,
"Lookit all them WIRES in there!"
-- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"

So Richard and I decided to try to catch [the small shark].
With a great deal of strategy and effort and shouting, we managed to
maneuver the shark, over the course of about a half-hour, to a sort of
corner of the lagoon, so that it had no way to escape other than to
flop up onto the land and evolve. Richard and I were inching toward
it, sort of crouched over, when all of a sudden it turned around and --
I can still remember the sensation I felt at that moment, primarily in
the armpit area -- headed right straight toward us.
Many people would have panicked at this point. But Richard and
I were not "many people." We were experienced waders, and we kept our
heads. We did exactly what the textbook says you should do when you're
unarmed and a shark that is nearly two feet long turns on you in water
up to your lower calves: We sprinted I would say 600 yards in the
opposite direction, using a sprinting style such that the bottoms of
our feet never once went below the surface of the water. We ran all
the way to the far shore, and if we had been in a Warner Brothers
cartoon we would have run right INTO the beach, and you would have seen
these two mounds of sand racing across the island until they bonked
into trees and coconuts fell onto their heads.
-- Dave Barry, "The Wonders of Sharks on TV"

Now, you might ask, "How do I get one of those complete home tool
sets for under $4?" An excellent question.
Go to one of those really cheap discount stores where they sell
plastic furniture in colors visible from the planet Neptune and where they
have a food section specializing in cardboard cartons full of Raisinets and
malted milk balls manufactured during the Nixon administration. In either
the hardware or housewares department, you'll find an item imported from an
obscure Oriental country and described as "Nine Tools in One", consisting of
a little handle with interchangeable ends representing inscrutable Oriental
notions of tools that Americans might use around the home. Buy it.
This is the kind of tool set professionals use. Not only is it
inexpensive, but it also has a great safety feature not found in the
so-called quality tools sets: The handle will actually break right off if
you accidentally hit yourself or anything else, or expose it to direct
sunlight.
-- Dave Barry, "The Taming of the Screw"

"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl."
-- Dave Barry

Men's skin is different from women's skin. It is usually bigger, and
it has more snakes tattooed on it. Also, if you examine a woman's skin
very closely, inch by inch, starting at her shapely ankles, then gently
tracing the slender curve of her calves, then moving up to her ...

[EDITOR'S NOTE: To make room for news articles about important world events
such as agriculture, we're going to delete the next few square feet of the
woman's skin. Thank you.]

... until finally the two of you are lying there, spent, smoking your
cigarettes, and suddenly it hits you: Human skin is actually made up of
billions of tiny units of protoplasm, called "cells"! And what is even more
interesting, the ones on the outside are all dying! This is a fact. Your
skin is like an aggressive modern corporation, where the older veteran
cells, who have finally worked their way to the top and obtained offices
with nice views, are constantly being shoved out the window head first,
without so much as a pension plan, by younger hotshot cells moving up from
below.
-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"

One promising concept that I came up with right away was that you could
manufacture personal air bags, then get a law passed requiring that they be
installed on congressmen to keep them from taking trips. Let's say your
congressman was trying to travel to Paris to do a fact-finding study on how
the French government handles diseases transmitted by sherbet. Just when he
got to the plane, his mandatory air bag, strapped around his waist, would
inflate -- FWWAAAAAAPPPP -- thus rendering him too large to fit through the
plane door. It could also be rigged to inflate whenever the congressman
proposed a law. ("Mr. Speaker, people ask me, why should October be
designated as Cuticle Inspection Month? And I answer that FWWAAAAAAPPPP.")
This would save millions of dollars, so I have no doubt that the public
would violently support a law requiring airbags on congressmen. The problem
is that your potential market is very small: there are only around 500
members of Congress, and some of them, such as House Speaker "Tip" O'Neil,
are already too large to fit on normal aircraft.
-- Dave Barry, "'Mister Mediocre' Restaurants"

What we need in this country, instead of Daylight Savings Time, which nobody
really understands anyway, is a new concept called Weekday Morning Time,
whereby at 7 a.m. every weekday we go into a space-launch-style "hold" for
two to three hours, during which it just remains 7 a.m. This way we could
all wake up via a civilized gradual process of stretching and belching and
scratching, and it would still be only 7 a.m. when we were ready to actually
emerge from bed.
-- Dave Barry, "$#$%#^%!^%&@%@!"

And so, men, we can see that human skin is an even more complex and
fascinating organ than we thought it was, and if we want to keep it
looking good, we have to care for it as though it were our own. One
approach is to undergo a painful surgical procedure wherein your skin
is turned inside-out, so the young cells are on the outside, but then
of course you have the unpleasant side effect that your insides
gradually fill up with dead old cells and you explode. So this
procedure is pretty much limited to top Hollywood stars for whom
youthful beauty is a career necessity, such as Elizabeth Taylor and
Orson Welles.

-- Dave Barry, "Saving Face"

Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content
to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good
beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up
drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a
nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves
and the teacher says: "Imagine what it does to your TEETH!" So Coca-Cola
was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to
improve ...
-- Dave Barry, "In Search of Excellence"

After [Benjamin] Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose
names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron Volt, Mary
Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These pioneers conducted
many important electrical experiments. For example, in 1780 Luigi
Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he attached two
different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an electrical current
developed and the frog's leg kicked, even though it was no longer
attached to the frog, which was dead anyway. Galvani's discovery led
to enormous advances in the field of amphibian medicine. Today,
skilled veterinary surgeons can take a frog that has been seriously
injured or killed, implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it
hop back into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact
that it sinks like a stone.

-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"

Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity?

And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?
-- Dave Barry, "What is Electricity?"

You men out there probably think you already know how to dress for success.
You know, for example, that you should not wear leisure suits or white
plastic belts and shoes, unless you are going to a costume party disguised
as a pig farmer vacationing at Disney World.
-- Dave Barry, "How to Dress for Real Success"

You should tip the waiter $10, minus $2 if he tells you his name, another $2
if he claims it will be His Pleasure to serve you and another $2 for each
"special" he describes involving confusing terms such as "shallots," and $4
if the menu contains the word "fixin's." In many restaurants, this means the
waiter will actually owe you money. If you are traveling with a child aged
six months to three years, you should leave an additional amount equal to
twice the bill to compensate for the fact that they will have to take the
banquette out and burn it because the cracks are wedged solid with gobbets
made of partially chewed former restaurant rolls saturated with baby spit.

In New York, tip the taxicab driver $40 if he does not mention his hemorrhoids.
-- Dave Barry, "The Stuff of Etiquette"

So as your consumer electronics adviser, I am advising you to donate your
current VCR to a grate resident, who will laugh sardonically and hurl it
into a dumpster. Then I want you to go out and purchase a vast array of
8-millimeter video equipment.

... OK! Got everything? Well, *too bad, sucker*, because while you were
gone the electronics industry came up with an even newer format that makes
your 8-millimeter VCR look as technologically advanced as toenail dirt.
This format is called "3.5 hectare" and it will not be made available until
it is outmoded, sometime early next week, by a format called "Elroy", so
*order yours now*.
-- Dave Barry, "No Surrender in the Electronics Revolution"

When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I
have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with
slightly over half that quantity of beer.
-- Dave Barry, "Postpetroleum Guzzler"