Dave Barry

[From "Sweating Out Taxes"] All the big corporations depreciate their possessions, and you can, too, provided you use them for business purposes. For example, if you subscribe to the Wall Street Journal, a business-related newspaper, you can deduct the cost of your house, because, in the words of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Warren Burger in a landmark 1979 tax decision: "Where else are you going to read the paper? Outside? What if it rains?"

[From "How to Dress for Real Success"] All you have to do to see the accuracy of my thesis is look around you. Look, in particular, at the people who, like you, are making average incomes for doing average jobs -- bank vice presidents, insurance salesman, auditors, secretaries of defense -- and you'll realize they all dress the same way, essentially the way the mannequins in the Sears menswear department dress. Now look at the real successes, the people who make a lot more money than you -- Elton John, Captain Kangaroo, anybody from Saudi Arabia, Big Bird, and so on. They all dress funny -- and they all succeed. Are you catching on?

[From "What is Electricity?"] Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights, radios, mixers, etc., for granted, hundreds of years ago people did not have any of these things, which is just as well because there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a lighting storm and received a serious electrical shock. This proved that lighting was powered by the same force as carpets, but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved is a penny earned." Eventually he had to be given a job running the post office.

[From "In Search of Excellence"] An excellence-oriented '80s male does not wear a regular watch He wears a Rolex watch, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Golfer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence:
    "The Rolex Hyperion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating handcraftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100 percent 24-karat gold. No watch parts or anything. Just a great big chunk on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn't need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he'll go to his 20th reunion, and they'll see his Rolex Hyperion. Hahahahahahahahaha."

[From "What is Electricity?"] But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first major invention in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest achievement came in 1879, when he invented the electric company. Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple electrical circuit: the electric company sends electricity through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the electricity back through another wire, then (this is the brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.
     This means that an electric company can sell a customer the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since, which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate increases.

[From "Read This First!"] Congratulations! You have purchased an extremely fine device that would give you thousands of years of trouble-free service, except that you undoubtably will destroy it via some typical bonehead consumer maneuver. Which is why we ask you to PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE READ THIS OWNER'S MANUAL CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU UNPACK THE DEVICE. YOU ALREADY UNPACKED IT, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UNPACKED IT AND PLUGGED IT IN AND TURNED IT ON AND FIDDLED WITH THE KNOBS, AND NOW YOUR CHILD, THE SAME CHILD WHO ONCE SHOVED A POLISH SAUSAGE INTO YOUR VIDEOCASSETTE RECORDED AND SET IT ON "FAST FORWARD", THIS CHILD ALSO IS FIDDLING WITH HE KNOBS, RIGHT? AND YOU'RE JUST NOW STARTING TO READ THE INSTRUCTIONS, RIGHT??? WE MIGHT AS WELL JUST BREAK THESE DEVICES RIGHT AT THE FACTORY BEFORE WE SHIP THEM OUT, YOU KNOW THAT?

[From "In Search of Excellence"] Excellence is the trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as "Garfield Gets Spayed", and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: "In Search of Excellence", "Finding Excellence", "Grasping Hold of Excellence", "Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It", etc.

[From "Tenting Grandpa Bob"] Harry is heavily into camping, and every year in the late fall, he makes us all go to Assateague, which is an island on the Atlantic Ocean famous for its wild horses. I realize that the concept of wild horses probably stirs romantic notions in many of you, but this is because you have never met any wild horses in person. In person, they are like enormous hooved rats. They amble up to your camp site, and their attitude is: "We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon."

[From "Pornography"] Here is the problem: For many years, the Supreme Court wrestled with the issue of pornography, until finally Associate Justice John Paul Stevens came up with the famous quotation about how he couldn't define pornography, but he knew it when he saw it. So for a while, the court's policy was to have all the suspected pornography trucked to Justice Stevens' house, where he would look it over. "Nope, this isn't it," he'd say. "Bring some more." This went on until one morning when his housekeeper found him trapped in the recreation room under an enormous mound of rubberized implements, and the court had to issue a ruling stating that it didn't know what the hell pornography was except that it was illegal and everybody should stop badgering the court about it because the court was going to take a nap.

[From "Sports is a Drag"] I realize that today you have a number of top female athletes such as Martina Navratilova who can run like deer and bench-press Chevrolet trucks. But to be brutally frank, women as a group have a long way to go before they reach the level of intensity and dedication to sports that enables men to be such incredible jerks about it.

     If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

     Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.

     Lassie looked brilliant, in part because the farm family she lived with was made up of idiots. Remember? One of them was always getting pinned under the tractor, and Lassie was always rushing back to the farmhouse to alert the other ones. She'd whimper and tug at their sleeves, and they'd always waste precious minutes saying things: "Do you think something's wrong? Do you think she wants us to follow her? What is it, girl?", etc., as if this had never happened before, instead of every week. What with all the time these people spent pinned under the tractor, I don't see how they managed to grow any crops whatsoever. They probably got by on federal crop supports, which Lassie filed the applications for.

[From "Sweating Out Taxes"] Let's talk about how to fill out your 1984 tax return. Here's an often overlooked accounting technique that can save you thousands of dollars: For several days before you put it in the mail, carry your tax return around under your armpit. No IRS agent is going to want to spend hours poring over a sweat-stained document. So even if you owe money, you can put in for an enormous refund and the agent will probably give it to you, just to avoid an audit. What does he care? It's not his money.

[From "Sports is a Drag"] Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history, dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire.
     What inner force drove this first athlete? Your guess is as good as mine. Better, probably, because you haven't had four beers.

     Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient in beer.

[From "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"] ...Now you're ready for the actual shopping. Your goal should be to get it over with as quickly as possible, because the longer you stay in the mall, the longer your children will have to listen to holiday songs on the mall public-address system, and many of these songs can damage children emotionally. For example: "Frosty the Snowman" is about a snowman who befriends some children, plays with them until they learn to love him, then melts. And "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" is about a young reindeer who, because of a physical deformity, is treated as an outcast by the other reindeer. Then along comes good, old Santa. Does he ignore the deformity? Does he look past Rudolph's nose and respect Rudolph for the sensitive reindeer he is underneath? No. Santa asks Rudolph to guide his sleigh, as if Rudolph were nothing more than some kind of headlight with legs and a tail. So unless you want your children exposed to this kind of insensitivity, you should shop quickly.

[From "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"] Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.
     In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it "Christmas" and went to church; the Jews called it "Hanukka" and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and drank. People passing each other on the street would say "Merry Christmas!" or "Happy Hanukka!" or (to the atheists) "Look out for the wall!"

[From "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"] Some of you... may have decided that, this year, you're going to celebrate it the old-fashioned way, with your family sitting around stringing cranberries and exchanging humble, handmade gifts, like on "The Waltons." Well, you can forget it. If everybody pulled that kind of subversive stunt, the economy would collapse overnight. The government would have to intervene: It would form a cabinet-level Department of Holiday Gift-Giving, which would spend billions and billions of tax dollars to buy Barbie dolls and electronic games, which it would drop on the populace from Air Force jets, killing and maiming thousands. So, for the good of the nation, you should go along with the Holiday Program. This means you should get a large sum of money and go to a mall.

[From "In Search of Excellence"] 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...

[From "Christmas Shopping: A Survivor's Guide"] The basic idea behind malls is that they are more convenient than cities. Cities contain streets, which are dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in. Malls, on the other hand, have parking lots, which are also dangerous and crowded and difficult to park in, but -- here is the big difference -- in mall parking lots, THERE ARE NO RULES. You're allowed to do anything. You can drive as fast as you want in any direction you want. I was once driving in a mall parking lot when my car was struck by a pickup truck being driven backward by a squat man with a tattoo that said "Charlie" on his forearm, who got out and explained to me, in great detail, why the accident was my fault, his reasoning being that he was violent and muscular, whereas I was neither. This kind of reasoning is legally valid in mall parking lots.

[From "Pornography"] The big problem with pornography is defining it You can't just say it's pictures of people naked. For example, you have these primitive African tribes that exist by chasing the wildebeest on foot, and they have to go around largely naked, because, as the old tribal saying goes: "N'wam k'honi soit qui mali," which means, "If you think you can catch a wildebeest in this climate and wear clothes at the same time, then I have some beach front property in the desert region of Northern Mali that you may be interested in."
     So it's not considered pornographic when National Geographic publishes color photographs of these people hunting the wildebeest naked, or pounding one rock onto another rock for some primitive reason naked, or whatever. But if National Geographic were to publish an article entitled "The Girls of the California Junior College System Hunt the Wildebeest Naked," some people would call it pornography. But others would not. And still others, such as the Spectacularly Rev. Jerry Falwell, would get upset about seeing the wildebeest naked.

[From "Postpetroleum Guzzler"] The problem... is that we have run out of dinosaurs to form oil with. Scientists working for the Department of Energy have tried to form oil using other animals; they've piled thousands of tons of sand and Middle Eastern countries on top of cows, raccoons, haddock, laboratory rats, etc., but so far all they have managed to do is run up an enormous bulldozer-rental bill and anger a lot of Middle Eastern persons. None of the animals turned into oil, although most of the laboratory rats developed cancer.

[From "Postpetroleum Guzzler"] 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.

[From "In Search of Excellence"] ...This striving for excellence extends into people's personal lives as well. When '80s people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an '80s couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves waiting, their beepers going off like crickets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn't have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.

[From "What is Electricity?"] Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

[From "Simple, Homespun Gifts"] We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right in his bowl full of jelly.

[From "An Utterly Absurd Look at Grammar"] What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: "Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America," or "Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II."

[From "Simple, Homespun Gifts"] Why not have an old-fashioned Christmas for your family this year? Just picture the scene in your living room on Christmas morning as your children open their old-fashioned presents.
Your 11-year-old son:
        What the heck is this?
You:        A spinning top! You spin it around, and then eventually it falls down. What fun! Ha, ha!
Son:        Is this a joke? Jason Thompson's parents got him a computer with two disk drives and 128 kilobytes of random-access memory, and I get this cretin TOP?
Your 8-year-old daughter:
        You think that's bad? Look at this.
You:        It's figgy pudding! What a treat!
Daughter:    It looks like goat barf.

     Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

[From "Postpetroleum Guzzler"] Wood is highly ecological, since trees are a renewable resource. If you cut down a tree, another will grow in its place. And if you cut down the new tree, still another will grow. And if you cut down that tree, yet another will grow, only this one will be a mutation with long, poisonous tentacles and revenge in its heart, and it will sit there in the forest, cackling and making elaborate plans for when you come back.
     Wood heat is not new. It dates back to a day millions of years ago, when a group of cavemen were sitting around, watching dinosaurs rot. Suddenly, lightning struck a nearby log and set it on fire. One of the cavemen stared at the fire for a few minutes, then said: "Hey! Wood heat!" The other cavemen, who did not understand English, immediately beat him to death with stones. But the key discovery had been made, and from that day forward, the cavemen had all the heat they needed, although their insurance rates went way up.

[From "Simple, Homespun Gifts"] You can always tell the Christmas season is here when you start getting incredibly dense, tinfoil-and-ribbon- wrapped lumps in the mail. Fruitcakes make ideal gifts because the Postal Service has been unable to find a way to damage them. They last forever, largely because nobody ever eats them. In fact, many smart people save the fruitcakes they receive and send them back to the original givers the next year; some fruitcakes have been passed back and forth for hundreds of years.
     The easiest way to make a fruitcake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet. Be sure to wear safety glasses.

[From "Sweating Out Taxes"] You first have to decide whether to use the short or the long form. The short form is what the Internal Revenue Service calls "simplified", which means it is designed for people who need the help of a Sears tax-preparation expert to distinguish between their first and last names. Here's the complete text:
1.    How much did you make? (AMOUNT)
2.    How much did we here at the government take out? (AMOUNT)
3.    Hey! Sounds like we took too much! So we're going to send an official government check for (ONE-FIFTEENTH OF THE AMOUNT WE TOOK) directly to the (YOUR LAST NAME) household at (YOUR ADDRESS), for you to spend in any way you please! Which just goes to show you, (YOUR FIRST NAME), that it pays to file the short form!"
     The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form.

[From "How to Dress for Real Success"] 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.

[From "Postpetroleum Guzzler"] You should not use your fireplace, because scientists now believe that, contrary to popular opinion, fireplaces actually remove heat from houses. Really, that's what scientists believe. In fact many scientists actually use their fireplaces to cool their houses in the summer. If you visit a scientist's house on a sultry August day, you'll find a cheerful fire roaring on the hearth and the scientist sitting nearby, remarking on how cool he is and drinking heavily.