Dave Barry Quotes

Ha ha! We are just poking a little friendly fun at Germany, which is famous for enjoying a good joke, or as the Germans say, "Sprechnehaltenzoltenfussenmachschnitzerkalbenrollen." Here is just one hilarious example of what we are talking about: First German: "How many Polish people does it take to screw in a light bulb?"
Second German: "I don't know! How many?"
First German: "Let's invade Poland and find out!"
Millions of Other Germans: "Okay!"

First of all, let's dispense with this absurd stereotype that the French are rude. The French are not rude. They just happen to hate you.

Denmark (also called "Norway") is best known as the original home of the prune Danish as well as the Vikings, who wore hats with horns sticking out of them, and for a very good reason: they were insane.

Vermont: See New Hampshire

But Nebraska was not always a bed of roses. When the first settlers arrived, they found a harsh, unforgiving place, a vast treeless expanse of barren, drought-parched soil. And so, summoning up the dynamic pioneer spirit of hope and steely determination, they left. But a few of them remained and built sod houses, which are actually made of dirt. Think about that. You can't clean a sod house, because it would be gone. The early settlers had a hell of a time getting this through to their children. "You kids stop tracking dirt out of the house!" they'd yell.

During the warm season (August 8 and 9), Maine is a true "vacation paradise," offering visitors a chance to jump into crystal-clear mountain lakes and see if they can get back out again before their bodily tissue is frozen as solid as a supermarket turkey.

What Dad means by "see" of course, is "drive past at 67 miles per hour." Dad feels it is a foolish waste of valuable vacation time to get out of the car and actually go look at an attraction.

I took an estimated two thousand years of high school French, and when I finally got to France, I discovered that I didn't know one single phrase that was actually useful in a real-life French situation.

We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there's a part of us that wants - that needs - to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new traveler's checks, buy new souvenirs, order new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for "transfusion," and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to french-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.

You get the idea. The main thing is, don't be discreet. We Boomers have never been a discreet generation, and I see no reason why we should fade quietly away just because we're getting old. Let's not go out with a whimper. Let's go out proudly whapping the umbrella of defiance on the taxicab hood of time. Let's remember the words of that rock song from the sixties, the anthem of our entire generation, the unforgettable song that spoke for all of us when it said... when it said... ummm... Jeez, how the hell did that song go?

I'll tell you what's weird. Not only is our generation turning into Republicans, but we also have a whole generation coming after us who are starting out as Republicans. With the exception of the few dozen spittle-emitting radicals I saw in Atlanta, the younger generations today are already so conservative they make William F. Buckley, Jr., look like Ho Chi Minh. What I'm wondering is, what will they be like when they're our age? Will they, too, change their political philosophy? Will millions of young urban professionals turn 40 and all of a sudden start turning into left-wing, antiestablishment hippies, smoking pot on the racquetball court, putting Che Guevara posters up in the conference room, and pasting flower decals all over their cellular telephones? It is an exciting time to look forward to. I plan to be dead.

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who would stop to help you change your flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy. The Republicans, on the other hand, would know how to fix your tire, but they wouldn't bother to stop because they'd want to be on time for Ugly Pants Night at the country club. Also, the Republicans have a high Beady-Eyed Self-Righteous Scary Borderline Loon Quotient, as evidenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, the entire state of Utah, etc.

I base my opinions on several years of working in an office located in a house with a large transient little-boy population. Individually they're okay, but if two of them get together, their combined IQ is halved, and if a third boy comes along it's halved again, and so on, so that if you have, say, six of them, you're talking about the destructive force of a tank commanded by the brainpower of a Labrador retriever. They communicate with each other by slamming doors. They have the attention span of gnats. "STOP SLAMMING THE DOORS!" I'll yell at them. "Okay!" they'll reply (SLAM). They are so busy running around and arguing and breaking things and strewing random objects over every square inch of floor that they barely have time to pee, and they definitely don't have time to aim. They just race into the bathroom, let loose in any old random direction, and then race out again, because by God there are doors to be slammed.

So in some ways I'm relieved that I don't have daughters, although in other ways I envy people with daughters, because little girls tend to be thoughtful, whereas little boys tend to be- and I say this as a loving father who would not trade his son for anything in the world- jerks. I used to think this was society's fault. This was back in the idealistic sixties and seventies, when we Boomers had many excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children. Remember those days? Remember when we truly believed that if society treated boys and girls exactly the same, then they wouldn't be bound by sexual stereotypes, and the boys could grow up to be sensitive and the girls could grow up to be linebackers? Ha ha! Boy, were we ever idealistic! By which I mean "stupid." Because when we look at actual children, no matter how they are raised, we notice immediately that little girls are in fact smaller versions of human beings, whereas little boys are Pod People from the Planet Destructo. I don't think society has anything to do with this. I think that if you had two desert islands, and you put girl babies on one island and boy babies on another island, and they were somehow able to survive with no help from adult society, eventually the girls would cooperate in collecting pieces of driftwood and using them to build shelters, whereas the boys would pretend that driftwood pieces were guns. (Yes, I realize they'd have no way of knowing what guns were. This would not stop them.) Not only that, but even if the island had 176,000 pieces of driftwood on it, the boys would all end up violently arguing over one of them.

I'll tell you what would really age me fast: if I had a teenaged daughter. I don't think I could handle that. Because that would mean teenaged boys would be coming around to my house. "Hi, Mr. Barry!" they'd say, with their cheerful, innocent young voices. "We're here to have sex with your daughter!" No, of course they wouldn't come out and say that, but I know that's what they'd be thinking, because I was a teenaged boy once, and I was basically a walking hormone storm. I'm sure modern boys are no different. So if I had a teenaged daughter, and a boy came to my house, after somehow picking his way through the land mines in the lawn, I'd probably lunge through the screen door and strangle him right there ("Hi, Mr. Barry! Is Jennifer heAAAAAAAWWWWK"). You think I'm exaggerating, but I have male friends whose daughters are approaching puberty at speeds upwards of 700 miles per hour, and when you say the word "dating," my friends get a look in their eyes that makes Charles Manson look like Captain Kangaroo.