I swear I am not making this up…
July 3, 2018
The ability to write humor is, in my opinion, one of the hardest things to do. Too often the humor is lost on the reader and they are left thinking “umm?”
For years I’ve read and enjoyed the humor of Dave Barry who turns 70 on J
uly 3. His nationally syndicated column ran from 1983 to 2005. Additionally, he’s written numerous books which highlight some of the more ridiculous aspects of modern American life.
His 27 published books have ranged from observations on parenthood, to musings on growing older, as well as Dave’s own unique take on history. Even the titles of his books are humorous. Here are a few of my favorite titles:
- The Taming of the Screw (1983)
- Claw Your Way to the Top: How to Become the Head of a Major Corporation in Roughly a Week (1986)
- Dave Barry Slept Here: A Sort of History of the United States (1989)
- Dave Barry’s Gift Guide to End All Gift Guides (1994)
- “My Teenage Son’s Goal in Life is to Make Me Feel 3,500 Years Old” and Other Thoughts On Parenting From Dave Barry (2001)
- “The Greatest Invention in the History Of Mankind Is Beer” And Other Manly Insights From Dave Barry (2001)
- Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster): Life Lessons and Other Ravings from Dave Barry (2015)
Here’s what the Infallible Wikipedia has to say about Barry’s career:
“Barry began his journalism career in 1971, working as a general-assignment reporter for the Daily Local News in West Chester, Pennsylvania, near his alma mater, Haverford College. He covered local government and civic events and was promoted to City Editor after about two years. He also started writing a weekly humor column for the paper and began to develop his unique style. He remained at the newspaper through 1974. He then worked briefly as a copy editor at the Associated Press‘s Philadelphia bureau before joining Burger Associates, a consulting firm.
At Burger, he taught effective writing to business people. In his own words, he ‘spent nearly eight years trying to get various businesspersons to…stop writing things like ‘Enclosed please find the enclosed enclosures,’ but…eventually realized that it was hopeless.’
In 1981 he wrote a humorous guest column, about watching the birth of his son, in the Philadelphia Inquirer, which attracted the attention of Gene Weingarten, then an editor of the Miami Herald‘s Sunday magazine Tropic. Weingarten hired Barry as a humor columnist in 1983. Barry’s column was syndicated nationally. Barry won a Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1988 for ‘his consistently effective use of humor as a device for presenting fresh insights into serious concerns.’
(snip) In response to a column in which Barry mocked the cities of Grand Forks, North Dakota, and East Grand Forks, Minnesota, for calling themselves the ‘Grand Cities’, Grand Forks named a sewage pumping station after Barry in January 2002. Barry traveled to Grand Forks for the dedication ceremony.”
Barry is perhaps best known for the following sentence which often precedes some outrageous and humorous ‘fact’ – “I swear I am not making this up.”
Although I read Barry’s columns for several years, it was a book given to me by a young Mom, Vicki, which really made me a fan.
The year was 1989 and I was pregnant with my son. As her two boys were now beyond the stage of needing cribs and car seats, Vicki, gave me piles of gear. The real gem among the stuff was Dave’s book Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months With Tools You Probably Have Around the Home (1984)
In the course of incubating my own small human I had time to read the book. There was lots of humorous stuff between the pages and I laughed at much of it. At the time I thought he was exaggerating. It wasn’t until AFTER my son was born that I came to appreciate the truth in his whimsical look at parenthood and maybe, just maybe, he WASN’T making it up.
Of all the lines in the book (I’m paraphrasing) it was this one which I did not understand until sometime in 1990:
“The best time to feed your baby is just before the phone rings and right after you’ve gone to sleep.”
For anyone who’s been a parent you know exactly what that means… for the rest of you? Well, check out any one of his other books to brighten your day.
Two links for you:
Over the years Coney Island was truly ground zero for amusement rides, especially the roller coaster.
When you ride the Matterhorn, according to the promotional Disney website, you will:
When I first visited Disneyland in the summer of 1970, the ride, called “Mine Train through Nature’s Wonderland,” was a sedate meander through an array of western landscapes including mountains, deserts, and geyser basins. My parents, my sister and I enjoyed the ride at the time, not realizing that it was destined to be re-purposed. The ride was closed in early 1977 and reopened as a roller coaster in September 1979.
It was on June 19, 1971 when her double sided single It’s Too Late/I Feel The Earth Move hit number one on the Billboard charts and remained there for five weeks.
In the summer of 1971, Tapestry was one of three albums which I wore out. The angst of King’s songs spoke – not only to me – but to a whole generation of teenagers experiencing love and heartbreak for the first time. Although I couldn’t directly relate to the lyrics of It’s Too Late, there was a sadness and loneliness which emanated loud and clear. It was a perfect breakup song.
Indeed it is. At 10,541 feet it is the fourth tallest peak in the state and is located a scant 50 miles southeast from where I now live and only 70 miles northeast of Seattle.
Armed with this revelation about Washington’s mostly unknown volcano, my hubby will attest to the fact that I’ve become obsessed. In my weekly or more drives up and down Interstate 5 I have found myself, on clear days, scanning the mountains to the east. Which one is Glacier Peak? And, more importantly, how is it I never knew which one it was and that it’s a volcano?
As always, links to a couple of Infallible Wikipedia articles, USGS, and – for those of you under the age of 50 – Rodney Dangerfield. Gotta have those cultural references.
The woman in question was Anastasia Nikolaevna, better known as the Grand Duchess, daughter of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II. She was born on June 5, 1901.
To add to the intrigue, no less than ten women claimed to have been Anastasia. The most famous was a woman by the name of Anna Anderson who insisted she was the Grand Duchess until the day she died.
And thus ended years of questions and impostors and the mystery of Anastasia turned out not to be a mystery after all.
“Between 1840 and 1850, Wisconsin’s non-Indian population had swollen from 31,000 to 305,000. Over a third of residents (110,500) were foreign born, including 38,000 Germans, 28,000 British immigrants from England, Scotland, and Wales, and 21,000 Irish. Another third (103,000) were Yankees from New England and western New York state. Only about 63,000 residents in 1850 had been born in Wisconsin.”
When I think about visiting Wisconsin, mostly I remember a frightening encounter in the fall of 1980 with a squadron of hungry mosquitoes. Before we get to that, however, let’s talk about how many mosquitoes there are in Wisconsin. A quick internet search reveals that 56 different species have been found in the state and mosquito season starts in early May, reaching its peak during the hottest months of the year. Additionally, mosquitoes thrive when there’s water nearby and, like its neighbor Minnesota, there are a bunch of lakes. Over 15,000 according to one source I found which totals up to 11,000 square miles of water in the state!
It was a nice September day but by the time we arrived at the cemetery it was sunset. I don’t recall how we knew where, exactly, the family was buried but I do know we parked on a road and walked past several rows of headstones before we came to the DeVore clan. I was busy taking photos – there were about a half dozen ancestors there – when we heard ‘the’ sound: the unmistakable whine of a million tiny wings beating their way through the air toward us, their target.
What is amazing to me about the person who said this is that, at the time, he was one of the youngest athletes to win an Olympic Gold medal. The individual? Apolo Ohno.
It was a different song, however, which was just downright weird and creepy and which no one can figure out why the duo recorded it (or the band America for that matter). That song: Muskrat Love.
by having the song’s end run into the locked groove of the 45.”
Around noon he waved at me from outside (my sewing room at the time was our dining room and the windows looked to the east) and pointed to a large maple tree which straddled the property line between us and the neighbor. I looked up to where he was pointing and there were the two raccoons asleep on separate branches some 30 to 40 feet above the ground. The presence of the nocturnal omnivores was observed by all in the house and then everyone continued on with their activities.
When this building opened on May 1, 1931 it was, at 1250 feet, the tallest in the world. More than that, however, it has become an iconic symbol of New York City and America.
It only took two years for the Empire State Building (ESB) to become an American movie favorite location when a rather large ape named King Kong was seen climbing the structure –Fay Wray grasped in his hairy paw – during the final scenes of the film which bore his name.
Through a series of plot twists and turns Annie decides to not go meet him but instead ends up in a Manhattan restaurant with her fiancé on February 14. As fate would have it they are seated near a window with a view of the ESB and Annie looks at the building and knows she must break off her engagement and take a chance with someone she’s seen but never met.
The movie is recognized by the American Film Industry as one of the top 10 in the category of romantic comedy movies. Although the plot is pretty obvious, Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan are just so adorable that they carry it off in a way that leaves women everywhere searching for a tissue.
barbaradevore.com 