Quotations by:
Barry, Dave
I cannot overemphasize the importance of good 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.”
I have never gotten into wine. I’m a beer man. What I like about beer is you basically just drink it, then you order another one. You don’t sniff at it, or hold it up to the light and slosh it around, and above all you don’t drone on and on about it, the way people do with wine. Your beer drinker tends to be a straightforward, decent, friendly, down-to-earth person who enjoys talking about the importance of relief pitching, whereas your serious wine fancier tends to be an insufferable snot.
It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who have a genuine medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.
Dave Barry (b. 1947) American humorist
“Decaf Poopacino,” Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down! (2000)
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Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television’s message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath.
Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall. We traditionally do this in my family by driving around the parking lot until we see a shopper emerge from the mall, then we follow her, in very much the same spirit as the Three Wise Men, who 2,000 years ago followed a star, week after week, until it led them to a parking space.
Puns are little ‘plays on words’ that a certain breed of person loves to spring on you and then look at you in a certain self-satisfied way to indicate that he thinks that you must think that he is by far the cleverest person on Earth now that Benjamin Franklin is dead, when in fact what you are thinking is that if this person ever ends up in a lifeboat, the other passengers will hurl him overboard by the end of the first day even if they have plenty of food and water.
I demand to know how much longer the so-called “authorities” intend to continue ignoring the international spate of alarming incidents involving bosoms.
At this point you’re thinking: “WHAT international spate of alarming incidents involving bosoms?” Unless, of course, you’re a man, in which case you’re thinking only: “Bosoms!” The male brain has an entire lobe devoted to this topic.
Pornography is like tooth decay, eating slowly away at the molars of our morals, and if it is not stopped we will wind up as a toothless nation, gumming at the raw meat of international competition while the drool of decadence dribbles down our collective chin and messes up the clean tablecloth of our children’s futures.
We were one of those wretched traveling families you see getting on planes — the kind where you don’t actually see the people, just this mound of baby equipment shuffling slowly down the aisle toward you. This sight is always hugely popular with the other passengers, some of whom will yank open the emergency exits and dive out of the plane. Because they know what babies do on planes: They stand on their parents’ laps and stick their heads up over the seats, so they can get maximum range when they shriek. On a baby-intensive airplane, you see shrieking baby heads constantly popping up all over, like prairie dogs from hell.
Nothing is ever really buried in a meeting. An idea may look dead, but it will always reappear at another meeting later on. If you have ever seen the movie Night of the Living Dead, you have a rough idea how modern corporations and organizations operate, with projects and proposals that everybody thought were killed constantly rising from their graves to stagger back into meetings and eat the brains of the living.
The function of RAM is to give us guys a way of deciding whose computer has the biggest, studliest, most tumescent MEMORY. This is important, because with today’s complex software, the more memory a computer has, the faster it can produce error messages. So the bottom line is, if you’re a guy, you cannot have enough RAM.
Why do we get older? Why do our bodies wear out? Why can’t we just go on and on and on, accumulating a potentially infinite number of Frequent Flier mileage points? These are the kinds of questions that philosophers have been asking ever since they realized that being a philosopher did not involve any heavy lifting.
And yet the answer is really very simple: Our bodies are mechanical devices, and like all mechanical devices, they break down. Some devices, such as battery-operated toys costing $39.95, break down almost instantly upon exposure to the Earth’s atmosphere. Other devices, such as stereo systems owned by your next-door neighbor’s 13-year-old son who likes to listen to bands with names like “Nerve Damage” at a volume capable of disintegrating limestone, will continue to function perfectly for many years, even if you hit them with an ax. But the fundamental law of physics is that sooner or later every mechanism ceases to function for one reason or another, and it is never covered under the warranty.Dave Barry (b. 1947) American humorist
Dave Barry Turns 40, ch. 2 “Your Disintegrating Body” (1990)
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Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.
If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He WILL NOT use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.
Toddlers have plenty of energy. During a standard restaurant meal, a standard toddler can easily toddle fifty-eight miles in totally random directions, while your hamburger cools and eventually reverts to a frozen patty. You have to follow toddlers closely at all times, because they could cheerfully toddle right out the door and into the path of a cement truck.
There are vital reasons why guys are interested in technology, and women should not give them a hard time about always wanting to have the “latest gadget.” And when I say “women,” I mean “my wife.” For example, as a guy, I feel I need a new computer every time a new model comes out, which is every fifteen minutes. This baffles my wife, who has had the same computer since the Civil War and refuses to get a new one because — get THIS for an excuse — the one she has works fine.
The Humvee has a feature that allows you to inflate or deflate your tires as you drive. In a perfect guy universe this would seriously impress women.
GUY: “Look! I can inflate the tires as I drive!”
WOMAN: “Pull over right now, so we can engage in wanton carnality!”
Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t work this way. I know this because when I took my wife for a ride in the Humvee, we had this conversation:
ME: “Look! I can inflate the tires as I drive!”
MY WIFE: “Why?”
In 1995, at the Citadel — the South Carolina military academy where courageous specimens of Southern manhood receive the rigorous training and character development they need to be able to fight any enemy, meet any challenge, and face any danger — many courageous manhood specimens became extremely upset when, for a little while, they had to go to school with — Yikes! — a girl! Oh no! Cooties!
A Harris survey was released showing that 70 percent of men do not view birth control as their responsibility. This resulted in the usual round of male-bashing by the usual critics, who as usual failed to note the many areas in which men take on MORE than their fair share of responsibility; such as spider-killing, channel-changing, referee-critiquing, scratching, and traffic gestures.
Women often ask, “What do men really want, deep in their souls?” The best answer — based on in-depth analysis of the complex and subtle interplay of thought, instinct, and emotion that constitutes the male psyche — is that, deep in their souls, men want to watch stuff go “bang.”
No matter how much you love your spouse, eventually the smooth unblemished surface of your relationship will be marred by a small pimple of anger, which, if ignored, can grow into a major festering zit of rage that will explode and spew forth a really disgusting metaphor that I don’t wish to pursue any further here.
We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to no one in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.
The commitment problem has caused many women to mistakenly conclude that men, as a group, have the emotional maturity of hamsters. This is not the case. A hamster is much more capable of making a lasting commitment to a woman, especially if she gives it those little food pellets. Whereas a guy, in a relationship, will consume the pellets of companionship, and he will run on the exercise wheel of lust, but as soon as he senses the door of commitment is about to close and trap him in the wire cage of true intimacy, he’ll squirm out, scamper across the kitchen floor of uncertainty, and hide under the refrigerator of nonreadiness.
Dave Barry (b. 1947) American humorist
The Greatest Invention in the History of Mankind is Beer (2001)
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