Category Archive 'Dave Barry'

28 Jun 2019

Dave Barry Reports From Miami

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Not an accurate debate list, but does it really matter? Who can possibly keep track of all of them?

Dave Barry doesn’t actually summarize the two-night democrat candidates debate.

Miami faces many daunting challenges. We have hurricanes, rising sea levels, overdevelopment, hellish traffic, lunatic drivers and air so humid it’s like breathing whale snot. We have bionic mosquitoes, hallucinogenic toads, termites that can chew through concrete, cockroaches the size of adolescent gerbils and snakes the length of municipal buses. We have alligators lurking on our lawns, lizards lounging on our ceilings and peacocks pooping on our cars. We’ve had bales of marijuana wash up on our beaches and bags of cocaine fall from the sky. We once had a live shark on the Metromover. For a while we even had O.J. Simpson.

So we Miamians have dealt with a lot. But never have we faced a challenge like the one we are facing this week: The largest mass of presidential contenders ever to descend upon an American city.

Nobody is certain exactly how many of them there are, but the estimates range into the dozens, and they are putting serious pressure on our fragile ecosystem. As a local meteorologist explained: “Every single one of these people is constantly emitting policy positions. When you concentrate this many presidential contenders in one place, you have a massive quantity of policies being expelled into the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide. It’s not a coincidence that since these people arrived, Miami has been hotter than Satan’s jockstrap.”

The reason all these candidates are here, of course, is the big Democratic Debate at the Arsht (Gesundheit!) Center. It’s actually two debates, taking place over two nights. Even then, there is room for only 20 candidates, so they had to qualify to participate based on their performance in polls, fundraising, the egg toss and the swimsuit competition.

his means some declared candidates did not make the cut. These include Steve Bullock, the governor of Montana; Seth Moulton, a congressman from Massachusetts, Wayne Messam, the mayor of Miramar; and Harvey Heckman, which is a name I just now made up, but because I am mentioning him in this column he will probably soon be polling at least as well as Steve, Seth and Wayne.

These debates are the first big Democratic event of the 2020 presidential election, in which Florida will play a crucial role, because we are a “swing state,” defined as “a state that is totally incompetent at holding elections.” If states were “Godfather” characters, Florida would definitely be Fredo. We have NO idea how to count votes. Anybody can win here. In 2016 at least two Florida counties, as far as we can tell, went for Vladimir Putin.

So the stakes are high, which is why this week the political eyeballs of the nation are turned toward Miami. The next Democratic presidential nominee will be one of the people participating in these debates, unless my man Harvey starts to gain traction. That is why these debates are so important, and that is why all of us, as concerned citizens, should consider it our civic duty to watch all four hours of these debates unless something more entertaining is on, for example “Bob’s Burgers” (the Toon Channel).

RTWT

HT: Bill Laffer.

06 Mar 2014

Dave Barry Reads “Fifty Shades of Grey”

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Dave Barry reads Fifty Shades of Grey.

What women want, to judge from Fifty Shades of Grey, is not just people doing It. Many pages go by in this book without any of It getting done, although there is a great deal of thinking and talking about It. The thoughts are provided by the narrator and main character, Anastasia Steele, who is a twenty-one-year-old American woman as well as such a clueless, self-absorbed ninny that you, the reader, find yourself wishing that you still smoked so you would have a cigarette lighter handy and thus could set fire to certain pages, especially the ones where Anastasia is telling you about her “inner goddess.” This is a hyperactive imaginary being—I keep picturing Tinker Bell—who reacts in a variety of ways to the many dramatic developments in Anastasia’s life, as we see in these actual quotes:

    “My inner goddess is swaying and writhing to some primal carnal rhythm.”
    “My very small inner goddess sways in a gentle victorious samba.”
    “My inner goddess is doing the Dance of Seven Veils.”
    “My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.”
    “My inner goddess has stopped dancing and is staring, too, mouth open and drooling slightly.”
    “My inner goddess jumps up and down, with cheerleading pom-poms, shouting ‘Yes’ at me.”
    “My inner goddess is doing backflips in a routine worthy of a Russian Olympic gymnast.”
    “My inner goddess pole-vaults over the fifteen-foot bar.”
    “My inner goddess fist-pumps the air above her chaise longue.”

That’s right: Her inner goddess, in addition to dancing, cheerleading, pole vaulting, etc., apparently keeps furniture inside Anastasia’s head. Unfortunately, this means there is little room left for Anastasia’s brain, which, to judge from her thought process, is about the size of a walnut.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to the Barrister.

29 Dec 2013

Year of the Zombies

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Humorist Dave Barry gives us a month-by-month rundown of the year currently slinking like a yellow dog toward its well-deserved end.

The Good News: Anthony Weiner and Eliot Spitzer did not successfully revive their loathsome political careers. The Bad News: New York City instead elected a Stalinist mayor, who is scheduled, it was recently reported, to be sworn in by Bill Clinton. To which news, Christopher Buckley responded: “Bill Clinton is swearing in De Blasio? On what, a stack of Playboys?”

October

… the federal government, in an unthinkable development that we cannot even think about, partially shuts down. The result is a catastrophe of near-sequester proportions. Within hours wolves are roaming the streets of major U.S. cities, and bacteria the size of mature salmon are openly cavorting in the nation’s water supply. In the Midwest, thousands of cows, no longer supervised by the Department of Agriculture, spontaneously explode. Yellowstone National Park — ALL of it — is stolen. In some areas gravity stops working altogether, forcing people to tie themselves to trees so they won’t float away. With the nation virtually defenseless, the Bermudan army invades the East Coast, within hours capturing Delaware and most of New Jersey.

By day 17, the situation has become so dire that Congress, resorting to desperate measures, decides to actually do something. It passes, and the president signs, a law raising the debt ceiling, thereby ensuring that the federal government can continue spending spectacular quantities of money that it does not have until the next major totally unforeseeable government financial crisis, scheduled for February 2014.

Things do not go nearly as smoothly with the rollout of Obamacare , which turns out to have a lot of problems despite being conceived of by super-smart people with extensive experience in the field of being former student council presidents.

03 Jan 2012

Goodbye, 2011, Don’t Let the Door, Etc.

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Dave Barry
bids an unfond farewell to a year that was not much fun for most Americans.

It was the kind of year that made a person look back fondly on the gulf oil spill.

Granted, the oil spill was bad. But it did not result in a high-decibel, weeks-long national conversation about a bulge in a congressman’s underpants. Which is exactly what we had in the Festival of Sleaze that was 2011. Remember? There were days when you could not escape The Bulge. At dinnertime, parents of young children had to be constantly ready to hurl themselves in front of their TV screens, for fear that it would suddenly appear on the news in high definition. For a brief (Har!) period, The Bulge was more famous than Justin Bieber.

And when, at last, we were done with The Bulge, and we were able to turn our attention to the presidential election, and the important issues facing us, as a nation, in these troubled times, it turned out that the main issue, to judge by quantity of press coverage, was: groping.

So finally, repelled by the drainage ditch that our political system has become, we turned for escape to an institution that represents all that is pure and wholesome and decent in America today: college football.

That was when we started to have fond memories of the oil spill.

I’m not saying that the entire year was ruined by sleaze. It was also ruined by other bad things. This was a year in which journalism was pretty much completely replaced by tweeting. It was a year in which a significant earthquake struck Washington, yet failed to destroy a single federal agency. It was a year in which the nation was subjected to a seemingly endless barrage of highly publicized pronouncements from Charlie Sheen, a man who, where you have a central nervous system, has a Magic 8-Ball. This was a year in which the cast members of “Jersey Shore” went to Italy and then — in an inexcusable lapse of border security — were allowed to return.

But all of these developments, unfortunate as they were, would not by themselves have made 2011 truly awful. What made it truly awful was the economy, which, for what felt like the 17th straight year, continued to stagger around like a zombie on crack. Nothing seemed to help. President Obama, whose instinctive reaction to pretty much everything that happens, including sunrise, is to deliver a nationally televised address, delivered numerous nationally televised addresses on the economy, but somehow these did not do the trick. Neither did the approximately 37 million words emitted by the approximately 249 Republican-presidential-contender televised debates, out of which the single most memorable statement made was, quote: “Oops.”

As the year wore on, frustration finally boiled over in the form of the Occupy Various Random Spaces movement, wherein people who were sick and tired of a lot of stuff finally got off their butts and started working for meaningful change via direct action in the form of sitting around and forming multiple committees and drumming and not directly issuing any specific demands but definitely having a lot of strongly held views for and against a wide variety of things. Incredibly, even this did not bring about meaningful change. The economy remained wretched, especially unemployment, which got so bad that many Americans gave up even trying to work. Congress, for example. …

Complete article.

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

30 Dec 2007

Dave Barry’s Year in Review

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A departing look at 2007 from Dave Barry:

It was a year that strode boldly into the stall of human events and took a wide stance astride the porcelain bowl of history.

It was year in which roughly 17,000 leading presidential contenders, plus of course Dennis Kucinich, held roughly 63,000 debates, during which they spewed out roughly 153 trillion words; and yet the only truly memorable phrase emitted in any political context was “Don’t tase me, bro!”

It was a year filled with bizarre, insane, destructive behavior, an alarming amount of which involved astronauts.

In short, 2007 was a year of deep gloom, pierced occasionally by rays of even deeper gloom. Oh, sure, there were a few bright spots:

• Several courageous members of the U.S. Congress — it could be as many as a dozen — decided, incredibly, not to run for president.

• O.J. Simpson discovered that, although you might be able to avoid jail time for committing a double homicide, the justice system draws the line at attempted theft of sports memorabilia.

• Toward the end of the year, entire days went by when it was possible to not think about Paris Hilton.

• Apple released the iPhone, which, as we understand it, enables users to fly, cure cancer, read minds and travel through time. …


Complete column
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