Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (25 page)

I realize that many of you laugh at stories of the paranormal. “Ha ha,” you say. But the truth is that the world is full
of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example. There are many other documented cases of baffling supernatural occurrences. Consider these examples:

• Early in the morning of October 8,1991, Mrs. Florence A. Snegg of Uvula, Michigan, was having an extremely vivid dream in which her son, Russell, was involved in a terrible automobile accident. Suddenly she was awakened by the ringing of her telephone. On the line was a Missouri state trooper, calling long distance to remind Mrs. Snegg that she had never had children
  .
  

• On the afternoon of March 13,1993, Winchester B. Fleen of Toad Sphincter, Arkansas, was abducted by hostile, large-brained beings who drilled holes in his head, probed him with giant needles, pumped chemicals into his body, took samples of his organs, and removed most of his bodily fluids before they found out that he did not have health insurance, at which point they released him back into the hospital waiting room
  .
  

• On the morning of July 3, 1994, seven-year-old Jason Toastwanker fell off his tricycle, hit his head, and was knocked out. When he regained consciousness, he spoke to his parents
  in fluent German.
  This did not surprise them, because they were Germans and this happened in Germany. What surprised them was that, before the accident, he had cleaned up his room
  without being asked.
  

• On February 12 of this year, Thelma Crumpet-Scone of New York City purchased a Whopper at Burger King; when she started to eat it, she bit her own finger, causing a painful red mark for several minutes. Incredibly, she decided that this was
  totally her fault,
  and she
  did not sue anybody.
  

Impossible, you say? Perhaps so, but all of these incidents, along with hundreds more that have not occurred to me yet, have been thoroughly documented by the Institute for Documenting Things Thoroughly The lesson is this: Before you say something is “impossible,” you would be wise to remember the old saying: “Truth is stranger than fiction, especially when ‘truth’ is being defined by the O.J. Simpson defense team.” And thus when you consider the New Zealand tree-sheep article, the question you must ask yourself is: “How can I, keeping an open mind, best explain what happened?”

The answer is: “Read the rest of the article, you moron.” It turns out that the sheep had fallen from a helicopter. The pilot had been transporting—I am not making up this quote—”some ewes that had died from sleepy sickness,” and the wire that was holding the sheep under the helicopter broke. Incredibly, the pilot had been warned about this the night before in a telephone call from a Missouri state trooper.

No, I made that last part up. But the rest of the story is true, which raises the following alarming questions for those who live in, or plan to visit, New Zealand:

• it a common practice there to transport deceased sheep via helicopter?
  

• If one of these sheep were to land on you, would you get “sleepy sickness”?
  

• What about Mad Cow Disease?
  

For the record, tree sheep are not the only bizarre phenomenon to occur lately in New Zealand. I have here a document, sent in by alert reader Gretl Collins, stating that a
researcher in New Zealand has discovered a new, improved method for growing tomatoes hydroponically. (“Hydroponically” comes from the Greek words “hydro,” meaning “a,” and “ponically,” meaning “way of growing tomatoes.”) According to the document, the researcher has found that he gets excellent results when he grows the tomatoes in: brassieres. I am not making this up. This leads to still MORE questions, including:

• Does this give new meaning to the expression “Get a load of those tomatoes”?
  

• Would it be tasteless to make a joke here about growing zucchini in athletic supporters?
  

• What about Mad Tomato Disease?
  

There’s probably nothing to worry about, but until we get some answers, I think everybody should panic for a while and then get some sleep. I myself am suddenly feeling VERY sleepy, so I’m just going to put my head down and…

Moo.

T
oday we present another part of our ongoing series, “Stuff That Guys Do.”

Our first example of guys doing stuff comes from the
University of Washington Daily
, which on February 27 published a report written by Jeremy Simer and sent in by alert reader Donna Bellinger, headlined “Fraternity Game Turns Into Arrest.”

What happened, according to this report, was that some guys were up on the roof of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity house, and, as guys will do when they spend any time together in an elevated location, they began sharing their innermost feelings.

I am of course kidding. These guys, being guys, began dropping things off the roof, starting with smaller items, and eventually escalating—this is when the police were summoned—to a chair and a rowing machine.

A fraternity member is quoted as follows: “We’re frat guys. What can you say?”

Far be it from me to indulge in sex stereotyping here, but I am willing to bet that the reaction of you readers to this story is divided along gender lines, as follows:

The simple truth is that guys have this overpowering urge to watch stuff fall and crash. If you ever see an inappropriate object, such as a piano, hurtling toward the Earth from a great height, you can be virtually certain that guys are responsible.

Ask yourself this question: If you were standing in the middle of a bridge spanning a magnificent wilderness gorge, at the bottom of which was a spectacular Whitewater river, what would you do?

Yes, the truth is that there are few things that a guy enjoys more than proudly watching a gob of spit—HIS spit; spit that HE produced—falling a tremendous distance. This is a male impulse that females frankly cannot relate to, just as males cannot relate to the female impulse to go into greeting-card stores and spend hours shopping for greeting cards even when there is no particular occasion or person you need to send a greeting card to, which is what women frequently do when guys are out spitting.

I am not suggesting here that all guys ever do is drop stuff. Sometimes they also throw stuff, and sometimes this can lead to trouble. I have in my possession an official U.S. government memorandum, sent to me by an alert but anonymous reader, that was written last year by Paul E.
Thompson, acting director, Western Region, Inspection Operations, Food and Safety Inspection Service, United States Department of Agriculture.

Here is the first paragraph of this memorandum, which I absolutely swear I am not making up:

“This is to remind all personnel of the danger and inadvisability of engaging in activities commonly referred to as ‘Horseplay.’ A few examples of horseplay include, but are not limited to: throwing spleens, squirting water, and flipping lymph nodes.”

In professional journalism, we have an old saying that we frequently say, which goes like this: “You do not print a story about federal employees engaging in horseplay involving spleens or lymph nodes without making a sincere effort to get the other side.” So I contacted the USDA’s Western Region office, which is located—and let this be a lesson to those who claim that the federal government is poorly managed—in the West.

I spoke with Dr. Bruce Kaplan, a public affairs specialist, who explained that, “on rare occasions,” poultry and meat inspectors, as well as plant employees, will become bored and flip meat and poultry organs at each other. (He did not specifically state that these were guys doing this, but some things go without saying.)

“In the poultry plants, they will flip spleens,” explained Dr. Kaplan. “In the red-meat plants, they will flip lymph nodes.”

Dr. Kaplan stressed that “there is absolutely no danger in terms of food safety.” The problem, he said, is the safety of plant workers: “When they walk on the floor where these organs fall, they could slip.”

In hopes of making the public more aware of the potential danger. I asked Dr. Kaplan to describe a poultry spleen.

“These are little small spleens,” he explained. “They’re tiny little slippery spleens.”

I think we can draw several conclusions from this story:

1. First and foremost, “Slippery Spleens” would be an excellent name for a rock band.
   

2. Although it has become fashionable to knock “big government,” we must not forget that, without the quick and decisive action by the USDA in the form of acting director Thompson’s memorandum, the ordinary public, in the form of food-plant workers, would have no protection from the threat of slipping on organs flipped by USDA inspectors.
   

3. If the USDA ever has a shortage of inspectors, it should definitely consider recruiting members of Theta Delta Chi.
   

R
ecently the federal government, as part of its ongoing effort to become part of the same solar system as the rest of us, decided to eliminate the National Pretend Speed Limit.

As you are aware, for many years the National Pretend Speed Limit was 55 miles per hour (metric equivalent: 378 kilograms per hectare). This limit was established back during the Energy Crisis, when America went through a scary gasoline shortage caused by the fact that for about six straight months, everybody in America spent every waking moment purchasing gasoline. Remember? We all basically went insane. The instant our car’s fuel gauge got down to fifteen-sixteenths of a tank, we raced to a service station and spent a couple of hours waiting in line with hundreds of other gasoline-obsessed Americans. It’s still a mystery why we did this. Maybe some kind of brain-damaging chemical got in our national water supply, because around the same time everybody also got into disco.

So anyway, the Energy Crisis came to the attention of the federal government, which, swinging into action as only our federal government can, told everybody to get swine-flu shots.

No, wait, that was another crisis. What the federal government
did in this particular crisis was declare, in 1974, a National Pretend Speed Limit of 55. This has been strictly observed everywhere except on the actual roads, where the
real
speed limit—the one actually enforced by the police—is a secret, unposted number ranging between 63 and 78, unless an individual police officer does not care for the way you look, in which case the speed limit is zero.

The result is that, for over twenty years, virtually everybody in the United States has been violating the speed limit except for Ralph Nader and elderly people wearing hats. (This system is similar to the one used in foreign countries such as Italy, where the government puts strict-looking speed-limit signs everywhere, but nobody ever sees them because light does not travel fast enough to catch the Italian drivers.)

So finally our government, facing reality, has decided to abolish the National Pretend Speed Limit and let individual states decide how fast drivers can go. The most interesting response so far has come from the extremely rural state of Montana (Official Motto: “Moo”), which announced that there would be
no speed limit
during daylight hours. I was frankly amazed when I read this in the newspaper. I mean, I am not a legal scholar, but to me “no speed limit” means that, theoretically, you can go 400 miles per hour, right?

If that were true, Montana would immediately become an extremely popular destination for your average guy driver on vacation with his family, because guys like to cover a tremendous amount of ground. A guy in Vacation Driving Mode prefers not to stop the car at all except in the case of a bursting appendix, and even then he’s likely to say, “Can you hold it a little longer? We’re only 157 miles from Leech World!” So if there really were no speed limit, a vacationing guy with the right kind of car—by which I mean
“the kind of car that has to be stopped with a parachute”—could cover all of Montana in approximately an hour.