Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus (12 page)

I want to stress that this was not all that they had to say about the big bag. They could have gone on for hours if they hadn’t been interrupted by a major news development:
namely, a person walking past pulling a wheeled suitcase. This inspired a whole new train of thought: (“There’s one of those suitcases with those wheels.” “Where?” “There, with those wheels.” “John has one.” “He does?” “With those wheels?” “Yes. He says you just roll it along.” “John does?”)

And so on. It occurred to me that a possible explanation for some plane crashes might be that people like these were sitting close enough to the cockpit for the flight crew to hear them talk (“There’s a cloud.” “Look, there’s
another…”)
and eventually the pilot deliberately flies into the ground to make them shut up.

The thing is, these people clearly didn’t know they were boring. Boring people never do. In fact, no offense, even YOU could be boring. Ask yourself: When you talk to people, do they tend to make vague excuses—”Sorry! Got to run!”—and then walk briskly away? Does this happen even if you are in an elevator?

But even if people listen to you with what appears to be great interest, that doesn’t mean you’re not boring. They could be pretending. When Prince Charles speaks, everybody pretends to be fascinated, even though he has never said anything interesting except in that intercepted telephone conversation wherein he expressed the desire to be a feminine hygiene product.

And even if you’re not Prince Charles, people might have to pretend you’re interesting because they want to sell you something, or have intimate carnal knowledge of you, or because you hold some power over them. At one time I was a co-investor in a small aging apartment building with plumbing and electrical systems that were brought over on the
Mayflower;
my partner and I were regularly visited by the building inspector, who had the power to write us up
for numerous minor building-code infractions, which is why we always pretended to be fascinated when he told us—as he ALWAYS did—about the time he re-plumbed his house. His account of this event was as long as
The Iliad
, but with more soldering. I’m sure he told this story to everybody whose building he ever inspected; he’s probably still telling it, unless some building owner finally strangled him, in which case I bet his wife never reported that he was missing.

The point is that you could easily be unaware that you’re boring. This is why everybody should make a conscious effort to avoid boring topics. The problem here, of course, is that not everybody agrees on what “boring” means. For example, Person A might believe that collecting decorative plates is boring, whereas Person B might find this to be a fascinating hobby. Who’s to say which person is correct?

I am. Person A is correct. Plate-collecting is boring. In fact, hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby (This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.) The New Age is boring, and so are those puzzles where you try to locate all the hidden words. Agriculture is important but boring. Likewise foreign policy. Also, come to think of it, domestic policy. The fact that your child made the honor roll is boring. Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down. Talking about golf is always boring.
(Playing
golf can be interesting, but not the part where you try to hit the little ball; only the part where you drive the cart.) Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.

Speaking of sports, a big problem is that men and women often do not agree on what is boring. Men can devote an entire
working week to discussing a single pass-interference penalty; women find this boring, yet can be fascinated by a four-hour movie with subtitles wherein the entire plot consists of a man and a woman yearning to have, but never actually having, a relationship. Men HATE that. Men can take maybe 45 seconds of yearning, and then they want everybody to get naked. Followed by a car chase. A movie called
Naked People in Car Chases
would do really well among men. I have quite a few more points to make, but I’m sick of this topic.

I
am not one to drop names, but I was recently invited to a private luncheon with Hillary Rodham Clinton, First Lady of the Whole Entire United States.

This is true. I got the invitation from Mrs. Clinton’s office, and I said that heck yes, I would go. I will frankly admit that I was excited. Mrs. Clinton would be the most important federal human with whom I have ever privately luncheoned.

I did once attend a dinner with Richard “Dick” Cheney when he was the secretary of defense under President George “Herbert Walker” Bush, but that was not a one-on-one situation. That was at the Cartoonists’ Dinner at the
Washington Post
, an annual event wherein political cartoonists get a chance to come out from behind their drawing boards and, in an informal setting with high-level federal officials, make fools of themselves. At least that’s what generally happens. I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president,
the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

So the Cartoonists’ Dinner usually provides some entertaining interaction between cartoonists and Washington dignitaries, such as the time a couple of years ago when a cartoonist, doing a heartfelt impersonation of Elvis in concert giving away a Cadillac, hurled a set of car keys behind his back, through the air, directly into the forehead of the wife of a Cabinet official. She took this graciously, but you could tell that henceforth she was going to stick to cartoonist-free gatherings.

As a maturity-impaired individual, I have had the honor of being invited to the Cartoonists’ Dinner on several occasions, which, as I mentioned, is how I came to meet Dick Cheney. I actually met him about six times. You know those situations where you have consumed a few unnecessary beers and think you’re being the funniest thing on two feet, whereas in fact you’re just being stupid? This was one of those situations. We were mingling before dinner, and for reasons that I cannot explain now, whenever I encountered Cheney, which was fairly often because this was a smallish room, I’d thrust out my hand and say, “Hi, Dick! Dave Barry!” There he was, the secretary of defense, probably trying to think about the Persian Gulf, and every 45 seconds he was shaking hands with the same grinning moron. It’s a good thing I didn’t have car keys.

But humiliating yourself in front of the secretary of defense, as impressive as it is, is not on a par with being invited to a private luncheon with the first lady. I was especially eager to share my views on health care, assuming I could think some up. Also I wanted to find out what it was
like to be a first lady. Once, at a dinner, I sat next to a very funny first lady of a large state that shall remain nameless. She told me that she and some other governors’ wives had once come up with the idea of getting lifesize smiling photographs of themselves and mounting them on pieces of cardboard to be used as portable first ladies. Thus the real first lady could have a life, while the portable one would be carried around to political events and propped up behind the governor.

“That’s all they really need to represent us,” the governor’s wife told me, “because all we ever do is stand there and smile, and they introduce the governor, and then they say, ‘And here is his lovely wife.’ That’s what they always say, ‘Here is his lovely wife,’ even if she is actually a dog.”

So we see that first ladies can be pretty entertaining, and I was fired up about my impending luncheon with Mrs. Clinton. We had set a date and a time, and everything seemed set—until Mrs. Clinton’s staff person, Lisa Caputo, informed me that the luncheon was going to be “off the record.” I asked what that meant.

“Mrs. Clinton would like to meet you,” Caputo said. “This is a chance for you to get together and have a good time. But you can’t write about it.”

My crest fell when I heard those words, because I knew I could not accept this restriction. I am a professional journalist, and if I’m going to have luncheon with one of this nation’s most powerful political figures, then I feel a deep moral obligation to provide you, my readers, with an irresponsible and highly distorted account of it.

I explained this to Caputo, but it was no use; either the luncheon had to be off the record, or there would be no luncheon. So there was no luncheon. I think this is a shame, be
cause I bet it would have been a fun occasion, possibly culminating, if we really hit it off, in my showing the first lady how to make comical hand noises. So in closing, I want to say: Mrs. Clinton, if you’re reading this, I sincerely appreciate the invitation, and I’m sorry it didn’t work out, and someday I hope we can sit down and have fun on the record, and if it would make you feel more comfortable, you’re certainly welcome to also invite you-know-who (Dick Cheney).

I
am pleased to report that the scientific community has finally stopped wasting time on the origins of the universe and started dealing with the important question, which is: Are lobsters really just big insects?

I have always maintained that they are. I personally see no significant difference between a lobster and, say, a giant Madagascar hissing cockroach, which is a type of cockroach that grows to approximately the size of William Howard Taft (1857-1930). If a group of diners were sitting in a nice restaurant, and the waiter were to bring them each a freshly killed, steaming-hot Madagascar hissing cockroach, they would not put on silly bibs and eat it with butter. No, they would run, retching, directly from the restaurant to the All-Nite Drive-Thru Lawsuit Center. And yet these very same people will pay $24.95 apiece to eat a lobster, despite the fact that it displays all three of the classic biological characteristics of an insect, namely:

1. It has way more legs than necessary.
   

2. There is no way you would ever pet it.
   

3. It does not respond to simple commands such as “Here, boy!”
   

I do not eat lobsters, although I once had a close call. I was visiting my good friends Tom and Pat Schroth, who live in Maine (state motto: “Cold, but Damp”). Being generous and hospitable people, Tom and Pat went out and purchased, as a special treat for me, the largest lobster in the history of the Atlantic Ocean, a lobster that had probably been responsible for sinking many commercial vessels before it was finally apprehended by nuclear submarines. This lobster was big enough to feed a coastal Maine village for a year, and there it was, sprawling all over my plate, with scary insectoid legs and eyeballs shooting out in all directions, while Tom and Pat, my gracious hosts, smiled happily at me, waiting for me to put this thing in my mouth.

Remember when you were a child, and your mom wouldn’t let you leave the dinner table until you ate all your Brussels sprouts, and so you took your fork and mashed them into smaller and smaller pieces in hopes of eventually reducing them to individual Brussels-sprout molecules that would be absorbed into the atmosphere and disappear? That was similar to the approach I took with the giant lobster.

“Mmmm-MMMM!” I said, hacking away at the thing on my plate and, when nobody was looking, concealing the pieces under my dinner roll, in the salad, in my napkin, anywhere I could find.

Tom and Pat: I love you dearly, and if you should ever have an electrical problem that turns out to be caused by a seven-pound wad of old lobster pieces stuffed into the dining-room wall socket, I am truly sorry.

Anyway, my point is that lobsters have long been suspected,
by me at least, of being closet insects, which is why I was very pleased recently when my alert journalism colleague Steve Doig referred me to an Associated Press article concerning a discovery by scientists at the University of Wisconsin. The article, headlined GENE LINKS SPIDERS AND FLIES TO LOBSTERS, states that not only do lobsters, flies, spiders, millipedes, etc., contain
the exact same gene
, but they also are all descended from a single common ancestor: Howard Stern.