There are always many things to look forward to as one year ends, and another begins. One of my absolute favorite joys about the start of a new year is getting to see the brilliant writing of Dave Barry, a humor columnist I’ve long admired.
For those of you who somehow have never heard of him, Barry is a longtime newspaper columnist, mostly for the Miami Herald and The Washington Post, and he’s just about the funniest writer I’ve read.
And his annual column summarizing the last 12 months of insanity is, as always, a must-read. Here is the whole thing, but as I like to do every year, some passages that really made me guffaw out loud are pasted here:
In February …
A massive ice storm blasts much of the nation, taking an especially brutal toll on Texas, where record-setting cold temperatures knock out power to large areas and wreak devastating havoc upon millions of cells in the brain of Sen. Ted Cruz, who, despite being (Just ask him!) the smartest person on the planet, decides this would be a good time to dash off to Cancún. Meanwhile the management of the Texas power grid is harshly criticized by members of Congress who could not personally reset a home circuit breaker without the help of at least four consultants and a pollster.
In the month’s most positive news, the NASA rover Perseverance, after traveling 293 million miles through space, lands safely on the surface of Mars. Technically it was supposed to land on Venus, but as a NASA spokesperson observes, “a planet is a planet.” The rover sends back breathtaking video revealing that Mars has an environment consisting — as scientists have long suspected — of dirt.
In March …
International shipping is seriously disrupted when the Suez Canal, which a lot of us totally forgot about after ninth-grade history class but apparently is still a thing, is blocked by a massive container ship that became wedged sideways after the pilot attempted to take a shortcut suggested by Waze. After six days of frantic efforts, tugboats are finally able to free the ship, aided by an unusually high tide and what maritime experts describe as “a really big jar of Vaseline.”
In May…
In a chilling reminder of the U.S. infrastructure’s vulnerability to cyberattack, Colonial Pipeline is forced to shut down a major East Coast fuel pipeline after suspected Russian hackers break into the corporation’s computer system and obtain naked photos of top executives with a duck.
We’re kidding, of course. The duck was fully clothed. In any event, the pipeline is reopened after Colonial pays the hackers a ransom of nearly $5 million, thereby sending a stern warning to any would-be future hackers that this is an excellent way to obtain money.
And in October…
The labor shortage has become so severe that for the first time since it began keeping records, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, which produces a monthly report on the nation’s employment situation, does not have enough workers to produce the monthly report.
Dave Barry is a national treasure, folks. If you haven’t laughed once while reading him, you may want to check to make sure you’re still alive.
**Next up, the sheer weirdness of this old commercial delighted me. The great Twitter feed of Rex Chapman sent this my way the other day, and it’s fantastic. This is a McDonald’s ad from 1970, and as someone commented about it, clearly commercials in this time period were made for stoners.
I mean, how creepy and scary do those apple pie trees look at the :20 mark??? If I was alive to see that commercial I wouldn’t sleep for a week.
**And finally, oh it’s been a while since I’ve featured a good “Florida Man” story, but this one is a doozy!
From an AP story out of Clearwater, Fla: “Authorities said they found cocaine and methamphetamine wrapped around a man’s penis during a traffic stop, but the man denied the drugs were his.
Pinellas County sheriff’s deputies said they stopped a vehicle driving without its lights on at 4 a.m. last Saturday. WFLA-TV reports the driver was arrested on charges of DUI and marijuana possession.
Authorities said they found a gun under the passenger’s seat while searching the car and discovered the drugs while searching the passenger.
The man said the drugs were not his, but didn’t say who the drugs belonged to, according to the arrest report.”
SO many questions! For one thing, who among us hasn’t tied contraband around our Johnson? I know I’m always taping things down there (don’t even get me started about how painful it is removing tape from down there!)
Second, OK let’s say for a second that Patrick Florence, age 34, the suspect, is telling the truth, and that the drugs weren’t his. How well do you have to know and like somebody to let them tie drugs around your penis? I mean, that’s a whole ‘nother level of friendship and love, ya know what I mean? It’s not like Hallmark makes a thank you card for this!
Finally, and this is an urgent question for a man like me who goes to the bathroom a lot: What if he had to pee while the drugs were taped to him? That cannot have been fun.
Wide World of Stuff 