Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up

INTRODUCTION People often say to me: "Dave, you are a leading journalism professional and not as short as I expected. What is your secret of success?" The answer is that, throughout my career, I have always kept one vital journalistic principle foremost in my mind: Try not to leave the house. A journalist who leaves his or her house can run into all kinds of obstacles, including: Editors. Members of the public. News events involving actual facts. All of these obstacles can seriously interfere with the basic work of journalism, which is sitting around and thinking stuff up. This is what I mainly do, which is why I have been able to achieve a level of high-quality journalistic productivity, as measured in booger jokes, that a guy like David Broder can only dream about. Nevertheless, every now and then a situation will come up wherein a story of major importance is breaking somewhere other than in my office, and I have no choice but to go and cover it. For example, in this book you will find a column concerning an incident in 1992 when I left my house and traveled, without regard for my personal convenience or safety, all the way to my yard, to see the World's Fastest Lawn Mower. That's the kind of dedicated professional I am. The result is that this book contains a number of columns based on real events. There are also some longer articles, most of which originally appeared in the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic; these also contain an unusually high (for me) level of factual content. That's why this book is called Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.* I want to stress, however, that this title does not mean that this is a serious book. This book also contains a lot of "tongue-in-cheek" social commentary and satire, by which I mean lies. I hope you don't find this mixture of fact and fiction to be confusing. If, in reading the following pages, you are uncertain as to whether a specific statement is meant seriously or not, simply apply this rule of thumb: If the statement makes you consider filing a lawsuit, I was kidding. Ha ha! * In an effort to boost up sales, we were going to call it Rush Limbaugh Is Not Making This Up, but there was some kind of legal problem. READER ALERT The following section, which is mostly about family stuff, contains the article that pretty much launched my writing career: the story of my son's "natural" birth. When I wrote it back in 1981, Beth and I were living in Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, and I had a job teaching effective business-writing seminars.* I wrote the article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and it got reprinted in many other newspapers, including the Miami Herald, which ended up hiring me. So in a way you could say that I owe my job to my son. Although if you consider the amount of money I wound up spending just on He-Man action figures, I have more than paid him back. * This could be why we got so far behind Japan. FOOD FOR THOUGHT It's getting late on a school night, but I'm not letting my son go to bed yet, because there's serious work to be done. "Robert!" I'm saying, in a firm voice. "Come to the kitchen right now and blow-dry the ant!" We have a large ant, about the size of a mature raccoon, standing on our kitchen counter. In fact, it looks kind of like a raccoon, or possibly even a mutant lobster. We made the ant out of papier-mache, a substance you create by mixing flour and water and newspapers together into a slimy goop that drips down and gets licked up by your dogs, who operate on the wise survival principle that you should immediately eat everything that falls onto the kitchen floor, because if it turns out not to be food, you can always throw it up later. The ant, needless to say, is part of a Science Fair project. We need a bBarry, Dave is the author of 'Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up' with ISBN 9780517595749 and ISBN 0517595745.