Where have you gone, Dave Barry, and why? I miss the old days when newspapers used to publish humor columns, like Dave Barry’s — why did he go away? In Dave’s column, you learned things the New York Times didn’t print, stuff about exploding badgers or a man with a blade of grass growing out of his ear, or a story about the amount of methane created annually by dairy cows. Dave pointed out the fact that men will never ask for directions and that this is a biological fact, which is why it takes several million sperm to find one female egg even though, compared to them, it is the size of Wisconsin. I laughed so hard at that, I almost coughed up a hairball. Dave Barry once made fun of Grand Forks, North Dakota, for its tourism campaign, whereupon the city fathers invited Dave to Grand Forks, and Dave — this shows you what a classy guy he is — Dave flew to Grand Forks where he was feted and dined and taken to the dedication of a municipal sewage pump station named after him. The plaque reads “Dave Barry Lift Station No. 16.” Talk about a tourist attraction. (Who knew a small city needed so many lift stations?) You could go visit it if you were in Grand Forks. Dave gave up writing a weekly column in 2005, and in 2019 we need him more than ever. Back in the day, humor was a relief from the serious, but now with our first preteen president, comedy has become the news itself. When the man twittered, “If Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” this was taken up by somber opinionators though it was pure methane. The fact that a man is the Leader of the Free World is no guarantee against his making skid marks in his shorts. A serious journalist is unable to point this out. Read the rest of the column >>> | 