Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (19 page)

Bok stood next to me and prepared various sushi items, and I attempted to imitate him. Here’s the recipe: You start with a little rectangle made of dried seaweed (I asked Bok where the seaweed comes from, thinking he would name some ancient Japanese seaside village, and he said, “a distributor”). Then you pick up a glob of special sticky rice and spread it evenly on the seaweed. At least Bok did. The majority of my rice remained firmly stuck to my hands and started migrating to other parts of my body. I may have to have it removed surgically.

Next, you cut up your ingredients, using a lethal-looking, extremely sharp sushi knife that causes professional sushi chefs to become very nervous when it is being wielded by a professional humor columnist. Then you put these ingredients on the rice and execute the secret sushi-rolling technique, which is difficult to describe in English words, as we can see by this actual transcript of Bok explaining it to me: “OK, you go like this, Boom! Then you go, Boom! Boom! Boom!”

The thing was, when Bok went boom, he produced this attractive, appetizing cylinder of sushi. Whereas when I went boom, I produced this mutant food unit leaking random seafood parts. I also had a problem with my sizing: Sushi rolls are supposed to be small, bite-size morsels; mine were more along the lines of seaweed-covered hams.

But I kept trying. Remember the movie
Karate Kid
, where the mean bully beats up Ralph Macchio, but then Ralph studies karate under Mr. Miyagi, and then finally, in the big tournament, with everybody watching, Ralph stuns the bully by rolling a reasonably tight cucumber roll? Well, that’s what I did. In fact, I may have a knack for it. So if one day you walk into a Japanese restaurant, and you see, standing behind the sushi bar, what appears to be a man-size blob of rice wearing a blue bathrobe belt on its head, feel free to say hi. But keep your distance if I’m holding a knife.

S
o this year, you agreed to host the big family Thanksgiving dinner. Congratulations! You moron!

No, seriously, hosting Thanksgiving dinner does NOT have to be traumatic. The key is planning. For example, every year my family spends Thanksgiving at the home of a friend named Arlene Reidy, who prepares dinner for a huge number of people. I can’t give an exact figure, because my eyeballs become fogged with gravy. But I’m pretty sure that Arlene is feeding several branches of the armed forces.

And Arlene is not slapping just any old food on the table, either. She’s a gourmet cook who can make anything. I bet she has a recipe for cold fusion. She serves moist, tender turkeys the size of Arnold Schwarzenegger, accompanied by a vast array of exotic hors d’oeuvres and 350 kinds of sweet potatoes made from scratch. I’m pretty sure Arlene threshes her own wheat.

If you were to look into Arlene’s dining room at the end of Thanksgiving dinner, it would at first appear to be empty. Then you’d hear groans and burps coming from under the table, and you’d realize that the guests, no longer able to cope with the food and gravity at the same time, were lying on the floor. Every now and then you’d see a hand snake up over the edge of the table, grab a handful of stuffing, then dart back under the table again, after which you’d hear chewing,
then swallowing, then the sound of digestive organs rupturing. Some guests have to be rushed by ambulance to the hospital, receiving pumpkin pie intravenously en route.

The question is: How is Arlene able to prepare such an amazing feast for so many people? The answer is simple: I have no idea. I’m always watching football when it happens. But my point is that, if you want to provide your Thanksgiving guests with a delicious home-cooked meal, one approach would be to go to Arlene’s house and steal some of her food when she’s busy churning the butter. She’d never notice. She has enough leftovers to make turkey sandwiches for everybody in Belgium.

If you prefer to do your own cooking this Thanksgiving, your first step is to calculate how much turkey you need. Home economists tell us that the average 155-pound person consumes 1.5 pounds of turkey, so if you’re planning to have 14 relatives for dinner, you’d simply multiply 14 times 1.5 times 155, which means your turkey should weigh, let’s see, carry the two … 3,255 pounds. If you can’t find a turkey that size, you should call up selected relatives and explain to them, in a sensitive and diplomatic manner, that they can’t come because they weigh too much.

In selecting a turkey, remember that the fresher it is, the better it will taste. That’s why, if you go into the kitchen of top professional homemaker Martha Stewart on Thanksgiving morning, you’ll find her whacking a live turkey with a hatchet. In fact, you’ll find Martha doing this
every
morning.

“It just relaxes me,” she reports.

Your other option is to get a frozen turkey at the supermarket. The Turkey Manufacturers Association recommends that, before you purchase a frozen bird, you check it for firmness by test-dropping it on the supermarket floor—it should bounce three vertical inches per pound—and then take a core sample of the breast by drilling into it with a ⅜-inch masonry bit until you strike the giblets. If supermarket employees attempt to question you, the Turkey Manufacturers Association
recommends that you “gesture at them with the drill in a reassuring manner.”

When you get the turkey home, you should thaw it completely by letting it sit on a standard kitchen counter at room temperature for one half of the turkey’s weight in hours, or roughly 19 weeks. “If you see spiders nesting in your turkey,” states the Turkey Manufacturers Association, “you waited too long.”

Once the turkey is defrosted, you simply cook it in a standard household oven at 138.4 degrees centimeter for 27 minutes per pound (29 minutes for married taxpayers filing jointly). Add four minutes for each 100 feet of your home’s elevation above sea level, which you should determine using a standard household sextant. Inspect the turkey regularly as it cooks; when you notice that the skin has started to blister, the time has come for you to give your guests the message they’ve been eagerly awaiting: “Run!” Because you left the plastic wrapper on the turkey, and it’s about to explode, spewing out flaming salmonella units at the speed of sound.

As you stand outside waiting for the fire trucks, you should take a moment to count your blessings. The main one, of course, is that you will definitely
not
be asked to host the big family Thanksgiving dinner next year. But it’s also important to remember—as our Pilgrim fore-parents remembered on the very first Thanksgiving—that two excellent names for rock bands would be “The Turkey Spiders” and “The Flaming Salmonella Units.”

T
his year, why not hold an old-fashioned Fourth of July Picnic?

Food poisoning is one good reason. After a few hours in the sun, ordinary potato salad can develop bacteria the size of raccoons. But don’t let the threat of agonizingly painful death prevent you from celebrating the birth of our nation, just as Americans have been doing ever since that historic first July Fourth when our Founding Fathers—George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Bob Dole, and Tony Bennett—landed on Plymouth Rock.

Step one in planning your picnic is to decide on a menu. Martha Stewart has loads of innovative suggestions for unique, imaginative, and tasty summer meals. So you can forget about her. “If Martha Stewart comes anywhere near my picnic, she’s risking a barbecue fork to the eyeball” should be your patriotic motto. Because you’re having a
traditional
Fourth of July picnic, and that means a menu of hot dogs charred into cylinders of industrial-grade carbon, and hamburgers so undercooked that when people try to eat them, they leap off the plate and frolic on the lawn like otters.

Dad should be in charge of the cooking, because only Dad, being a male of the masculine gender, has the mechanical “know-how” to operate a piece of technology as complex as a barbecue grill. To be truly traditional, the grill should be constructed of the following materials:

If the grill uses charcoal as a fuel, Dad should remember to start lighting the fire early (no later than April 10) because charcoal, in accordance with federal safety regulations, is a mineral that does not burn. The spiders get a huge kick out of watching Dad attempt to ignite it; they emit hearty spider chuckles and slap themselves on all eight knees. This is why many dads prefer the modern gas grill, which ignites at the press of a button and burns with a steady, even flame until you put food on it, at which time it runs out of gas.

While Dad is saying traditional bad words to the barbecue grill, Mom can organize the kids for a fun activity: making old-fashioned ice cream by hand, the way our grandparents’ generation did. You’ll need a hand-cranked ice-cream maker, which you can pick up at any antique store for $1,875. All you do is put in the ingredients, and start cranking! It makes no difference what specific ingredients you put in, because—I speak from bitter experience here—no matter how long you crank them, they will never, ever turn into ice cream. Scientists laugh at the very concept. “Ice cream is not formed by cranking,” they point out. “Ice cream is formed by freezers.” Our grandparents’ generation wasted millions of man-hours trying to produce ice cream by hand; this is what caused the Great Depression.

When the kids get tired of trying to make ice cream (allow about 25 seconds for this) it’s time to play some traditional July Fourth games. One of the most popular is the “sack race.” All you need is a bunch of old-fashioned burlap sacks, which you can obtain from the J. Peterman catalog for $227.50 apiece. Call the kids outside, have them line up on the lawn, and give each one a sack to climb into; then
shout “GO!” and watch the hilarious antics begin as, one by one, the kids sneak back indoors and resume trying to locate pornography on the Internet.

Come nightfall, though, everybody will be drawn back outside by the sound of loud, traditional Fourth of July explosions coming from all around the neighborhood. These are caused by the fact that various dads, after consuming a number of traditionally fermented beverages, have given up on conventional charcoal-lighting products and escalated to gasoline. As the spectacular pyrotechnic show lights up the night sky, you begin to truly appreciate the patriotic meaning of the words to “The Star-Spangled Banner,” written by Francis Scott Key to commemorate the fledgling nation’s first barbecue:

After the traditional visit to the hospital emergency room, it’s time to gather ’round and watch Uncle Bill set off the fireworks that he purchased from a roadside stand operated by people who spend way more on tattoos than dental hygiene. As Uncle Bill lights the firework fuse and scurries away, everybody is on pins and needles until, suddenly and dramatically, the fuse goes out. So Uncle Bill re-lights the fuse and scurries away again, and the fuse goes out again, and so on, with Uncle Bill scurrying back and forth with his Bic lighter like a deranged Olympic torchbearer until, finally, the fuse burns all the way down, and the firework, emitting a smoke puff the size of a grapefruit, makes a noise—“phut”—like a squirrel passing gas. Wow! What a fitting climax for your traditional old-fashioned July Fourth picnic!

Next year you’ll go out for Chinese food.

T
he only time I got really scared was when the mob surrounded me and began beating on my head. Fortunately, it was not my usual head: It was the head of a giant lizard.

I was wearing the giant-lizard head because—and this is why people who value their dignity should avoid journalism—I thought it would be fun to write about being a sports-team mascot and engaging in comical hijinks with the crowd. The mascot that I wound up being is named “P.K.,” which stands for “Penalty Kick.” P.K., a seven-foot green lizard, is the mascot for the Miami Fusion, a professional soccer team of which I’m a big fan.

I like soccer because there’s a lot of action and drama. There are no time-outs, so the only way players can catch their breath is to sustain a major injury, which some of them are very good at. A guy will get bumped by another player, or a beam of sunlight, and he’ll hurl himself dramatically to the ground, writhing and clutching his leg (not necessarily the leg that got bumped) and screaming that the referee should get a priest out there immediately to administer the last rites, or at least call a foul. The referee generally ignores the player, who, after a while, gets up and continues playing. Some players suffer four or five fatal injuries per game. That’s how tough they are.

Here’s another example of soccer-player toughness, which I am not making up: Last year, in Brazil, there was a soccer match between two
arch-rival teams, one of which is nicknamed “The Rabbits.” The other team scored a goal, and the guy who scored it celebrated by reaching into his shorts, pulling out a carrot, and eating it. He had a carrot in his shorts the whole time! Talk about team spirit! You wonder what he’d do if he played a team nicknamed “The Eel Eaters.”

But back to my point: I asked Fusion officials if I could wear the P.K. costume at a game, and they said OK. And so one Sunday afternoon I found myself in an office next to the stadium, struggling into the P.K. outfit, which includes green leggings, green arms with only four fingers per hand, big feet, a four-foot tail, and a large lizard head with buggy eyes and a grinning, snouty mouth. Helping me put these items on was the regular Fusion mascot, Tony Mozzott, who, when he is not a giant lizard, manages a supermarket meat department. As he attached my tail, Tony gave me some mascotting tips, such as: “I high-five people, because if you shake their hands, they’ll try to take off your fingers.”