Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down (3 page)

I
f you are a regular reader of this column, you know that I make it my business to report on Stuff That Guys Do.

A good example is the sport of snowplow hockey, in which guys driving trucks use their snowplow blades to knock a bowling ball past trucks driven by opposing guys. This is not to be confused with car bowling, in which guys in low-flying airplanes try to drop bowling balls onto junked cars. I’ve also reported on guys going off a ski jump in a canoe, and on guys trying to build a huge modernized version of a catapult-like medieval war weapon and then using it to hurl a Buick 200 yards.

These are guy activities. These are activities that, when you describe them to a group containing both males and females, provoke two very different reactions:

The answer, of course, is: Because guys like to do stuff. This explains both the Space Shuttle and mailbox vandalism.

Today I want to report on another inspiring example of guys doing stuff. There is a guy in Van Nuys (rhymes with “guys”), California, who is planning, one day soon, to roll down an airport runway and become
the first human in recorded history to take off in an airplane that is powered by a rubber band.

I am not making this up. I have met this guy, a 44-year-old stunt pilot whose name happens to be George Heaven. I have also seen his plane, which he designed, and which is called the Rubber Bandit. Do you remember the little rubber-band planes that you used to assemble from pieces of balsa? This plane looks a lot like those, except that it’s 33 feet long, with a wingspan of 71 feet and an 18-foot-long propeller. The body is made from high-tech, super-lightweight carbon fiber, so it weighs only 220 pounds without the rubber band, which weighs 90 pounds.

This is not your ordinary rubber band such as you would steal from the supply cabinet at your office. This is made from a continuous strand of rubber that is a quarter inch wide and
miles
long; if you stretched it out, it would extend for 24 miles, which means that—to put this in scientific terms—if you shot it at somebody, it would sting like a mother.

The rubber band has been folded back over itself 400 times, so now it forms a fat, 25-foot-long python-like rubber snake on the hangar floor at the Van Nuys Airport. When the big day comes, a winch will wind the rubber band 600 to 800 times, and everybody involved will be very, very careful. You have to watch your step when dealing with your large-caliber rubber bands. I know this from personal experience, because one time a friend of mine named Bill Rose, who is a professional editor at
The Miami Herald
and who likes to shoot rubber bands at people, took time out from his busy journalism schedule to construct what he called the Nuclear Rubber Band, which was 300 rubber bands attached together end to end.

One morning in
The Miami Herald
newsroom, I helped Bill test-fire the Nuclear Rubber Band. I hooked one end over my thumb, and Bill stretched the other end back, back, back, maybe 75 feet. Then he let go. It was an amazing sight to see this whizzing, blurred blob come hurtling through the air, passing me at a high rate of speed and then
shooting WAYYYY across the room, where it scored a direct bull’s-eye hit smack dab on a fairly personal region of a professional reporter named Jane.

Jane, if you’re reading this, let me just say, by way of sincere personal apology, that it was Bill’s fault.

The thing is, Bill’s rubber band was
nothing
compared with the one that will power George Heaven’s Rubber Bandit. If that one were to snap when fully wound, in the words of Rubber Bandit crew chief Tom Beardsley, “it has the potential to kill someone.”

Then there is the whole question of what will happen if the Rubber Bandit—with Heaven sitting on a tiny seat hanging below the fuselage, between the wheels—actually takes off. I keep thinking about all the balsa model planes I had when I was a boy. I’d wind the propeller until my finger was sore, then I’d set the plane down on the street, let the prop go, and watch as the plane surged forward, became airborne, and then—guided by some unerring homing instinct that balsa apparently possesses—crashed into the nearest available object and broke into small pieces.

I discussed this with Heaven, who nodded the nod of a man who has heard it all many times. He told me he was not worried at all.

“You’re out of your mind,” I said.

“I know it,” he said.

So there you have it: A Guy on a Mission. Heaven (who looks and sounds a little like the late Robert Mitchum, although he denies this) hopes to make his historic flight around the end of this month. He’s trying to raise money so that he and his crew can finish the Rubber Bandit. Naturally you are wondering if he has approached the Trojan condom company about a sponsorship; the answer is yes, he did, and—incredibly—Trojan turned him down.

But he and his volunteers have been working on this project for two years, and I don’t think they’re going to quit. So keep an eye out for news on the Rubber Bandit. If you live near Van Nuys, you should also keep an ear out, and if you hear a really loud twanging sound, duck.

F
rom time to time I receive letters from a certain group of individuals that I will describe, for want of a better term, as “women.” I have such a letter here, from a Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina, who asks the following question:

“Why do men open a drawer and say, ‘Where is the spatula?’ instead of, you know, looking for it?”

This question expresses a commonly held (by women) negative stereotype about guys of the male gender, which is that they cannot find things around the house, especially things in the kitchen. Many women believe that if you want to hide something from a man, all you have to do is put it in plain sight in the refrigerator, and he will never, ever find it, as evidenced by the fact that a man can open a refrigerator containing 463 pounds of assorted meats, poultry, cold cuts, condiments, vegetables, frozen dinners, snack foods, desserts, etc., and ask, with no irony whatsoever, “Do we have anything to eat?”

Now I could respond to this stereotype in a snide manner by making generalizations about women. I could ask, for example, how come your average woman prepares for virtually every upcoming event in her life, including dental appointments, by buying new shoes, even if she already owns as many pairs as the entire Riverdance troupe. I could point out that, if there were no women, there would be no such thing as Leonardo DiCaprio. I could ask why a woman would walk up
to a perfectly innocent man who is minding his own business watching basketball and demand to know if a certain pair of pants makes her butt look too big, and then, no matter what he answers, get mad at him. I could ask why, according to the best scientific estimates, 93 percent of the nation’s severely limited bathroom-storage space is taken up by decades-old, mostly empty tubes labeled “moisturizer.” I could point out that, to judge from the covers of countless women’s magazines, the two topics most interesting to women are (1) Why men are all disgusting pigs, and (2) How to attract men.

Yes, I could raise these issues in response to the question asked by Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina, regarding the man who was asking where the spatula was. I could even ask WHY this particular man might be looking for the spatula. Could it be that he needs a spatula to kill a spider, because, while he was innocently watching basketball and minding his own business, a member of another major gender—a gender that refuses to personally kill spiders but wants them all dead—DEMANDED that he kill the spider, which nine times out of 10 turns out to be a male spider that was minding its own business? Do you realize how many men arrive in hospital emergency rooms every year, sometimes still gripping their spatulas, suffering from painful spider-inflicted injuries? I don’t have the exact statistics right here, but I bet they are chilling.

As I say, I could raise these issues and resort to the kind of negativity indulged in by Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina. But I choose not to. I choose, instead, to address her question seriously, in hopes that, by improving the communication between the genders, all human beings—both men and women, together—will come to a better understanding of how dense women can be sometimes.

I say this because there is an excellent reason why a man would open the spatula drawer and, without looking for the spatula, ask where the spatula is: The man does not have TIME to look for the spatula. Why? Because he is busy thinking. Men are almost always
thinking. When you look at a man who appears to be merely scratching himself, rest assured that inside his head, his brain is humming like a high-powered computer, processing millions of pieces of information and producing important insights such as, “This feels good!”

We should be grateful that men think so much, because over the years they have thought up countless inventions that have made life better for all people, everywhere. The shot clock in basketball is one example. Another one is underwear-eating bacteria. I found out about this thanks to the many alert readers who sent me an article from
New Scientist
magazine stating that Russian scientists—and you KNOW these are guy scientists—are trying to solve the problem of waste disposal aboard spacecraft, by “designing a cocktail of bacteria to digest astronauts’ cotton and paper underpants.” Is that great, or what? I am picturing a utopian future wherein, when a man’s briefs get dirty, they will simply dissolve from his body, thereby freeing him from the chore of dealing with his soiled underwear via the laborintensive, time-consuming method he now uses, namely, dropping them on the floor.

I’m not saying that guys have solved all the world’s problems. I’m just saying that there ARE solutions out there, and if, instead of harping endlessly about spatulas, we allow guys to use their mental talents to look for these solutions, in time, they will find them. Unless they are in the refrigerator.

R
ecently I spent several days touring the California wine country, and I must say that it was a wonderful experience that I will remember until long after I get this mud out of my ears.

I’ll explain the mud in a moment, but first I should explain that the wine country is an area near San Francisco that is abundantly blessed with the crucial natural ingredient that you need to have a successful wine country: tourists. There are thousands and thousands of them, forming a dense continuous stream of rental cars creeping up and down the Napa Valley, where you apparently cannot be a legal resident unless you own a winery named after yourself. Roughly every 45 feet you pass a sign that says something like “The Earl A. Frebble-munster And His Sons Earl Jr. And Bud, But Not Fred, Who Went Into The Insurance Business, Winery.”

When you see a winery that you like, you go inside for wine-related activities, which are mainly (1) tasting wine, and (2) trying to adopt thoughtful facial expressions so as to appear as though you have some clue as to what you are tasting. Some wineries also give guided tours wherein they show you how wine is made. The process starts with the grapes, which ripen on vines under the watchful eyes of the head wine person (or “poisson de la tête”) until exactly the right moment, at which point they form a huge swarm and follow the queen to the new hive location.

No, wait, I’m thinking of bees. When the grapes are ripe, they’re harvested and stomped on barefoot by skilled stompers until they (the grapes) form a pulpy mass (called the “fromage”) which is then discarded. Then the head wine person drives to the supermarket and buys some nice hygienic bunches of unstomped grapes, which are placed in containers with yeast—a small but sexually active fungus—and together they form wine.

The wine is then bottled and transported to the Pretentious Phrase Room, where professional wine snots perform the most critical part of the whole operation: thinking of ways to make fermented grape juice sound more complex than nuclear physics. For example, at one winery I sampled a Pinot Noir (from the French words “pinot,” meaning “type of,” and “noir,” meaning “wine”) and they handed me a sheet of paper giving many facts about the wine, including something called the “Average Brix at Harvest”; the pH of the grapes; a detailed discussion of the fermentation (among other things, it was “malolactic”); the type of barrels used for aging (“100 percent French tight-grained oak from the Vosges and Allier forests”); the type of filtration (it was “a light egg-white fining”); and of course the actual nature of the wine itself, which is described—and this is only part of the description—as having “classical Burgundian aromas of earth, bark, and mushrooms; dried leaves, cherries; subtle hints of spice and French oak”; and of course the flavor of “blackberry, allspice, cloves, vanilla with nuances of plums and toast.”

Yes! Nuances of toast! I bet they exchanged high fives in the Pretentious Phrase Room when they came up with that one!

At another winery, I stood next to some young men—they couldn’t have been older than 22—who were tasting wine and making serious facial expressions and asking a winery employee questions such as: “Was ’93 a good year for the Cabernets?” I wanted to shake them and shout, “What’s WRONG with you!? When I was your age, I was drinking Sunshine Premium brand beer (motto: ‘Made From Ingredients’) at $2.39 a CASE!”

Needless to say, these young men also had cigars. You have to worry about where this nation is headed.

Anyway, the other major tourist thing to do in wine country is to go to a town called Calistoga and take a mud bath, which is an activity that I believe would be popular only in an area where people have been drinking wine. My wife and I took one at a combination spa and motel, where we were met by a woman who said, I swear, “Hi, I’m Marcie, and I’ll be your mud attendant.”

Marcie led us into a room containing two large tubs filled to the brim with what smelled like cow poop heated to 104 degrees. We paid good money to be allowed to climb into these things and lie there sweating like professional wrestlers for 15 minutes. Marcie—who later admitted that she had done this only once herself—said it was supposed to get rid of our bodily toxins, but my feeling is that from now on, if I have to choose between toxins and hot cow poop, I’m going with the toxins.