635 Quotes by Dave Barry With Free Shareable Pictures

What I look forward to is continued immaturity followed by death.

Never under any circumstances take a sleeping pill and a laxative on the same night.

Sign outside a country shop: We buy junk and sell antiques.

Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face.

The only kind of seafood I trust is the fish stick, a totally featureless fish that doesn't have eyeballs or fins.

As a child, I was more afraid of tetanus shots than, for example, Dracula.

It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.

Newspaper readership is declining like crazy. In fact, there's a good chance that nobody is reading my column.

The real threat to whales is whaling, which has endangered many whale species.

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Guys are simple... women are not simple and they always assume that men must be just as complicated as they are, only way more mysterious. The whole point is guys are not thinking much. They are just what they appear to be. Tragically.

The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.

Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.

Although golf was originally restricted to wealthy, overweight Protestants, today it's open to anybody who owns hideous clothing.

Camping is nature's way of promoting the motel business.

Nobody cares if you can't dance well. Just get up and dance.

The information encoded in your DNA determines your unique biological characteristics, such as sex, eye color, age and Social Security number.

It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate.

Fishing is boring, unless you catch an actual fish, and then it is disgusting.

We believe that electricity exists, because the electric company keeps sending us bills for it, but we cannot figure out how it travels inside wires.

The ultimate camping trip was the Lewis and Clark expedition.

Eugene is located in western Oregon, approximately 278 billion miles from anything.

Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.

People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them.

Eating rice cakes is like chewing on a foam coffee cup, only less filling.

The Internet: transforming society and shaping the future through chat.

We journalists make it a point to know very little about an extremely wide variety of topics; this is how we stay objective.

Sharks are as tough as those football fans who take their shirts off during games in Chicago in January, only more intelligent.

If God had wanted us to be concerned for the plight of the toads, he would have made them cute and furry.

We operate under a jury system in this country, and as much as we complain about it, we have to admit that we know of no better system, except possibly flipping a coin.

Geographically, Ireland is a medium-sized rural island that is slowly but steadily being consumed by sheep.

I realize that I'm generalizing here, but as is often the case when I generalize, I don't care.

The word user is the word used by the computer professional when they mean idiot.

Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!

We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail.

Scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid.

The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl.

Magnetism, as you recall from physics class, is a powerful force that causes certain items to be attracted to refrigerators.

To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.

For me, the worst part of playing golf, by far, has always been hitting the ball.

The nuclear generator of brain sludge is television.

Your modern teenager is not about to listen to advice from an old person, defined as a person who remembers when there was no Velcro.

What may seem depressing or even tragic to one person may seem like an absolute scream to another person, especially if he has had between four and seven beers.

I would not know how I am supposed to feel about many stories if not for the fact that the TV news personalities make sad faces for sad stories and happy faces for happy stories.

Never assume that the guy understands that you and he have a relationship.

It always rains on tents. Rainstorms will travel thousands of miles, against prevailing winds for the opportunity to rain on a tent.

If you have a big enough dictionary, just about everything is a word.

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.

Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.

Auto racing is boring except when a car is going at least 172 miles per hour upside down.

The leading cause of death among fashion models is falling through street grates.

'Escargot' is French for 'fat crawling bag of phlegm'.

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery.

If you were to open up a baby's head -- and I am not for a moment suggesting that you should -- you would find nothing but an enormous drool gland.

The major parties could conduct live human sacrifices on their podiums during prime time, and I doubt that anybody would notice.

And so by the fifteenth century, on October 8, the Europeans were looking for a new place to try to get to, and they came up with a new concept: the West.

The simple truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs.

The world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example.

Dogs feel very strongly that they should always go with you in the car, in case the need should arise for them to bark violently at nothing right in your ear.

My problem with chess was that all my pieces wanted to end the game as soon as possible.

It was Public Art, defined as art that is purchased by experts who are not spending their own personal money.

Have you noticed that whatever sport you're trying to learn, some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent?

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

I want a pit crew... I hate the procedure I currently have to go through when I have car problems.

We idolized the Beatles, except for those of us who idolized the Rolling Stones, who in those days still had many of their original teeth.

I believe that we parents must encourage our children to become educated, so they can get into a good college that we cannot afford.

I have been a gigantic Rolling Stones fan since approximately the Spanish-American War.

Skiers view snowboarders as a menace; snowboarders view skiers as Elmer Fudd.

To better understand why you need a personal computer, let's take a look at the pathetic mess you call your life.

American consumers have no problem with carcinogens, but they will not purchase any product, including floor wax, that has fat in it.

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

Electricity is actually made up of extremely tiny particles called electrons, that you cannot see with the naked eye unless you have been drinking.

Aside from velcro, time is the most mysterious substance in the universe. You can't see it or touch it, yet a plumber can charge you upwards of seventy-five dollars per hour for it, without necessarily fixing anything.

Love and pregnancy and riding on a camel cannot be hid.

You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.

The most powerful force in the universe is gossip.

Reading... a vacation for the mind.

Congress, after years of stalling, finally got around to clearing the way for informal discussions that might lead to possible formal talks that could potentially produce some kind of tenative agreements.

Each year, millions of skiers come to Colorado to experience its superb emergency medical facilities.

One of the major hobbies in South Florida is keeping animals that no sane person would want to keep. One of those is snakes. They usually get them when they're small, and when they get too big, they let them go. But there are also people with monkeys, lions, tigers. And they all get away, eventually.

Natives of the Florida Keys often refer to themselves as Conchs, and for good reason: They have been drinking.

Under Florida's "stand your ground" law, it is legal to shoot anybody for any reason as long as you are standing on the ground.

She goes to Frederick's of Hollywood at the mall and purchases an explicit lingerie outfit so sheer that you could read an appliance warranty through it in an unlit closet.

Sign at a Kentucky appliance store: Don't kill your wife. Let our washing machine do the dirty work.

Nevada has a very dynamic economy, with gambling being the number-one industry, followed closely by blood donorship.

I actually like south Florida. I never lived in a more interesting place than this. I've never met a wider range of people. I guess when I came here I thought there were Cubans and then there were people from New York and that was Miami. Now I know that it's Cubans, people from New York, and some people from New Jersey.

If for some reason you are unsure where to go, all you have to do is stand there looking lost, and within seconds a helpful New Yorker will approach to see if you have any "spare" change.

At the height of rush hour, people on the London underground actually say "excuse me." Imagine what would happen if you tried an insane stunt like that on the New York City subway. The other passengers would take it as a sign of weakness, and there'd be a fight over who got to keep your ears as a trophy.

Everybody in New York, including police horses, dresses fashionably, and whenever I'm there, even in my sharpest funeral-quality suit with no visible ketchup stains, I feel as though I'm wearing a Hefty trash bag. And it's last year's Hefty trash bag.

It is an inconvenience, being located in a city where taxes are ludicrously high, where you pay twice your annual income to rent an apartment that could easily be carried on a commercial airline flight.

Although it was constructed in 1536, the New York subway system boasts an annual maintenance budget of nearly $8, currently stolen, and it does a remarkable job of getting New Yorkers from Point A to an indeterminate location somewhere in the tunnel leading to point B.

Within less than an hour, Chuck and I easily located what could well be the correct platform, where we pass the time by perspiring freely until the train storms in, colorfully decorated, as is the tradition in New York, with the spray-painted initials of all the people it has run over.

We decide to start with the best-known sight of all, the one that, more than any other, exemplifies what the Big Apple is all about: the Islip Garbage Barge.

Sign at a Tennessee highway: When this sign is under water, this road is impassable.

The Republicans have a high Beady-Eyed Self-Righteous Scary Borderline Loon Quotient, as evidenced by Phyllis Schlafly, Pat Robertson, the entire state of Utah, etc.

Most American homes have alternating current, which means that the electricty goes in one direction for a while, then goes in the other direction. This prevents harmful electron buildup in the wires.

AARP is a large and powerful organization, similar to the Mafia but more concerned about dietary fiber.

Dogs love to go for rides. A dog will happily get into any vehicle going anywhere.

Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.

I love Halloween. It reminds me of my happy childhood days as a student at Wampus Elementary School in Armonk, N.Y., when we youngsters used to celebrate Halloween by making decorations out of construction paper and that white paste that you could eat.

I read "Remembrance of Things Past" in the original French. I never start the day without reading me some Marcel Proust.

We kids feared many things in those days -- werewolves, dentists, North Koreans, Sunday School -- but they all paled in comparison with Brussels sprouts.

I think I became funny because I grew up in the Bronx. I was small and weak and Jewish instead of large and fierce and Puerto Rican. You need something.

I grew up in the Southwest Bronx. Father an accountant, mother a schoolteacher. Brother was six years older, which explains why I gobbled crystal meth at 12, smoked hashish at 13, and was shooting smack at 17, which explains how I got Hepatitis C, which was the basis of my first book, which was a humor book about dying.

Dogs would make totally incompetent criminals. If you could somehow get a group of dogs to understand the concept of the Kennedy assassination, they would all immediately confess to it. Whereas you'll never see a cat display any kind of guilty behavior, despite the fact that several cats were seen in Dallas on the grassy knoll area, not that I wish to start rumors.

People -- just weird people are attracted to Miami. And they come there not for serious reasons, usually.

Miami drivers will attempt to pass you inside a car wash.

The major advantage of domestic travel is that, with a few exceptions such as Miami, most domestic locations are conveniently situated right here in the United States.

Miami, you can never run out of material. As long as you have Miami around you, you will never, never stop being amused.

Actually, there are people from all ove -- not just Latin America, certainly not just Cuba, but all over Europe, all over the United States. I like that. I like knowing a lot of different types of people. And I can afford to live in a relatively safe part of Miami.

Some years ago I proposed a new tourism-promotion slogan for Miami. I even had a bumper sticker made. It said: 'Come back to Miami! We Weren't Shooting at YOU'.

And you definitely shouldn't attempt to drive yourself in Miami, because odds are you'd make some foolish tourist mistake such as stop for a red light, which means you'd be rear-ended by a vehicle going upwards of eighty miles per hour driven by a motorist with no insurance but a minimum of two firearms.

The truth is that only a small percentage of Miami's population consists of violent criminals, and the bulk of those are elected officials. The rest of us Miamians are regular people, just like the people in your town: We work hard, try to raise our kids right, and are always ready to help out our neighbors by laying down covering fire when they go outside to get their newspapers.

Tokyo is huge. Something like 15 million people live there, and my estimate is that at any given moment, 14.7 million of them are lost.

One night in Tokyo we watched two Japanese businessmen saying good-night to each other after what had clearly been a long night of drinking, a major participant sport in Japan. These men were totally snockered, having reached the stage of inebriation wherein every air molecule that struck caused them to wobble slightly, but they still managed to behave more formally than Americans do at funerals.

The Japanese tend to be far more co-operative and docile and group-oriented. It would be easier to get the entire population of Tokyo to wear matching outfits than to get any two randomly selected Americans to agree on pizza toppings.

Flying from the United States to Tokyo takes approximately as long as law school.

Baby's room should be close enough to your room so that you can hear baby cry, unless you want to get some sleep, in which case baby's room should be in Peru.

Denmark (also called Norway) is best known as the original home of the prune Danish as well as the Vikings, who wore hats with horns sticking out of them, and for a very good reason: they were insane.

Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.).

Yet another spunky li'l NASA robot lands and begins transmitting back photographs of rocks that appear virtually identical to the rock photos beamed back by all the other spunky li'l NASA robots, thus confirming suspicions that the universe has a LOT of rocks in it.

Stuffwise we are not a lean operation. We're the kind of people who, if we were deciding what absolute minimum essential items we'd need to carry in our backpacks for the final, treacherous ascent to the summit of Mount Everest, would take along aquarium filters, just in case.

The hugely popular Windows 95 operating system revolutionized the software world thanks to its capability of accomplishing the seemingly impossible task of making Bill Gates even richer than he already was.

At the time, we were mad at Moammar Gadhafi, which resulted in us bombing all over Libya and killing a bunch of people, but not him. Then Ronald Reagan gets up and says we're not trying to kill him, we're just dropping bombs. You can kill all the Libyans you want, but legally you can't try to kill the leader.

The Soviet Union at this time was being run by the Communists, a group of men fierce in their dedication to wearing hilariously bad suits. Their leader was Josef Stalin (Russian for "Joey Bananas").

Japan has a low crime rate, unless you count the fact that approximately every fifteen minutes the entire Cabinet gets indicted for taking bribes.

The Japanese eat, sleep, and breathe golf; the only thing they don't do is actually play it, because to get on a course, you have to make a reservation roughly 137 years in advance, which means that by the time you actually get to the first tee you are deceased. Of course, in golf this is not really a handicap.

I have read that, on the average, the Japanese are getting taller, but at the moment they seem to be about the same height as American junior-high-school students, only with fewer guns.

Unless you live in Indonesia, there should be several malls within five miles of your home. It makes no difference whatsoever which one you go to: Under federal law, all malls in the United States must have the same 42 chain stores.

One key lesson of history is that virtually anything, including afternoon or evening thundershowers, causes Germany to invade Belgium.

Canada, as you know, is a major important nation boasting a sophisticated, cosmopolitan culture that was tragically destroyed last week by beavers.

There are also a number of humans living up there (Canada), and in many ways they have a lifestyle quite similar to ours, including such traditional American activities as driving Japanese cars.

During the warm season (August 8 and 9), Maine is a true vacation paradise, offering visitors a chance to jump into crystal-clear mountain lakes and see if they can get back out again before their bodily tissue is frozen as solid as a supermarket turkey.

I never stop running. I'm not one of the weenies who drop out just because the electoral college votes. I'm still in the race. I'm an extremely corrupt candidate and I stress that in case anybody in our reading audience is interested in sending me money.

Mother Nature clearly intended for us to get our food from the "patty" group, which includes hamburgers, fish sticks, and McNuggets- foods that have had all of their organs safely removed.

There comes a time in a man's life when he hears the call of the sea. If the man has a brain in his head, he will hang up the phone immediately.

All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears -- of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required".

If everybody were a guy, the human race could easily get by on less than one twentieth the current number of shoes.

The old system of having a baby was much better than the new system, the old system being characterized by the fact that the man didn't have to watch.

As far as outlining is concerned, I don't outline humor. I might right down a word or two to remind myself of a punch line I thought of, but the actual structure of a piece I really don't. I don't think it would really help me because for me the process is joke, joke, joke, joke.

Sailboats are the slowest form of transportation on Earth with the possible exeption of airline flights that go through O'Hare.

There is nothing as relaxing as being out on the open sea, listening to the waves and the wind and the sails and voices downstairs yelling "HOW DO YOU FLUSH THESE TOILETS?

Your first job is to prepare the soil. The best tool for this is your neighbor's garden tiller. If your neighbor does not own a garden tiller, suggest that he buy one.

I was a young person once, shortly after the polar ice caps retreated, and I distinctly recall believing that virtually all adults were clueless goobers.

If a Greek woman tells you to do something, you do it.

Without question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

Trails need to be wider so people can walk while holding hands.

I never had the vaguest idea whether any of it had anything to do with me, especially being a sixth grader. When I got older and traveled, I'd read about the history of where I was going. I'd be like, "Oh, history is kind of interesting.

Call me a proud American, if you want, but I truly believe that no other nation on Earth possesses the capabilities to put on a more powerful display of underwater mermaid patriotism.

For most celebrities, the biggest meal of the day is toothpaste (they use reduced-fat Crest).

One day soon the Gillette company will announce the development of a razor that, thanks to a computer microchip, can actually travel ahead in time and shave beard hairs that don't even exist yet.

Dating means doing a lot of fun things you will never do again if you get married. The fun stops with marriage because you're trying to save money for when you split up your property.

If a woman has to choose between catching a fly ball and saving an infant's life, she will choose to save the infant's life without even considering if there are men on base.

Cats are independent, by which I mean smart.

Kids have *_____ never* taken guidance from their parents. If you could travel back in time and observe the original primate family in the original tree, you would see the primate parents yelling at the primate teenager for sitting around and sulking all day instead of hunting for grubs and berries like dad primate. Then you'd see the primate teenager stomp up to his branch and slam the leaves.

Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once.

When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy.

Avoid the traffic by using one of the park's shuttle buses and view the elk rut with a park ranger.

The letters in 'Brace Beemer' can be arranged to spell 'Embrace Beer.'

In the Bowling Alley of Tomorrow, there will even be machines that wear rental shoes and throw the ball for you. Your sole function will be to drink beer.

When I heated my home with oil, I used an average of 800 gallons a year. I have found that I can keep comfortably warm for an entire winter with slightly over half that quantity of beer.

If swimming is so good for your figure, how do you explain whales?

The problem with winter sports is that -- follow me closely here -- they generally take place in winter.

Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America.

To enter Europe, you must have a valid passport with a photograph of yourself in which you look like you are being booked on charges of soliciting sheep.

Never lick a steak knife.

My wife, like many women, actually LIKES wrapping things. If she gives you a gift that requires batteries, she wraps the batteries separately, which to me is very close to being a symptom of mental illness.

There are two kinds of people in this world, and I am one of them.

Can we move this conversation along, I'm getting frightfully tired of 'hoa'.

What happened was, they put me and my co-marshal, author Ridley Pearson, into an antique fire truck along with Daisy Duck and Clarabelle the Cow. I have nothing against either of these veteran Disney characters, but let's be honest, their careers are not currently sizzling, especially in the case of Clarabelle, who hasn't had a hit cartoon since roughly the Civil War.

You can say any fool thing to a dog and the dog will just give you this look that says, 'My GOSH, you're RIGHT! I NEVER would've thought of that!

You should not confuse your career with your life.

Most married couples, even though they love each other very much in theory, tend to view each other in practice as large teeming flaw colonies, the result of being that they get on each other's nerves and regularly erupt into vicious emotional shouting matches over such issues as toaster settings.

As you get older; you've probably noticed that you tend to forget things. You'll be talking with somebody at a party, and you'll know that you know this person, but no matter how hard you try, you can't remember his or her name. This can be very embarassing, especially if he or she turns out to be your spouse.

Dogs make good pets because they are very loyal.

The United States tried, by depressing the clutch of diplomacy and downshifting the gearshift lever of rhetoric, to remain neutral, but it became increasingly obvious that the nation was going to get into a war, especially since it was almost 1812.

Albert Einstein, who discovered that a tiny amount of mass is equal to a huge amount of energy, which explains why, as Einstein himself so eloquently put it in a famous 1939 speech to the Physics Department at Princeton, 'You have to exercise for a week to work off the thigh fat from a single Snickers.'

Generally the pythons are better than anything else at killing.

What women want: To be loved, to be listened to, to be desired, to be respected, to be needed, to be trusted, and sometimes, just to be held. What men want: Tickets to the World Series.

I love the Olympics, because they enable people from all over the world to come together and -- regardless of their political or cultural differences -- accuse each other of cheating.

Guys care about sports teams. I'm not talking about simply rooting; I'm talking about a relationship that guys develop, a commitment to a sport team that guys take way more seriously than, for example, wedding vows.

I shared this insight with some other boat owners, and they all agreed that, definitely, putting your boar into the water is asking for trouble. Most of them have had their boats sitting in their driveways long enough to be registered historical landmarks.

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.

Because of the level of my chess game, I was able -- even against a weak opponent, such as my younger brothers or the dog -- to get myself checkmated in under three minutes. I challenge any computer to do it faster.

Dogs need to sniff the ground; it's how they keep abreast of current events. The ground is a giant dog newspaper, containing all kinds of late-breaking dog news items, which, if they are especially urgent, are often continued in the next yard.

The bad news was that the yard contained a dog. A very, very large dog, wide and hairy, like a cross between a rottweiler and a Goodyear blimp.

I am a world-class weenie when it comes to letting people stick needles into me. My subconscious mind firmly believes that if God had wanted us to have direct access to our bloodstreams, He would have equipped our skin with small, clearly marked doors.

I also saw a huge expansion of the Internet, with many major corporations, afraid of being left behind, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop World Wide Web sites in a frantic scramble to reach the vast new consumer market of Web use.

We're wild horses. We're going to eat your food, knock down your tent and poop on your shoes. We're protected by federal law, just like Richard Nixon.

We travel because, no matter how comfortable we are at home, there's a part of us that wants -- that needs -- to see new vistas, take new tours, obtain new entrees, introduce new bacteria into our intestinal tracts, learn new words for "transfusion," and have all the other travel adventures that make us want to French-kiss our doormats when we finally get home.

I bet that if you actually read the entire vastness of the U.S. Tax Code, you'd find at least one sex scene.

Modern cyberspace is a deadly festering swamp, teeming with dangerous programs such as 'viruses,' 'worms,' 'Trojan horses' and 'licensed Microsoft software' that can take over your computer and render it useless.

Common criticism of the Internet is that it is dominated by the crude, the uninformed, the immature, the smug, the untalented, the repetitious, the pathetic, the hostile, the deluded, the sefl-righteous, and the shrill. This criticism overlooks the fact that the Internet also offers -- for the savvy individual who knows where to look -- the tasteless and borderline insane.

Back then, the entire Internet consisted of two slow, boxcar-sized UNIVAC computers about 50 feet apart, connected by a wire. It would take one of these computers an entire day to send an email to the other one, which would immediately delete it, because it was a Viagra ad.

Classical music gradually lost popularity because it is too complicated: you need twenty-five or thirty skilled musicians just to hum it properly. So people began to develop regular music.

Congress shall also create a tax code weighing more than the combined poundage of the largest member of the House and the largest member of the Senate, plus a standard musk ox.

Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.'

Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud.

There are terrific TV shows now. This is a golden age for TV humor, I think. There's an actual market there. Of course, I have no idea how you'd break in, but there must be a way. They have all these shows and they need jokes and somebody is writing them.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will. If you're right 90% of the time, why quibble about the remaining 3%? In Africa some of the native tribes have a custom of beating the ground with clubs and uttering spine chilling cries. Anthropologists call this a form of primitive self-expression. In America we call it golf.

Mousse was a Labrador retriever, which is a large enthusiastic bulletproof species of dog made entirely from synthetic materials. This is the kind of dog that, if it takes an interest in your personal regions (which of course it does) you cannot fend it off with a blowtorch.

The term SAT is a set of initials, or autonym, standing for Scholastic Attitude Treaty Organization.

The question is: What can we, as citizens, do to reform our tax system? As you know, under our three-branch system of government, the tax laws are created by: Satan. But he works through the Congress, so that's where we must focus our efforts.

Are we ever going to have a federal tax system that regular people can understand?

What I think is that the F-word is basically just a convenient nasty-sounding word that we tend to use when we would really like to come up with a terrific-ally witty insult, the kind Winston Churchill always came up with when enormous women asked him stupid questions at parties.

And to you taxpayers out there, let me say this: Make sure you file your tax return on time! And remember that, even though income taxes can be a 'pain in the neck,' the folks at the IRS are regular people just like you, except that they can destroy your life.

DNA is an abbreviation for deoxyribonucleicantidisestablishmentarianism, a complex string of syllables.

He could be a testosterone donor.

Most of the presidential candidates' economic packages involve 'tax breaks,' which is when the government, amid great fanfare, generously decides not to take quite so much of your income. In other words, these candidates are trying to buy your votes with your own money.

Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth *and* fresher breath.

You must prepare yourselves, young people, because Uncle Dave's generation is getting old. We are almost ready to go to the retirement home to spend the rest of our days tapping our bedpans rhythmically in time to "easy listening" rock 'n' roll. We must pass the torch on to you, and you must grasp it, ideally by the end that is not on fire.

Someone was tapping on the window.

The places where trails do not exist are not well marked.

We constantly see surveys that reveal this ignorance, especially among our high school students,78 percent of whom, in a recent nationwide multiple-choice test, identified Abraham Lincoln as 'a kind of lobster.' That's right: more than three quarters of our nation's youth could not correctly identify the man who invented the telephone.

European toilet paper is made from the same material that Americans use for roofing, which is why Europeans tend to remain standing throughout soccer matches.

Toaster: A gift that every member of the family appreciates. Automatically burns toast.

Today's scientific question is: What in the world is electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?

I've gained a few pounds around the middle. The only lower body garments I own that still fit me comfortably are towels.

What I like best about the telephone is that it keeps you in touch with people, particularly people who want to sell you magazine subscriptions in the middle of the night.

It was not easy victory in the America Cup. Our boys spent years experimenting with different designs for their boat before they came up with the innovative idea of having a submerged nuclear submarine tow it.

Do not spit gum in the drinking fountains.

I've been checking with people back in South Florida to see if Hurricane Dennis is going to whack my house, and the consensus of the experts seems to be: No, it will not, unless it does, in which case, yes. So I'm feeling really calm over here in London.

A critical function that we journalists perform at political conventions is to try to get into parties that we have not been invited to. There are dozens of these parties, sponsored by large corporations with a sincere public-spirited desire to become larger.

Orangutan are very weird animals but they look very soulful.

If you tell the reader it's funny, then the audience is like an audience at a stand-up comedy club and they expect you to be funny, and if you're not, they notice. Whereas if you read a regular op-ed about Israel or the family or medicine, you're not starting with the assumption that you're supposed to laugh.

The science fair has long been a favorite educational tool in the American school system, and for a good reason: Your teachers hate you.

There was nowhere to sit except the bunk, which was covered with rotting food, and a wooden stool, upon which sat a large fur-covered lump--an old cheese, perhaps, or a dead cat.

The average tax payer is not a big voluntary supporter of the arts. The only art that the average taxpayer buys voluntarily either has a picture of Bart Simpson on it or little suction cups on its feet so you can stick it onto a car window.

Once again we find ourselves enmeshed in the Holiday Season, that very special time of year when we join with our loved ones in sharing centuries-old traditions such as trying to find a parking space at the mall.

I can snap your spine like a toothpick.

Fortunately the boat we rented had a motor in it You will definitely want this feature on your sailboat too, because if you put up the sails, the boat tips way over, and you could spill your beer.

You have to be careful on the deck, because of the "hatches," which are holes placed around a sailboat at random to increase the insurance rates.

No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously.

That is the Wasp, yes. But it was captured by Black Stache, and he's coming for this ship now." "And how do you know that?" asked Slank. "Did a seagull tell you?" This brought chuckles from the crew. Something like that, thought Peter.

Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc.

Note that both of these papers the New York Post and the New York Daily News are big sellers in a city whose residents like to go around saying they'd never live anyplace else on account of they'd miss the opera.

As a professional journalist, I have always been fascinated by people who appear to have even more spare time than I do.

It's a real smug self-righteous punk kid saying nobody has the right to tell him what to do and how dare you put a sign up saying that I can't go on your property?

The Internet "browser"... is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later.

Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV.

Leonard Aster thanked Fighting Prawn and the Mollusk tribe for their hospitality. "You mean," said Fighting Prawn, "for not killing you?" "Yes," said Leonard. "It was very gracious of you." "Do you," said Leonard, "I mean, does you tribe, shake hands?" "No," said Fighting Prawn. "We kiss on the lips." "Oh," said Leonard, looking very alarmed.

We're trying to make our current house look domestic so that somebody will want to buy it. We're making a lot of simple, obvious improvements that never would have occurred to us to make while we actually lived here, because, tragically, we both happen to be domestically impaired. If we were birds, our nest would consist of a single twig with the eggs attached via Scotch tape.

When I'm writing columns, it's -- all I'm thinking about is jokes, joke, joke, joke, setup, punch line, joke, joke, joke. And I really don't care where it goes.

My current computer, in addition to 'DOS,' has 'Windows,' which is another invention of Bill Gates, designed as a security measure to thwart those users who are somehow able to get past DOS.

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and -- this always amazes me -- not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.

Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals, drawing perfect verticals, drawing really spastic diagonals, trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside.

The Russians will never be able to get their missiles thought the dense protective layer of delayed flights circling over the United States in complex, puke-inducing holding patterns.

A child can go only so far in life without potty training. It is not mere coincidence that six of the last seven presidents were potty trained, not to mention nearly half of the nation's state legislators.

The primary function of the government is -- and here I am quoting directly from the U.S. Constitution -- 'to spew out paper.'

The greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas Edison Edison's first major invention, in 1877, was the phonograph, which could soon be found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat until 1923, when the record was invented.

I hate to speak for the whole society, but I will. I'm a journalist, it's my job. There's been something of a reaction against political correctness. Needless to say, the government hasn't caught up yet.

A printer consists of three main parts: the case, the jammed paper tray and the blinking red light.

Line printer paper is strongest at the perforations.

Babies are equipped at birth with a number of instinctive reflexes and behavior patterns that cause them to spend their first several years trying to kill themselves. If your home contains a sharp, toxic object, your baby will locate it; if your home contains no such object, your baby will try to obtain one via mail order.

Until I became a parent, I thought children just naturally knew how to catch a ball, that catching was an instinctive biological reflex that all children are born with, like knowing how to operate a remote control or getting high fevers in distant airports.

For Dad, the perfect Father's Day would be one in which he didn't even realize that it was Father's Day, because nobody was making him appreciate gifts he didn't want, or read greeting cards filled with lame Father's Day poetry.

Instead of a permit system or regulations, the Forest Service needs to reduce worldwide population growth to limit the number of visitors to wilderness.

Is there a medical rule that requires doctors-office personnel to treat you as though you have the IQ of a Cheeto?

If the security personnel do their job properly, they just might cause you to miss your plane, thereby possibly saving your life.

Of course God enjoys a good prank as much as the next infallible deity.

Real cars were made here in America: Fords, Chevys, Plymouths. These were large chunks of Detroit iron -- cars that had the size, weight, and handling characteristics of aircraft carriers but worse fuel efficiency.

A small deer came into my camp and stole my bag of pickles. Is there a way I can get reimbursed? Please call.

By the eighties, a lot of radio stations had started playing "Sixties" music. They called it "Classic Rock," because they knew we'd be upset if they came right out and called it what it is, namely "middle-aged-person nostalgia music.

All these people helped make this book possible. But let me make one thing clear: If there are any errors or omissions in this book, these people are not responsible. In the end, there is only one person responsible for what I write, and that person, of course, is: Donald Trump.

For people who like peace and quiet: a phoneless cord.

At certain times each year, we journalists do almost nothing except apply for the Pulitzers and several dozen other major prizes. During these times you could walk right into most newsrooms and commit a multiple axe murder naked, and it wouldn't get reported in the paper because the reporters and editors would all be too busy filling out prize applications.

There shall be a National Anthem containing incomprehensible words and a high note that normal humans cannot hit without risk of hernia.

Technically, Windows is an "operating system," which means that it supplies your computer with the basic commands that it needs to suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, stop operating.

I was a middle-of-the-road Democrat more than anything else. I know I voted for Carter. Watergate taught me how bad the Republicans were.

Just get on any major highway, and eventually it will dead-end in a Disney parking area large enough to have its own climate, populated by large nomadic families who have been trying to find their cars since the Carter administration.

I will vote for the first candidate who promises to use nuclear missiles against LinkedIn.

Remember: What dad really wants is a nap. Really.

Nobody in the United States knows what either a "meter" or a "kilogram" is. The whole reason why we fought the Cold War was so we wouldn't have to learn the metric system.

I can't recall a story that played out exactly as I'd expected it to. That's one of the thrills of journalism -- being surprised, and learning new stuff, but it also poses the biggest challenge to a writer's character.

Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.

I had arrived at the airport one hour early so that, in accordance with airline procedures, I could stand around.

The story of the eighties will be the story of the Reagan administration and the many men and women who served in it, some of whom are already out on parole.

Software: These programs give instruction to the CPU, which processes billions of tiny facts called bytes, and within a fraction of a second it sends you an error message that requires you to call the customer-support hot line and be placed on hold for approximately the life-span of a caribou.

This nation is so friendly that the leading cause of injury is getting passionately embraced by strangers.

Speaking of food, English cuisine has received a lot of unfair criticism over the years, but the truth is that it can be a very pleasant surprise to the connoisseur of severely overcooked livestock organs served in lukewarm puddles of congealed grease. England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Magnetism is one of the Six Fundamental Forces of the Universe, with the other five being Gravity, Duct Tape, Whining, Remote Control, and The Force That Pulls Dogs Toward The Groins Of Strangers.

Childbirth, as a strictly physical phenomenon, is comparable to driving a United Parcel truck through an inner tube.

Another foreign-policy triumph for Reagan was his 1984 visit to China, where he met for more than three hours with Mao Zedong before realizing that Mao was dead.

Cyrus Pembridge, the Never Land's captain, was widely regarded as the most incompetent man to comman a ship since the formation of water. "Who in the name of common sense would put to sea on that ship with that man in charge?" wondered Mack. "Well," Alf answered, "we are." "True," Mack said.

Why don't you lift the end?" said Alf. "It's me back, Alf," complained Mack. "You know how it troubles me." "No more than mine troubles me," said Alf. "But I said it first," said Mack.

Why do we shave? It doesn't seem like a natural activity. There are no examples of shaving in nature. The only creature that comes close is the male South Pacific Groping Beetle, which sometimes, just before mating, will slap on a little Aqua Velva. But we think this resulted from atomic testing.

See, when the government spends money, it creates jobs; whereas when the money is left in the hands of taxpayers, God only knows what they do with it. Bake it into pies, probably. Anything to avoid creating jobs.

The coyotes made too much noise last night and kept me awake. Please eradicate these annoying animals.

The population of earth has reached 7 billion people, every single one of whom send you irritating emails to join something called "LinkedIn.

We're deep into the holiday gift-giving season, as you can tell from the fact that everywhere you look, you see jolly old St. Nick urging you to purchase things, to the point where you want to slug him right in his bowl full of jelly.

The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture finished and put inside boxes.

Another well-known Paris landmark is the Arc de Triomphe, a moving monument to the many brave women and men who have died trying to visit it.

They have a lot of trouble with pronunciation, because they can't move their jaw muscles, because of malnutrition caused by wisely refusing to eat English food, much of which was designed and manufactured in medieval times during the reign of King Walter the Mildly Disturbed.

Eternal boyhood is the dream of a depressing percentage of American males, and the locker room is the temple where they worship arrested development.

The Japanese, implementing a complex, long-term, and ultimately successful strategy to dominate the U S consumer-electronics market, attacked Pearl Harbor.

Imagine what will happen to this nation if large numbers of American women start using the Wonderbra. It will be catastrophic. The male half of the population will be nothing but mindless drooling Zombies of Lust. Granted, this is also true now, but it will be even worse.

If women were in charge of all the world's nations, there would be sincerely believe this -- no military conflicts, and when there WAS a military conflict, everybody involved would feel just awful and there would soon be a high-level exchange of notes written on greeting cards with flowers on the front, followed by a Peace Luncheon.

I am not one to generalize, but cartoonists, as a group, exhibit a level of social sophistication generally associated with pie fights. In high school, when the future lawyers were campaigning for class president, the future cartoonists were painstakingly altering illustrations in their history books so that Robert E. Lee appeared to be performing an illegal act with his horse.

If there really is a God who created the entire universe with all of its glories, and He decides to deliver a message to humanity, He will not use, as His messenger, a person on cable TV with a bad hairstyle.

I've never been struck by lightning as far as I know, so the Higher Power is treating me as well as even those people who love him very much.

We Americans live in a nation where the medical-care system is second to none in the world, unless you count maybe 25 or 30 little scuzzball countries like Scotland that we could vaporize in seconds if we felt like it.

The trouble is, you cannot grow just one zucchini. Minutes after you plant a single seed, hundreds of zucchini will barge out of the ground and sprawl around the garden, menacing the other vegetables. At night, you will be able to hear the ground quake as more and more zucchinis erupt.

On Valentine's Day, millions of men give millions of women flowers, cards and candy as a heartfelt expression of the emotion that also motivates men to observe anniversaries and birthdays-fear.

My point here, young couples, is that baby-having is extremely serious business, and you probably don't have the vaguest idea what you're doing, as is evidenced by the fact that you're reading a very sloppy and poorly researched book.

Men's magazines often feature pictures of naked women. Women's magazines also feature pictures of naked women. This is because the female body is a beautiful work of art, while the male body is lumpy and hairy and should not be seen by the light of day. Men are turned on at the sight of a naked woman's body. Most naked men elicit laughter from women.

I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.

A short distance away is the Tidal Basin, ringed by cherry trees that every year produce flowers, an event to which Washingtonians react as though it were the Second Coming of Christ.

Ban walking sticks in wilderness. Hikers that use walking sticks are more likely to chase animals.

Do not put this product in a big vat and drop rats into it from a cat-walk.

I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

The taxpayers cannot be relied upon to support performing arts such as opera. As a taxpayer, I am forced to admit that I would rather undergo a vasectomy via Weed Whacker than attend an opera.

But my point is that competitive eating is a real sport, and I considered taking it up. But when I thought about what this would mean sitting around for hours, stuffing my face with unhealthy food I realized it was basically the same thing as journalism.

England is a very popular foreign country to visit because the people there speak some English.

When doctors describe pain as experiencing "discomfort," it's like saying Hiroshima experienced "urban renewal".

You and Teacher," said Molly. "Yes," said Peter. "She's very clever. You'll like her." "I'm sure," said Molly.

If Peter was nine, and a new boy came to St. Norbert's Home for Wayward Boys who said he was ten, why, then, Peter would declare himself eleven. Also, he could spit the farthest. That made him the undisputed leader.

A full-grown manatee, which can weigh more than 1,000 pounds, looks like the result of a genetic experiment involving a walrus and the Goodyear Blimp.

You can use the Internet to find out, from anywhere on the planet: exactly how much coffee is in a certain coffee machine at Cambridge University in England; exactly how many sodas are available in certain vending machines at certain major universities; and much, much more.

Winter's here, and you feel lousy: You're coughing and sneezing; your muscles ache; your nose is an active mucus volcano. These symptoms -- so familiar at this time of year -- can mean only one thing: Tiny fanged snails are eating your brain.

The scrub sink...is the place where doctors wash their hands after they operate so that they won't get flecks of your vital organs on their Lexus upholstery.

There's a test they can do to determine a baby's gender ahead of time; I think they insert a tiny photo of Leonardo DiCaprio into the uterus, and if the baby punches it, it's a boy.

Basically Ken is a very gentle, home-loving person. I remember when one of his stick insects had a knee infection. He stayed up all night rubbing it with germoline and banging its head on the table.

You should definitely have a travel agent. Why go through all the hassle of dealing with airlines, hotels, and rental-car agencies yourself, only to see the arrangements get all screwed up, when with just a single phone call you can have a trained professional screw them up for you?

I haven't been able to slam-dunk the basketball for the past five years. Or, for the thirty-eight years before that, either.

There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is age 11.

In my experience, if you go to a hospital for any reason whatsoever, including to read the gas meter, they give you a tetanus shot.

Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top.

Playing an unamplified electric guitar is like strumming on a picnic table.

Some archeologists believe that Stonehenge -- the mysterious arrangement of enormous elongated stones in England -- is actually a crude effort by the Druids to build a computing device.

At least once per year, some group of scientists will become very excited and announce that:

•The universe is even bigger than they thought!

•There are even more subatomic particles than they thought!

•Whatever they announced last year about global warming is wrong.

Editorials are written by people who have agreed to have several strong opinions a day and to write them down, provided they do not have to sign their names.

I do not mean to suggest for a moment that all it takes to be a top executive is a custom-tailored European suit. You also need the correct shirt and tie.

It is important to be nice. But sometimes niceness can be misconstrued as weak. Should we be nice to everybody? Should we be nice only when others are nice to us? Here are some interesting views about being nice. Read these nice quotes and turn on your niceness.

It would be hard to conceive of any activity more useless than stamp collecting.

Hardware: This is the part of the computer that stops working when you spill beer on it.

I don't want to dis anybody, but someone like Robert Parker. I first read a Spenser book maybe 20 years ago and then read every one that came out. I did that with Tony Hillerman too.

I tried sniffing Coke once, but the ice cubes got stuck in my nose.

In foreign countries such as Italy, the government puts strict-looking speed limit signs everywhere, but nobody ever sees them because light does not travel fast enough to catch the Italian drivers.

England manufactures most of the world's airline food, as well as all the food you ever ate in your junior-high-school cafeteria.

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other large organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them:

1. They all had editors.

2. They are all dead.

Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

A secret society within a secret society.

And that's the wonderful thing about family travel: it provides you with experiences that will remain locked forever in the scar tissue of your mind.

Once you're safely in the mall, you should tie your children to you with ropes so the other shoppers won't try to buy them. Holiday shoppers have been whipped into a frenzy by months of holiday advertisements, and they will buy anything small enough to stuff into a shopping bag. If your children object to being tied, threaten to take them to see Santa Claus; that ought to shut them up.

To people who make moving ads that block the view of websites: Not only will we not buy from you, but we want shrews to eat your liver.

Sometimes you panic and find yourself emitting remarks so profoundly inane that you would be embarrassed to say them to your dog. Your dog would look at you and think to itself, 'I may lick myself in public, but I'd never say anything as stupid as that.'

When the armed robber of unhappiness knocks over the Keebler cookie display of our complacency, and bangs the samurai sword of negativity on the checkout counter of our dreams, we must not be afraid to hurl the fruit cocktail can of hope.

You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe daylight savings time.

Never allow a child to spend all of his allowance. Insist that he set aside a certain amount of money every week and put it in a safe place, where you can get it if you need to buy beer.

I am a superior form of human and I have absolutely no quirks or irrational impulses of any kind.

As sensitive and broad-minded humans, we must never allow ourselves to be in any way judgmental of the religious practices of other people, even when these people clearly are raving space loons.

I always assumed that at some point I would have to quit making jokes, get a real job and do something meaningful and productive that would actually benefit society. Fortunately this never happened.

For the benefit of those of you who have real jobs and are not involved in the news business, I should first explain that.

Many things have been written, including by me, linking humor and pain. Mostly, in my case, the humor part keeps me sane. If I spent all my hours writing things like "Fatal Distraction," I'd become a brooding, erratic melancholic. I'd be Raskolnikov.

The other major kind of computer is the "Apple," which I do not recommend, because it is a wuss-o-rama New-Age computer you basically just plug in and use.

Although humans tend to view sex as mainly a fun recreational activity sometimes resulting in death, in nature it is a far more serious matter.

I hope I don't sound like an old-fashioned stick-in-the-mud, but when I hear about people making vast fortunes without doing any productive work or contributing anything to society, my reaction is: "How can I get in on that?

The Hawaiian Islands were discovered by hardy Polynesian sailors, who crossed thousands of miles of open ocean in primitive canoes, braving violent storm-tossed seas for months at a time. My family and I arrived by modern commercial aviation, which was infinitely worse.

Advice to expectant mothers: you must remember that when you are pregnant, you are eating for two. But you must remember that the other one of you is about the size of a golf ball, so let's not go overboard with it. I mean, a lot of pregnant women eat as though the other person they're eating for is Orson Welles.

The story you envision as you start out is always a great story; when the facts turn out to be different from, or more complex than, what you expected, your first reaction is always disappointment. That's when you must fight the urge to bend the story to your preconceived notions. First, it's dishonest. And second, in the end, the truth is always the best story.

The porpoises said hello to Molly. She told them all her teeth were green.

If you want to give a man something practical, consider tires. More than once, I would have gladly traded all the gifts I got for a new set of tires.

A perfect parent is a person with excellent child-rearing theories and no actual children.

If Mozart had power tools, there's no telling how great his music might have been.

You've read newspaper stories about elderly widows who die and leave their entire estates to their pet cats, right? Well, your cat reads those stories too, and has spent most of its skulking, devious little life dreaming about inheriting all your money.

What's happened to marriage? The wedding-industrial complex. Brides get swept up in this world of obsession -- it has to be your perfect day.

The fact that Gene Weingarten and I and Bathroom Inventory are now part of some kind of Matrix of Poop strongly suggests that the Pulitzer is not what it once was.

Too many bugs and leeches and spiders and spiderwebs. Please spray the wilderness to rid the area of these pests.

The IRS wants you to use this form because it gets to keep most of your money. So unless you have pond silt for brains, you want the long form.

Talking about golf is always boring. Playing golf can be interesting, but not the part where you try to hit the little ball; only the part where you drive the cart.

What a crock. I could easily overemphasize the importance of good grammar. For example, I could say: Bad grammar is the leading cause of slow, painful death in North America, or Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

We have been flooded with postal cards from all over the United States and several parallel universes. Just a quick glance though these cards is enough to remind you why this great nation, despite all the talk of decline, still leads the world in tranquilizer consumption.

I liked making people laugh, and I decided I was an atheist early on. My Dad was all right with that. We argued about it all the time, but it was good-natured. He was the most open-minded human being I've ever known.

'I'm sorry,' guys are always telling women, 'but I'm just not ready to make a commitment.' Guys are in a permanent state of nonreadiness. If guys were turkey breasts, you could put them in a 350-degree oven on July Fourth, and they still wouldn't be done in time for Thanksgiving.

There's an old saying among scientific guys: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, ideally by dropping a cement truck on them from a crane.

Today's beauty ideal, strictly enforced by the media, is a person with the same level of body fat as a paper clip.

I've been to Washington many times over the years for stories, and it always seems remarkably the same. More the same than the rest of the country. It's almost like they dress the same as they did 20 years ago. The same old guys are sitting outside the same dirty, dingy secret offices in the Capitol that you're not allowed to go in.

Buying the right computer and getting it to work properly is no more complicated than building a nuclear reactor from wristwatch parts in a darkened room using only your teeth.

The Olympic movement simply cannot allow the Russians to become estranged, because Russia is a vital part of the world sports community, in the sense of having nuclear missiles.

Directors are always changing things at the last minute. Actors will do a scene, and the director will say, ‘Okay, that was perfect, but this time, Bob, instead of saying "What's for dinner?" you say, "Wait a minute! Benzene is actually a hydrocarbon!" And say it with a Norwegian accent. Also, we think maybe your character should have no arms.

I think Twitter is kind of fun, it's not deep and it never will be, but it's a great way to communicate one-liners and to sort of see what people are laughing about. It's a terrific source of misinformation.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people try their hand at this demanding profession (humor columnist). After a few months, almost all of them have given up and gone back to the ninth grade.

Most recently I read Michael Lewis "Boomerang." The other guy I love is Bill Bryson.

It takes a minimum of six people, working in close harmony, to successfully flush a nautical toilet. That's why those old ships carried such large crews.

I'm always writing new books so I don't dwell on the ones I've already done. I think that's a habit from being a newspaper guy because you're always writing columns and you can't reflect on the ones you've already done.

He felt a momentary pang of regret that he had not spent more time with his beloved wife. But it passed when he remembered that the reason he'd gone to sea in the first place was that he had never really liked his beloved wife.

I think I've learned over the years, because you'd have to be stupid not to, that when a book publisher gives you a deadline they're just kidding for the most part. I don't know what they do with it, it's like you send them your book and they just hold it in their hands for like six months and I don't know why, and you realize you probably had more time.

Never trust anything you read in a travel article.

For 41 years I have gone with a very natural hair "look" that was originally popularized by coconuts.

Funny, isn't it? The airlines go to all that trouble to keep you from taking a gun on board, then they just hand you a dinner roll you could kill a musk ox with.

The Mollusks--generous hosts when they weren't trying to kill you.

Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.

In modern America, food is abundant everywhere except aboard commercial airplanes.

Headbangers' are people who like heavy-metal music, which is performed by skinny men with huge hair who stomp around the stage, striking their instruments and shrieking angrily, apparently because somebody has stolen all their shirts.

I become faint and nauseous during even very minor medical procedures, such as making an appointment by phone.

Professional marriage counselors agree that the most productive and mature way to deal with marital anger is to stomp dramatically from the room. You want to make your move before the opponent does, because the first person to stomp from the room receives valuable Argument Points that can be redeemed for exciting merchandise at the Marital Prize Redemption Center.

I'm a big believer in anesthesia. I think it should be used for every medical procedure, indlucing routine physicals.

If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from the Beverly Hillbillies.

People don't like it when you make fun of a celebrity. When you make fun of a celebrity, you'll hear from really loyal fans of that celebrity.

And, of course, you have the commercials where savvy businesspeople get ahead by using their MacIntosh computers to create the ultimate American business product: a really sharp-looking report.

Genes are little items that are found in every living thing except Sen. Alfonse D'Amato.

Long, long ago, before eruptions were invented, the molten lava had to be carried down the mountainside, bucket by bucket, and poured over the sleeping villagers. This took time.

I'm not sure you can count as history, was Keith Richards's "Life," which he so modestly titled it. I did find it a fascinating book. Keith's a pretty honest fellow.

If you look at photos of the Gettysburg Address there's a guy off to the right who I think is Keith Richards.

This book is dedicated to Wilbur and Orville Wright, without whom air sickness would still be just a dream.

Dogs do not grasp the concept of house cleaning.

I care about our young people, and I wish them great success, because they are our Hope for the Future, and some day, when my generation retires, they will have to pay us trillions of dollars in social security.

The word aerobics comes from two Greek words: aero, meaning "ability to," and bics, meaning "withstand tremendous boredom.

Greyhound Bus Lines motto: "We Stop For Some Damn Thing Every 200 Yards.

My son wouldn't go get heroin. If he did or didn't, it wouldn't have anything to do with whether it was legal or illegal.

He's a boating enthusiast, although that phrase seems too weak to describe the level of his interest, kind of like describing someone as a heroin fancier.

Hell, which as every frequent traveler knows, is in Concourse D of O'Hare Airport.

A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment problems at O'Hare, you can't get there at all.

What happens if a big asteroid hits Earth ? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad.

One popular new plastic surgery technique is called lip grafting, or 'fat recycling,' wherein fat cells are removed from one part of your body that is too large, such as your buttocks, and injected into your lips. People will then be literally kissing ass.

Without computers, the government would be unable to function at the level of effectiveness and efficiency that we have come to expect... Today's government uses computers which are capable of cranking out millions of documents per day without any regard whatsoever for their content, thereby freeing government employees for more important responsibilities, such as not answering their phones.

I want to gag sometimes when I see who "we" are recommending that people vote for, and not just as a libertarian.

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it.

Spain travel tip: If bathroom genders are indicated by flamingos, the boy flamingo is the one with a hat. I learned this the hard way.

Your friends love you anyway.

Reflectors need to be placed on trees every 50 feet so people can hike at night with flashlights.

The basic Roman ruin design is a pile of rocks with a little plaque saying "Roman Ruins" and a group of tourists frowning at it and wishing they were back at the hotel bar.

There is a very fine line between hobby and mental illness.

First, a few words about this title. It isn't easy, coming up with book titles. A lot of the really good ones are taken. Thin Thighs in 30 Days, for example. Also The Bible.

Why can't Americans do their own taxes? Because the federal Tax Code is out of control, that's why. It's gigantic and insanely complex, and it gets worse all the time. Nobody has ever read the whole thing. IRS workers are afraid to go into the same ROOM with it.

There is a breed of fashion models.

The question is, why are politicians so eager to be president? What is it about the job that makes it worth revealing, on national television, that you have the ethical standards of a slime-coated piece of industrial waste?

English history consists largely of royal people getting their heads chopped off...Needless to say, this brand of history was a hit with our son.

Congress is thinking about eliminating a federal program under which scientists broadcast signals to Alien beings. This would be a large mistake. Alien beings have atomic blaster death cannons. You cannot cut off their federal programs as if they were merely poor people.

All other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer and we are drinking Barry Manilow.

One I'm deeply into is Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." I was the only person in the US who hadn't read it.

I walked out of the movie "Lincoln" and bought the book of Doris Kearns Goodwin at the bookstore next door.

I have a friend named Doris who argues, on good authority, that the single biggest cause of global warming is menopause.

I guess nobody assumes anybody is a libertarian. It's a more complex political discussion than most people are used to, to explain why you think the way you do about public education or drug laws, and why it's not as simple as being for or against something.

Several years ago we had an intern who was none too swift. One day he was typing and turned to a secretary and said, "I'm almost out of typing paper. What do I do?" "Just use copier machine paper," she told him. With that, the intern took his last remaining blank piece of paper, put it on the photocopier and proceeded to make five blank copies.

The Spanish government, having run completely out of money, secretly sold the Pyrenees to China, and is now separated from France only by traffic cones.

More and more products are coming out in fiercely protective packaging designed to prevent consumers from consuming them. These days you have to open almost every consumer item by gnawing on the packaging.

My mother told me, "Son, it is better to be rich and healthy than poor and sick." I have tried very hard to heed those words.

The method preferred by most balding men for making themselves look silly is called the comb over.

As the saying goes: "If you're not part of the solution, you're a newspaper columnist.

One of the issues that we professional newspaper columnists are required by union regulations to voice grave concern about is the federal budget deficit, which we refer to as the "mounting" deficit, because every extra word helps when you have to produce a certain number of gravely concerned newsprint inches.

The great thing about golf -- and this is the reason why a lot of health experts like me recommend it -- you can drink beer and ride in a cart while you play.

I find myself having these conversations where I go...You know, the guy, in that place. The guy in the place with the thing, you know. And it becomes this game of charades. And then finally, we realize that I mean the Pope.

I am much more likely to care about someone trying to be funny and give them some credit for whatever he or she did that was remotely funny than I am to be mused by somebody declaring this isn't funny, that isn't funny, this sucks. If you want to write humor, you're going to have to get used to that.

Technology is constantly improving our lives. Look at the cellular telephone. Just ten years ago, virtually nobody was able to get into a car crash caused by trying to steer and dial at the same time; today, people do this all the time.

Ask any real estate broker to name the three most important factors in buying a property, and he'll say: "Location, location, location." Now ask him to name the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, and he'll say: "Location, location, location." This tells us that we should not necessarily be paying a whole lot of attention to real estate brokers.

I believe many Harley guys spend more time revving their engines than actually driving anywhere; I sometimes wonder why they bother to have wheels on their motorcycles.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

If Charles Lindbergh, flying with no instruments other than a bologna sandwich, managed to cross the Atlantic and land safely on a runway completely covered with French people, why are today's airplanes, which are equipped with radar and computers and individualized liquor bottles, unable to cope with fog?

Men have no cause to criticize women about the way they are about weddings. Because men are like that about sports, but it never ends. At least women, after the wedding, say it wasn't that big a deal and they're never going to look at the DVD again. Men never stop being crazy about sports.

If, when you talk to people, they keep backing away from you, it's because you're TOO CLOSE, alright? SO DON'T KEEP ADVANCING ON THEM LIKE A HUMAN GLACIER.

What I need is a search engine that, no matter what I type in, comes back with GO BACK TO WORK.

I recently had my annual physical examination, which I get once every seven years, and when the nurse weighed me, I was shocked to discover how much stronger the Earth's gravitational pull has become since 1990.

Motto of the U.S. airline industry -- "We're Hoping to Have a Motto Announcement in About an Hour.

I hate rap music, which to me sounds like a bunch of angry men shouting, possibly because the person who was supposed to provide them with a melody never showed up.

I suspect that LaGuardia is an elaborate prank, and New York has a real airport nearby that only locals know about.

Granted, this system is insane, but we must not let sanity stand in the way of airport security.

Airline food is not intended for human consumption. It's intended as a form of in-flight entertainment, wherein the object is to guess what it is, starting with broad categories such as "mineral" and "linoleum.

American business long ago gave up on demanding that prospective employees be honest and hardworking. It has even stopped hoping for employees who are educated enough that they can tell the difference between the men's room and the women's room without having little pictures on the doors.

But from the perspective of the aging parent, there is no major difference between four and fifteen, except that when your child is four, his motoring privileges are restricted to little toy Fisher-Price vehicles which are unlikely (although I would not totally rule it out in America) to sue you.

After the war, Prohibition was passed, and with liquor no longer legally available the nation plunged headlong into the Great Depression.

When I read that I had to go to Gettysburg.

The Japanese tend to communicate via nuance and euphemism, often leaving important things unsaid; whereas Americans tend to think they're being subtle when they refrain from grabbing the listener by the shirt.

Your federal government needs your money so that it can perform vital services for you that you would not think up yourself in a million years.

The first animals to be successfully domesticated were dogs, which were a big help because they would bark all night and fetch thrown sticks, thereby freeing humans from having to perform these tedious yet vital tasks.

You cannot paint the exterior of your house. You have to take the paint chip down to show the paint-chip Nazis.

In my experience, you run into trouble when you ask a group of beer-drinking men to perform any task more complex than remembering not to light the filter ends of cigarettes.

On behalf of the newspaper industry I wish to announce some changes we're making to serve you better. When I say 'serve you better,'' I mean 'increase our profits.' We newspapers are very big on profits these days. We're a business, just like any other business, except that we employ English majors.

Many, many of you have written to me asking the following question: 'Dave, have their been any new advancements in the field of artificial falcon insemination, and could these developments be used to improve the American electoral process?'

As Americans we must always remember that we all have a common enemy, an enemy that is dangerous, powerful, and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.

Disney Resort and World and Compound, a place where your dreams really do come true, if you dream about having people wearing enormous cartoon-animal heads come around to your restaurant table and act whimsical and refuse to go away until you laugh with delight.

I feel that nasal spray is a wondrous medical achievement, because it is supposed to relieve nasal congestion, and by gadfrey, it relieves nasal congestion. What I'm saying is that it actually works, which is something you can say about very few other aspects of the medical establishment.

What was life like in the colonies? Probably the best word to describe it would be "colonial".

Normal person's weekly chore list:
1. clean kitchen.
2. clean bathroom.
3. clean entire rest of domicile.
cleaning impaired person's weekly chore list:
1. don't get peanut butter on sheets.

I would say that the single most important conclusion I reached, after traveling through Japan, as well as countless hours reading, studying, and analyzing this fascinating culture, is that you should always tighten the cap on the shampoo bottle before you put it in your suitcase.

When the boomers started to have kids reach adolescence, there was suddenly this feeling that they needed to protect their kids from all the same things they did when they were kids. Which I guess is a natural tendency, but it makes for a less fun society.

You should never pick up a newspaper when you're feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories.

The reason is that you eat too many foods that are high in "calories," which are little units that measure how good a particular food tastes. Fudge, for example, has a great many calories, whereas celery, which is not really a food at all but a member of the plywood family, provided by Mother Nature so that mankind would have a way to get onion dip into his mouth at parties, has none.

The badness of a movie is directly proportional to the number of helicopters in it.

Perhaps you are thinking: 'But a tank costs several million dollars, not including floor mats. I don't have that kind of money.' Don't be silly. You're a consumer, right? You have credit cards, right? Perhaps you are thinking: 'Yes, but how am I going to pay the credit-card company?' Don't be silly. You have a tank, right?

His body rigid with terror as he waited for the savages to something horrible to him--bash his head with clubs, or stab him with spears, or… …or tap him on the shoulder.

When I say "dogs", I'm talking about dogs, which are large, bounding, salivating animals, usually with bad breath. I am not talking about those little squeaky things you can hold on your lap and carry around. Zoologically speaking, these are not dogs at all; they are members of the pillow family.

Another important rule of affair-having: Never be discreet at the office.

If the people in Europe are SOOOOOO smart, how come so many of them can't seem to locate the deodorant, huh?

I was really bummed when I got to the last one of Tony Hillerman Navajo detective books.

We have always had dogs, and they have faithfully performed many valuable services for us, such as: 1. Peeing on everything. 2. When we're driving in our car, alerting us that we have passed another dog by barking real loud in our ears for the next 114 miles. 3. Trying to kill the Avon lady.

I report as a machine; I write as a person. That clear dichotomy softens the transition.

Database: the information you lose when your memory crashes.

Millions of Americans own dogs, because they are good-natured, simple, and easily amused. I am referring here to the Americans. The dogs are not exactly Mensa members either, but they definitely make better pets than tropical fish.

Today, you're 50. Now we can round your age up to 100! Happy 50th birthday!

I am not a violent person. I am a product of the Flower Power '60s. I have actually worn bell-bottomed jeans.

Without good grammar, the United States would have lost World War II.

Panicky despair is an underrated element of writing.

Crabgrass can grow on bowling balls in airless rooms, and there is no known way to kill it that does not involve nuclear weapons.

We journalists... are also extremely impressed with scientists, and we will, frankly, print just about any wacky thing they tell us, especially if it involves outer space.

We don't shoot somebody soon, I'm gonna forget how.

You know how on the evening news they always tell you that the stock market is up in active trading, or off in moderate trading, or trading in mixed activity, or whatever. Well, who gives a.

Earnest is our dog. She senses instantly that something is wrong, and guided by that timeless and unerring nurturing instinct that all female dogs have, she tries to lick my ears off.

As a taxpayer, you are required to be fully in compliance with the United States Tax Code, which is currently the size and weight of the Budweiser Clydesdales.

I'm happy to start on one topic and end on another one entirely, as long as it's funny.

With humor you have so many options with topics and length, I mean I can write humor essays in books now and they can be as long as I want them to be.

I've never actually given birth to a child, but I suspect that going to a Justin Bieber concert with a child is close.

Software is usually accompanied by documentation in the form of big fat scary manuals that nobody ever reads. In fact, for the past five years most of the manuals shipped with software products have actually been copies of Stephen King's The Stand with new covers pasted on.

Recently I began to feel this void in my life, even after meals, and I said to myself, "Dave, all you do with your spare time is sit around and drink beer. You need a hobby." So I got a hobby. I make beer.

San Francisco leads the world in the category of Most People On The Sidewalk Holding Conversations With Purely Imaginary Companions.

I'm one of those people who tells my wife, "No coaching from the sidelines.

When my generation was your age, we took crazy risks. The wildest thing was -- prepare to be shocked -- we deliberately ingested carbohydrates!

Passing the SAT: My personal theory is that it has to do with how much money you send them in the mail. I think the amounts they tell you to send are actually just suggested minimum donations -- if you get my drift.

Simply by eliminating description, the screenwriter can work his way through the entire plot in a single morning, leaving the afternoon free for screenwriter leisure activities such as drugs.

American tax laws are constantly changing as our elected representatives seek new ways to ensure that whatever tax advice we receive is incorrect.

Everyone has a right to be stupid. Some just abuse the privilege.

But if I hadn't shoved you off the boat back there,you'd be lost at sea now,wouldn't you? We'd all be lost! So thanks to me you're all standing on land." (Pirates, its a good thing they're idiots).

I always wanted to write when I was a kid; it just never occurred to me that you could have a job that didn't involve any actual work.... I felt it would be fun to have a job like that where you could make stuff up and be irresponsible and get paid for it.

As a professional journalist, I am always looking for new ways to get paid for being motionless.

Sign at a New England church: Will the last person to leave please see that the perpetual light is extinguished?

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

Be advised that there is no parking in Europe.

This year, U.S. airlineswill carry a record 143 million passengers, who will be in the air for 382 million hours, during which they will be fed an estimated total of four peanuts.

This is true; virtually all edible substances, and many automotive products, are now marketed as being low-fat or fat-free. Americans are obsessed with fat content.

Terry Jackson, who is the Miami Herald's automotive writer and TV critic. That's correct: This man gets paid to drive new cars AND watch television. If he ever dies and goes to heaven, it's going to be a big let down.

There's only one way kids will wear helmets, and that's if their parents are nagging them to. They will never wear helmets because some state passes a law requiring it.

By today's beauty standards, of course, Marilyn Monroe was an oil tanker.

I watched as an extremely nerdy exhibitor -- I'm talking about a guy who makes Bill Gates look like Brad Pitt.

The main accomplishment of almost all organized protests is to annoy people who are not in them.

If you asked me to name the three scariest threats facing the human race, I would give the same answer that most people would: nuclear war, global warming and Windows.

Murphy's golden rule: Whoever has the gold, makes the rules.

A sense of humor is a measurement of the extent to which we realize that we are trapped in a world almost totally devoid of reason. Laughter is how we express the anxiety we feel at this knowledge.

The voice belonged to Mr. Pzyrbovich, an algebra teacher who was always called Mr. P, for obvious reasons. He has a heavy accent, which a lot of kids said made him hard to understand, although to be fair some of these kids would have never understood algebra anyway.

Spiders so large they appear to be wearing the pelts of small mammals.

Meetings are places where dead ideas rise from their graves and eat the brains of the living.

I really, really like Suzana Delgado, who is the most beautiful girl in the eighth grade and probably the world. She has like 183 million Instagram followers.

Like many members of the uncultured, Cheez-It consuming public, I am not good at grasping modern art.

If Black Stache laughed, you laughed. If he snarled, you snarled. If he breathed in your direction, you ran for cover.

I think Superman should go on the Larry King show and announce that he would come back to life if people in all 50 states wanted him to.

The Romans spent the next 200 years using their great engineering skill to construct ruins all over Europe.

The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, "people without lives." We don't care. We have each other.

Print neatly. That's the kind of advice that the IRS considers a "dynamite" tax tip. If you ask them a real tax question, such as how you can cheat, they're useless.

When I write my annual tax column, some ex-IRS agent will complain, "There you go IRS bashing again." They're always saying that they're just doing their job. Someone I know once said, "You could get another job.

Thanks to my solid academic training, today I can write hundreds of words on virtually any topic without possessing a shred of information which is how I got a good job in journalism.

Dear Hotel People: We don't need a cheeseball clock-radio. WE NEED PLACES TO PLUG STUFF IN. Thank you.

You can only be young once but you can always be immature.

Humor is an escape, because you cannot think about your problems when you are trying to be funny; so, in essence, "being a humorist" gives you a valid excuse to hide from your pain.

There are no bad haircuts in cyberspace.

Sometimes I think the main purpose of professional sports is to give guys something to talk about that does not involve them personally.

For all I know, some of my close friends could be dead. The only way to find out would be to call them up and talk to them about what's going on in their lives, and I never do that.

I think this is true of many guys, even the ones who are not Humor Personalities: we do not view talking about our personal lives as an acceptable activity.

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

He was distracted by a giggle, and turned to see a rare sight: a girl.

As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved.

I guess libertarianism is always considered so weird and fringe that people assume that you're in the closet if you don't go around talking about it.

People are afraid to own their own homes. People are afraid their own government will catch them fixing their houses.

Experts agree that the best type of computer for your individual needs is one that comes on the market about two days after you actually purchase some other computer.

The planes are crowded and noisy and late, and everybody hates everybody. If armed terrorists had tried to hijack any of the flights I've been on lately, we passengers would have swiftly beaten them to death with those hard rolls you get with your in-flight meals.

It is a good idea to 'shop around' before you settle on a doctor. Ask about the condition of his Mercedes. Ask about the competence of his mechanic. Don't be shy! After all, you're paying for it.

Babies and Other Hazards of Sex: How to Make a Tiny Person in Only 9 Months, with Tools You Probably Have around the Home.

Like all writers, my greatest inspiration, my ultimate muse, is a deadline.

I am not the only person who uses his computer mainly for the purpose of diddling with his computer.

This is the funniest book I've ever held in my hands. -- Dave Barry, Pulitzer Prize winning humorist and author says about Radical Sabbatical.

Today's toys contain computer chips, so they can move and talk; this stimulates the mind of your child. Notice I say "your child." MY child just wants to eat the toys.

Most people make babies out to be very complicated, but the truth is they have only three moods:
MOOD ONE: Just about to cry.
MOOD TWO: Crying.
MOOD THREE: Just finished crying.

The truth is that balding African-American men look cool when they shave their heads, whereas balding white men look like giant thumbs.

What Dad means by "see" of course, is "drive past at 67 miles per hour." Dad feels it is a foolish waste of valuable vacation time to get out of the car and actually go look at an attraction.

Remember that a lone amateur built the Ark. A large group of professionals built the Titanic.

We must always remember that, as Americans, we all have a common enemy -- an enemy that is dangerous, powerful and relentless. I refer, of course, to the federal government.

The best baby-sitters, of course, are the baby's grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.

Now I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "How in a free country such as this, can we ban video games and golf, yet continue to permit stamp collecting?

Mankind's yearning to engage in sports is older than recorded history, dating back to the time millions of years ago, when the first primitive man picked up a crude club and a round rock, tossed the rock into the air, and whomped the club into the sloping forehead of the first primitive umpire.

What, exactly, is the Internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a "modem" can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo.

There was a time when the human race did not have technology. This time was called "the 1950s." I was a child then, and it was horrible. There were only three TV channels, and at any given moment at least two of them were showing men playing the accordion in black and white.

If, when you appear at the breakfast table, your wife laughs to hard that she spits out her toast, you should consider wearing a different tie.

The best way to learn Japanese is to be born as a Japanese baby, in Japan, raised by a Japanese family.

You may have gone to college and learned how to solve all of society's problems, but when you get out in the real world, nobody ever asks you to how to solve all of society's problems. In the real world, what people ask you are questions like: "Can you make coffee?" and "Where's the rent money?

The Constitution of the United States of America, Article V, Section 1: "There shall be a National Anthem containing incomprehensible words and a high note that normal humans cannot hit without risk of hernia.

If someone is nice to you but rude to the waiter, they are not a nice person.

The remote control had 48 buttons. No resident of the Old Farts Senile Dying Center knew how to operate it. They were the Greatest Generation, men and women who had survived the Depression, defeated the Nazis, built America into the greatest nation the world had ever seen. But this damned gizmo had beaten them.

I like beer. On occasion, I will even drink beer to celebrate a major event such as the fall of communism or the fact that the refrigerator is still working.

I'm a beer man. What I like about beer is you basically just drink it and order moor. You don't sniff at it, or hold it up to the light and slosh it around, or drone on and on about it, the way people do with wine. Your beer drinker tends to be a straightforward, decent, friendly, down-to-earth person, whereas your serious wine fancier tends to be an insufferable snot.

Like most Americans, I don't spend a lot of time thinking about Belgium, and thus sthere are many things I don't know about it as a country, such as which specific continent it is located on.

Belgium is a small nation containing people who call themselves -- this is true -- "Walloons." They are not ashamed of this at all. "I myself am a Walloon" is the kind of thing they say all the time. It's called "Walloon Pride.

There's nothing wrong with enjoying looking at the surface of the ocean itself, except that when you finally see what goes on underwater, you realize that you've been missing the whole point of the ocean. Staying on the surface all the time is like going to the circus and staring at the outside of the tent.

It's income tax time again, Americans: time to gather up those receipts, get out those tax forms, sharpen up that pencil, and stab yourself in the aorta.

Karate is a form of martial arts in which people who have had years and years of training can using only their hands and feet make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.

The government: What we can as citizens do to reform our tax system? As you know, under our three-branch system of government, the tax laws are created by Satan. But he works through the Congress, so that's where we must focus our efforts.

Not all chemicals are bad. Without chemicals such as hydrogen and oxygen, for example, there would be no way to make water, a vital ingredient for beer.

Without a question, the greatest invention in the history of mankind is beer. Oh, I grant you that the wheel was also a fine invention, but the wheel does not go nearly as well with pizza.

The best babysitters, of course, are the baby's grandparents. You feel completely comfortable entrusting your baby to them for long periods, which is why most grandparents flee to Florida.

My therapist told me the way to achieve true inner peace is to finish what I start. So far I've finished two bags of MandMs and a chocolate cake. I feel better already.

I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty seven year olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

It is inhumane, in my opinion, to force people who genuinely have a medical need for coffee to wait in line behind people who apparently view it as some kind of recreational activity.

If you had to identify in one word the reason why the human race has not achieved and never will achieve its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.

The easiest way to make a fruit cake is to buy a darkish cake, then pound some old, hard fruit into it with a mallet. Be sure to wear safety glasses.

Harvard University, according to the directory of the American Society of Colleges and Universities, is a 'type of weevil.'

Hobbies of any kind are boring except to people who have the same hobby. This is also true of religion, although you will not find me saying so in print.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

Remember that the important thing is not what you give, or how you wrap it. The important thing, during this very special time of year, is that you save the receipt.

Today, it is easier to get divorced in most states than to get a transmission repaired properly.

You should be prepared for anything during divorce proceedings, even the truth.

The internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, people without lives. We don't care. We have each other.

The Internet, transforming society and shaping the future through chat.

The Democrats seem to be basically nicer people, but they have demonstrated time and again that they have the management skills of celery. They're the kind of people who'd stop to help you change a flat, but would somehow manage to set your car on fire. I would be reluctant to entrust them with a Cuisinart, let alone the economy.