Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down Read Free Page A

medieval war weapon and then using it to hurl a Buick 200 yards.
    These are guy activities. These are activities that, when you describe them to a group containing both males and females, provoke two very different reactions:
    MALE REACTION: “Cool!”
    FEMALE REACTION:
“Why?”
    The answer, of course, is: Because guys like to do stuff. This explains both the Space Shuttle and mailbox vandalism.
    Today I want to report on another inspiring example of guys doing stuff. There is a guy in Van Nuys (rhymes with “guys”), California, who is planning, one day soon, to roll down an airport runway and becomethe first human in recorded history to take off in an airplane that is powered by a rubber band.
    I am not making this up. I have met this guy, a 44-year-old stunt pilot whose name happens to be George Heaven. I have also seen his plane, which he designed, and which is called the Rubber Bandit. Do you remember the little rubber-band planes that you used to assemble from pieces of balsa? This plane looks a lot like those, except that it’s 33 feet long, with a wingspan of 71 feet and an 18-foot-long propeller. The body is made from high-tech, super-lightweight carbon fiber, so it weighs only 220 pounds without the rubber band, which weighs 90 pounds.
    This is not your ordinary rubber band such as you would steal from the supply cabinet at your office. This is made from a continuous strand of rubber that is a quarter inch wide and
miles
long; if you stretched it out, it would extend for 24 miles, which means that—to put this in scientific terms—if you shot it at somebody, it would sting like a mother.
    The rubber band has been folded back over itself 400 times, so now it forms a fat, 25-foot-long python-like rubber snake on the hangar floor at the Van Nuys Airport. When the big day comes, a winch will wind the rubber band 600 to 800 times, and everybody involved will be very, very careful. You have to watch your step when dealing with your large-caliber rubber bands. I know this from personal experience, because one time a friend of mine named Bill Rose, who is a professional editor at
The Miami Herald
and who likes to shoot rubber bands at people, took time out from his busy journalism schedule to construct what he called the Nuclear Rubber Band, which was 300 rubber bands attached together end to end.
    One morning in
The Miami Herald
newsroom, I helped Bill test-fire the Nuclear Rubber Band. I hooked one end over my thumb, and Bill stretched the other end back, back, back, maybe 75 feet. Then he let go. It was an amazing sight to see this whizzing, blurred blob come hurtling through the air, passing me at a high rate of speed and thenshooting WAYYYY across the room, where it scored a direct bull’s-eye hit smack dab on a fairly personal region of a professional reporter named Jane.
    Jane, if you’re reading this, let me just say, by way of sincere personal apology, that it was Bill’s fault.
    The thing is, Bill’s rubber band was
nothing
compared with the one that will power George Heaven’s Rubber Bandit. If that one were to snap when fully wound, in the words of Rubber Bandit crew chief Tom Beardsley, “it has the potential to kill someone.”
    Then there is the whole question of what will happen if the Rubber Bandit—with Heaven sitting on a tiny seat hanging below the fuselage, between the wheels—actually takes off. I keep thinking about all the balsa model planes I had when I was a boy. I’d wind the propeller until my finger was sore, then I’d set the plane down on the street, let the prop go, and watch as the plane surged forward, became airborne, and then—guided by some unerring homing instinct that balsa apparently possesses—crashed into the nearest available object and broke into small pieces.
    I discussed this with Heaven, who nodded the nod of a man who has heard it all many times. He told me he was not worried at all.
    “You’re out of your mind,” I said.
    “I know it,” he said.
    So