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

there you have it: A Guy on a Mission. Heaven (who looks and sounds a little like the late Robert Mitchum, although he denies this) hopes to make his historic flight around the end of this month. He’s trying to raise money so that he and his crew can finish the Rubber Bandit. Naturally you are wondering if he has approached the Trojan condom company about a sponsorship; the answer is yes, he did, and—incredibly—Trojan turned him down.
    But he and his volunteers have been working on this project for two years, and I don’t think they’re going to quit. So keep an eye out for news on the Rubber Bandit. If you live near Van Nuys, you should also keep an ear out, and if you hear a really loud twanging sound, duck.

From Now On, Let Women Kill Their Own Spiders
    F rom time to time I receive letters from a certain group of individuals that I will describe, for want of a better term, as “women.” I have such a letter here, from a Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina, who asks the following question:
    “Why do men open a drawer and say, ‘Where is the spatula?’ instead of, you know, looking for it?”
    This question expresses a commonly held (by women) negative stereotype about guys of the male gender, which is that they cannot find things around the house, especially things in the kitchen. Many women believe that if you want to hide something from a man, all you have to do is put it in plain sight in the refrigerator, and he will never, ever find it, as evidenced by the fact that a man can open a refrigerator containing 463 pounds of assorted meats, poultry, cold cuts, condiments, vegetables, frozen dinners, snack foods, desserts, etc., and ask, with no irony whatsoever, “Do we have anything to eat?”
    Now I could respond to this stereotype in a snide manner by making generalizations about women. I could ask, for example, how come your average woman prepares for virtually every upcoming event in her life, including dental appointments, by buying new shoes, even if she already owns as many pairs as the entire Riverdance troupe. I could point out that, if there were no women, there would be no such thing as Leonardo DiCaprio. I could ask why a woman would walk upto a perfectly innocent man who is minding his own business watching basketball and demand to know if a certain pair of pants makes her butt look too big, and then, no matter what he answers, get mad at him. I could ask why, according to the best scientific estimates, 93 percent of the nation’s severely limited bathroom-storage space is taken up by decades-old, mostly empty tubes labeled “moisturizer.” I could point out that, to judge from the covers of countless women’s magazines, the two topics most interesting to women are (1) Why men are all disgusting pigs, and (2) How to attract men.
    Yes, I could raise these issues in response to the question asked by Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina, regarding the man who was asking where the spatula was. I could even ask WHY this particular man might be looking for the spatula. Could it be that he needs a spatula to kill a spider, because, while he was innocently watching basketball and minding his own business, a member of another major gender—a gender that refuses to personally kill spiders but wants them all dead—DEMANDED that he kill the spider, which nine times out of 10 turns out to be a male spider that was minding its own business? Do you realize how many men arrive in hospital emergency rooms every year, sometimes still gripping their spatulas, suffering from painful spider-inflicted injuries? I don’t have the exact statistics right here, but I bet they are chilling.
    As I say, I could raise these issues and resort to the kind of negativity indulged in by Susie Walker of North Augusta, South Carolina. But I choose not to. I choose, instead, to address her question seriously, in hopes that, by improving the communication between the genders, all human beings—both men and