Just Call Me Studboy.com - Dave Barry

  • Thought you all might get a giggle out of Dave Barry's latest column :
    Quote:
    Just Call Me Studboy.com

    I started lifting weights. But not for the reason you think. You think I want to look ''cut'' and ''ripped'' and have bulging muscles like the ones on male underwear models, who for some reason are always shown posing outdoors, looking sullen, as if a group of even more-muscular models stole their pants.

    You think I want to have muscles like that, so women will look at me and think: ``Wow! I would like to see HIS syndicated column!''

    But you are wrong. I'm lifting weights for sensible medical reasons, which I learned about from the highest possible medical authority: the Internet. If you ever experience a medical symptom, such as itching, you don't need to waste time sitting in a doctor's waiting room reading 1997 issues of Redbook. Instead, you can go to the Internet, and with just a few mouse clicks, you'll discover the reassuring truth: There might be a worm in your brain.

    Really. According to a medical site called Medline Plus (''Trusted Health Information for You'') sponsored by The National Medical Library AND The National Institutes of Health, itching can be a symptom of a condition called ''visceral larva migrans'' (literally, ``a worm in your brain''). And before I get a bunch of nasty letters from irate physicians attacking me for unnecessarily scaring people, let me note that another symptom of brain worm is -- and this is a direct quote from Medline Plus -- ``irritability.''

    But getting back to weightlifting: I found out from the Internet that when you get to be my age (old), you lose bone density and muscle mass. This alarmed me, because I never had any muscle mass to begin with.

    Men: You know how, when your wife can't open a pickle jar, she gives it to you, and you're supposed to smile in a manly patronizing way as you effortlessly twist it open? That's not what happens in our house. What happens is, after a grim struggle lasting several minutes, I wind up lying on the kitchen floor, exhausted and whimpering, while the pickle jar, unopened, laughs and flirts boldly with my wife. Sometimes it gives me a wedgie.

    I've always been puny. As a youth, I totally missed the boat to Puberty Island. It sailed away with all my classmates, leaving me standing on the dock. When it returned, down the gangplank came tromping all these young adults between six and eight feet tall, sporting muscles and beards and bosoms (sometimes all three). Whereas I was still this little hairless dweeb with a voice in the Pinocchio range.

    It was a difficult time for me, but one day my mom, bless her heart, had a talk with me. She told me that girls were not interested only in looks -- that the qualities that really mattered were brains and a sense of humor. That little talk was long ago, but it taught me an invaluable life lesson I have never forgotten: Moms lie when they have to. The truth is that -- and I speak here as a trained humor professional -- women are definitely more interested in muscles than a sense of humor. You will never hear a woman say: ``I wish Brad Pitt would put his shirt back on and tell some jokes!''

    But let me repeat in a non-defensive manner that this has NOTHING TO DO with why I'm lifting weights. I'm doing it for mass and density, as clearly explained on the Internet.

    Is my weight training working? Consider this: After just one week of lifting, I can no longer move my arms. I feel as though oxen have been clog-dancing on my upper body. I have to brush my teeth by holding the toothbrush still and moving my head up and down.

    The problem is that weights -- follow me closely -- are heavy. When you lift them, your muscles hurt, which is your body's way of telling you: ''Stop lifting weights, moron!'' (Or, in some cases: ``There's a worm in your brain!'')

    But I'm making progress: This very morning I ''bench-pressed'' a total weight of -- and here, to make it look more impressive, I will use the metric system -- 4,082,331.33 centigrams. Lying on my back, I was able to lift this weight INTO THE AIR, then bring it back down onto my chest, thus completing a ``bench press.''

    Unfortunately, I couldn't get the weight back off my chest. Seriously: I was trapped. My wife had to come rescue me. She thought it was very funny; I heard her laughing all the way back to the kitchen. I bet the pickle jar was laughing, too. I will kill it with a hammer, if I can ever lift my arms again.
    http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...printstory.jsp
  • That's actually not bad for a beginner 90 lb bench.

    Handy-dandy conversion site for pedants like me

    Linda C.
  • Absolutely Delish
    Love this article, the office wants to know what I am laughing about. Thank you very much.
  • That was a hoot Meg!! I'm sure the neighbours heard me laugh !!
  • Love it, Meg - I have always been a fan of Dave Barry, I have one of his books that I read again and again when I am having a bad day. Is there an internet site that has his columns??

    P.S. This one literally had me in tears!!!
  • Dave Barry On Carbs
    Samantha -- I love Dave Barry too. His web site is www.davebarry.com. Here's another one of my faves for you:

    Quote:
    Confessions Of A Closet Carb Fiend

    DAVE BARRY

    I probably shouldn't admit this to you younger readers, but when my generation was your age, we did some pretty stupid things. I'm talking about taking CRAZY risks. We drank water right from the tap. We used aspirin bottles that you could actually open with your bare hands. We bought appliances that were not festooned with helpful safety warnings such as ''DO NOT BATHE WITH THIS TOASTER.''

    But for sheer insanity, the wildest thing we did was -- prepare to be shocked -- we deliberately ingested carbohydrates.

    I know, I know. It was wrong. But we were young and foolish, and there was a lot of peer pressure. You'd be at a party, and there would be a lava lamp blooping away, and a Jimi Hendrix record playing (a ''record'' was a primitive compact disc that operated by static electricity). And then, when the mood was right, somebody would say: ''You wanna do some 'drates?'' And the next thing you know, there'd be a bowl of pretzels going around, or crackers, or even potato chips, and we'd put these things into our mouths and just ... EAT them.

    I'm not proud of this. My only excuse was that we were ignorant. It's not like now, when everybody knows how bad carbohydrates are, and virtually every product is advertised as being ''low-carb,'' including beer, denture adhesives, floor wax, tires, life insurance and Viagra. Back then, we had no idea. Nobody did! Our own MOTHERS gave us bread!

    Today, of course, nobody eats bread. People are terrified of all carbohydrates, as evidenced by the recent mass robbery at a midtown Manhattan restaurant, where 87 patrons turned their wallets over to a man armed only with a strand of No. 8 spaghetti. (''Do what he says! He has pasta!'') The city of Beverly Hills has been evacuated twice this month because of reports -- false, thank heavens -- that terrorists had put a bagel in the water supply.

    But as I say, in the old days we didn't recognize the danger of carbohydrates. We believed that the reason you got fat was from eating ''calories,'' which are tiny units of measurement that cause food to taste good. When we wanted to lose weight, we went on low-calorie diets in which we ate only inedible foods such as celery, which is actually a building material, and grapefruit, which is nutritious, but offers the same level of culinary satisfaction as chewing on an Odor Eater.

    The problem with the low-calorie diet was that a normal human could stick to it for, at most, four hours, at which point he or she would have no biological choice but to sneak out to the garage and snork down an entire bag of Snickers, sometimes without removing the wrappers. So nobody lost weight, and everybody felt guilty all the time. Many people, in desperation, turned to disco.

    But then along came the bold food pioneer who invented the Atkins Diet: Dr. Something Atkins. After decades of research on nutrition and weight gain -- including the now-famous Hostess Ding Dong Diet Experiment, which resulted in a laboratory rat the size of a Plymouth Voyager -- Dr. Atkins discovered an amazing thing: Calories don't matter! What matter are carbohydrates, which result when a carbo molecule and a hydrate molecule collide at high speeds and form tiny invisible doughnuts.

    Dr. Atkins' discovery meant that -- incredible though it seemed -- as long as you avoided carbohydrates, you could, without guilt, eat high-fat, high-calorie foods such as cheese, bacon, lard, pork rinds and whale. You could eat an entire pig, as long as the pig had not recently been exposed to bread.

    At first, like other groundbreaking pioneers such as Galileo and Eminem, Dr. Atkins met with skepticism, even hostility. The low-calorie foods industry went after him big time. The Celery Growers Association hired a detective to -- yes -- stalk him. His car tires were repeatedly slashed by what police determined to be shards of Melba toast.

    But Dr. Atkins persisted, because he had a dream -- a dream that, some day, he would help the human race by selling it 427 million diet books. And he did, achieving vindication for his diet before his tragic demise in an incident that the autopsy report listed as ''totally unrelated to the undigested 28-pound bacon cheeseburger found in his stomach.''

    But the Atkins Diet lives on, helping millions of Americans to lose weight. The irony is, you can't tell this by looking at actual Americans, who have, as a group, become so heavy that North America will soon be underwater as far inland as Denver. Which can only mean one thing: You people are still sneaking Snickers. You should be ashamed of yourselves! Got any more?
    http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...printstory.jsp
  • Very funny, Meg -- especially that first one! It had me cracking up!
  • Guess I have to cut out my dog biscuit habit.
    Love Dave Barry
    Here's my favorite: it has nothing to do with weights, food or health, but I first read it when my dd was headed to college, as a chemistry major.


    "College" by DAVE BARRY

    Many of you young persons out there are seriously thinking about
    going to college. (That is, of course, a lie. The only things you
    young persons think seriously about are loud music and sex. Trust
    me: these are closely related to college.)

    College is basically a bunch of rooms where you sit for roughly
    two thousand hours and try to memorize things. The two thousand
    hours are spread out over four years; you spend the rest of the time
    sleeping and trying to get dates.

    Basically, you learn two kinds of things in college:

    * Things you will need to know in later life (two hours). These
    include how to make collect telephone calls and get beer and
    crepe paper stains out of your pajamas.

    * Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours).
    the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology,
    -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is, you memorize these
    things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them.
    If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay
    in college for the rest of your life.

    It's very difficult to forget everything. For example, when I was
    in college, I had to memorize -- don't ask me why -- the names of
    three metaphysical poets other than John Donne. I have managed to
    forget one of them, but I still remember that the other two were
    named Vaughan and Crashaw. Sometimes, when I'm trying to remember
    something important like whether my wife told me to get tuna packed
    in oil or tuna packed in water, Vaughan and Crashaw just pop up in
    my mind, right there in the supermarket. It's a terrible waste of
    brain cells.

    After you've been in college for a year or so, you're supposed to
    choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and
    forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of
    advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts
    and Right Answers.

    This means you must *not* major in mathematics, physics, biology,
    or chemistry, because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for
    example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class
    one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of
    the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result
    to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with *exactly*
    the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of
    chemistry: if you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen
    combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to
    come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have
    agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
    So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy,
    psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really
    understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve
    virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these
    subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:

    ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books you have
    read little snippets of just before class. Here is a tip on how to
    get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a
    book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example,
    suppose you are studying Moby-Dick. Anybody with any common sense
    would say that Moby-Dick is a big white whale, since the characters
    in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly eleven thousand
    times. So in *your* paper, *you* say Moby-Dick is actually the
    Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of
    reading papers and never liked Moby-Dick anyway, will think you are
    enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic
    interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.

    PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and
    deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch.
    You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.

    PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams.
    Psychologists are *obsessed* with rats and dreams. I once spent an
    entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain
    sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat
    learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor.
    If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats,
    you should major in psychology.

    SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and
    away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of
    sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never
    once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because
    sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of
    their time translating simple, obvious observations into
    scientific sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll
    have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have
    observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write:
    "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies
    of pre maturated isolates indicates that a casual relationship exists
    between groundward tropism and lachrimatory, or 'crying,' behavior
    forms." If you can keep this up for fifty or sixty pages, you will
    get a large government grant.


    Mel
  • MEL - Very funny, loved it. I majored in Anthropology, sort of like Sociology only in another country with really good food.


  • You guys are cracking me up!

    He nailed sociology -- good thing DD wised up (it was her original major) and is going to paramedic school.
  • Those were great girls!!
  • Meg - thank you so much for the website!! I used to read him every week in the paper, but my paper stopped printing him!! I should write a letter!
  • I love Dave Barry! My favorite book is "Dave Barry is NOT Taking This Sitting Down" (He is on the cover sitting on a toliet, and it goes on an on about the great late 80's early 90's controversy of the end of the 4 gallon toliet, there was also an episode of "King of the Hill " on this subject). I got it on tape and it was an awesome way to get my son to start reading the paper even if he just reads Dave Barry on Sundays and the comics.

    for the morning laugh! And yes "Moms do lie when they have to" especially when their sons are intelligent and funny and will never look like Brad Pitt

    Chris