Dave Barry– Classic ’95: Return of the Lawn Rangers

Folks—

Dave Barry’s article this week—reprised from Oct 1995— is a little more sophomoric than usual. As such, I had hesitated to forward it this week. But then my medication wore off, so here it is.

His article starts out describing Ranger Reeder, who is an active member in the “World Famous Lawn Ranger Precision Lawn Mower Drill Team”, and how he was dancing around with his bent over bare buttocks gyrating around. They didn’t mention, specifically, what kind of music and dance that was but I have to ask: is that what they used to call a “can-can”? (And, much like my joke, the article goes downhill from there.)

An organization of Lawn Rangers who are part of a “precision lawn mower” drill team would have very few members here in California. Largely, that is because dead grass doesn’t require much mowing. As the drought continues unabated here in the Golden State—named for the golden brown color of the lawns most people have here these days—the sight of a lawn mower is somewhat anachronistic now. Plumbers in California, however, still have work so partial moon sightings still exist here.

Speaking of rumps—the second GOP presidential candidate debate occurred last week and, again Donald Trump (Donald T. Rump?) is still leading in the polls. Although Rick Perry and, more recently, Scott Walker have dropped out, the clown car of GOP candidates is still pretty crowded, much to the delight of late night talk show comedians everywhere.

This almost-Vaudevillian electoral sideshow almost makes me nostalgic for the California Gubernatorial Recall Election of 2003 where we had 135 candidates, including former child star Gary Coleman and porn star Mary Carey. Unfortunately, this same election left us with Governor Schwarzenegger.

However, unlike Ranger Reeder below, the only member of the electorate, other than his wife, who saw the governor’s bare buttocks was their household employee, Patty Baena, who bore his illegitimate son.

—- Peter

Classic ’95: Return of the Lawn Rangers

BY DAVE BARRY

(Originally published on October 15, 1995)

It was Saturday night in the beer tent, which is where everybody goes after the day’s festivities at the annual Broom Corn Festival in Arcola, Ill. A group of us guys were standing around, shouting snippets of conversation over the din of the band, when we saw a man’s naked rear end advancing toward us through the crowd. The owner of the rear end was walking backward and bending over, so we couldn’t see his head or upper body — just a disembodied, naked butt shuffling our way.

Next to us, a group of women suddenly noticed the oncoming butt. To say they were startled would be an understatement.

“Look!” they gasped, pointing at the butt. “He’s . . . He’s . . . It’s . . . ”

“It’s OK!” we assured them. “It’s only Ranger Reeder!”

Ranger Doug Reeder is a member of an organization I belong to, the World Famous Lawn Ranger Precision Lawn Mower Drill Team. It was founded 15 years ago by some guys in Arcola, a small central-Illinois town that each fall hosts the Broom Corn Festival, a celebration of the glory years when Arcola was a leading producer of the corn used to make broom bristles. The highlight of the festival is the Broom Corn parade, and the most elite marching unit in the parade, as measured in per capita consumption of keg-dwelling beverages, is the Lawn Rangers.

When you talk about dedicated service organizations — when you talk about decency, integrity and leadership — you are not talking about the Lawn Rangers. We are not one of those organizations — and here I am thinking of our arch-enemies, the Shriners — that try to justify their existence by occasionally doing something useful. What we do is push lawn mowers and carry brooms. At various points along the parade route, we stop and astonish the crowd by performing broom-and-lawn-mower maneuvers with a level of smooth precision that you rarely see outside of train wrecks.

I’ve marched with the Lawn Rangers in four Broom Corn parades now. My friends ask me why I keep going back, but when I try to explain it (“We’re pushing lawn mowers, see, and we’re wearing masks, and we’re tossing brooms, and . . . “) it just sounds stupid. This is, of course, because it IS stupid. But it is more than that: It is also extremely immature.

I refer here to what goes on during Ranger Orientation, which takes place before the parade in Ranger Ted Shields’ garage. This is where we Rangers get ourselves into peak physical and mental condition by consuming refreshing beverages and a scientific training diet of bratwurst; this is also where we teach our precision maneuvers to the rookie Rangers via a brutal training regimen that can last as long as five minutes. And above all, this is where we hold the Ranger Business Meeting, which could well be the single most tasteless annual event in America, surpassing even the Christmas retail season.

Two years ago the governor of Illinois, who was running for re-election, showed up at the Business Meeting, apparently thinking it was a collection of normal voters. As he approached us, he realized that he had made a huge mistake and stopped, with his mouth maintaining a rigid professional smile, but his eyes revealing the stark terror of a politician who realizes that he’s in danger of being photographed shaking hands with, for example, a man wearing a hat festooned with a lifelike replica of the male anatomical unit.

The governor left quickly, which meant he missed the Business Meeting, including the much-anticipated performance by Ranger Reeder. Out of respect for a fellow Ranger, I am not going to comment upon Ranger Reeder’s mental state, except to say that he has the kind of penetrating stare and intense smile that would make him a prize recruit for the U.S. Postal Service, if you get my drift.

He is a legend among the Rangers. Each year — this is the highlight of the Business Meeting — he gets up a ladder, turns his back to the audience, and presents an extremely explicit dramatic rendition, using props, of a song or poem involving the word “moon.” Each year his performance gets more elaborate; this year, it concluded with actual fireworks shooting out of a tube that was . . . Well, I can’t tell you where the tube was, except to say we were all amazed that Ranger Reeder did not require medical treatment. But he showed no ill effects, and was in superb form that night in the beer tent, where he continued to personify the “moon” theme by backing slowly through the crowd. Every now and then you’d look down, and there would be Ranger Reeder, serving as a proud symbol of Rangerhood, making the rest of us proud to be part of this crack (rim shot) outfit.

For the next solid year, American voters are going to be relentlessly hounded by presidential contenders, all of whom are going to assure us that they represent mainstream, heartland values. I say to those candidates: Maybe not everybody in the heartland has exactly the same values. Maybe it would broaden your perspective to come to Arcola next fall, march with the Rangers, hang out in the beer tent, watch Ranger Reeder in action. He would make an awesome secretary of state.

© 1995, Dave Barry  This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary links to this column at http://www.miamiherald.com may be posted or distributed without written permission.

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Dave Barry– Arrrrr! Talk like a pirate — or prepare to be boarded

Folks—

This week Dave Barry reprises a column from 2002 where he trumpets the merits of and promotes September 19 as Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Truth be told, I’m mostly agnostic about such a day. But we do have Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Grandparent’s Day, Secretary’s Day, Nurse’s Appreciation Week, Teacher’s Appreciation Week, plus awareness weeks or months for police, libraries, parks, playground safety, stress, autism, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, breast cancer, and others. There’s even an International Chocolate Day—so why not this?

Of course, you know, if this does take hold you can be sure that Hallmark will get into the act by creating new greeting cards that will stand shoulder to shoulder with the usual array of other holiday cards. I can almost visualize some of the sentiments we’d be likely to see:

It’s Talk Like a Pirate Day, yank,
So I hope ye remembers,
Else ye be walkin’ the plank.
Shiver me timbers!

On Talk Like a Pirate Day
You hear pirate talk all around town,
Join in—it’s fun to hear and say
“Blow The Man Down!”

Have fun! Wear an eyepatch!
‘Cause it’s Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Batten down the hatches,
And anchors aweigh!

Since Talk Like a Pirate Day would be this Saturday, Sept 19, 2015, you have very little time to get your “pirate patter” down pat. Towards that end, I might suggest a free phone app that the young kids of a friend of mine told me about a few years ago called Pirate Utility Lite. It will generate random pirate insults and also will translate various sentences into pirate talk. For instance:

English: “Hello there. How are you?”

Pirate: “Gangway! Ahoy thar! Hoist the Jolly Roger! How fares yer day?”

And don’t forget to follow most sentences with “Arrrr!”

— Peter

Arrrrr! Talk like a pirate — or prepare to be boarded

BY DAVE BARRY

(This classic Dave Barry column was originally published Sept. 8, 2002.)

Every now and then, some visionary individuals come along with a concept that is so original and so revolutionary that your immediate reaction is: ”Those individuals should be on medication.”

Today I want to tell you about two such people, John Baur and Mark Summers, who have come up with a concept that is going to make you kick yourself for not thinking of it first: Talk Like a Pirate Day. As the name suggests, this is a day on which everybody would talk like a pirate. Is that a great idea, or what? There are so many practical benefits that I can’t even begin to list them all.

Baur and Summers came up with this idea a few years ago. They were playing racquetball, and, as so often happens, they began talking like pirates. And then it struck them: Why not have a day when EVERYBODY talks like a pirate? They decided that the logical day would be Sept. 19, because that — as you are no doubt aware — is Summers’ ex-wife’s birthday.

Since then, Baur and Summers have made a near-superhuman effort to promote Talk Like a Pirate Day. As Baur puts it: “We’ve talked like pirates, and encouraged our several friends to, every Sept. 19, except for a couple where we forgot.”

And yet, incredibly, despite this well-orchestrated campaign, the nation has turned a deaf shoulder to Talk Like a Pirate Day. In desperation, Baur and Summers turned to me for help. As an influential newspaper columnist, I have the power to ”make or break” a national day. You may recall that almost nobody celebrated Thanksgiving until I began writing about it in the 1970s.

I have given Baur’s and Summers’ idea serious thought, looking for ways to improve it. One variation I considered was Talk Like a Member of the Lollipop Guild Day, on which everybody would talk like the three Munchkins in the film version of The Wizard of Oz who welcome Dorothy to Munchkin Land by singing with one corner of their mouths drooping down, as though they have large invisible dental suction devices hanging from their lips. But I realized that would be stupid.

So I have decided to throw my full support behind Talk Like a Pirate Day, to be observed this Sept. 19. To help promote this important cause, I have decided to seek the endorsement of famous celebrities, and I am pleased to report that, as of today, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Britney Spears, Brad Pitt, Oprah Winfrey, the Osbournes, Tiger Woods, Ted Koppel, the Sopranos, Puff Doody and the late Elvis Presley are all people who I hope will read this column and become big supporters. I see no need to recruit [former] President Bush, because he already talks like a pirate, as we can see from this transcript of a recent White House press conference:

REPORTER: Could you please explain either your foreign or your domestic policy?

PRESIDENT BUSH: Arrrrr.

To prepare for Talk Like a Pirate Day, you should practice incorporating pirate terminology into your everyday speech. For example, let’s consider a typical conversation between two co-workers in a business office:

BOB: Hi. Mary.

MARY: Hi, Bob. Have you had a chance to look at the Fennerman contract?

BOB: Yes, and I have some suggestions.

MARY: OK, I’ll review them.

Now let’s see how this same conversation would sound on Talk Like a Pirate Day:

BOB: Avast, me beauty.

MARY: Avast, Bob. Is that a yardarm in your doubloons, or are you just glad to see me?

BOB: You are giving me the desire to haul some keel.

MARY: Arrrrr.

As you can see, talking like a pirate will infuse your everyday conversations with romance and danger. So join the movement! On Sept. 19, do not answer the phone with ”hello.” Answer the phone with ”Ahoy me hearty!” If the caller objects that he is not a hearty, inform him that he is a scurvy dog (or, if the caller is female, a scurvy female dog) who will be walking the plank off the poop deck and winding up in Davy Jones’ locker, sleeping with the fishes. No, wait, that would be Talk Like a Pirate in The Godfather Day, which is another variation I considered (“I’m gonna make him an offer that will shiver his timbers”).

But the point is, this is a great idea, and you, me bucko, should be part of it. Join us on Sept. 19. You HAVE the buckles, darn it: Don’t be afraid to swash them! Let’s make this into a grass-roots movement that sweeps the nation, like campaign-finance reform, or Krispy Kreme doughnuts. I truly think this idea could bring us, as a nation, closer together.

But not TOO much closer. Some of us will have swords.

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Dave Barry– Classic ’95: Frogs in space

Folks—

I hope everyone’s Labor Day weekend went well. And hopefully none of you had any “frog-related” incidents such as is mentioned in Dave Barry’s column below where he recaps about “Frogs Making News.”

One doesn’t usually read much about frogs in the mainstream press these days. But, when reference is made about these amphibious creatures, it usually seems to be negative. For instance, having a frog in one’s throat is often cause for discomfort. Back around WWII, French people were derisively referred to as “frogs”. A person described as a “big frog in a small pond” is someone who usually has an exalted title only because he/she is a player at a small and insignificant place. And it’s never a compliment if someone says that you’re tighter than a frog’s ass– essentially they’re saying that you’re cheap.

However, when I was a kid living on the 4^th floor of a walkup apartment building, my mom didn’t allow us to have any real pets like dogs, cats or birds. For one thing, the rental lease precluded any such pets from living in the apartment. For another, we were allergic to them. So, I had to be content with “pseudo-pets” like painted turtles or fish. One summer, however, I spent it at camp in the White Mountains of New Hampshire where I caught a frog which I brought back with me to Brooklyn and kept as a pet. So, in this case, the presence of frogs was a positive thing. And I have to believe that I probably was the only kid in the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn who had a frog as a pet. I am living testament that debunks the long-standing, and decidedly negative, myth that frogs can cause warts. That only applies if one dares to touch some toads– such as Ted Cruz or Donald Trump, for instance.

Sadly, my slimy green-skinned friend escaped from the bowl/tank that I set up for him. Not wanting to generate any hysterics from the only female living in the apartment at the time, I hid this fact from my mom but, eventually– days or weeks later– I found the frog dead and desiccated under the radiator in my room.

This fact was also not reported in the mainstream press, nor was the small burial service that I held for it in the patch of grass that ran curbside on the block that I lived in, so it’s of little surprise to me that Dave Barry neglected to mention it in his column below.

However, in retrospect, I guess it would have been too much of a “leap” of faith to believe it would be.

— Peter

Classic ’95: Frogs in space

BY DAVE BARRY

This Dave Barry column was originally published Sunday, October 1, 1995

As part of our continuing effort to keep you, the voting public, alarmed, today we present a Special Report entitled: Frogs Making News.

Our lead frog hails from West Virginia, where it was the subject of a news story in The Charleston Daily Mail, written by Evadna Bartlett and sent in by alert reader Jeremy Scott. The headline states:

PUTNAM WOMAN FINDS FROG INSIDE HER FROZEN DINNER

The story — which is one of the most thorough frog-related stories we have seen in 24 years of journalism — quotes the woman, Emily Stover, as stating that she had eaten about three- quarters of a “Healthy Choice” brand Chicken Cantonese frozen dinner, and was about to eat the broccoli (“her favorite vegetable,” the story states) when she came across what she at first thought was a piece of asparagus. Upon closer examination, however, she discovered, to her horror, that it was a frog.

“I love frogs,” she is quoted as saying, “but I don’t want them in my food.”

The Daily Mail published a color photograph of a concerned- looking Stover holding a small green object, identified as the frog in question, next to a Healthy Choice box. The story states that Stover notified the company that makes Healthy Choice, ConAgra Frozen Foods, which sent a representative out to pick up the frog, pack it in dry ice and send it to Omaha, Neb., “for laboratory analysis.” (It is only a matter of time before it shows up in the O.J. Simpson trial.)

The ironic thing is that some people actually eat frogs’ legs on purpose. It is conceivable that we could some day receive another newspaper article concerning a consumer who had come home from the supermarket with a Healthy Choice Frog Cantonese frozen dinner, heated it up in the microwave, then discovered, to her horror, that it contained a piece of chicken.

NOTE FROM THE LEGAL DEPARTMENT: Mr. Barry is not in any way suggesting that there actually is any such product as Healthy Choice Frog Cantonese, or Healthy Choice Snake Cantonese, or Healthy Choice Leech Cantonese, or Healthy Choice Hundreds Of Baby Spiders Cantonese; nor is he suggesting that, if these products DID exist, they would be contaminated with chicken. Thank you.

If you read this column regularly but have nevertheless somehow retained at least some brain functionality, at this point you are scratching your head and saying: “Wait a minute! Didn’t you print an item in 1993 concerning a woman in Manchester,  N.H., who discovered a one-inch frog baked on one of her pretzels?”

Yes, we did. This means that, in just two short years, there have been two reported instances of frogs showing up in people’s food. And any law-enforcement expert will tell you that, because of the shame experienced by the victims, the vast majority of these cases are never reported to the authorities. The actual number of frogs found in people’s food, per year, is probably much closer to 63 million. That is what we here in the professional news media call a Major Epidemic.

What is the federal government doing about it, you ask? Please do not cause us to laugh in a harsh barking manner. We have here a “Science Watch” column, sent in by alert reader Dale M. Lang, that appeared in the March 18, 1995, Atlanta Journal and Constitution under the heading FROGS BREED ON SPACE FLIGHT. It begins:

“A decades-long question of whether gravity is required for the fertilization of amphibians and the development of embryos has been answered, say researchers at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration . . . In the virtual absence of gravity during a space shuttle mission in September 1992, female frogs were induced to ovulate, eggs were collected and fertilized with a sperm suspension, and resulting embryos developed to a free- living stage.”

Do not adjust your eyeballs. You are reading this correctly. At a time when millions of Americans are afraid to go into the frozen-food sections of their supermarkets because of the burgeoning epidemic of entree-dwelling frogs, an agency of our federal government has been spending billions of estimated dollars to see if it can produce frogs in space. As if we, as a nation, really need to know this. As if every time you walked into a bar, you heard ordinary American taxpayers sitting around saying: “Yo, Vince, is gravity required for the fertilization of amphibians and the development of embryos? I’ve been wondering for decades.”

And there is the whole issue of safety. As Aristotle once wrote: “When a nation, no matter how powerful and secure within its own borders, reaches the point where it is launching suspended frog sperm into space, watch out.” Think about it: What if something goes wrong? What if the shuttle pilot, played by Tom Hanks, glances out the window and notices that a small meteor has punched a hole in one of the tanks, causing suspended frog sperm to spew into space, forming a frozen chunk that could some day fall out of orbit, with the friction of atmospheric re- entry turning it into a steaming, glowing glob, hurtling toward Earth at over 3,000 miles per hour, and perhaps ultimately smashing, with devastating effect, directly into — we do not wish to create panic, but it is a distinct possibility — boxing promoter Don King. We don’t know about you, but we would pay our local cable company a flat $1,000 to see this event.

Obviously there is much, much more that needs to be said about this issue, but unfortunately we have no idea what it is. Also we have run out of space, and it’s time for our dinner. We’re having Prozac Cantonese.

© 1995 Dave Barry This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Electronic or print reproduction, adaptation, or distribution without permission is prohibited. Ordinary links to this column at http://www.miamiherald.com may be posted or distributed without written permission.