Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus by Dave Barry Read Free Book Online

same movie, Abu the monkey says a bad word
.
In
The Little Mermaid,
the officiator in the wedding scene “is obviously sexually aroused.” Not only that, but
“the box cover of
The Little Mermaid
contains a phallic symbol in the center of the royal castle
.”
In
The Lion King,
when Simba plops down, “The cloud of dust that he stirs up, to the upper left of his head, forms the letters S-E-X.” (Which, if you remove the hyphens, spells “sex.”)
    None of this surprises me. I have been suspicious of the Disney people ever since it was first pointed out to me, years ago, that Donald Duck does not wear pants. There is WAY more of this perversion going on than we are aware of, and it is not limited to Disney Look at the shape of the Life Savers package! Are we supposed to believe that’s
coincidence?
    No, this kind of thing is everywhere, and today I am calling on you readers, as concerned individuals with a lot of spare time, to look for instances of hidden perversion in commercial products, then report them to me by sending a postcard to: Smut Patrol, c/o Dave Barry,
Miami Herald
, Miami, FL 33132.
    Working together, we WILL get to the bottom of this. And then we will glue it shut.

MESSAGE
FROM THE
STARS

    W e are not alone.
    I make this statement in light of an article sent to me by alert reader Steve Kennedy, who found it in an academic journal called
Popular Music and Society
. The article, written by a college professor named Cherrill P. Heaton, is titled “Air Ball: Spontaneous Large Group Precision Chanting.”
    The article concerns a phenomenon that often occurs at basketball games when a visiting player shoots an “air balt”—a shot that misses everything. Immediately, the crowd, in a sportsmanlike effort to cause this player to commit suicide, will start chanting “AIR-ball… AIR-ball…”
    Professor Heaton, who teaches English but is also interested in music, noticed an odd thing about the “Air Ball” chant: The crowd members always seemed to start at precisely the same time, and in perfect tune with each other.
    “As any director of a church choir or secular chorus knows,” Professor Heaton writes, “getting a mere twenty or thirty trained singers to sing or chant together and in tune isnot always easy. Yet without direction… thousands of strangers massed in indoor auditoriums and arenas are able, if stimulated by an air ball, to chant ‘Air Ball’ in tonal and rhythmic unison.”
    But there’s more. Using his VCR, Professor Heaton taped a bunch of basketball games; he discovered that, no matter where the games were played, almost all the crowds chanted “Air Ball” in
the same key
—namely, F, with the “Air” being sung on an F note, and the “Ball” on a D note.
    This is an amazing musical achievement for Americans, who are not noted for their skill at singing in unison. Listen to a random group of Americans attempting to sing “Happy Birthday,” and you will note that at any given moment they somehow manage to emit more different notes, total, than there are group members, creating a somber, droning sound such as might be created by severely asthmatic bagpipers, so that the birthday person, rather than feeling happy, winds up weeping into the cake. It’s even worse when Americans at sporting events attempt to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” because not only does this song contain an estimated 54,000 notes, but also the crowd has only the vaguest notion of what the words are, so what you hear is a vaguely cattle-like sound created by thousands of people murmuring uncertainly, in every conceivable key, about the ramparts red gleaming. And yet according to Professor Heaton, somehow these same sports fans, all over the country, almost always spontaneously chant “Air Ball” in the same key, F.
    I decided to check Professor Heaton’s findings myself. Under the carefully controlled scientific conditions of my living room, I chanted “Air Ball” out loud several times. I