Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry Read Free Book Online

car, clearly ready to leave, so I stop my car and wait for them to vacate the spot, and … nothing happens! They just stay there! WHAT THE HELL ARE THEY DOING IN THERE??!! COOKING DINNER???
    When I finally get into the supermarket, I often experience ShoppingCart Rage. This is caused by the people—and you just KNOW these are the same people who always drive in the left-hand lane—who routinely manage, by careful placement, to block the entire aisle with a single shopping cart. If we really want to keep illegal immigrants from entering the United States, we should employ Miami residents armed with shopping carts; we’d only need about two dozen to block the entire Mexican border.
    What makes the supermarket congestion even worse is that shoppers are taking longer and longer to decide what to buy, because every product in America now comes in an insane number of styles and sizes. For example, I recently went to the supermarket to get orange juice. For just
one brand
of orange juice, Tropicana, I had to decide whether I wanted Original, HomeStyle, Pulp Plus, Double Vitamin C, Grovestand, Calcium, or Old-Fashioned; I also had to decide whether I wanted the 16-ounce, 32-ounce, 64-ounce, 96-ounce, or six-pack size. This is WAY too many product choices. It caused me to experience Way Too Many Product Choices Rage. I would have called Tropicana and complained, but I probably would have wound up experiencing Automated Phone Answering System Rage (“… For questions about Pulp Plus in the 32-ounce size, press 23. For questions about Pulp Plus in the 64-ounce size, press 24. For questions about …”).
    My point is that there are many causes for rage in our modern world, and if we’re going to avoid unnecessary violence, we all need to “keep our cool.” So let’s try to be more considerate, OK? Otherwise I will kill you.

Weird Science
    T oday’s topic for young people is: How to Do a School Science-Fair Project
    So your school is having a science fair! Great! The science fair has long been a favorite educational tool in the American school system, and for a good reason: Your teachers hate you.
    Ha ha! No, seriously, although a science fair can seem like a big “pain,” it can help you understand important scientific principles, such as Newton’s First Law of Inertia, which states: “A body at rest will remain at rest until 8:45 P.M . the night before the science-fair project is due, at which point the body will come rushing to the body’s parents, who are already in their pajamas, and shout, ‘I JUST REMEMBERED THE SCIENCE FAIR IS TOMORROW AND WE GOTTA GO TO THE STORE RIGHT NOW!’ ”
    Being driven to the store by pajama-wearing parents at the last minute is the most important part of any science-fair project, because your project, to be legal, must have an Official Science-Fair Display Board. This is a big white board that you fold into three sections, thus giving it the stability that it needs to collapse instantly when approached by humans. The international scientific community does not recognize any scientific discovery that does not have an Official Science-Fair Display Board teetering behind it; many top scientists fail to win the Nobel Prize for exactly this reason.
    Once you have returned home and gotten your display board folded into three sections (allow about six hours for this) it’s time to start thinking about what kind of project to do. The prize-winning projects are the ones that clearly yet imaginatively demonstrate an interesting scientific principle. So you can forget about winning a prize. What you need is a project that can be done at 1 A.M . using materials found in your house. Ideally, it should also involve a minimum of property damage or death, which is why, on the advice of this newspaper’s legal counsel, we are not going to discuss some of our popular project topics from previous years, such as “What Is Inside Plumbing?” and “Flame-Proofing Your Cat.”
    Whatever topic you