Dave Barry is simply my favorite humorist. You just have to read a few of these to know why.

"The only really good place to buy lumber is at a store where the lumber has already been cut and attached together in the form of furniture, finished, and put inside boxes."

"Males have a lot of trouble not looking at breasts. What is worse, males cannot look at breasts and think at the same time. In fact, scientists now believe that the primary biological function of breasts is to make males stupid. This was proved in a famous 1978 laboratory experiment wherein a team of leading male psychological researchers at Yale deliberately looked at photographs of breasts every day for two years, at the end of which they concluded that they had failed to take any notes. "We forgot," they said. "We'll have to do it over."

"Scientists tell us that the fastest animal on earth, with a top speed of 120 ft/sec, is a cow that has been dropped out of a helicopter."

"On the Japanese news, if the announcers had happy faces and perky voices, I knew that meant good news, such as that Japanese scientists had discovered a way to make VCR's even more difficult for Americans to program; whereas if the announcers had serious voices and frowny faces, it meant bad news, such as the worsening eel shortage."

"I'm a middle age white guy, which means I'm constantly reminded that my particular group is responsible for the oppression of every known minority PLUS most wars PLUS government corruption PLUS pollution of the environment, not to mention that it was middle-age white guys who killed Bambi's mom."

"You should never pick up a newspaper when you're feeling good, because every newspaper has a special department, called the Bummer Desk, which is responsible for digging up depressing front-page stories with headlines like DOORBELL USE LINKED TO LEUKEMIA and OZONE LAYER COMPLETELY GONE DIRECTLY OVER YOUR HOUSE."

"I assume you are on the Internet. If you are not, then pardon my French, but vous êtes un big loser. Today EVERYBODY is on the Internet, including the primitive Mud People of the Amazon rain forest. In the old days, when the Mud People needed food, they had to manually throw spears at wild boars; whereas today they simply get on the Internet, go to www.spear-a-boar.com and click their mouse a few times (the Mud People use actual mice). Within three business days, a large box is delivered to them by a UPS driver, whom they eat."

"I have not felt remotely cool for a long time, thanks largely to the relentless efforts of my teenage son, whose goal in life is to make me feel 3,500 years old. We'll be in the car, and he'll say, 'You wanna hear my new CD?' And I, flattered that he thinks his old man might like the same music he does, will say 'Sure!' So he increases the sound-system volume setting from '4' to 'Meteor Impact,' and he puts in a CD by a band with a name like 'Pustule,' and the next thing I know gigantic nuclear bass notes have blown out all the car windows and activated both the driver- and passenger-side air bags, and I'm writhing on the floor, screaming for mercy with jets of blood spurting three feet from my ears. My son then ejects the CD, smiling contentedly, knowing he as purchased a winner. On those extremely rare occasions when I like one of his CDs, I imagine he destroys it with a blowtorch."

"I probably should never have been there anyway, and it served me right when the two alert police officers fired up their siren, pulled me over, and pointed out that my car's registration had expired. I had not realized this, and as you can imagine I felt like quite the renegade outlaw as one of the officers painstakingly wrote out my ticket, standing well to the side of the road so as to avoid getting hit by the steady stream of passing unlicensed and uninsured motorists driving their stolen cars with their left hands so that their right hands would be free to keep their pit bulls from spilling their cocaine all over their machine guns. Not that I am bitter."

"Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice."

"Skiing combines outdoor fun with knocking down trees with your face."

“If the Pentagon needs, say, fruit, it will argue that it must have fruit that can withstand the rigors of combat conditions, and it will wind up purchasing the FX-700 Seedless Tactical Grape, which will cost $160,000 per bunch, and will have an 83 percent failure rate.”

"It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million guy sperm cells, each one wriggling in its own direction, totally confident it knows where it is going, to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin."