Quotes from Dave Barry

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

To an adolescent, there is nothing in the world more embarrassing than a parent.

Spreadsheet: a kind of program that lets you sit at your desk and ask all kinds of neat "what if?" questions and generate thousands of numbers instead of actually working.

I do not mean to be the slightest bit critical of TV newspeople, who do a superb job, considering that they operate under severe time constraints and have the intellectual depth of hamsters. But TV news can only present the "bare bones" of a story; it takes a newspaper, with its capability to present vast amounts of information, to render the story truly boring.

Never assume that the guy understands that you and he have a relationship.

Hardware: where the people in your company's software section will tell you the problem is. Software: where the people in your company's hardware section will tell you the problem is.

Bill Gates is a very rich man today... and do you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

The world is full of strange phenomena that cannot be explained by the laws of logic or science. Dennis Rodman is only one example.

Imagine what will happen to this nation if large numbers of American women start using the Wonderbra. It will be catastrophic. The male half of the population will be nothing but mindless drooling Zombies of Lust. Granted, this is also true now, but it will be even worse.

The Constitution of the United States of America, Article V, Section 1: There shall be a National Anthem containing incomprehensible words and a high note that normal humans cannot hit without risk of hernia.

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.

I have seen women walk right past a TV set with a football game on and - this always amazes me - not stop to watch, even if the TV is showing replays of what we call a "good hit," which is a tackle that causes at least one major internal organ to actually fly out of a player's body.

In college, Yuppies major in business administration. If to meet certain requirements they have to take a liberal arts course, they take Business Poetry.

Snowboarding is an activity that is very popular with people who do not feel that regular skiing is lethal enough.... I now realize that the small hills you see on ski slopes are formed around the bodies of forty-seven-year-olds who tried to learn snowboarding.

Big business never pays a nickel in taxes, according to Ralph Nader, who represents a big consumer organization that never pays a nickel in taxes.

User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean "idiot."

You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you think she's pregnant unless you can see an actual baby emerging from her at that moment.

Life is anything that dies when you stomp on it.

I regularly read Internet user groups filled with messages from people trying to solve software incompatibility problems that, in terms of complexity, make the U.S. Tax Code look like Dr. Seuss.

Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.

All the shopping malls and restaurants and airports are riddled with low-fidelity loudspeakers, which apparently have developed the ability to reproduce by themselves; these are all connected to a special programming service called Music That Nobody Really Likes, and you cannot get away from it.

The information encoded in your DNA determines your unique biological characteristics, such as sex, eye color, age and Social Security number.

The big dispute between the government and Microsoft concerns the Internet "browser," which is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later. As you can imagine, the potential market for this service is huge, so Microsoft would like you to use its browser, and not somebody else's.

It is a scientific fact that your body will not absorb cholesterol if you take it from another person's plate.