With Ryder blazing his way through my old Bloom County collections over the weekend and a synth-heavy Cars vibe running through “Traffic and Weather,” the new Fountains of Wayne album in regular rotation at our house, it’s feeling like ’80s throwback week.
In that spirit, then, it’s worth noting that Dave Barry has a book review in today’s Times. We are apparently among the last people to start reading his stuff regularly, and he is surprisingly funny — broad popularity usually prefers its humor bland, obvious, or retrograde. The Times’ book review is an odd place to find him, and it’s a bit of an odd fit. You can almost hear the muttered reminders as he tries to confine himself to doing the book review thing instead of the Dave Barry thing.
The review turns out to be a minor letdown (or a minor success, depending on your expectations, I guess), but nothing like the disappointment you may one day experience in reading your kids the serviceable but stubbornly unamusing Peter Pan sequels that Barry wrote with Ridley Pearson. Ugh.
If you have a few minutes to spare, check out Dave’s anthropological take on Koch-era NYC at http://www.davebarry.com/gg/newyork.html. Great stuff.
I picked up a remaindered copy of “Dave Barry’s Money Secrets” and livened up our van rides by reading (most of) it aloud. Some on-the-fly editing was required, such as in the chapter titled “How to Ace Your Job Interview: The Amazing Power of Oral Sex.”
This was nowhere near adequate preparation, though, it turns out, for Ryder’s sudden adoption of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose “Stadium Arcadium” has replaced Green Day’s “American Idiot” as the official soundtrack of middle school.
Before letting the boy hear “BloodSugar…” for the first time, I told him to substitute “melon” for any word that sounded like something he shouldn’t really be hearing. This worked reasonably well, since he is a pretty mature kid and not really suited for truancy. Still, you can’t not cringe at a lyric like:
Sopping wet, her melon melon
Melon the melon with Isabella
Wait till your kids grow up, Adam. Just you wait.
