Dave Barry - Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

1—Speaking in unison, an estimated three dozen congressmen, all of them age

43, all of them blond, and all of them named Dick, announce that they are seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.

3—In the Persian Gulf, Iranians attack the Islip garbage barge, but are driven off by courageous flies.

6—Noncandidate Mario Cuomo, in the pursuit of his normal gubernatorial duties, reaches a tentative pact with Soviet arms negotiators.

12—At an art auction, Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers fetches the highest price ever paid for a painting, $39.8 million, paid by grateful Miami taxpayers wishing to hang it in the office of City Commissioner Rosario Kennedy.

13—True Anecdote: In National League baseball action, the Atlanta Braves’ Dion James hits a ball that would have been caught easily, except that in midair it strikes and kills a dove.

14—In Colorado, Gary Hart declares his candidacy for the presidential nomination, making the announcement while standing in front of a dramatic backdrop of soaring mountains, towering pine trees and four Miami Herald reporters disguised as rhododendrons.

15—The lifeless body of Atlanta Braves player Dion James is found under an enormous mound of dove droppings.

16—President and Mrs. Reagan release their tax returns.

19—The IRS sends back the Reagans’ tax returns, gently pointing out that you’re supposed to fill them out.

22—Crack U.S. counterintelligence agents in Moscow begin to suspect that the new U.S. Embassy in Moscow, constructed by Soviet labor, might be bugged, when one of them sneezes in the ambassador’s office and six chairs say,

“Gesundheit.”

23—The National Basketball Association grants Miami a franchise. The new team will be named The Enormous Bloodsucking Insects.

26—jack Kemp announces that he is running for president, pledging that, if elected, he will deepen his voice.

30—Following a lengthy and dramatic trial, a confused New Jersey jury awards custody of a 3-year-old boy to a 6week-old girl.

2—Late at night on a Washington street, four Miami Herald reporters on routine patrol notice that Gary Hart appears to be spending the weekend with an attractive woman who is not his wife. The reporters confront Hart, who explains that there is no woman, and he hardly knows her, and she is actually his uncle, and the voters don’t care about candidates’ private lives anyway. Satisfied, the reporters decide to write a story about Hart’s monetary policy.

3—Like a raging unquenchable forest fire, the Gary Hart story sweeps across the nation, as voters are consumed by a burning need to know more about the candidate’s monetary views.

4—The Hart story becomes so hot that issue-oriented Phil Donahue devotes a show to it, preempting the sexchange lesbian surrogate-mother nude-dancer ex-priests.

5—The presidential campaign of Gary Hart experiences another “close call” when a Miami Herald reporter receives a tip that Hart spent a night in Bimini aboard a boat named Monkey Business with an attractive woman who is not his wife. Fortunately, Hart is able to explain that he has never been on a boat and there is no such place as “Bimini” and the person who went there with the woman was actually a being from the Planet Buppo who is able to take the form of leading presidential candidates. Satisfied, the reporter writes a lengthy analysis of Hart’s views on the NATO alliance.

6—An angry Gary Hart is forced to withdraw from the race after word leaks out that the Washington Post has obtained documented evidence that he once proposed tying the prime rate to the Index of Leading Economic Indicators.

7—Citing alleged “bisexual activity,” officials of the Assemblies of God Church vote to have Jim Bakker defrocked. Then they hastily vote to have him frocked again.

16—Rita Hayworth dies moments after confiding to Bob Woodward that his forthcoming book, Veil, would be out “just in time for Christmas gift giving.”

29—Nineteen-year-old Mathias Rust, a German, flying a single-engine Cessna airplane, manages to cross 400 miles of Soviet airspace to reach Red Square in Moscow, where he narrowly avoids colliding with a Delta Air Lines flight en route from Pittsburgh to Cleveland.

30—Caspar Weinberger orders 5,000 single-engine Cessna airplanes.

1—The public responds with massive displays of sympathy to reports that a number of totally unsuspecting Dade County politicians were cruelly tricked into believing that a private duplex where a man allegedly sold stolen suits was in fact a major department store. “It was a mistake that anyone could have made,” said a police spokesman, “provided that he had the IQ of Cheez Whiz.”

2—True Item: In the ongoing Iran-contra hearings the committee learns that a country named Brunei contributed $10 million to help the contras, except Fawn Hall or somebody typed a wrong number, so the money ended up in the Swiss bank account of a total stranger. This helps explain why, despite all the elaborate assistance efforts with secret codes and passwords and everything, the only actual aid ever received by the contras was a six-month trial subscription to Guns and Ammo.

5—Another True Item: In Venice for the European Economic Summit, President Reagan, unaware that his words are being broadcast over an open microphone, tells a joke wherein God gradually reduces a gondolier’s intelligence until the gondolier switches from singing “O Sole Mio” to

“When Irish Eyes are Smiling.”

7—Brunei receives 314,334 urgent personal mail solicitations from TV evangelists.

8—In the most dramatic Iran-contra testimony to date, Fawn Hall, played by Farrah Fawcett, testifies that, as justice Department investigators closed in, she and Oliver North stayed late in their White House basement office and “colorized” a number of classic black-and-white films.

13—After a highly controversial trial in New York, “subway vigilante” Bernhard Goetz is acquitted in connection with a subway shooting incident wherein he claims he was attacked by a gang of prominent Wall Street investors.

18—A survey of Florida residents reveals that their No. 1 concern about the state is that “not enough people are walking around with guns.” Alarmed, the state Legislature passes a law under which all citizens who are not actually on Death Row will be required to carry revolvers.

22—Fred Astaire dies in the arms of Bob Woodward.

24—In a ground-breaking experiment, medical researchers reduce a gondolier’s intelligence to the bare minimum required to sustain life, and the gondolier says: “Everybody that can remember what they were doing on August 8, 1985, raise your hand.”

29—In Wimbledon action, John McEnroe kills a line judge and is given a stern warning.

1—In a contest sponsored by a pesticides company, a Broward County insect is declared the largest cockroach in the country, narrowly edging out Phyllis Schlafly.

4—The Hormel Company marks the 50th anniversary of Spam in festivities featuring a full-size, fully functioning suspension bridge constructed entirely out of the popular luncheon substance.

7—The central figure in the Iran-contra hearings, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, becomes an instant national folk hero when, with his eyes glistening and his voice cracking with emotion, he courageously admits, before a worldwide television audience, that he is very patriotic.

9—Oral Roberts reveals that he can raise the dead. He is rushed to the White House.

11—The Iran-contra hearings reach their dramatic peak when Lieutenant Colonel North, his eyes glistening and his voice cracking with emotion, makes a sweeping patriotic hand gesture and knocks over his bottle of Revlon Eye Glistener.