People often say to me: “Dave, you are a leading journalism professional and not as short as I expected. What is your secret of success?”
The answer is that, throughout my career, I have always kept one vital journalistic principle foremost in my mind: Try not to leave the house. A journalist who leaves his or her house can run into all kinds of obstacles, including:
Editors.
Members of the public.
News events involving actual facts.
All of these obstacles can seriously interfere with the basic work of journalism, which is sitting around and thinking stuff up. This is what I mainly do, which is why I have been able to achieve a level of high-quality journalistic productivity, as measured in booger jokes, that a guy like David Broder can only dream about.
Nevertheless, every now and then a situation will come up wherein a story of major importance is breaking somewhere other than in my office, and I have no choice but to go and cover it. For example, in this book you will find a column concerning an incident in 1992 when I left my house and traveled, without regard for my personal convenience or safety, all the way to my yard, to see the World’s Fastest Lawn Mower. That’s the kind of dedicated professional I am.
The result is that this book contains a number of columns based on real events. There are also some longer articles, most of which originally appeared in the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, Tropic; these also contain an unusually high (for me) level of factual content. That’s why this book is called Dave Barry Is Not Making This Up.*
I want to stress, however, that this title does not mean that this is a serious book. This book also contains a lot of “tongue-in-cheek” social commentary and satire, by which I mean lies. I hope you don’t find this mixture of fact and fiction to be confusing. If, in reading the following pages, you are uncertain as to whether a specific statement is meant seriously or not, simply apply this rule of thumb: If the statement makes you consider filing a lawsuit, I was kidding. Ha ha!
* In an effort to boost up sales, we were going to call it Rush Limbaugh Is Not Making This Up, but there was some kind of legal problem.