Free Dave Barry Is from Mars and Venus by Dave Barry

stay right where you are, rigid as a statue, until the spring thaw. At night, when the Downhillers have all gone home, we Breath-Catchers will still be up there, clinging to the mountainside, chewing on our parkas for sustenance.
    So I thought I’d take a stab at snowboarding, which is quite different from skiing. In skiing, you wear a total of two skis, or approximately one per foot, so you can sort of maintain your balance by moving your feet, plus you have poles that you can stab people with if they make fun of you at close range. Whereas with snowboarding, all you get is one board, which is shaped like a giant tongue depressor and manufactured by the Institute of Extremely Slippery Things. Both of your feet are strapped firmly to this board, so that if you start to fall, you can’t stick a foot out and catch yourself. You crash to the ground like a tree and lie there while skiers swoop past and deliberately spray snow on you.
    Skiers hate snowboarders. It’s a generational thing. Skiers are (and here I am generalizing) middle-aged Republicans wearing designer space suits; snowboarders are defiant young rebels wearing deliberately drab clothing that is baggy enough to contain the snowboarder plus a major appliance. Skiers like to glide down the slopes in a series of graceful arcs; snowboarders like to attack the mountain, slashing, spinning, tumbling, going backward, blasting through snowdrifts, leaping off cliffs, getting their noses pierced in midair, etc. Skiers view snowboarders as a menace; snowboarders view skiers as Elmer Fudd.
    I took my snowboarding lesson in a small group led by a friend of mine named Brad Pearson, who also once talked me into jumping from a tall tree while attached only to a thin rope. Brad took us up on a slope that offered ideal snow conditions for the novice who’s going to fall a lot: approximately seven flakes of powder on top of an eighteen-foot-thick base of reinforced concrete. You could not dent this snow with a jackhammer. (I later learned, however, that you
could
dent it with the back of your head.)
    We learned snowboarding via a two-step method:
    Step One: Watching Brad do something.
    Step Two: Trying to do it ourselves.
    I was pretty good at Step One. The problem with Step Two was that you had to stand up on your snowboard, which turns out to be a violation of at least five important laws of physics. I’d struggle to my feet, and I’d be wavering there and then the Physics Police would drop a huge chunk of gravity on me, and WHAM my body would hit the concrete snow, sometimes bouncing as much as a foot.
    “Keep your knees bent!” Brad would yell helpfully Have you noticed that whatever sport you’re trying to learn,some earnest person is always telling you to keep your knees bent? As if THAT would solve anything. I wanted to shout back, “FORGET MY KNEES! DO SOMETHING ABOUT THESE GRAVITY CHUNKS!”
    Needless to say my son had no trouble at all. None. In minutes he was cruising happily down the mountain; you could actually see his clothing getting baggier. I, on the other hand, spent most of my time lying on my back, groaning, while space-suited Republicans swooped past and sprayed snow on me. If I hadn’t gotten out of there, they’d have completely covered me; 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.
    So I think, when my body heals, I’ll go back to skiing. Maybe sometime you’ll see me out on the slopes, catching my breath. Please throw me some food.

WHEEL OF
MISFORTUNE

    I f I had to summarize, in one sentence, the major lesson I have learned in life, that sentence would be: “Sometimes you have to buy a vowel.”
    I learned this lesson when I became a contestant on
Wheel of Fortune
, the hugely popular game show in which contestants try to figure out the hidden phrase, aided by the lovely and talented Vanna White, who smiles radiantly while turning over the