Free Dave Barry Is Not Taking This Sitting Down by Dave Barry

every few minutes they would pause to sniff the air for the scent of prey. Of course, since this was nearly a million years before the invention of soap, all they could smell was their own armpits; the animals could easily detect them at a range of 35 miles. As a result, the hunters never captured any animal that had not already died of natural causes, although when the hunters brought this animal back to the primitive village, they’d make up a story to impress the women with their bravery and prowess.
    “Whew!” they would say. “You should have seen the ferocious fight this wild animal put up!”
    “That wild animal is a rotting squirrel,” the women would respond, “and you get it out of this primitive village RIGHT NOW.”
    Men and women are still divided on the issue of smell. Most women are very sensitive to odors, whereas men, largely as a result of smellingtheir own selves over the eons, have reached the point where they tend not to detect any aroma below the level of a municipal dump. That’s certainly the way it is in my household. At least five times per week, my wife and I have the same conversation. Michelle says: “What’s that smell?” And I say, “What smell?” And she looks at me as though I am demented and says: “You can’t SMELL that?”
    The truth is, there could be a stack of truck tires burning in the living room, and I wouldn’t necessarily smell it. Whereas Michelle can detect a lone spoiled grape two houses away. When she takes food out of the refrigerator, she always sniffs it, and she immediately discards it if it smells remotely suspicious. I, on the other hand, will cheerfully eat a cold cut that was manufactured during the Aztec empire.
    This Male Smelling Deficiency Syndrome, or MSDS, explains why women generally smell pretty good, whereas some men, particularly men who sit next to you on airplanes, smell like the Football Team Laundry Bag From Hell. Perhaps you know somebody who tends to emit B.O. rays, and you have been wondering what is the best way to tell him. The answer is: sensitively.
    For example, in 1964, when I was a student at Pleasantville High School, I had a class with a teacher who had a major odor problem, to the point where, when he’d stroll past the rows of desks, which he did often, students would keel over in his wake. Being teenagers, we might have handled this situation in a cruel manner. But instead, one day, as the teacher walked past, a student in the front row, whose name I will not reveal here, sensitively whipped out a can of Right Guard brand deodorant, fired off a brief blast, then quickly hid the can before the teacher turned around. This gesture was so sensitive that many of us thought we would rupture key internal organs from vibrating so hard.
    There are many, many more exciting facts I could tell you about the fascinating topic of smell, but unfortunately I have no idea what they are. So I will conclude this discussion with this thought: Keep sniffing! But don’t inhale.

Missing in Action
    I think I might know where the missile launcher is. I’m referring here to the $1 million missile launcher that our armed forces have apparently misplaced, according to the recent audit of the U.S. government (motto: “We Do Have a Motto, But We Don’t Know Where It Is”).
    You might have missed the news stories about this audit, which didn’t get a whole lot of media attention because—as difficult as this is to believe—it had nothing to do with Paula Jones. The background is, back in 1994 Congress decided that there should be a complete audit of the entire federal government. This seemed like a good idea, since the U.S. government—which is the fourth-largest financial entity in the world behind Bill Gates, the Spice Girls, and your electrician—had not been audited for (this is the truth) more than 200 years. The reason Congress did not get around to ordering an audit any sooner is that it has been extremely busy with its primary functions,