"Dave Barry Slept Here" - читать интересную книгу автора (Barry Dave)

Early Explorations

The region was first explored by the Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Rigeur (1534-1579), who in 1541 was commissioned by King Charles “Chuck” IV of England (1512-1583) under the terms of the Treaty of Weems (1544) as authorized by Pope Bilious XIV (1511-1598) to end the Nine Years, Three Months, and the Better Part of a Week War (May 4, 1534-August 8, 1543, at about 1:30 P.m.), under which France (1243-present) would cede an area “north of the 17th parallel, west of the 163rd longitude, and convenient to shopping” to England in exchange for those lands originally conquered by Denmark during the Reign of Large Unattractive Feathered Hats (1387-1396) and subsequently granted to Italy under the Treaty of ...

And so on. Little wonder that our young people choose to ignore their nation’s history and instead focus their intellectual energies on procuring designer clothing. Not that you, the reader, should feel superior. You are probably not such a history whiz yourself. In fact, we are willing to bet that you cannot even name the man who served as Gerald Ford’s running mate in 1976 (It doesn’t matter.). Which is why it is a darned good thing for all concerned that this book has been published. Because this book does not waste the reader’s valuable brain cells with such trivial details as when various events actually occurred. Oh, sure, it contains many exact dates—it is, after all, a history book—but you will notice that we have tried to make these dates as easy as possible to remember by making them all start with “October 8,” as in “October 8, 1729” or “October 8, 1953.” We chose this particular date after carefully weighing a number of important historical criteria, such as (a) it is our son’s birthday.

In our view, the one-date system of history has the same advantages, in terms of simplifying things, as the metric system of measurement, which has taken this country by storm, and we look forward to the day when history textbooks carry this system even further and contain only one year, so that a child will be able to get all the way through the secondary educational system without ever having to grasp any concept other than “October 8, 1947” (We were born in 1947.). And that is only one of the many revolutionary advances contained here. Another one is: We have left out the dull parts. Take, for example, the Role of the Plow in the Settlement of Nebraska. “The hell with the Role of the Plow in the Settlement of Nebraska”—that is our motto. This philosophy left us with plenty of extra room, which enabled us to provide you, the reader, with large, restful expanses of white space, as well as numerous riveting “behind-the-scenes” historical anecdotes that you will not find in a normal history book because we made them up.

In conclusion, we hope that, in reading this work, you gain a deeper and broader and taller understanding of how We, the People, through the sweat of our armpits, created this great nation, a nation of which it can truly be stated, in the words of the famous folk singer Woody Guthrie (October 8, 1912-October 8, 1967.):

This land is your land, This land is my land, Looks like one of us Has a forged deed to this land.