Beach Slapped Humor Columns Series

One flying starfish of death and life on the beach has never been the same; Barton Grover Howe can prove it. The beginning of his weekly need to leave Americans “Beach Slapped,” in his newspaper column, he’s got all the stories of life in the Pacific Northwest that matter. His wife’s crazed driving habits (“She’s from New Jersey, where cussing out the guy next to you isn’t so much rude as it is a preemptive strike.”); tips for getting through airport screening during the busy holiday season (“Nothing says you’re not an Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist like carrying a 12-pound honey-glazed pile of pig meat onto the plane.”); and questioning the methods of sanctimonious supermarket environmentalists (“Where do they take their cloth bags from the store? Their cars. If they were serious they’d be going home on a llama.”). So join Amazon.com best-selling author Barton Grover Howe as he tells the real-life story of the world’s first homicidal starfish ... and just gets funnier from there.

Coming to grips with a life-long addiction to brightly colored drinks with umbrellas is just one of the things Amazon.com best-selling author Barton Grover Howe addresses in his latest compilation of newspaper humor columns. Among the highlights: advice to Madison Avenue on how to reach men (“Remember: we’re the kind of people that buy Colt 40 Malt Liquor because it’s huge and we can use the bottles in a water fight when we run out of balloons.”); pondering about how Madison Avenue chooses to reach women (“There are a LOT of women’s hygiene products, most of them being disposable. Which begs the question: Why not label all of them that way? I can’t imagine anyone buys these things as a souvenir.”); and observations on all of humanity’s attempts to figure out what’s going on in his bedroom. (“Trying to get pregnant seems to be EVERYBODY’s business, as if, somehow, the entire future of the human race is riding on my wife and I repopulating the species. It’s like I’m in a terrible Bruce Willis movie set in 2057. Or Brigham Young’s house in 1857.”) So, head to the beaches of the Pacific Northwest one more time as Barton uses his unique perspective on just about everything to comment on life, the universe and gender things — and get “Beach Slapped” all over again.

“If cats had opposable thumbs, they would try to kill us all in our sleep with tiny pistols. They are evil little animals.” And so begins another year of observations from bestselling author Barton Grover Howe. With more reflections on life from his “Beach Slapped” newspaper column, he’s at it again: The discussions between his pregnant wife and allegedly sympathetic women (“What else explains the endless discussion about what’s about to emerge from her: Watermelons, bowling balls, Black & Decker tool sets, you name it. And as long as the sentence ends with ‘... it’s like that scene in “Alien,’’’ they seem pleased that they could share this amusing little anecdote.”); his daughter’s arrival into the rainy world of the Oregon coast (“It’s a moist, dark and quiet kind of place; pretty much a womb with a view.”); and other people’s ongoing need to make him a better person (“This is national ‘Turn Off Your TV Week,’ something I first heard about on TV, thus highlighting why this is the dumbest thing on Earth.”)

It begins with refugee status in New Jersey, trapped amidst crunchy toilet paper and blowhard New Yorkers, before moving on to the worst disaster never to strike the Oregon Coast. It must be time to get "Beach Slapped" again, with Amazon bestseller Barton Grover Howe. With everything from offering tips on how to survive a hard-core evacuation during breakfast, ("Mimosas made entirely with Jack Daniels") to the disappointment of getting all dressed up for Armageddon with no place to go, ("Well, that was a crappy Rapture. Crapture, anyone?") Howe once again boldly goes where writers with taste rarely do. Throw in the random observations of his one-year-old daughter, ("About 90 percent of the time, I wake up in a different place than where I fell asleep. It's like living Lindsey Lohan's life.") It's a life at its stupidest—and funniest. It's another year of impending disaster and babies on the move—often at the same time—and all the other things that keep leaving readers "Beach Slapped" as Barton once again gives readers 52 reasons—54, actually; it was a very long time in New Jersey—to laugh out loud. Barton Grover Howe resides in the only small town on the Oregon coast that has seven miles of coastline and not one boat dock. A high school teacher, his students don’t find him near as funny as he thinks they should — much like their parents, who use teacher conferences to tell him they have no idea what he’s talking about half the time in his weekly humor column. On the plus side, he is married to the most patient woman on Earth and is father to the cutest daughter in the universe, who got all of her looks from her mother. In addition to writing a weekly humor column, Barton is also an Amazon Top 10 best-selling novelist, bringing his weird sense of humor to tell the stories of Surfland, Oregon. The fictional home for the wet and weird, his first novel, “Beach Slapped” takes readers on an adventure that’s been called by reviewers a “well written, tightly plotted romp.” “Move over Carl Hiaasen, Tim Dorsey, Dave Barry and all the other Florida humor satire writers. There’s a new voice and a very accomplished one... Howe does for the Oregon Coast what Hiaasen and the others have done for Florida.”