It Feels So Good To Laugh Until You Cry

and Dave Barry is the only writer who has ever made me do that. I think I stopped reading him when I decided I didn't have time to be happily entertained and filled with mirth, life was too serious. Then, when I realized I still needed him, he went on sabattical or something.
But he's back, and in China. Ahh, much better now.

...Now you are in Beijing traffic, which is like an exciting video game with the bonus element of potential death. You have fast-moving cars, trucks and buses; you have a wide variety of mutant two-and-three-wheeled motorbike-contraptions putting along at minus two miles per hour; you have many bicycles, sometimes with an entire family on the one bicycle, dad pedaling, mom balanced behind him, holding a baby; and you have the occasional pushcart, stacked high with what appears to be trash. All of these vehicles are competing for the same packed road space, and nobody ever yields to anybody. Left turns routinely produce dramatic oncoming-bus moments that cause you to very nearly void your clueless western bladder.
Sometimes your driver will gesture at another vehicle, then turn to you and say something in Chinese, which you interpret to mean, ''Can you BELIEVE these morons?'' You answer ''Ha ha!,'' meaning it in the sense of ``Please resume watching the road.''

NOTE TO SELF: Bookmark Dave Barry blog. Read daily.