Dear Friends,
I'm sitting here in the jungles of Borneo waiting for a helicopter pick up, and I just watched a man eat a beetle larva the size of my pinky finger. Which isn't that bad (I once ate a taco made of sloth brains wrapped in a bat wing), but the disgusting part was that he dipped the wriggler in shrimp cocktail sauce. Larva and tomato sauce? The Horror. Everyone knows mayonnaise is the correct condiment for larvae.

Why am I in Borneo you ask? I was here giving one of my popular motivational speeches, this time to a tribe hoping to transition from a Bic-lighter based economy to a car-battery based economy. My inspirational rants are known to jumpstart entire Asian economies. In fact, when I gave a motivational talk at Toyota world headquarters in Japan last summer, I didn't have time to change out of my lime-green Speedo after completing the first nonstop backstroke across Atsumi Bay, so I rushed the stage still dripping. The audience gasped in delight at my heroic entrance, and when I finished five minutes later (normally my speech takes two hours, but they made me trim it on the fly—the Japanese, so efficient!), security had to escort me out the back door to avoid a mob scene. The next day Toyota stock jumped six points. Banzai!

Please send me your questions and queries (and booking requests!) and I'll address them in the pages of Outside in my column Ask Dave.


Dave Out

See my latest column at http://outside.away.com/outside/culture/200612/ask-dave.html