Dave Barry offers advice — in case you need that sort of thing

But, what to do about the current crop of teen boys who show interest in his daughter Sophie?

“Apparently it’s illegal to shoot them,” said Barry, author of “You Can Date Boys When You’re Forty,” who will discuss other methods of deterrence in book-signings Friday at the Carter Center and at the Barnes & Noble in Buckhead.

“I propose a humane trap.”

One of the things Barry has learned as the father of a daughter is the sound of a Justin Bieber concert. “It turns out,” he writes, “that the noise teenaged girls make to express happiness is the same noise they would make if their feet were being gnawed off by badgers.”

Barry has written more than a book a year for the past 30 years, and during most of that time he was holding down a full-time job as a newspaper columnist. He left the Miami Herald in 2005, but still contributes columns occasionally (and has the luxury of a phone number and an answering machine at the newspaper).

Barry has covered Democratic and Republican conventions, he has written about winter and summer Olympics and has thoughtfully discussed boogers. About the status of modern man, he’s concerned.

Modern man, he writes in his new book, is inept. If the power goes down at the coffee shop and modern man has to use his own brain to calculate the change from a twenty, he’s out of luck. “Regular adult Americans are no more capable of doing math than they are of photosynthesis,” he writes.

Modern man looks soft compared to ancestors who forded rivers and built cities. Modern man looks soft even compared to Dave Barry’s father, who was a balding, nearsighted, Presbyterian minister. “I know for a fact,” Barry writes, “that my father was way manlier than I am.”

His father wasn’t buff, didn’t do spin class or pump iron, but he built the Barry family house. “It took him years to finish. But guess what? When he was done we had a pretty crappy house.”

True, his father didn’t know much about carpentry. But he had the gumption to dig his own footings and pour his own foundation. “I’ve tried do-it-yourself projects,” Barry said last week, from his home in Coral Gables, Florida, “and most of them end up looking as if there was some sort of vandalism at the house.”

His solution he says is to write the occasional column about his lack of handyman skills, and use the proceeds to pay professionals. “I convert humor into home improvement.”

That’s important because he lives in southern Florida, where civilization has only a tenuous grasp, and most structures erode like ice sculpture in the subtropical weather. “Humans were not meant to inhabit this area,” he said. “This is clear to me when you walk outside and see a grasshopper as big as a cocker spaniel.”

Barry has seen his books serve as inspiration for a four-season television series, “Dave’s World.” He has played guitar in a band (called the Rock Bottom Remainders) with other writers including Stephen King, Amy Tan and Scott Turow, and was once honored by having a sewage pumping station in Grand Forks, North Dakota named after him.

But perhaps the most surprising biographical tidbit to emerge from his new book is the fact that he was raised by Presbyterians. Which makes him a Presbyterian humorist. “True, when you think wacky, you don’t think Presbyterian,” he said. “Pretty much everyone else I know in the comedy business is Jewish.”

As is everyone else in his neighborhood, including his wife, sportswriter Michelle Kaufman.

“My wife is actually Cuban and Jewish,” said Barry. “They didn’t come over on rafts: they parted the Caribbean.”