Well, by nature I’m a stream-of-consciousness-type comedian, and I was scheduled to take a five-hour plane flight, so …
1. A four-hundred-pound man on his way to see a flatulence specialist
2. A nun with Tourette’s syndrome
3. A transparent Amelia Earhart having an animated conversation with a transparent Buddy Holly
4. A body builder in a sleeveless T-shirt with BO so bad he was fired from his job at a sewage treatment plant
5. A man with a live squirrel in his pants who keeps opening his fly to feed it peanuts
6. A very thin woman wearing a T-shirt that says “Proud to Be Bulimic,” who keeps saying she hopes you hit some heavy turbulence
7. A nervous man inflicted with a severe facial twitch, uncontrollable blinking, compulsive toe tapping, leg crossing, earlobe pulling, and knuckle cracking, who asks you to please stop chewing gum
8. A drunken transvestite with a heavy five o’clock shadow who keeps talking to you in a loud voice about various gender-concealment techniques involving duct tape
9. A strange little man wearing a derby who picks his nose vigorously and then puts the fruits of his labor in a small silver box and winks at you knowingly
10. An unfortunate man with see-through prosthetic cheeks, eating a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich
11. A Middle Eastern-looking man with a very large facial mole that is ticking
12. Twin albino ten-year-olds with blank expressions and eerie blue eyes, who are boiling water in a beverage glass by staring at it.
They say that about half of working Americans like or even love their jobs. They are the lucky ones, but even they probably had to suffer in crappy jobs first; so if you are now in job hell, grin and bear it and be thankful you don’t have one of these.
1. Rhino milker
2. Shark-repellent tester
3. Professional mourner at a pet cemetery
4. Vaseline boy on a stud farm
5. Mime in Rwanda
6. Croupier at the Russian roulette table
7. Judge at a voodoo-cursing contest
8. Head of the complaint department in a gun store in Somalia
9. Clam trainer
10. Amish disc jockey
12. Mayor of a trailer camp
13. Scab shoveler at a slaughterhouse
14. Streetwalker in Greenland
15. Teller at a sperm bank
16. Cannibalism instructor
17. Door-to-door penile-implant salesman
18. Baby-seal-club salesman
19. Landscaper in Antarctica
20. Mormon marriage counselor
21. Neck-brace model
22. Bible salesman in Afghanistan
23. Troubleshooter for the department of sewers
24. Stunt man in army venereal disease films
25. Greeter at a federal penitentiary
They say a person’s choice of pet often reflects his or her personality. Folks who choose exotic animals like ocelots and iguanas are trying to show uniqueness. I once spent the night at the home of a woman who kept tarantulas and scorpions. She was a lawyer. I slept on top of the refrigerator.
1. Nigel Pennyworth of Sheffield, England, had a tapeworm that he named Sam and taught to beg for sweets. Nigel would tap his front teeth with a sugar cube and then slowly raise the sugar cube higher and higher until his parasitical pet extended a full ten inches out of his mouth. Unfortunately, Nigel liked to do this at upscale restaurants, despite the screaming, fainting, and vomiting of the patrons. He was often assaulted for his performances and was once stabbed with an escargot fork by the headwaiter at Maxim’s in Paris.
2. Bill Crawford of Amarillo, Texas, kept bees. This in itself is not unusual, but Bill kept them in his ten-gallon cowboy hat. He said that he loved the cooling effect of thousands of tiny, beating wings but admits that what he loved most was going to bars and saying to strangers, “Hey, wanna see something far out?” and then watching the often terrified expressions on people’s faces when he tipped his hat.
3. Guido Bonnelli of Mistretta, Sicily, has a half-pound leech named Bambino, which he keeps on his forehead. Guido says he eats plenty of red meat to make extra blood, because “The little fella … he sure lika to eat.” Mr. Bonnelli has been prohibited from using public transportation, unless he wears his hair in bangs.
4. Boris Orloff of Moscow has a ten-pound, six-legged, two-headed, nine-eyed frog named Rasputin that he caught in the Chernobyl area. Boris, often ridiculed for his hideous pet, insists, “Cute is in the eye of the beholder. Anyway, how many pets can you read by?”
5. Ms. Vicki Sugarhill of Augusta, Georgia, has a thirty-five-foot anaconda named Huggy that has gotten her into a lot of trouble lately. Since numerous pets in her neighborhood have dissappeared, several neighbors have claimed Vicki’s snake is responsible, and have brought suit against her. During the trial Huggy was brought into the courtroom to show his enormous size and lethal potential. But Ms. Sugarhill had an excellent attorney and was clearly winning, until Huggy, responding to stress, regurgitated three dog collars, several Tabby bells, a pair of running shoes, a Walkman, half a skateboard, and a postal worker’s hat. Further charges are pending.
6. Mrs. Abigail Jenkins od Hartford, Connecticut, has a parrot named Sonny Boy that apparently is an accomplished ventriloquist. The parrot expertly projects its voice into Abigail’s cat Mickey, which was recently fixed, and says, “I hate Abigail. Where’s my balls? No more balls. Kill Abigail. Scratch her eyes out.”
7. Michael Kelly of Boston, Massachusetts, has a Vietnamese potbelly pig named Willie that can fart show tunes. Michael claims he never taught Willie this trick and really hates show tunes, especially now.
8. Marijuana dealer Matt Bigelow of Toronto, Canada, has a spider monkey named Rosta Man that not only rolls joints but also can prepare Pop-Tarts and find the Cartoon Network on TV.
9. Elmore Hickman of Hunstville, Alabama, has a strange yellow-and-blue, two-inch-long fungal growth that he has named Fred.
10. Viola Blackwell of San Francisco has a large vampire bat named Pete that she has trained to attack mimes.
THREE DISEASES THAT SOUND LIKE ROMAN EMPERORS OR GENERALS
1. Vaginitis
2. Bursitis
3. Colitis
In the hands of the right child almost any toy can be dangerous. A good example would be little Al Capone’s baseball bat or the young Jeffrey Dahmer’s Visible Man model. However, some items are just a trip to the emergency room waiting to happen. They usually give us a list of them on TV around the Christmas holidays.
1. Tiny Tot Welding Kit, ages three to six.
2. Junior Commando Homemade Flame Thrower Kit, ages six to twelve. Mom’s vacuum cleaner, a gallon of gasoline, and you’re in business.
3. I Dare You Stuntman Book, ages nine to fifteen. How to do high falls, fire stunts, and much more
4. Sugarcoated, fruit-flavored carpet tacks
5. The Big Book of Extreme Sports for Kids, ages six to twelve. How to turn your cellar stairs into a toboggan run. Bungee jumping with dad’s old suspenders, hang gliding with a bed sheet, and much more.
6. Sparky’s Junior Electrician Kit, ages three to ten
7. Microwave Magic, ages five to ten
8. The Little Cave Explorer’s Book, ages five to ten. How to turn sewers, culverts, and abandoned wells into adventure
9. Bozo’s Find Daddy’s Gun Game, ages three to ten
10. Huff the Magic Dragon: Fun with Fumes, ages five to ten. An introduction to the magical chemicals under the sink
11. Braveheart Catapult. Can launch a twenty-five-pound toddler up to fifty feet!
12. Wild West Big Dog Saddle and Spurs. Fits Dobermans, rottweilers, and Great Danes. Free pit bull lasso included.
Last night on TV I saw a piece about a man who paints famous masterpieces on grains of rice, using an eyelash for a brush. True, I swear. Another built a model of ancient Rome out of matchsticks. That kind of brings out the Nero in me. Folks collect beer bottles, swords, political buttons, belt buckles, antique toys, rocks, butterflies—anything is fair game for the hobbyist.
1. Scream collector Teddy Witherspoon of London, England, is into SandM in an audio sense. Several years ago he accidentally had a car door slammed on his hand while a small tape recorder he was carrying was turned on. When he heard the recording of his own agonized scream, he became fascinated with the texture and acoustic range of the scream. Since then, Teddy has recorded over one hundred extremely painful accidents and purposeful incidents. His favorites include Hot Oatmeal on the Groin, an accident during breakfast at a nudist colony; Lemon Juice in a Paper Cut; Sitting Down on Glass Christmas Balls, courtesy of a tipsy lady friend; and Penis in a Wasp Nest, his own courageous effort.
2. Orville Hoffman of Seattle, Washington, breeds and trains fighting slugs.
3. Traveling salesman Homer Bentwell photographs stains on hotel mattresses. He has collected over 3,000 photos, many of which he says resemble famous people.
4. Yolanda Brown of Tampa, Florida, is an extreme piercing enthusiast who has 350 pieces of metal in her body. Last year while visiting the beach, she was struck by lightning for the third time, fusing her nose ring to her upper-lip stud and causing her nipple rings to glow red.
5. Robert “Bobbe” Dunkans has embraced gender change as a hobby, having eleven sex-change operations in seven years. Reputable surgeons will not perform the procedure for Dunkans any longer, forcing Robert to have his last operation converting him to “Bobbe” in Tijuana, Mexico, at Pablo’s Chop and Swap Shop.
6. Dr. Steven Moreau of Los Angeles is a geneticist who uses all of his professional skills in pursuit of his hobby: creating designer pets. Using gene splicing and DNA manipulation, Dr. Moreau has crossed a pit bull with a parrot, producing the “pit polly,” a bird that says really vicious things like, “Is that cellulite, or are you smuggling cottage cheese in your ass?” He has also crossed common box turtles with minks. These die quickly, making attractive earmuffs. His favorite is produced by crossing a Doberman pinscher with a spider monkey, creating the “dobermonkey,” a guard dog that can actually use a gun.
7. Ms. Lotty Simpson of Tucson, Arizona, calls her hobby “cooking with stones.” By this she does not mean cooking over hot stones, but actually making edible stone meals. She says she got the idea a few years ago when she picked up a stone and smelled its damp underside. “It smelled good, delicious actually,” says Lotty. A typical meal would be roast rock with a side of moss, stone soup, and pebble salad. The only negative side effects are an occasional broken tooth and chronic constipation, which she treats with mineral oil and a blasting cap. Also, she recommends not swimming for two days after eating.
8. Ms. Peggy Marlow of San Diego, California, performs her own cosmetic surgery. Since it’s her hobby and not done professionally, it’s perfectly legal. Peggy says she loved playing with Mr. Potato Head as a child and has a very high pain threshold, so why should she waste thousands of dollars. Well, one reason might be her appearance, which has been described as the Elephant Man with blond hair and really sexy lips.
9. Mickey “Crazy Man” O’Reilly considers himself an environmental and bad-habit daredevil. His hobby is breaking every possible health rule and challenging all environmental warnings. He has swum in the poisonous Love Canal; drinks Lake Erie water; eats only deep-fried foods and sugary, additive-laden snack foods; and smokes three packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day. Mickey lives in a mobile home, which he parks under high-voltage power lines or downwind of chemical plants. Recently, he camped out in the Chernobyl off-limits area for three months, eating only high-mercury tuna and drinking from local streams. Mr. O’Reilly regularly sells his urine as an “organic” pesticide and has been asked to donate his organs to medical science to serve as bad examples. He is ninety-two years old. His motto is, “Man does not live or die by bread alone.”
10. Bob “Bad One” Anderson has a decidedly antisocial hobby. He likes to eat a large meal of fried liver, baked beans, sauerkraut, eggs, and warm beer, and then fart in crowded elevators, using a hidden video camera to record the ensuing panic.
FIVE PEOPLE YOU DON’T OFTEN RUN INTO
1. A Jewish rodeo clown
2. An Amish pimp
3. A Tibetan hit man
4. A Taliban rock star
5. A yodeling exorcist
FIVE WAYS TO LOSE AN EYE
1. A BB gun accident
2. Running with a fork in your hand
3. Cuddling your pet porcupine
4. Heckling at a dart game
5. Bobbing for sea urchins
I recently saw a guy on TV sky boarding, skydiving with a snowboard on his feet, landing on the impossibly steep slope of a mountain and zooming down. Bungee jumping, rock climbing, and the like are activities for adrenaline junkies who just may have a mild death wish.
1. LAVA SURFING. The surfer, wearing a heat-resistant suit made of aluminum foil, like those used to fight oil well fires, is mounted on a special asbestos-treated surfboard with a water-soaked ceramic bottom to create a cushion of steam. A wipeout is called a “baked potato” for obvious reasons.
2. BOINGBOOMKA. A little-known Bosnian sport in which a man rides a pogo stick through an active mine field.
3. GEYSER RIDING. Or “catching the squirt;’ as it’s called by practitioners, who grease their bodies and then cram themselves into the chimneys of geysers, such as Old Faithful, waiting to be propelled hundreds of feet into the air and then float to earth by parachute.
4. MAGNETIC TRUCK-BOARDING. The practitioner, who is mounted on a skateboard, wearing a helmet and belt with powerful magnets on them waits on the side of a highway. When a truck zooms by, he is whisked away at high speed.
5. CRUMPING. The crumper, as players are called, is put in a heavy-duty garbage bag filled with those little plastic peanuts that are used for packing delicate items and then thrown from a high place, such as a roof or bridge.
6. WET MAN. The player must approach a group of dangerous-looking bikers, such as the Hells Angels, then pee on the leg of the leader while screaming, “Wet Man,” and then, of course, run like a goosed gazelle.
One of the things I love about this culture is that we have things called novelty items and the stores that sell them, joke shops. Some of these can even be considered classics: plastic dog crap, the dribble glass, the old fly in the ice cube, and the palm buzzer. But some novelty item concepts just weren’t up to snuff.
1. The chocolate crucifix
2. The Osama Bin Ladin PEZ dispenser
3. Talking condoms
4. Exploding suppositories
5. Hot-pepper contact lenses
6. The Krazy Glue toilet seat
7. Peyote chewing gum
8. Testicle mittens
9. Little striped convict outfits for parakeets and canaries
11. Bikini bottoms that say, “My Other Ass Is Great”
12. Electric nipple warmers
13. Piano-wire dental floss
14. Men’s underwear that say, “Less Is More”
Probably the first laughter among primitive humanoids was an apelike shriek of delighted mirth caused by seeing one of their fellow cavemen having an accident. A loose stone ax head flying off its wooden handle and bouncing off Ooga’s head, or a hunter returning home with an ass full of porcupine quills would do the trick. The more unexpected the circumstance, the bigger the laugh. We haven’t changed much, except now we watch it on America’s Funniest Home Videos.
1. Since new police officer Mike O’Reilly had a rambunctious four-year-old and a gun-shy wife, he was extremely careful with his service pistol at home. He did, however, leave a single loose 9 mm cartridge in the pocket of his blue jeans after an afternoon at the firing range. Somehow the cartridge ended up on the bedroom rug, where little Timmy found it. He put it in his mouth, partially up his nose, and finally decided it was a hobbit. Mr. 9 mm Hobbit ended up in his little house, which we adults call the toaster. The next morning Officer O’Reilly put two blueberry Pop-Tarts in the toaster and sat down to sip his coffee. Suddenly, he had blueberry Pop-Tarts on the ceiling, a flesh wound in his right shoulder, and soiled pants. He now works for the department of sanitation.
2. Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti had a plate of pasta in each hand, so he used his belly to bump open the swinging barroom-style doors to his kitchen. Unfortunately, he was wearing only boxer shorts, and his private parts became wedged between the doors. Mr. Pavarotti produced a sound so powerful and of such a pitch, that it destroyed all his fine crystal and caused his dog to suffer permanent hearing loss.
3. Willie Petoskey returned home after an office party in an inebriated state, which explains why he mistook the tube of Preparation-H for toothpaste and vigorously brushed his teeth with it. Willie lost over three hat sizes. However, his wife, Ida, says she likes him with a small head, because it makes his eyes seem very large, like the kittens in her favorite paintings.
4. Tony Falcone of Long Island was showing off at a family backyard barbecue. He bounced much too high on the family’s new trampoline, lost control, and landed ass first on the grill. Later, when Tony was at a nearby hospital and being treated for second-degree burns and having a link of sausage removed from his colon, two nurses fainted from the strain of suppressing laughter. The attending physician suffered a minor stroke for the same reason when Tony, in recounting what had happened, said, “… and then I yelled, ‘Watch this!’”
5. Mrs. Nina Finch of Bangor, Maine, suffered from severe dry skin, so she covered her entire body with copious amounts of moisturizing lotion. Her phone rang when she was sitting naked on her bed and applying the lotion to her feet. When Nina’s greased feet hit her highly polished parquet floor, she slipped and fell, sliding fifteen feet on her slick buttocks. By her count, Mrs. Finch slipped and fell some twenty times trying to get to the phone, looking like an exotic break-dancer. Finally, the phone stopped ringing, and Mrs. Finch wriggled on her stomach like a snake in the direction of the bed. Unknown to Nina, her husband had come home and was standing silently in the bedroom doorway, watching her gyrate toward the bed. Mr. Finch said that it was the most erotic thing he had ever seen and that he now often asks Nina to do her “snake walk” for him.
6. Science teacher George Loriber was trying to demonstrate the effect of motion on the human senses to his middle school class. First he placed an electric fan on his desk, facing the class, to show that as the blades move faster, they become blurred and then invisible to the human eye. Then he asked chubby Chucky Bremmer to come to the front of the class and twirl around, to show how circular motion affects the human balance mechanism and how the room seems to be in motion, even after the twirling stops. Unfortunately, before class the boy had consumed three slices of pizza, two hot dogs, a chocolate shake, a KitKat bar, and a box of Skittels. He promptly threw up into the moving fan, sharing with the whole class, launching Mr. Loriber into barf-story legend.
7. Forty-two-year-old Daniel Everson has been a roofer for twenty years, yet he can’t explain how the nail gun accidentally went off, nailing his scrotum to the roof of McGregor’s barn. But he says that he now knows how it feels to be a weather vane.
8. Everyone at the party told Calvin that he’d had too much to drink and then drive, but he ignored them, saying, “No, I’m cool. I’ll be fine. I’m cool.” He must have repeated that ten times on the way to the door. “I’m cool. I’m cool.” Calvin put a cigarette in his mouth for the ride home, unlocked his car, and got in. Then he pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter, waited for it to pop out, and used it to light up. Apparently, he then tried to start the car by putting his key into the dashboard lighter socket. The jolt of electricity made his arm muscle spasm violently, punching himself in his nose and breaking it, and then causing his bladder to let loose. Sitting there stunned, Calvin grudgingly had to admit that punching himself in the nose and peeing his pants was definitely not cool.
9. Sister Rose Marco was only four feet, eight inches tall in her classic black-and-white habit. While she and her “back-up” nun, Sister Evelyn Mary, were escorting a grammar school class on a trip to the San Diego Zoo, she slipped on a dropped ice cream cone and fell through the protective railing of the penguin exhibit. She was at the rear of the group, and the crowd was light that day, so no one saw the accident. The poor nun was not badly hurt, but she did bump her head pretty hard on the twenty-five-foot slide down the concrete slope. Badly dazed, she got to her feet and wobbled into the waddling crowd of penguins, who immediately accepted her as one of their own. Sister Rose went missing for almost two hours, while everyone searched frantically, and her “back-up” nun became increasingly hysterical. Zookeeper Tony Correlli almost fainted when, while feeding the penguins, he bounced a dead fish off the head of the tall one, and suddenly it whirled around and turned into an enraged charging nun brandishing a ruler. Tony said that he had spent eight years in Catholic school and that though lions and tigers did not faze him, that pissed-off little nun scared the crap out of him.
10. Truck driver Emmett Picker loved his job driving sixteen-wheelers cross country, and ten-hour nonstop runs were his specialty. He would screw the rest rules since he carried lots of snack food and drank Coca-Cola with NoDoze for stamina. Although the amount of caffeine caused frequent urination, he solved that problem with his Gatorade jug. One night on a lonely stretch of highway in Oregon, his truck bumped over a large fallen rock that he hadn’t seen because of his docking procedure. A sudden sickening jolt of pain made him glance down only to find that his testicles had been roughly jammed into the jug—and he couldn’t get them out without causing more pain. About twenty minutes later he was pulled over for driving erratically. The highway patrol officer asked what the trouble was, and Emmett Picker became part of highway patrol legend, forced to live forever with the wise-ass cop’s words, “You really love your Gatorade. Don’t you, boy.”
THREE PEOPLE YOU DON’T WANT TO GET ON AN ELEVATOR WITH
1. A naked man holding a samurai sword
2. A man whose hair is on fire, who is laughing hysterically
3. A drunken biker who has a pit bull on a leash with a severed hand in its mouth
FOUR ESTABLISHMENTS YOU DON’T WANT TO GIVE YOUR BUSINESS TO
1. Sid ’N Bubba’s Plastic Surgery Shack
2. The Stinking Clam Seafood Restaurant
3. Big Wally’s Glass-Eye Barn
4. The Vendetta Brothers’ EZ Loans and Cement Company
Everybody has little quirks and idiosyncrasies. I, for example, because of years of Catholic school, cannot make love during a thunderstorm, and I have a friend who says she must floss her teeth after eating anything, including chewing gum or tic tacs. The rich and famous not only have the eyes of the world on them, but the license to really indulge themselves.
1. Sir Edward Coswell of Sussex, England, who is ninety-two years old, has saved his fingernail and toenail clippings since he was sixteen. To accommodate his colossal collection, he built a special room in his manor house that his servants refer to as “the clip joint.”
2. Bonnie Springer of Amarillo, Texas, is an attractive oil heiress worth over $150 million, yet she apparently suffers from low self-esteem and has a violent streak. Mrs. Springer has hired fifty construction workers and unemployed truck drivers to work on her sprawling estate as professional oglers and louts. Their job is to conceal themselves behind trees and shrubbery and when she walks by, jump out, and shout things like “Nice ass, lady!” and “What a set of jugs!” and make vulgar gestures like tongue wiggling, whereupon Mrs. Springer, who is a fifth-degree black belt in karate, kicks the shit out of them. She pays all medical expenses and gives bonuses for severe injuries, her last being $5,000 for a crushed testicle.
3. Genghis Khan had a pathological fear of sitting on his own helmet, which sported a six-inch spike. He did take it to extremes though: He had a dozen body servants whose only job was to follow him around, making sure that the painful and embarrassing event never happened. Six times the sharp-eyed servants prevented the accident by shouting, “Hold it!” in the nick of time. However, they missed once, but that’s another list.
4. Thomas Alva Edison, the prolific genius and inventor of the lightbulb, the phonograph, and the motion picture camera, plus scores of now commonly used devices, was also a hopelessly compulsive practical joker. Not many know, however, that he also invented fake puke, the whoopee cushion, and plastic dog crap.
5. Wild Bill Hickok, arguably the deadliest gunfighter of the Old West, was stricken with a terrible stutter that was aggravated by stress. So many of his gun fights started something like this: “You dirty varmint. Dra - Dra - Dra - Dra - Dra - Draw!” Most of his opponents reached for it on the third “Dra,” so by the time Bill got out the word “Draw,” he was talking to a perforated corpse.
6. Timothy Leary, the famous proponent of consciousness expansion through the use of LSD and other psychedelic substances, often peed pure white light after binges.
7. Catherine the Great, the Empress of Russia, famous for her lusty appetites and love of horses, had a bra and panties artfully constructed from oats and sugar cubes.
8. Elvis Presley, who unfortunately was a prodigious consumer of pills and deep-fried food, including his now famous deep-fried peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches, also invented other unique recipes, such as “sleepy chicken,” which is deep-fried in a barbiturate batter and rolled in crushed quaaludes. Choice of wine with this meal is irrelevant, but it’s best served with a side of defibrillator paddles.
9. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards has had so many near-death experiences that he has an E-Z pass for the tunnel of light.
10. Apparently, Chinese Emperor Ch’in Shih Huang Ti of the Ch’in Dynasty was an incredibly self-indulgent man, since it was during his reign that construction of the Great Wall began, and he just happened to be a fanatical handball player and prolific graffiti artist.
11. Benjamin Walker was a classic mountain man, a trapper, a frontiersman, and a scout for Lewis and Clark. He was also an animal lover in the literal sense, in that he spent two winters cohabiting with a female grizzly bear named Clementine. Ben and Clementine were by all accounts a happy couple, and Ben did not mind the good-natured ribbing he took from his friends about the love scratches on his back. However, near the end of the second winter, Clementine, who was jealous by nature, found a female cougar hair on Ben’s buckskins and ended the relationship. Kit Carson commented, “I told him that if she found out about his tomcatting around, she’d tear his head off.” She did—and both arms too.
12. Japanese multibillionaire Kiki Suzuki was spoiled beyond rotten. Laws and rules were for other people. Suzuki crushed anyone or anything that got in his way, protected by the Kevlar armor of lawyers with unlimited funds. Like many rich, middle-aged Japanese men, Suzuki believed that ground-up rhinoceros horn boosts virility and so consumed large amounts of the superexpensive dust, while the rhinos dwindled to the point of extinction. He finally decided that he wanted to prove his bravery and kill a rhino personally to harvest the horn. He arranged an illegal safari by bribing an impoverished African country with a hydroelectric dam. Armed with the most expensive German magnum big-game rifle fitted with a laser sight, he declined backup by a professional hunter—which he considered dishonorable—and confronted one of the last rhinos by himself. It charged him and SPLAT! He died like a moth on a car windshield. He had forgotten to take the safety off, and also, the one law no one can get around: What goes around comes around.
13. The wealthy Roman patrician Gluttonous Maximus, who had a chain of vomitoriums named after him, was so fat he had two small senators orbiting him, trapped in his gravitational field.
14. Buffalo Bill never killed a single buffalo. He got his nickname because he was amazingly well hung.
FOUR THINGS YOU SHOULDN’T DO IN ZERO-GRAVITY CONDITIONS
1. Chew tobacco
2. Throw up
3. Eat watermelon
4. Pick your nose
All people have some foods they don’t care for. That’s only natural. Then again, some people would rather be flogged than have to eat certain foods. That’s what this list is all about. I should add that it is also my personal list of icky foods.
1. LIVER. Over 90 percent of the people I’ve asked hate liver with a passion. I would rather eat a nice, clean poodle turd than liver.
2. KIDNEYS. Another 90 percent rejection-level food. Those few who do enjoy eating them say it’s all in the preparation. If you could vaporize a couple of ounces of the wretched stuff and spray the mist over a swimming pool full of melted chocolate, I might try some. Kidneys are a filtration organ after all, and that doesn’t sound very appealing. “Let’s see now. You say about half a million gallons of cow urine has passed through this stuff. Sure I’ll try some.” I don’t think so.
3. TONGUE SANDWICH. How the hell can you enjoy something that tastes you back? You go, “Mmmmmn.” The sandwich goes, “Mmmmmn.” Taste buds on taste buds just sounds wrong. Ich!
4. TRIPE. It’s right up there on the disgust scale. It’s boiled, shredded stomach lining of beef—kind of what you would get if a cow were somehow killed in a boiler explosion. I would eat it if I were hungry enough … like just before I ate my own foot.
5. HEADCHEESE. Just the name if repeated enough can induce vomiting. Headcheese sounds like it belongs with toe jam. It’s almost always in the cold cut section of your supermarket, but no one will knowingly look at it. It’s little chunks of meat suspended in an unknown clear jelly—kind of what I imagine a transporter accident on Star Trek would look like.
6. PICKLED PIG’S FEET. You’ve got to ask yourself one question. What do pigs feet stand around in all day when they’re alive? That’s right, pigs’ shit! Only now they’re dead, floating in a jar of preservative solution. Appetizing, no?
7. RAW OYSTERS ON THE HALF SHELL. Some folks consider them a delicacy. They’re expensive and thought by some to be an aphrodisiac. I have one word for you regarding raw oysters: snot! I’d rather just get a bad head cold. And as far as their supposed aphrodisiac qualities, that idea probably comes from the fact that shellfish are about 80 percent reproductive organ by weight. I don’t consider that a culinary plus.
If it is rare, exotic, outrageously expensive, and very weird, we want to stuff our faces with it. That’s the credo of the gourmet.
1. SOUP: Luminescent plankton soup (served with the lights dimmed)
APPETIZER: Sautéed pigmy shrew scent glands, served on a bed of Spanish moss, fried in rose oil
ENTRÉE: Baby mink steak, glazed with killer-bee honey and sparrow egg whites, served with albino truffles
DESSERT: Licorice ice cream topped with candied ermine nipples
PRICE: $15,000
2. SOUP: Eye-of-giant-squid jelled consommé
APPETIZER: Roasted breast of hummingbird on a crisp bed of stir-fried monarch butterfly wings
ENTRÉE: Unborn Bengal tiger fried in a light batter of pulverized pearls and platypus eggs, served with Arctic lichen soufflé
DESSERT: Rare orchids suspended in tangerine Jell-O
PRICE: $25,000
APPETIZER: Carnivorous plant salad with an assortment of trapped prey
ENTRÉE: Filet of tree sloth sautéed in jaguar milk, with a side of gibbon-placenta crisps
DESSERT: Cocoa-leaf rice pudding garnished with candied parrot tongues
PRICE: $12,000
Ice cream was originally invented by the Romans and has since been adopted worldwide. However, each culture expresses its uniqueness in its flavor choices of the frozen dessert. Hence:
1. Cricket crunch—Indonesia
2. Monkey brain delight—Burma
3. Octopus fudge ripple—Cuba
4. Squid chip—Sicily
5. Coconut grub—New Guinea
6. Cherry missionary surprise—Borneo
7. Chunky bat—Australian outback
8. Lard swirl—Finland
9. Pine needle and tree bark jamboree—Siberia
11. Tarantula surprise—Jamaica
12. Chocolate herring—Norway
Ya know if a guy hangs himself, that’s tragic. But if he does it from the nose of the Snoopy balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, that’s at least a little amusing, no? I never met this guy, because he doesn’t exist, and yet I like his style. Know what I mean? A man drops dead on a treadmill in a health club. It happens a lot. It’s sad and a little ironic. But if a guy slips on a catwalk in a bubble gum factory and drowns in a vat of Double Bubble, you know the jokes will start long before they get him unsticky. There is no shame in this aspect of human nature. In fact, I think it demonstrates intuitive spiritual savvy and true grit.
1. Harvey Di Lungano of Brooklyn, New York, had a perfect reproduction of a pay phone tattooed on his chest and then dialed himself with an ice pick. His suicide note read, “Beep. Beep. Boop. Beep. Boop. Beep. Beep.”
2. Schoolteacher Scott Grafton of Chicago, Illinois, grew despondent over the shrinking attention spans and growing restlessness of his classes. He committed suicide by filling his suit pockets with raw meat and throwing himself into the shark tank at Sea World during a class trip. His suicide note said, “Maybe this will get the little bastards’ attention.” The children were heard to comment that though the event was shocking, it was “way cool,” but not quite as exciting as The Matrix.
3. Hang-gliding enthusiast “Lucky” Louis Brown was riding the thermals over Route 66 near Gallup, New Mexico, on a beautiful clear day. Suddenly he was struck by a turkey buzzard, plummeted onto power lines, and bounced off into the path of a speeding sixteen-wheeler that knocked him 150 feet into the holding pen of a roadside rattlesnake ranch—where he was bitten numerous times. Amazingly, the burned, battered, and poisoned “Lucky Lou” survived the ordeal. Unfortunately, he shot himself soon afterward. His suicide note said, “I can take a hint.” (Synchronistically, Lucky Lou was wearing a Wile E. Coyote T-shirt at the time of the accident.)
4. Billy Joe Clanton of Atlanta, Georgia, was a Civil War reenactment enthusiast who enjoyed putting on Confederate gray and firing his musket at the mock Yankees who were in reality his friends and neighbors. However, during the staging of the Battle of Vicksburg, somehow a lemon sour ball got lodged in the barrel of a Yankee musket on top of a powder charge. The high-velocity confection struck Billy Joe in the forehead, killing him. The last word he muttered was “tangy.”
5. Elroy Gibbs won $90 million in the Tennessee state lottery, at odds of 150 million to one, and then was struck in the head and killed by a falling piece of space junk, at odds of approximately 150 million to one. So it can be said that overall he had average luck.
6. Vegetarian Becky Anderson of San Francisco put a coconut in her microwave oven and thereby became the first person killed by organic shrapnel.
7. Marijuana grower Buzz Caldwell spent most of his time deep in the forests of northern California, tending and guarding his illegal crop. A gentle soul who had little human contact, he befriended the local wildlife, boasting that he actually “got stoned” with them. Celebrating harvest time, Buzz smoked several bongs with his animal buddies, which included two bears, a wolverine, and some raccoons. All went well until the munchies struck the happy group. In the spirit of love and harmony, his animal buddies shared Buzz equally.
8. The Vomiting Skulls biker gang, out of Boise, Idaho, was operating an illegal lab producing methamphetamine, the drug of choice in the American Midwest, when the lab was raided by federal narcotic agents. The gang surrendered without a fight, except for their leader, “Benny-the-Maggot” Williams, who led the Feds on a high-speed chase, reaching speeds of over one hundred miles an hour—which is impressive, considering that he was on foot. The pursuit ended when Benny-the-Maggot hit an oil spill, lost control, crashed into an oak tree, and killed himself.
9. Ed Burns of Nome, Alaska, was attending a costume party dressed as a seal when the highly inebriated Mr. Burns and a friend decided to go out onto the ice briefly and “make a couple of snow cones,” as outdoor urination is called in those latitudes. Suddenly, an orca crashed through the ice, snatched Ed, and disappeared. His buddy was heard to comment, “Was that a freakin’ great costume or what?”
10. Kurt Bannon of Hollywood, California, was not a handsome man by any standards. In Hollywood he was Quasimodo. Afflicted with a weak chin, large hooked nose, Ping-Pong-paddle ears, and sloping forehead, “rodentlike” would have been a kind description. Since appearance meant everything to Kurt, he spent $25,000 and endured much pain to get a complete cosmetic surgical makeover. He was, literally, a changed man. Even his closest friends couldn’t recognize him easily, so one couldn’t really blame his attack-trained rottweiler Ripper for the unfortunate incident. However, everyone agreed that burying the head in the backyard seemed excessive and somewhat ironic. His reported last words were, “Here boy!”
11. Bubba “Big Boy” Higgins topped the scale at 651 pounds—not a record, but impressive for his five-foot-six-inch frame. Warned that he had only a short time to live unless he lost weight, Bubba decided to have himself committed to a “fasting clinic,” where he was put on a medically supervised fast consisting of water and a five-hundred-calorie protein-vitamin shake per day. Considering that five hundred calories was the amount of food left stuck in his teeth after his average pre-fast eating day, it is amazing that he stuck it out until he lost almost 350 pounds. Soon after his release, Bubba was on his way to a follow-up counseling session, but had the misfortune to get stuck in a traffic jam behind a Krispy Kreme truck loaded with still-warm donuts. Police say it was probably the aroma that caused him to snap. Bubba, growling and foaming at the mouth, charged the truck, scaring off the driver, and then ate the entire contents of the truck, which caused his death. His last words were, “Got milk?”
FIVE SIGNS OF OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER
1. Needing to brush your teeth after talking about food
2. Using more than twenty bars of hand soap a week
3. Using more than twenty rolls of toilet paper a week
4. Picking lint off the clothes of total strangers
5. Slamming on your breaks in the middle of a highway to get out and stand up a fallen highway cone
I had a friend who took pride in giving the oddest, most useless gifts. He gave me an antique can of harpoon wax once for my birthday. The year before, it was an ant farm. I asked him why he did this weird gift thing, and he replied, “to remind people to expect the unexpected.”
1. Scrap metal dealer Felix Pocala gave his wife, Peggy, a large barrel of doorknobs for their fifth wedding anniversary. Peggy said it beat the hell out of the six-foot ball of aluminum foil she got last anniversary.
2. In ancient Egypt, Pharoah Nehep Tu gave his favorite daughter a tiny chariot constructed of gold paper, containing six perfect diamonds and six perfect pearls for her sixth birthday. The sparkling chariot was drawn by a team of one hundred trained dragonflies so that the little treasure actually flew through the air to his daughter’s delight. It’s a shame the window was left open, but that did lead to the miracle at the meat market.
3. Depression-era gangsters Ma Parker and her sons were killers, but they were a family too. It was rumored that when the Parker boys were just kids, their ma gave each a brand-new Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver and then at a birthday party had a piñata filled with ammo.
4. Ultrarich Saudi Prince Ben Al Bokmal discovered that his beautiful new wife had an absolute fetish for cheddar cheese, so he bought her Wisconsin.
5. Roman Emperor Claudius Maximus gave his beloved wife what had to be the first hair dryer. It consisted of a golden mesh cage that could be worn as a hat and was crammed with two hundred hummingbirds.
6. Polka King Stanley Bronski’s band gave him an accordion that dispensed cold beer from a spigot on the side, to commemorate ten years as bandleader.
7. Porn star Vicki Cummings was presented with a six-foot-high Jell-O mold of her ass with hundred-dollar bills suspended in it.
What distinguishes us from the animal kingdom is our inventiveness and use of tools. I know chimps use twigs to probe termite mounds, but that’s the rare exception. In general, animals and insects actually adapt their bodies to get the job done, like the anteater’s long, sticky tongue—evolution being the inventor. We alone invent and build things to do a job. I’m not talking about just the big stuff like the steam engine, but the small things on the Veg-O-Matic or Salad Shooter level, the kind of things you see in catalogs or in late-night TV ads—ingenious but somewhat wacky.
1. HUMANE FLYPAPER. Instead of sticky glue trapping the poor fly, leaving it to starve, Teflon is used so that the fly just slips and throws its back out.
2. STEER DISTRACTER. A clown hand puppet covered with tiny flashing lights, to be used at slaughterhouses to distract the doomed animal just before the pneumatic hammer slams into its skull.
3. POOP FLINGER. Instead of scooping up your dog’s “business,” leaving you with a really nasty package to tote, the poop flinger uses a strong spring and a Ping-Pong paddle to swat the droppings up to fifty yards away, where, of course, they’re none of your concern.
4. FALSE-TEETH NAIL CLIPPER. A hand-operated set of spring-loaded false teeth, to trim your nails the way nature intended.
5. THE FUNK-O-METER DIRTY CLOTHES SNIFFER. A handheld electronic odor detector for checking out those clothing items of questionable freshness. Set the control for the item to be sniffed: socks, underwear, or shirts. Hold the sniffer wand within two inches, and you get a digital readout of “good,” “passable at a distance,” or “pigpen.” Caution: Be sure the selector control is set for the proper item, to get an accurate reading. Example: “Passable” socks are “pigpen” underwear.
6. WHO CUT THE CHEESE? BLAME DESIGNATOR. From the folks who brought you Funk-O-Meter. Don’t you just hate it when the room suddenly fills with a nostril-searing stench and no one in the group will claim responsibility? Just extend the retractable sniffer wand and sweep the room with this handy pocket compasslike device, and the guilt arrow will unerringly point to the responsible party.
7. THE ABUSIVE TALKING BATHROOM SCALE. The scale has a select switch for abuse level and style. For example, level one: “Is that you, Lard Ass, or did somebody park a car on me?” Level two: “If you were sixty feet tall, you would be at your ideal weight.” Level three: “Just don’t eat me, Fat Boy.”
8. BIONIC LION HOME SECURITY DEVICE. When an intruder breaks the invisible beam, superpowerful surround sound speakers emit the angry roar of an African lion magnified two hundred times, usually resulting in involuntary bowel release and immediate flight.
9. GOTCHA POOL ADDITIVE. Does it irritate you when some grinning bozo takes a whiz in your swimming pool? End it now with Gotcha pool additive, a harmless chemical that reacts with urine to instantly turn the water in your pool into a thick Jell-O-like substance, trapping the offender like an insect in amber.
10. THE CHASTITY CHIP. A microchip is placed under the skin of a spouse that detects sexual arousal and sends a signal to the wrist-worn receiver of the significant other. The receiver then displays an icon of a fist with the index finger and pinkie extended, the Italian sign for cuckold, while Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart” plays.
11. TOE FLOSS.
12. A MAGIC MARKER BAYONET FOR PAINT-BALL GUNS.
13. THE KICK-THE-HABIT CIGARETTE CASE. When opened, it emits the voice of Humphrey Bogart delivering his famous line, “Here’s looking at you, kid”—followed by a hacking cough.
14. THE IN-LINE WHEELCHAIR.
I love watching science and nature shows on cable TV, because besides their informational value, many have a very high weirdness factor. I’ve seen guys up to their hips in bat dung, filming vampire bats “doing it,” and others enduring the dangers of snake-infested jungles to watch giant snails mating, demonstrating both bravery and patience.
1. Dr. Michael Truman of UCLA has discovered that 20 percent of pet goldfish that die and are then flushed down the toilet are not dead at all but merely faking in the hope of escaping through the sewer system.
2. Harvard geneticist Dr. Carl Lee has crossed the genetic material of common cockroaches with that of fireflies, producing roaches that glow in the dark. He reports that the “glow roaches” are in a constant state of panic and have trouble eating because of their normal tendency to run for their lives when the kitchen light is turned on.
3. Dr. Richard Kitman of Stamford University has discovered that clams laugh. However, he does not know why and feels they may be mocking him.
4. Naturalist Emma Flowers studies the migration of caribou herds across the Alaskan wilderness and has found that they never deviate more than three miles off course—except during recent sunspot activity when several were traced to a suburb of Detroit.
5. Dr. Raymond Segal has discovered that mosquitoes, recently fed on the blood of manic-depressives, have a 63 percent higher rate of flying into a backyard bug zapper.
6. Dr. Elizabeth Sutter has discovered that jellyfish are terrified of Kleenex.
7. Dr. Timothy O’Connor, who studies elephant behavior and communication, has discovered that when a bull elephant flares its ears and raises its trunk straight up, it is actually making a vulgar gesture at the cameraman.
I’ve always loved weird forms of artistic expression. Whether it’s a reproduction of the Mona Lisa done with bird droppings, the Taj Mahal constructed of Legos, or a stripper who does bird calls, it’s all cool with me. The group designated as performance artists, however, takes
1. Otto Klugman of Toronto, Canada, in order to make a statement about growing violence among children, comes out on stage dressed like Shirley Temple and then hammers a tenpenny nail into his forehead, while lip-synching “On the Good Ship Lollipop.”
2. Freddy Caldwell of London, England, has himself suspended naked in a ten-foot-high lime Jell-O mold. He breathes through a transparent tube that several church groups have tried to block off. Freddy says that he’s not trying to make any particular statement. He just likes the way it feels when the Jell-O jiggles.
3. Animal rights activist Molly Bergman of San Francisco puts on a small play in which two tall body builders wearing French poodle costumes perform a mock castration involving a machete, ketchup, and walnuts on a short, thin man. At the end of each performance, the nuts are thrown into the audience.
4. Tim Goodman of Seattle, Washington, has created a gigantic papier-mâché nose. When the curtain rises, Tim, wearing black leotards and a ski mask, drops out of a nostril and proclaims, “Hi! I’m Billy Booger!” This is as far as the performance has gotten to date, because at this point the audience inevitably starts booing and shouting in disgust. Undaunted, Tim is in the process of building an enormous latex anus for his new show.
5. Bob Snowfield of Albany, New York, performs a piece in which he precariously balances a unicycle while holding a large plastic bag of money in one hand and an identical bag filled with rubber sex toys in the other. The floor of the stage is covered with realistic, coiled rubber rattlesnakes. On either side of him is a man dressed like Uncle Sam and another dressed like an Arab, who are throwing grapefruits at each other. The title is Stress in Modern Times.
6. Megan O’Connor of Los Angeles, California, sits on a stool on an empty stage, with a blank expression on her face, cheeks ridiculously distended by twenty multicolored Ping-Pong balls. A man approaches and hits her on top of the head, causing a brightly colored ball to pop out into his hand. He walks away, pretending to eat the object. The name of the piece is Service Job.
One of the earliest forms of entertainment were trained animal acts, from dancing bears and prancing ponies to poodles forming a conga line and seals balancing balls on their noses. All have delighted audiences. I favor the stranger acts, like a flea circus or a horse that does math. The weirder, the better.
1. Carl Dabchick of the Ukraine has a high-class bird act in which parrots and mynah birds perform Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The drama is only slightly affected when he rewards a player with a grape after a soliloquy. And once, the parrot playing Caesar repeated “Et tu, Brute?” twenty-five times before being shot with a low-powered BB gun to snap him out of it.
2. Louis Ferrillo comes out on stage completely naked but covered from head to foot with his trained bees, which on his command form Bermuda shorts, a shirt, and a vest. Unfortunately, once a cloud of cigar smoke from the audience caused the bees that formed his Bermuda shorts to scatter, and Louis was arrested for indecent exposure.
3. James Marlowe of Kingston, Jamaica, loves Busby Berkeley films, and so has created an act in which two hundred trained tarantulas form intricate designs, such as snowflakes, concentric wheels spinning in different directions, and a chrysanthemum blossom on a white wall. The only trouble he has had is at the end of the show when all of his tarantulas jump from the wall to the stage for a group bow. Several phobic audience members have fainted, and once a woman wearing a fuzzy wool sweater ran into a wall, knocking herself unconscious.
4. Claus Krupp of Hamburg, Germany, did an act in which sixty Chihuahuas were harnessed to a small wagon holding the 250-pound Krupp wielding a whip. The straining dogs then pulled the wagon up a 40-degree incline to a fake mountaintop where Claus planted a flag. One night in 1998 the dogs broke out of their cages, and in a savage but remarkably coordinated attack, tore off Claus’s whip arm.
5. Bill Skidmore of Sidney, Australia, trained four full-grown mountain gorillas to perform dozens of tricks for delighted audiences. However, he went a trick too far when he had Bomba, Koko, Sampson, and Bingo hold separate ends of a sturdy blanket and begin bouncing him in the air. The apes apparently started having fun and forgot their incredible strength, launching Skidmore through the skylight fifty feet above. His body was found on a roof two buildings away. Bingo cried.
6. Emma Bronsky has trained two beavers and a hedgehog to play Ping-Pong. The beavers use their tails as paddles, and the hedgehog, of course, is the ball.
FIVE HIGHLY UNDESIRABLE NICKNAMES
1. Porky
2. Lard Ass
3. Needle Dick
4. Pin Prick
5. Barnyard
The animal kingdom gives us many examples of the initial interaction, or signaling, of potential mates. The males display and strut their stuff, and the females choose. Some fish and lizards change color. Some birds puff up a big brightly colored sack under their necks and do a weird dance. However, we humans must speak. And therein lies the problem.
1. Hey, my sore’s better. Let’s celebrate with dinner.
2. Wanna go back to my place and feed crickets to my iguana?
3. Wanna shoot some pool? My probation officer says it’s OK.
4. Wanna go down to the stockyards and watch the hogs “do it”?
5. Wanna go back to my place for a drink? You can meet my Great Dane Romeo… he’s very clean.
6. All the voices in my head agree that we should ask you out, and they promise to behave—so nobody will get hurt this time.
7. Hi there. I know how it is being a good-looking woman and getting hit on all the time, because I used to be one. But the stitches come out next Thursday.
How about a date on Friday?
8. Don’t you just love the shower scene in Psycho?
9. Wanna go back to my place for a drink? Maybe you can pick up some spare change too.
10. I get really nervous and tongue-tied around beautiful women like you, so I hope you won’t think it too forward of me if I just hump your leg awhile until I relax.
The seven deadly sins are lust, anger, envy, gluttony, pride, greed, and sloth. In our culture, all of these receive a lot of media coverage, except for sloth, or laziness, the forgotten sin. So this list is dedicated to those souls who have written next to their names in the book of life, “Lazy Bastard!”
1. Elroy Gump of Coon Bottom, Tennessee, when informed by his screaming wife that their roof was on fire, replied that it was supposed to rain real soon, then rolled over in bed and fell asleep.
2. House painter Will Hicks of Seattle, Washington, took three months to paint a doghouse. When accused of laziness by the owner, Will replied that he gave it three full coats and that the color sky blue was hard to work with because it induced uncontrollable daydreaming.
3. Bob “Slowpoke” Potter of Fairbanks, Alaska, was struck and killed by a glacier.
4. Charles Cromwell, a ship captain, loved to take naps. One day when his first mate said there was a fire in the engine room, an iceberg dead ahead, and a mutiny brewing, Cromwell told him that if he ever interrupted the captain’s afternoon nap again—for no good reason—he would have him flogged.
5. Lion tamer Eric Kirkland of London, England, was badly mauled when he attempted to do his act without a chair or whip, using only violent hand gestures and dirty looks to control the beasts. Eric said that he had accidentally left his chair and whip in his trailer and wasn’t about to walk all the way across the main tent to get the damn things.
6. Short-order cook Stanley Bloom was fired for serving a customer a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich made with a whole uncut tomato. Bloom said of the incident, “What the hell am I supposed to do—everything?”
7. After Molly Holdfied of Toronto, Canada, served her husband Otto an anniversary dinner consisting of Fig Newtons and a box of Chicklets—he divorced her. Molly complained that he was unappreciative, since it took her quite awhile to pick out fresh Fig Newtons and then open the well-sealed box.
8. Clem Perkins of Augusta, Georgia, spent so much time in his backyard hammock that he was almost strangled by a wisteria vine.
I just saw a news story about a kid being thrown out of high school for refusing to remove his “Goth” makeup, which consisted of whiteface, black lipstick, and mock blood streaming from his eyes. In a related story, a preppy was asked to leave his exclusive private school for pimping. I think that’s taking junior achievement a tad too far.
1. Nigel Singleton III of the United Kingdom was expelled from Oxford University for reasons of moral turpitude. When he was arrested for exposing himself in front of the squid tank at the London Aquarium, the incident was caught on tape by a security camera and occurred when the Aquarium was closed to the public, leaving Nigel alone with the confused and frightened squid.
2. Charles Bumford was thrown out of the University of Miami for cheating on his tanning finals.
3. Betty “Giggles” Mumford was asked to leave the Culinary Institute of America when it was discovered that she had sucked the nitrous oxide out of all the school’s Reddi-wip cans.
4. Cadet William Crown was expelled from West Point Military Academy for poor attitude when it was discovered that he bore tattoos of Jesus, Gandhi, John Lennon, Jane Fonda, and a dove with an olive branch in its beak.
5. Eric Kessler was ejected from Boston University for a hazing incident in which he Krazy Glued four freshman to the ceiling of their dorm rooms.
6. Fred Hasenpfeffer, a student of quantum physics at MIT, while experimenting in the high-energy laser lab, accidentally tore a hole in the space-time continuum, allowing a saber-toothed tiger to briefly appear in the faculty lounge, resulting in several heart attacks. Fred was expelled since he had been warned after a previous incident in which a bewildered Roman gladiator materialized in a restroom.
7. Billy Closely was expelled from his Brooklyn, New York, high school when, after dissecting a frog in biology class, he doused it with garlic and olive oil and ate it.
History seems to record only very serious pivotal moments, such as the beginning and end of great wars; the introduction of world-changing ideas like democracy and monotheism; and monumental events, both catastrophic and beneficial. I think there should be a record of outstanding embarrassing moments, since as Mark Twain states, humans are the only creatures who experience embarrassment or need to.
1. Genghis Khan sits on his own spiked helmet. As previously mentioned, the great Khan had a phobia involving this accident and had taken extraordinary precautions to avert it, and yet, at the worst possible moment, in front of a gathering of the most important clan leaders and warlords of the Mongol tribes, he plunked down on the razor-sharp, six-inch spike and emitted an ear-piercing, high-pitched scream like a little girl. In his supermacho warrior culture this was the ultimate loss of face. Thirty men were immediately beheaded for laughing out loud. Another twenty threw themselves on their swords while laughing. All others swore an oath to say that the great Khan roared like a lion, and the special body servants, given the task of preventing the occurrence, were skinned alive and then rolled in rock salt before being severely punished.
2. Henry VIII accidentally sets fire to the French ambassador. After eating a large meal at a lavish feast in the great hall at Buckingham Palace, Henry accidentally farted on a lit candle set on a low table. Some said this caused a five-foot jet of blue flame to exit his rear, setting the poor ambassador ablaze. A servant was heard to comment, “With all those frills and ruffles the Frenchie was wearin’, he went up like a bloody dry Christmas tree.” There was much official embarrassment but no repercussions. The only other casualty was a minor Italian baron attending the affair, whose head exploded from the force of suppressed laughter.
3. Cleopatra almost fails to seduce Julius Caesar. The sensual and stunningly beautiful queen of Egypt realized that she must beguile the great Caesar to save her country, so she carefully orchestrated their first meeting. Wearing a transparent garment, bejeweled with diamonds and pearls, she perfumed herself with exotic aphrodisiac spices and oils. Then she had herself rolled up in a priceless carpet and had it presented to Caesar as a gift, revealing herself to him for the first time when the carpet was unfurled at his feet. Caesar was visibly surprised and delighted when the treasure hidden in the rug was revealed and Cleopatra fixed him with her hypnotic, erotic gaze. She then smiled at him, not realizing she had a large piece of spinach clinging to her front teeth. Caesar was taken aback and briefly turned off. When he pointed toward his own teeth to make the queen aware of her spinach, she almost fainted with embarrassment, but the rest of her charms soon won out, and the rest is history.
4. Moses descended from Mount Ararat with the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. When he stood on a parapet and started to address the multitudes, one of the stone tablets slipped and fell, smashing his toes. Fortunately, with no modern public address system, only a few people heard him hiss, “Shit! My foot!” Embarrassed but undaunted, he started over again.
5. Werner Von Braun, father of the American space program and former head of Hitler’s rocket development program, succumbed to nerves at a press conference after the successful launch of America’s first space satellite and referred to President Eisenhower as “mein führer.”
6. Christopher Columbus kneels at the feet of Queen Isabella of Spain to ask for help in his exploration venture. When his back goes out, Columbus is forced to deliver the rest of his plea bent at a 90-degree angle.
7. Ben Franklin forgets that he must attend a state dinner and give an address on the evening of his famous kite-flying-in-a-thunderstorm experiment. He is forced to address the dignitaries with no eyebrows, with what’s left of his hair standing straight up, and with a temporary case of Tourette’s syndrome induced by the lightning strike. Although the audience forgives his bizarre appearance and occasional barking and swearing, Franklin is embarrassed to tears.
8. When Jesus of Nazareth was walking through Jerusalem, he saw a crowd about to stone a prostitute to death. He stopped them, saying, “Let ye among you who is without sin cast the first stone.” Suddenly, a large rock flew out of the crowd, hit the hooker in the head, and killed her. Jesus looked embarrassed, and then walked over to the crowd and said, “You know, Ma, you really piss me off sometimes.”
NOTE: This is a modification of a street joke I heard as a boy.
9. Adolf Hitler, after finishing a long and passionate speech on Aryan superiority, slips on a dropped bratwurst and falls headlong into a large bowl of potato salad.
10. Sigmund Freud, while addressing a medical college in Vienna, declares that he may be using too much of the new, but then legal, drug cocaine—he’s too embarrassed to admit that he cannot interpret the dream of a student in which the young man is stabbing a donut with a banana.
11. Samuel Colt, inventor of the six-shooter, has a gun accident. Mr. Colt admitted he was embarrassed after shooting off his right pinkie toe. He had a nightmare that a long, ghostly hand was reaching over the edge of his bed and awoke with a start—and then shot himself in the foot.
12. When Hannibal forgets the peanuts, panic breaks out among his army as they are crossing the Alps. The elephants suddenly realize: “Hey, we’re elephants! What the hell are we doing up in the mountains freezing our asses of?” The elephants then go berserk and trample the men. Hannibal is mortified that he has forgotten to bring along the one thing that calms them down: peanuts.
FIVE CONDITIONS THAT MAY BE HELPED BY A POKE IN THE ASS WITH A SHARP STICK
1. Attention-span deficiency
2. Chronic fatigue syndrome
3. Narcolepsy
4. Snoring
5. Stuttering
Major museums like the Smithsonian have hundreds of famous historical artifacts, but I think sometimes it’s the smaller, lesser-known bits of history that give us perspective.
1. The suggestion box from the Alamo
2. Adolf Hitler’s Chap Stick
3. An original “I’m Spartacus” tunic
4. Marquis de Sade’s barbed-wire jockstrap
5. King Tut’s ant farm
6. Julius Caesar’s original salad dressing recipe in his own hand
7. Napoleon’s platform bedroom slippers
8. Michelangelo’s first coloring book
9. J. Edgar Hoover’s prom dress
10. John Dillinger’s spare penis
11. Al Capone’s first Holy Communion suit with matching shoulder holster
12. General Custer’s defective lucky rabbit’s foot
13. Joan of Arc’s eyeliner
14. Attila the Hun’s enemy testicle necklace with matching earring
15. Nostradamus’s Magic Eight Ball
16. Marcus Aurelius’s book of knock-knock jokes 17. Mahatma Gandhi’s switchblade
18. Joseph Stalin’s mood ring
19. P. T. Barnum’s midget trap 20. Abraham Lincoln’s ticket stub
21. Doc Holliday’s last box of cough drops
22. Davy Crockett’s bunny slippers
23. Pancho Villa’s roach clip
24. Albert Einstein’s secret win-at-blackjack formula—available for only $19.95 at 1-800-BIG-BUCKS, and leave off the “S” for savings
25. Pablo Picasso’s rejection letter for police sketch-artist job
26. Henry VIII’s complete “thin” wardrobe
27. Teddy Roosevelt’s dental floss
28. Marco Polo’s take-out menu
29. A “No Smoking” sign from the Hindenburg
30. A one-inch square of Queen Victoria’s pubic permafrost
FIVE B-MOVIES WORTH MISSING
1. Biker Nuns from Hell
2. Godzilla vs. Gumby
3. Baton-twirlers Gone Wild
4. Hercules vs. the Midget Zombies
5. Attack of the Fifty-foot Librarian
George Orwell has likened the advertising industry to “the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.” Let’s face it. Modern advertising has raised the art of bullshitting to a surreal level. It literally creates a large chunk of reality for most people, and in that reality, consuming for the sake of consumption is the ultimate goal. That’s like making love to hear the bed squeak.
1. A new breakfast cereal for kids called Sugar ’N Shit
2. Bottled water called Jersey Garden Hose
3. Eye makeup that states on the label, “It only blinded some of the rabbits.”
4. Tuna fish that states on the label, “Enough mercury to kill a shark.”
5. A pet store that claims, “Our goldfish have a twenty-four-hour lifetime guarantee.”
6. An army recruiting commercial that states, “Be all you can be… unless you get killed.”
7. A drug company commercial that says, “Ask your doctor if this product is for you, because you don’t know squat and are just responding to the pretty colors and the catchy tune in our ad. And yet, we pitch directly to you, because we’re greedy bastards.”
Yes, it’s truly amazing to be able to sit in the comfort of your living room and see images sent millions of miles through space from the surface of Mars by a little robot, but they are a bit boring. We’re spoiled by state-of-the-art special effects and the fantastic made commonplace by Hollywood. A rock or a bleak desert vista doesn’t really have a high “Oh Wow” factor, so here are some images with more pizzazz.
1. A three-foot-long forked condom
2. A row of parking meters
3. Half a corn dog
4. An amoeba-like creature making out with itself on a beach blanket
5. A six-legged, two-headed, doglike creature, licking itself
6. Elvis, thin
7. A huge mountain of mismatched socks
8. Jesus in a business suit, wearing mirrored sunglasses
9. A dune buggy driven by an iguana wearing a red sombrero
10. A cigarette butt with glowing green lipstick on it
11. A lobster bib with the silhouette of a man on it
12. A twelve-foot-long purple turd
I guess the most famous urban legend is the one about alligators living in the New York City sewer system. Predating that one is a story of a lady finding a rat in a Coke bottle. Lately, the story about the woman who cleaned some paintbrushes with gasoline and then poured the gas in the toilet bowl, only to be discovered later by her unfortunate cigarette-smoking husband, and the guy seduced by a beautiful woman who later woke up in a tub of ice with a kidney missing are the rage. There’s always a new one, and how much truth, if any, they contain is up for grabs. Here are some choice ones from the latest crop.
1. Pest control worker Elroy Higgins could hardly believe his eyes when he looked behind the refrigerator in apartment 3A in an old building in New York City’s Greenwich Village. Elroy swears he observed a group of cockroaches standing upright and dancing around a tiny campfire. He says that they wore itty-bitty loincloths and that there were crude charcoal drawings of crumbs and M’s candies drawn on the wall. The conclusion was inescapable: The roaches had developed intelligence, and the human race may be doomed.
2. Emily Goodman felt sorry for the homeless but was naturally repulsed by the really funky-smelling filthier ones. Overcoming her disgust, she approached a truly foul-smelling, raggedy old man and dropped a dollar bill in his cup. To her shock, the beggar suddenly straightened from his pathetic slouch, smiled at her, and said, “Thank you, my good lady. You are a true human being, and I am not a poor beggar but a multibillionaire, and you shall be handsomely rewarded.” Emily thought him well spoken for an obviously deranged person. However, the old man then gave her what he claimed to be a priceless ruby. It was about the size of a small apple and could not possibly have been genuine. The old man then spoke briefly into a cell phone, and moments later a Rolls Royce limo pulled up, and he got in, waving goodbye. The stone was genuine, and Emily is now a multimillionaire. She dresses in filthy rags and works the same spot in Midtown Manhattan.
3. Chicago, Illinois, known as the Windy City, is infamous for the bone-numbing wind that blows across frozen Lake Michigan in the winter. People claim to have found stray dogs frozen like statues with one leg raised, connected to the ground by a stream of frozen urine.
4. New York City’s East River is said to be the final resting place for so many Mafiosos that several years ago a scuba diver retrieved $20,000 worth of pinky rings in one afternoon.
5. John Crow was an eighty-two-year-old Native American known in the neighborhood as “Chief.” The quiet old man spent every day the weather would permit sitting on a park bench, feeding the pigeons breadcrumbs and popcorn from an old beaded leather bag. One day a young punk wearing tough-guy black leather and chains approached John and gave him a vicious kick in the leg saying, “Give me your money, old man, or I’ll put you in the hospital.” The chief ignored him and continued to feed the pigeons. The thug became enraged and kicked the old man again. He was about to say, “I’m not messing around,” but all he got out was, “I’m not …” before a large pigeon flew into his mouth. He was immediately swarmed by dozens of attacking birds tearing at his face and eyes. One flew away with an ear in its beak. The punk tried to scream, but that’s hard to do with a pigeon in your mouth. When it was over, there wasn’t much left, and the cops, who thought they had seen everything, said they had never even heard about anything like this. The chief returned to feeding the pigeons, but now, along with the breadcrumbs and popcorn, he gives them a little dried meat. He winks and says, “They like it… especially now.”
6. The alligators said to inhabit the New York City sewers do not exist. They have been killed by the giant mutant sea monkeys.
7. The little dessert town of Pahrump, Nevada, which is very close to Death Valley, is so hot in the summer that the inhabitants cannot walk on the pavement in a normal manner without the soles of their shoes melting. Instead, they must skip or use pogo sticks.
Recently, a national poll indicated that over 50 percent of Americans in favor of capital punishment would be willing to pay to watch a televised execution on pay-per-view. I’m pretty sure these folks don’t want to watch something as boring as “Lethal Injection,” which is like watching a poodle being put to sleep. And the medieval stuff, such as beheading and burning at the stake, is just too gruesome and, to be honest, trite and predictable. What we need is something entertaining.
1. The convict, wearing only underwear and a funny hat, is rubbed with hamburger meat and then forced to walk a tightrope across a pool filled with hungry piranha fish, while the studio audience throws cantaloupes at him.
2. The prisoner is strapped into an electric chair that has been set up at a miniature golf course and wired so that the switch is thrown when a golf ball—after going up and down the various shoots and ramps, through the little windmill, out the fake cannon, etc.—eventually drops out of the clown’s mouth, completing the circuit and frying him. The prisoner is allowed to shout at and harass the golfers, who are all wearing executioner hoods to spoil their aim.
3. The condemned, dressed in a tutu, is forced to stand on a metal floor that is carrying a harmless electric current. However, he must keep an aluminum Hula-Hoop going, because it is filled with high explosives that will detonate if the hoop touches the floor.
4. The doomed convict must answer seven out of ten trivia questions correctly to postpone his execution for another day. If he fails, a gorgeous showgirl wearing only a G-string and hood comes out on stage and shoots him in the head. The questions will be extremely difficult. For example: “Name the actor who plays the pilot of the first airplane to open fire on King Kong.”
5. The condemned man is buried in the ground up to his neck on a well-kept lawn and is forced to wear a beanie hat that has a wind chime rigged on top of it. Six blind muscle men then hit steel croquet balls at him, using only the faint sounds of the chimes to locate their target. Betting is encouraged.
6. The convict is dressed in an oversized jumpsuit that has been stuffed with twelve pounds of the same highly absorptive material used to make tampons and disposable diapers. He is then thrown into a deep pool. If he can swim the sixty yards to the opposite end of the pool, his sentence is commuted to life. This is highly unlikely, however, since the stuffed jumpsuit, when saturated, will weigh approximately nine hundred pounds.
7. The doomed prisoner is placed in a gaily colored papier-mâché piñata suspended from a rope-and-pulley rig. A blindfolded martial arts expert wielding a samurai sword swipes at him, but as is customary, the prisoner is yanked up to a safe height whenever the swordsman gets close. However, the team pulling on the rope consists of ten seventy-year-old ladies with arthritis. Once again, betting is encouraged.
I was in a cranky mood recently from lack of sleep, and I noticed that my internal dialog was slightly hostile and overly critical. I experienced a stream of negative fantasies throughout the day. I guess most of us have had these edgy periods, but of course we keep our thoughts to ourselves for the most part. Maybe if you never have these funks, you suddenly explode one day and shoot everybody at the department of motor vehicles. I prefer the natural, secret flow. Don’t you?
1. To have Paris Hilton develop an exotic allergy to camera flashes that causes her to instantly grow a two-pound cold sore.
2. To poke very fat women wearing stretch pants in the ass with a sharp umbrella and then ask them why the hell they’re wearing stretch pants anyway.
3. To pull up next to a car that has rap music blasting with one of those bass boosts that you can feel in your gut a mile away and toss in a hand grenade.
4. To go over to the next person you see with a large pit bull on a leash and shoot the dog through the head, explaining that you feel more relaxed now.
5. To sneak up on men wearing really cheap, obvious toupees and set them on fire.
6. To hire a skywriting plane to fly over a British royal wedding and write, “Who Gives a Shit!”
7. To drive slowly down the street, pointing a powerful directional magnet at people with nose rings, forcing them to trot along in a group behind your car.
8. To strike a blow for nonconformity by saying a magic word that will cause anyone above the age of sixteen who is wearing a baseball cap backward to have his head rotate 180 degrees while the cap remains stationary.
An overwhelming percentage of Americans believe that we are not alone in the universe, and given the mathematical odds, it is almost a certainty that we are not. Films, such as ET and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, have given a face to the UFO phenomenon, and hundreds of highly reputable eyewitnesses have given it validity. But “What are UFOs?” “Who are operating them?” and “Why are they visiting and sometimes borrowing us?” remain intriguing questions.
1. Grain silo night watchman Homer Finstwell of Wichita, Kansas, is not a man given to flights of fancy. He admittedly has no discernible imagination, a trait that Homer considers essential to his job. However, he claims that at 2 a.m. on May 9, 2003, a golden metallic sphere, approximately one hundred feet in diameter, soundlessly descended or materialized—Homer is not sure which because the event occurred during the time of night he relegates to staring at his right foot—not twenty yards in front of him. There was a brief whooshing sound and a circular opening appeared in the side of the craft. Nothing happened for several seconds, and then a creature closely resembling a cow walking upright stepped out and approached Homer. The creature pointed a shiny object at him, and he was instantly paralyzed.
The alien then communicated telepathically with Homer, telling him that the earth would be destroyed if we did not turn over the mass murderer called Ronald McDonald to be tried for war crimes. As these words formed in Homer’s mind, he was shown a hologram of the famous hamburger clown and the golden arches, with the sign stating, “Over 100 Billion Sold.” Homer telepathically said, “But cows are just dumb animals,” and the creature answered angrily, “compared to what, monkey boy?” and returned to his ship, which then vanished in a flash of blue light.
2. On the evening of April 2, 2003, Peggy and Eddie Miller were driving back from their vacation cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains when they noticed a bright light in the western sky. The mysterious light was much too big to be a star, and seemed to be following their car. They became nervous and afraid as the light grew larger, since they were completely alone on a dark mountain road. The now blinding ball of light passed only a few feet over their car and landed in the road directly in front of them. Eddie stopped the car just twenty yards from the blazing circle of light, which the now terrified couple said appeared to have depth “like a doorway.”
The next morning the couple awoke at home with no memory of the incident, but they noted something inexplicable—the drive home had taken four hours longer than usual and they could not figure out why. They were missing four hours. Over the next few weeks, they both started to exhibit strange behavior, such as hiding in the broom closet or in the cabinet under the kitchen sink. Strangest of all, they would awaken in the middle of the night and scream, “IT’S SHOWTIME!”
Hypnosis helped them remember the events of that strange night, and they both recalled the same thing. Apparently, they had gotten out of their car of their own volition, but in a detached zombielike state of mind, and had walked into the dazzling circular portal. Once through, their minds cleared and they found themselves in an IHOP surrounded by that yummy pancake smell. It was empty, except for one man who waved them over to his booth. The man was Joe Pesci, whom they had just seen on cable in My Cousin Vinny. He smiled, invited them to sit down, and then said, “I’m not really human, OK? I don’t look like this, and we’re not in a pancake house, OK? These are just familiar images taken from your minds. I’m not an ET yearning to give you an anal probe or any weird crap like that either. I’m just a businessman, but I’m from another dimension, a parallel universe, so to speak, OK? We’re a little more advanced than you are. I mean it’s not like you trying to talk to yogurt, but it’s difficult, so please pay attention, OK? We have developed the technology to observe your universe through viewing portals, which are in almost all our 3.5 trillion homes. You got that? It’s like your cable TV. I’m a portal show producer. That’s my business, understand? Think of it as the ultimate reality TV show. Right now, with all the scary shit that’s happening in your world, your show Survivor would be a good analogy, but don’t worry too much, because traditionally you have been our Comedy Central. So now you two get a memory wipe and go home, and I go back to work… IT’S SHOWTIME!”
3. Otto Kramer is a twenty-three-year-old bachelor and a classic slob. His friends refer to his apartment as the Black Hole of Calcutta with good reason. He once lost his bicycle under the piles of dirty clothes, pizza boxes, and assorted debris that Otto uses like nesting material. His bathroom looks like the facility in a Turkish prison, and Otto brags that he only cleans his tub when it asks him to.
At 2 a.m. on June 9, 2003, he lugged an overstuffed laundry bag filled with truly dirty clothes into his neighborhood twenty-four-hour Laundromat. Otto was alone, except for the Laundromat night guy, who was asleep with his feet on a chair and a magazine covering his face. He was always in this exact position, and Otto suspected that he was not a real live person, but instead, a plastic reproduction, like those fake owls used to scare pigeons. Otto transferred his dirty laundry into a double-load machine, one of those newer models with a brushed-steel finish and digital controls.
He sat down to watch the machine take on the challenge of his filthy mountain of laundry, when suddenly the fabric of his reality was torn to shreds. All outside sound stopped, as if the Laundromat was covered by a glass jar, and the washing machine with his clothes in it began to glow with a soft reddish light. Otto’s jaw dropped as the steel machine seemed to soften and morphed into a perfect sphere floating six inches off the floor. He glanced at the night man, who remained comatose.
A robotic voice emanated from the glowing object and said, “Thank you, filthy carbon-based life form. You have given us enough DNA from the garments you call underwear and socks to clone thousands of slaves for work in our molybdenum mines for many years. We will depart now. And by the way, after examining your shorts, we suggest you check your solid and liquid waste exit ports for leakage.” The object became transparent, floated through the front wall of the Laundromat into the street, resolidified, and then shot straight up into the night sky.
4. In the early evening on July 14, 1992, a huge saucer-shaped object hovered over Mexico City in the crystal-clear sky. The object floated over an outdoor circus and sent down a greenish beam of light that sucked up an elephant, two zebras, six clowns, three midgets, and a juggler. Thousands witnessed the event. The official U.S. government explanation was that it was a misinterpreted sighting of the planet Venus, which was very large in the sky that night.
Our culture is fascinated with the paranormal, as demonstrated by the success of TV shows like Medium and Ghost Hunters and films like The Sixth Sense and White Noise. Many specials and books have been dedicated to the human mind’s “Oh Wow” elements, such as remote viewing, ESP, precognition, and telekinesis (mind over matter). This is not surprising, since legitimate scientific studies of ESP and telekinesis at both Princeton University and Duke University have produced positive results. Quantum physics routinely deals with odd phenomena, such as subatomic particles being in two places at the same time, or traveling backward in time, and of everything in the universe being magically connected. Albert Einstein called it “spooky action at a distance.”
1. Quentin Boswell shocked the congregation at Sunday Mass by suddenly screaming in ecstasy and shouting, “YES! OH YES! DON’T STOP!” at the top of his lungs. Apparently, his twin brother, William, was at that exact moment making love on his honeymoon in Acapulco. The embarrassed Quentin called his twin and asked him to beep him next time, to avoid another incident.
2. Famous Russian psychic Boris Karpov declared he would stand on the tracks in front of a speeding train and stop it, using only the power of his mind. He failed miserably and ended up plastered to the front of the locomotive like a decal. However, it was later discovered that every spoon on the train was bent.
3. Japanese tourist Kyoko Namura and his wife, Yui, were frightened out of their wits when they visited the American West. A man dressed as a U.S. cavalryman of the 1800s had suddenly appeared out of thin air in their motel room and declared that General Armstrong Custer was an asshole. The figure then turned, revealing three arrows protruding from his back, and walked straight through the wall.
4. Joe McDonald woke from sleep with his heart racing and his pajamas soaked with sweat. He lay in bed awake, recalling the vivid nightmare he had just had where he was trapped in quicksand up to his knees while a charging bull elephant bore down on him. Later that day when Joe was on his way to the grocery store, he stepped off the curb right into a huge plop of dog crap. He cursed the irresponsible dog owners and used the curb to scrape the dog poop off his shoes. A bus seemed to come out of nowhere with its horn blaring and tires screeching and stopped only inches from Joe’s frozen form. He was stunned by his close brush with death and stood trembling as he stared at the ad on the side of the bus. It was for the Barnum and Bailey Circus and featured a head-on view of an enormous bull elephant.
5. “I don’t believe in any of this mumbo jumbo magic bullshit.” That’s what Martin Smith, the head engineer for a major U.S. copper mining company operating in South Africa, said. He was responding to his on-site engineer, who had just informed him that the native workers were afraid to begin work in a new area that was the turf of a well-known witch doctor. A few hours later Smith stood in front of the witch doctor’s hut, pissed off and eager to start working. When the much-feared witch doctor finally appeared, Smith couldn’t help laughing. The man was a dwarf, no more than three feet tall, and painted from head to foot bright yellow with blue polka dots. The diminutive extortionist demanded 10,000 U.S. dollars or he would cast a curse on the mining operation. Martin laughed again and said, “Screw you, munchkin. Go follow the yellow brick road.”
Later that afternoon Smith was standing on a hill overlooking the work site and shaking his head in disgust. His workers had abandoned their jobs, leaving millions of dollars worth of heavy equipment sitting idle. Suddenly a strange, green fog rolled across the work site, completely obscuring the equipment. When the fog dissipated a few minutes later, Smith’s jaw dropped: The bulldozers, trucks, and enormous earthmovers had been reduced to the size of Tonka Toys.
Martin Smith now resides in the Sunnydale Rest Home, where he is a source of amusement, even to the veteran staff, as he stands naked, holding his toy truck, his body painted yellow with blue polka dots, singing, “Follow the yellow brick road” over and over.