The Sporadic Curmudgeon

I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again: what is it with Florida?

Friday morning a man and woman were involved in a motorcycle crash in Jacksonville. Naked. Both are expected to recover everything but their dignity.

Normally, this is where I begin heaping scorn on the miscreants, but actually I’m filled with dumbstruck admiration. Here’s what he’s being charged with:

1. Driving while intoxicated — Well duh.
2. Driving without a license — C’mon, give him a pass on this one. Where was he going to put it?
3. License revoked — So apparently there have been other vehicular indiscretions in his past.
4. Expired inspection — There was plenty of inspection afterward, I’m sure.
5. No helmet — Because riding naked with a helmet is such a good look.
6. No insurance — I’m sensing a pattern of contempt for authority here…
7. Reckless driving — Nothing in the article says anything about who was where doing what, so this could have been the result of any number of scenarios. We have to calculate for seating order, hand placement, orientation (obviously heterosexual, but I was thinking more along the lines of pitch, roll and yaw), if he happened to become momentarily distracted, and whether or not his view was obstructed.

That, my friends, is the true American Dream.

The only thing that could have made this more awesome was if they’d been firing shotguns into the air while crashing through the doors of a crowded church. It’s enough to bring a tear to the late Hunter S. Thompson’s eye.

Oh, and did I mention that he’s a Marine gunnery sergeant specializing in bomb disposal? He blows things up for a living! Damn.

Don’t arrest this guy; give him a medal for sheer badassery. Hell, he’d probably let them pin it straight into his naked, glistening chest.

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving! This is the day when we celebrate the anniversary of the first time ordinary Americans got screwed over under cover of a PR stunt. Yes, I have Native American ancestry. You know where to shove the candied yams, Pilgrims.

And now, on to a story about a Maryland couple that certainly isn’t having a very happy Thanksgiving at all. Or a comfortable one. A young woman was treated for severe injuries sustained when her boyfriend penetrated her using a sex toy mounted on the blade of a reciprocating saw. Pentrated being the operative word. Apparently neither of these tool-crazed geniuses stopped to think that the entire function of a power saw is to cut through stuff like wood. Or in this case, vinyl, and then her.

Here’s a little life tip from David, kids: Never have sex with something that can do 2,800 strokes a minute and requires one of those big orange three-prong extension cords. There are much better workarounds for erectile dysfunction.

Say, does anyone remember the ‘Yam Lady,’ Karen Finley? You know, in the spirit of the holiday and all.

I tried. Lord knows, I tried. But I’m only human.

At one time this site was notorious for gleeful posts about people putting various body parts where they plainly didn’t belong. And as it happens, for reasons known only to the Almighty and a handful of mental health professionals, some of these posts inspired me to create some rather unsavory artwork.

After a number of complaints chiding me for my apparent fixation on genitalia, I decided to take the tender sensitivities of my readership into account and tone it down. Well, that and the sinking feeling that I was making myself less employable than a 1930s hobo. See old-timey illustration at right. No, that is not Al Franken. I know it looks like Al Franken, but it’s not. Just shut up, okay? Jeez.

So I took the high road. (There was going to be a Loch Lomond joke here but I decided against it for the same reason I don’t do jokes about mythology or quantum physics anymore.)

If I saw a newswire story about some guy that got caught by a stoplight camera travelling fifty miles an hour with his putz in one hand and a porn magazine in the other, my first impulse was to pillory the miscreant on the internet. But then I would stop, think about my readers’ delicate constitutions, and slowly back away from the keyboard. Far be it from me to cause a case of the vapors.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I became… mature.

My traffic numbers fell faster than the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.

Actually, once I made the decision to write only things that wouldn’t get me fired, I found that I had very little to say. It turns out that my thoughts on pretty much any subject whatsoever are so juvenile and libelous that the whole “not getting fired” thing filters out all but one or two posts a month. Regardless, I was trying to be a grown-up even though I still think whoopee cushions are the best invention ever including fire.

Today all that flew right out the damned window. I simply could not resist. What, I ask you, am I to do when a story like the following comes along? I’m not made of stone, after all.

A New Jersey police officer is in trouble for forcing calves to perform oral sex on him and videotaping it. Five times.

Here’s the ugly meat of the matter:

Judge Morely said it was questionable that Melia’s acts, though “disgusting,” constituted animal cruelty.

“I’m not saying it’s OK,” Morely said. “This is a legal question for me. It’s not a questions of morals. It’s not a question of hygiene. It’s not a question of how people should conduct themselves.”

The dismissal reportedly irked the prosecution.

“I think any reasonable juror could infer that a man’s penis in the mouth of a calf is torment,” a Burlington County assistant prosecutor, Kevin Morgan, said. “It’s a crime against nature.”

I guess this means I’m back to being immature. C’est la vie. Hey, am I the only one that thinks the quote from the assistant prosecutor would make a killer ringtone?

Oh, yes. I almost forgot. The unsavory artwork:

Q: How do you know if you’re masturbating too much?

A: When the only way somebody can make you stop beating off is to stab you twice in the shoulder.

An Australian man showed up at his female friend’s house, popped some speed, hopped into the shower and proceeded to pollute himself. Not sated, he went into his host’s bedroom and rolled around on her bed naked, still milking the snake. He then returned to the bathroom, where the woman was attempting to give her 3 1/2-year-old daughter a bath (I hope she rinsed out the tub), and began flogging the log yet again.

The woman was understandably upset at this bizarre behavior, and demanded that he stop. The frenzied onanist continued buffing the bishop, however, so she ran to the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and stabbed him. This got his attention, and he put on his pants and went outside to wait for the police to arrive. His monophilia got the better of him, though, and he retreated to the garage where he once more made the angels cry.

Well.

You can only imagine my horror upon reading this sordid little tale and finding that it has brought a long-repressed memory burbling back to the surface like a foul-smelling bubble of sulfurous methane. Many years ago I, too, had to deal with a crazed masturbator.

 
The year was 1992, and the Rodney King riots were in the news. I was living with a woman and her seven-year-old daughter in a two-bedroom apartment in San Antonio, Texas. I’ll call the woman “Sharon.”

I was working as a housepainter. My boss, “Wally,” was a recovering cocaine addict. One Saturday afternoon the doorbell rang. I opened the door, and there was Wally, looking a little nervous.

“Hey, Wally,” I said. “What’s up?”

“I was driving by and I’ve got to go to the toilet. Can I use yours?”

“Uh… sure.” I let him in.

“Thanks, man.” He rushed into the bathroom and shut the door. I heard the lock click.

Sharon came out of the bedroom. “What’s going on?”

“My boss just showed up at the door asking to use the toilet.”

“That’s kind of odd,” she said.

“Yes. Yes, it is.”

 
Thirty minutes later, Wally had not emerged. I knocked on the door. There was a rustling noise and the sound of running water. “Yeah?”

“Hey, Wally. You okay in there?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Fine. I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

“Alright. Just checking.”

 
Fifteen more minutes passed.

“Wally?”

“I’ll be right out. Give me a few more minutes, okay?”

“Okay.”

Sharon looked at me. “What the hell is he doing in there?”

“I don’t know. But he’s behaving very strangely. I think he’s on something.”

“In my bathroom!?”

“I think he did it before he got here.”

 
Another fifteen minutes. He’d been in the bathroom for an hour.

“Hey, Wally? Are you sick? Do you want us to call the paramedics?”

“NO! No, I’m fine. Just having some… trouble. I’ll be out soon.”

Sharon glared at me. “I want him out!” she hissed. “I have to go myself.”

“Okay, Wally. We need you to leave now. Please get out of the bathroom.”

“I’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’ll give you five more minutes, and then I’m going to call your wife.”

“Hold, on, hold on. Don’t do that.” There was a lot of thrashing about from behind the locked door.

 
The five minutes passed. No Wally.

“That’s it, Wally. I’m going to call your wife.”

I called her and outlined the situation. A few minutes later I was back at the door.

“Hey, Wally. Your wife told me to go ahead and call the cops if you don’t get the fuck out of the bathroom right now.”

“Shit. Okay, okay.” I heard Wally getting dressed. The door unlocked and opened. Wally looked out, blinked at Sharon and me, and scurried toward the exit. “Thanks for everything,” he said. He was carrying his shoes, and his shirttail was out.

He’d been in our bathroom for more than 90 minutes.

“You’d better let me take a look before you go in there,” I said.

“Hurry up. I have to go bad.”

I turned on the light. It was humid. The mirrors were steamed up. I noticed a strange gleam on the tiles, toilet, tub and sink: hand lotion. Here and there were dark curly hairs sticking to the porcelain.

I must have spent fifty dollars on cleaning products that afternoon.

 
I never returned to that job, and Wally never called to find out why. Shortly thereafter I was asked to find other living arrangements.

Now I must see if blunt-force trauma will help me re-bury that memory.

I just don’t understand it. Every day I get about a dozen emails telling me that my penis is so woefully inadequate as to have become the target of public ridicule.

Here’s a typical example:

Subject: re: could you reply why your schlong is so short?

Salute Man

I don’t care why your one-eyed monster is so small, but 77% of women do.
They are pretty sure that bigger ramrod will make their desire
stronger. You have the chance to change your life.

Here you can get the thing.

It will help you for sure.
The remedy can be sent worldwide.
If you wont be satisfied - we will return all you money.
No bullshit.

Somehow that final “no bullshit” fails to have the reassuring effect that was its undoubted intent. Unless it was meant as a signature.

A few things strike me as odd about these emails.

• How exactly did this vicious rumor about my being hung like a dwarf hamster start? Did I really tick off an ex?

• Where do they get their statistics? Has Gallup recently begun asking women about one-eyed monster preference?

• Why do they think that pointing and laughing at a potential customer’s genitalia is a good sales technique? Except for some recent Hummer ads, it flies in the face of the entire history of American advertising. In fact, it’d be more likely to make someone go on a four-day shooting spree than clinch a sale.

All in all, it’s very puzzling.

Oh, for the record, I do not have a tiny penis. I’m a liberal.

A Romanian man has been awarded £120,000 after his doctor lost his temper during surgery, lopped off the man’s penis, placed it on the operating table, and chopped it up into small pieces. Unbelievably, the Romanian doctors’ unions are criticizing the decision to make the Benihana wannabe pay the £100,000 damages part of the award.

They say the move sets a dangerous precedent and that Professor Ciomu, a urologist and lecturer in anatomy, has already been punished enough after having his medical licence suspended.

They said he had been under stress and had lost his temper after he accidentally cut the man’s urinary channel and ‘overreacted’ to the situation. He told the court it was a temporary loss of judgement due to personal problems.

Vice-president of the Romanian Doctors Union, Vasile Astarastoae, said: ‘Ciomu’s case is a dangerous precedent for all Romanian doctors. In future doctors may have to think very carefully about what work they undertake.’

That’s some overreaction. Seems like a simple “damn it” would have been sufficient.

I feel for Professor Ciomu, though. It’s a lot of money. I’d give him a choice: either pony up the £100,000, or let the aggrieved (and truncated) patient slice and dice the good doc’s crotch cobra. The lack of surgical skills could be ameliorated by the use of power tools.

Tonight I was doing research for a post on the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury in 1613 (no, really) when I happened to glance over at the TV. My daughter was watching Pokémon, which, believe it or not, is a show I don’t have a problem with. (The writing’s not bad, the “Team Rocket” bad guys are a hoot, and the episodes usually teach a lesson. Besides, from a pure marketing standpoint I sure as hell wish I’d thought of it.)

However, this particular episode featured a Pokémon that had me doing a spit-take. I swear it looks like a skinny dick and balls wearing a French tickler for a hat. This isn’t just bad character design, this is Hindenburg-style catastrophic failure.

I can just imagine Pat Robertson having nightmares where these things dance around on his pillow singing “Anything Goes.”

An enterprising Slovakian man has found a novel way to relieve the tedium of the daily commute. Unfortunately it ended badly when he crashed his car into a bus while masturbating with a penis pump.

“After the accident, the driver of the Citroen remained lying motionless in his car, so some passers-by and bus passengers went to the car to help the driver,” said Peter Polák from the Levice police. He added that the rescuers were shocked to discover that the driver was naked from the waist down and that he had a vacuum pump on his penis.

You know, sometimes a man just needs the touch of an airbag.

Too bad the guy won’t end up being tried here in the US. If he got the right judge he could get off easy. So to speak.

It’s a little-known and oddly charming fact that people in the Catalonia region of Spain hide a small porcelain figure of a shitting peasant in their Nativity scenes. The character, known as El Caganer (according to the linked article it means “the great defecator” — wasn’t that a Platters song?), has been a feature of the local Christmas celebration for centuries.

During the holiday season, pastry shops around Catalonia sell sweets shaped like feces, and on Christmas Eve Catalan children beat a hollow log, called the tio, packed with holiday gifts, singing a song that urges it to defecate presents out the other end.

These traditions, in the case of the caganer dating back as far as the 17th century, come from an agricultural society where defecation was associated with fertility and health.

The Wikipedia article on the caganer, however, claims that this comforting explanation is, well, full of shit. The real reason is probably the simplest: it’s pretty danged funny to hide a little guy taking a crap in the Nativity scene.

Some of you who haven’t managed to scour it from your memory may remember the exceedingly unfortunate tale of the man in Enunmclaw, Washington who died after being on the painful end of a horizontal hula session with a horse. At the time, Washington was one of the few states with no bestiality laws on the books. As you can imagine, the legal oversite was quickly rectified. (Sorry about the pun.)

Well, the first charges have been filed under the new bestiality law, and the case is a real doozy: a woman came home to find her hubby literally screwing the pooch on the back porch. She had the presence of mind to snap off a couple of pictures with her cell phone, and immediately called the cops. I suspect she made a few more calls right after that: “Hey, Mom? Tell Dad he was right.”

I know from personal experience how badly it hurts to lose a girlfriend to another guy. Hell, I even know how badly it hurts to lose a girlfriend to another girl. (Less than you’d think on that one, though… the libidinous imagination has dark and mysterious curative powers).

But to lose your husband to a pit bull terrier?

That just bites.