Do you see how the jellyfish here look all graceful and calming? FALSE. THEY'LL EAT YOUR FACE.
GateHouse — There have been a lot of jellyfish in the news lately, and by that I mean it’s possible that there have been a lot of jellyfish stories in the news lately. I have no idea, really, but I’ve personally encountered the same jellyfish story twice in 48 hours, and since taking one’s own personal experience, writing about it at breathless, context-free length and behaving as though you’ve uncovered a massing panic of national consequence is how the media works now, I figured I might as well board the Journalism 2.0 train. So what I meant to say there was INVADING MONSTER JELLYFISH WILL DEVOUR US WHOLE, AND ALSO I THINK THAT THEY ARE RACIST.
Anyway, the jellyfish story arrived first via a Friend on my Facebook wall, who I am immediately calling out because he’s the sort of person WHO WOULD POST A JELLYFISH STORY ON MY FACEBOOK WALL, which, for those who know me and my deep disapproval of floaty viscous goo-blobs that sting your face when you’re trying to kite-surf, is the new Most Direct Path To Getting Unfriended By Me, besting the previous winner, Videos From Your Children’s Many Recitals. (Seriously, Gooey Dead Jellyfish Pictures is the new Heather Wants To Share Some Cranberry Bushels With You In FarmVille! Which is to say, delete delete delete.)
The story was then echoed Saturday night by the 11-year-old offspring of friends whose obvious repeating of the story over the past few days had not lessened his relish in telling it. It opened with something on the order of “DidyouknowtherewasajellyfishinNewHampshirethathad45longtentaclesand150peoplewentothehospital?” breathlessly reported at speeds that would qualify him for inclusion in OutKast in the superheated, wild-eyed manner available only to 11-year-olds who are reporting to a passingly familiar adult a recent event in which many people were badly hurt.
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Sting (with Jo Lawry) – You Will Be My Ain True Love
(Photo and expert Photoshopping job by the New York Post)
GateHouse — It’s difficult to imagine trained monkeys being anything but fully 100 percent awesome, but leave it to the Taliban to find a way to screw them up, like they did with Afghanistan, the “Jonah Hex” movie and, you know, life.
According to a newspaper in China called The People’s Daily — and by that they mean the State-Run Things Awesome About China Herald-Bugle, although whatever they call it their comics are terrible (“Andy Capp” in China is basically straight-up Communist propaganda, which is what it is over here too, but we all seem to be OK with it) — the Taliban in Afghanistan is actively training monkeys to serve as pint-size soldiers. Leave it to the Taliban to take an animal that routinely throws its own poop at its peers when angered and make it more displeasing to have around during meals.
The story says that Islamic insurgent-types are arming macaques and baboons with AK-47s, machine guns and trench mortars and releasing them in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan known as Bananastan. Ha! Just kidding, easy one there. I mean to say it’s called Bubblesistan. No no, I got it, I got it, It’s really called Chimpanzia! Listen, I’ve got Google and the rest of the day, people. Rest. Of. The. Day.
Is there a better painting horse in all of Reno? I SAY NEIGH
GateHouse — Horses, if we’re being honest, are terrible at most things. They can’t kick a field goal, they can’t drive a tractor and they are completely useless when you ask them for help with your iPhone. Just try to get one to run an errand for you: Once I sent a horse to Target for bread, milk and paper towels — three super-easy, really basic things, right? — and six weeks later the idiot came back, and what did he have on his back? Yeah, that’s right: Hay. Three bales of hay. Well to be fair, he also had bread and milk, but it had been so long that by the time Mr. Snuffles returned, I’d had bought my own like two weeks before anyway.
Yet I received word this week that though they still can’t help me decide what to do with my 401(k), horses are getting better at one thing: art. There is a horse in Reno, Nev. — I don’t know why, but the geography is very pleasing to me — named Cholla who is a painter. He is a painter who is described in a news story of having “the fire of Pollock” or “the fixed gaze of Resnick,” which would be extremely impressive-sounding sound bites if I had the remotest idea who Pollock or Resnick were. Frankly, I’m glad I’ve never met this Resnick. He sounds like one of those creepy fixed-gazers.
GateHouse — Good news for extremely fat dogs, people with several hundred thousand dollars of cash left over in the pharmaceutical funds, or those who are just plain tired of being able to overmedicate only themselves and their children.
Recently, the Federal Government, during an uncharacteristic break from acting like Hulk-eyed lunatics on TV news programs, managed to approve the first-ever drug aimed at curbing the fast-expanding epidemic of overweight dogs. The drug is called Slentrol, or, if you’re a dog, Arf.
“This is a welcome addition to animal therapies, because dog obesity appears to be increasing,” said Stephen Sundlof, director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine at the FDA, articulating what’s really the only remaining problem facing the nation. (Seriously, we get this under control and get that fourth “Twilight” movie made and it’s a quick summer sail to Sunshine Margaritatown.)
According to the AP’s Fat Dog reporter, a dog is obese if it weighs 20 percent more than its ideal weight or is owned by Dennis Hastert (look it up — I don’t write these rules). That’s over three million dogs in the U.S. alone. Moreover, an additional 20 to 30 percent of American canines are considered merely overweight, but let’s try to keep that quiet, because it will make them seriously depressed and they won’t be able to drink out of the toilet for like days.
Island Packet — We have had, it can be argued by most good people, a fairly colorful few months here in the swamps of Carolina. Our governor vanished for a week, another guy lost track of his Red Bull allowance and yelled something at President Kenya O’Islam on the TV, another dude and his grandma called poor people farm animals and then whined about being made fun of, some hilarious representative person introduced pointless nuisance legislation about banning paper money to make a point about small government and it’s still legal to marry your first cousin. There is alsoa story about a horsemy editor won’t let me write about.
But even these many terrible people are mere hors d’oeuvres when compared with the greatest problem facing residents of South Carolina, which is that we are all going to be eaten and probably killed by feral wild pigs, which are running wild throughout the state and cannot be stopped at all, by anything, except maybe feral wild dragons, and I’m pretty sure we exported most of those already.
Indeed, according to a story right here in the Newspaper written by my cubicle-mate, Patrick Donohue, who spent all of Feral Pig Infestation Reporting Day growing increasingly unhinged by panic, “There may be no slowing the state’s booming wild hog population, experts say.” Moreover, it turns out our state is home to the nation’s sixth-largest population of wild hogs. (It is also home to the nation’s fourth-largest collection of owners of the DVD of “Wild Hogs,” which is equally troubling.)
Jake "The Snake" Roberts, who could put an end to this whole thing in about two minutes.
Island Packet — Well, everything seems to be under control around here. Swine flu is getting good and vaccinated, at least among you chirpy, vivacious Younger People. Windows 7 is out, giving us Mac people another great many reasons to direct smug, self-important smirks at each other (try it, it’s fun). The Balloon Boy’s weird parents will soon be given over to torture, as they should be. Yep, everything would be pretty much as solid as could be expected, were it not for the small flotilla of behemoth Burmese pythons slithering their way from Florida to the Lowcountry to devour us all.
Now, unless you are aficionado of Celtic music or belts, there’s really no upside to learning that many thousands of snakes are en route to your town, and yet this may be the case, according to a story last week that has inexplicably not caused residents to scamper chaotically into the streets with curlers in their hair, slippers on their feet and mad rictus grins of horror frozen on their faces. Because, and I want to be absolutely clear on this, SNAKES ARE COMING TO KILL US ALL. You guys have your little slap-fights on the blogs about health care or whatever, I’ll be moving all my essential documents, potable water and slow, chewy smaller dogs to the top floor.
GateHouse — I can’t be sure about you, but I know that every single time I come across a full-grown camel in my everyday travels, the absolute first thing I think is: I got to get me some milk from that.
Which makes this the best week ever, because I have just read that camels, in addition to being some of nature’s most gorgeously attractive beasts, represent the bright shining future of American milk production. You hear that, cows? Your days are OVER, jerks, with your incessant mooing and walking everywhere in groups and being easily seasoned. Camels are the way to go, as they can produce a cappuccino-esque beverage with magical properties and all you have to do to obtain it is tickle them a little bit near their udders. DONE.
GateHouse — Because I am an idiot who believes that going running in near-noontime 90-degree heat is not the stupidest idea in the world, I am currently planted on the couch in a state of pretty impressive dehydration speed-guzzling Gatorade like a crazy person and not moving, so it goes without saying that I’m watching dogs on ESPN.
But I am not watching just any dogs. I am watching magic dogs from space doing tricks. These dogs are so much better than your dog it’s ridiculous. Unless your dog is on ESPN right now, your dog is seriously terrible. (Sorry. I don’t hate your dog. It’s the Gatorade talking.)
These are the Purina Incredible Dog Challenge Western Regional Championships, a surprisingly well-attended and expensive-looking event starring dogs with names like Casanova and Gumbo that is apparently the bees’ knees of Dog Challenge Regional Championships (the Western bracket is always the toughest), and currently more important to ESPN than anything that humans are doing, which is as it should be. Since that weekend in high school when we suddenly got free Cinemax for some reason I don’t remember being so utterly unable to turn off my television. My little boy is on the other couch right now, and his eyes are popping out of his head like Elmer Fudd’s. (“How can dogs catch a Frisbee?” he just asked, which is a great question and considerably easier to answer than the last one he asked me, which was, “Did Jesus really walk on water?” So basically we’re gonna watch the dog show until I don’t have to explain the Bible.)
Island Packet — Here’s what I did at work last Friday: Held an alligator. With my hands. Both of them. That is an essential strategy, because holding an alligator with one hand is a terrible idea, because no matter how you do it the gator is going to be hanging in some fashion, and that is highly unsafe, especially if the hanging portion contains the mouth. So I used both, which was good news for the alligator, because when you’re being held by someone who is quivering uncontrollably, the effect is probably that of a pleasant massage.
I was holding an alligator because it was brought to the office by gator wrangler/guy who could snap my spine in half like a pretzel stick Joe Maffo of Critter Management, a company that specializes in the removal of alligators from things, such as pools, ponds, baby seats and refrigerators. If there’s an alligator that needs to be relocated — often, it seems, because of tourists trying to impress someone by playing a minivan version of “Man Vs. Wild” or attempting to snap a cool picture for the breakroom bulletin board — it is his job to do so, which is the mathematical opposite of my job, which involves trying to tap-tappity funnies at 2 a.m. for one of these “newspapers” that my grandkids will be asking me about in the way that I ask about, say, stegosauruses, like: “Wait, they really had those?”
Island Packet – One could make the argument that all animal bites are displeasing developments, and that if possible, it’s best to avoid putting any of your valuable, delicious skin into the path of the teeth of something. It’s what biologists call “evolutionary theory,” and what most other people call “trying to avoid becoming dead.”
So it’s a little disingenuous to be writing a column about how one local animal’s bite is much, way and totally worse than all other local animals’ bites — especially when the animal in question isn’t an alligator, a development that can’t be sitting well with the local alligator community. I imagine they’re feeling a little like Ron Santo when he gets passed over for the Hall of Fame every time, like, “Um, what else do you need us to do here?” (I’m pretty sure they grumble about this during their council meetings before going back to doing whatever it is alligators do, which, according to every time I’ve seen one around here, is lounge around doing nothing really useful and being partially submerged in a pond of standing water, kind of like Sean Hannity.)
I'm a a writer for such outlets as Men's Health, Paste, Billboard and brucespringsteen.net, a writer/editor at Nickelodeon's humor site NickMom.com, a syndicated humor columnist for GateHouse, a very slow runner and a father of two (the younger of whom has been personally approved by Bruce Springsteen) living on the coast of South Carolina. Even longer bio/clips.
