“My dog pants” is a double entendre.

A while back, I came across a weird and disturbing news item. At a Paris airport, French police arrested a man who was trying to smuggle through a snake hidden in his underpants.

According to an airport spokeswoman, “the 30-year-old Frenchman, who was trying to smuggle the 16-inch boa into Roissy airport from Colombia, was caught after a sniffer dog latched on to the reptile’s scent through the man’s bulging trousers.”

I don’t know much about the criminal mind. But I do know this: here’s une monsieur who really didn’t think through his plan.

First of all, he put a snake in his pants. That’s always a bad idea. 

Second, it was a boa constrictor. A CONSTRICTOR! And you thought your underwear was binding. Try putting in a boa.

Still, he might have gotten away with it if it had not been for that pesky hound. Let’s re-read the above: “… After a sniffer dog latched on to the reptile’s scent.”

That was cette misérable’s final mistake. Never smuggle anything in your pants in situations where crotch-sniffing border dogs can latch onto anything. That’s probably Chapter One in the Big Book of Smuggling.

Chapter Two: DO NOT PUT ANIMALS IN YOUR PANTS. This means no kittens, puppies, weasels, otters, marmosets, prairie dogs, and badgers. And no snakes.

Much to my surprise, a simple Google search revealed that this erstwhile snake smuggler wasn’t the only one to try the old’ Is-That-A-Snake-In-Your-Pants-Or-Are-You-Just-Happy-To-Be-Going-Through-Customs routine. A Swedish man tried it with cobras. COBRAS!

Even more to my astonishment, my Google search didn’t start and end with dumb crooks. To my horror, searching for information about animals in pants led me to a whole new category of web sites.

These weren’t sites dedicated to the joys and perversion of putting animals in your pants. I would have expected that. They were sites for retailers who sell pants for animals.

Apparently, it’s big business to create—for example—underpants for in-heat and incontinent dogs. Go to NappyPantsForDogs.com if you want to see a boxer in briefs. A boxer. In briefs. That’s funny; I don’t care who you are.

From www.pantsfordogs.com 

Funny. But haunting.

At Petco, they sell doggie diapers that, in their words, are “ideal for excitable urination.”

I assume they mean the dog’s.

Because if you see a Welsh corgi in a pink gingham thong, you might pee a bit, too.  

Cheetah Cheetah Peter Eater

Petie was speedy.
But the cheetah was fleeter.
Petie looked meaty
to the meat-seeking cheeter.

The cheetie got greedy and chased after Peter.


Petie got petered
just teetering ten meters.
Peter's poor feetie
were feverish bleaters.

Peter asked Rita, "Could I use your two-seater?"

Rita saw Cheetah
one meter behind Peter.
And sweetly gave Peter
her street-worthy two-seater.

The cheetah stopped neatly and leered long at Rita.

Ritly smiled sweetly
at the Pete-starved cheetah.
And gave the beat cheetly
two neat veggie pitas.

The cheetah thanked Rita and ate her for dinner.

A Lesson in Probe-ability ... or It's Possible You've Already Been Abducted.

According to The Roper Poll: UFOs & Extraterrestrial Life, Americans' Beliefs and Personal Experiences, published a lifetime ago in 1991, as many as 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens (the kind who cross ozone layers, not borders).

Imagine. Nearly four million of us have been taken, beamed up, tossed in UFO trunks, prodded, poked, radio-tagged, and released back into the wild. And although that’s just a shade over 1 percent of the population, that’s a lot of folks tripping the light years fantastic.

Think of it. If you’re a typical American family, you have 2.3 children, 1.7 parents, 1.7 mother and father-in laws, 0.5 step parents, 2.6 brothers and sisters and their in-law counterparts, 5.9 nieces and nephews, 8.4 grandparents and grand-in-laws, 10.9 aunts and uncles, 1.0 Uncle Miltie, 1.0 Uncle Sam, 1.0 Aunt Jemima, and 62 hangers-on. Statistically speaking, one of them has already been abducted by aliens. (More if you’re from West Virginia.)

Several people from your office, your school, and your town have had close encounters.  If statistics hold true, then it’s safe to say one U.S. Senator and a handful of Congressmen have filibustered in oxygen-enriched holding tanks in the sky. … It shouldn’t be hard to figure out which ones, either. Search the congressional records for anal probe legislation. Those for it have probably been abducted. Those against are Republicans.

You’d need two hands to count how many Major League Baseball players have been bagged and strapped on the hood of a UFO. 

These aren't the steroids you're looking for. 

Put in these terms it’s easy to see why we all need to address the alien abduction issue … why we need to prepare ourselves for abduction.  How should we act?  What should we say?  What should we wear?  Can we bring anything—maybe a nice mustard-potato salad?

It’s important to note that, if four million Americans (and as many as 50 million humans worldwide) have been abducted by now, a good 150 million more have been considered for abduction and summarily rejected. What are we—chopped liver?

Unfortunately, to the aliens who are most likely to visit Earth, we probably are. 

Assault with a deadly sugar

Can you outrun molasses? Don’t be too sure.

Ninety-four years ago, on January 15, 1919, Boston suffered the Great Molasses Flood, in which a large storage tank collapsed—releasing some two million gallons of the viscous goo upon the poor unsuspecting souls of the North End.

According to the Great Wizards of Wiki, the resulting gush created a 15-foot wave traveling 35 miles per hour! A plaque in the North End suggests the wave was 40 feet.

In 1919, there were not a lot of creatures who could outrun a 35-mph treacle tsunami. There were no cheetahs in the North End. (No doubt, in pre-Prohibition Boston, there were plenty of “cheatahs” ...  mischief-makahs, swindlahs, prankstahs, and whippah-snappahs, too. But no cheetahs.) And there were not many gnarly dudes prepared to go syrup surfing.

As a result, this was a tragedy. Twenty-one dead.  And that’s just counting the humans. Boy, talk about taking the bitter with the sweet.

I’m up to my glasses in a sea of molasses.

But I won’t complain.

Cuz’ under the grasses, lie vole and mole asses

Who drowned in sweet disdain …

Who drowned in sweet disdain.

So it’s time to reconsider our idioms. Slow as molasses? How about unforgiving as molasses? Deadly as molasses?  Guys don’t make passes at girls covered in molasses.

This sugary surge of yore, of course, serves as another example that sweets kill. Need another? Coca-Cola has launched an anti-obesity campaign. Coca-Cola! That’s like me launching an anti-sarcasm campaign. (Yeah, that’s a real super idea, dude. Sarcasm is soooo dangerous.) 

Coke wants you to count calories. So rather than making fizzy shit with better ingredients, they’re going to print the number of calories in a bigger font on the can.

The message here is clear: If you’re fat, it’s your own damn fault. Can’t you read? The calories are printed right there on the can!

Of course, never mind that high fructose corn syrup might be more addictive than cocaine. (Wow, I just wrapped my fat brain around that. I’m not saying it totally blew my mind, but it feels like my medulla oblongata just popped into a bowl’s worth of Sugar Puffs. … I like sugar. What can I say? I’d make a vampire pack insulin.)

So Coke wants me to not drink Coke? OK. I can live with that. 

At least I better try. 

A Bad Enchiladas Carol

Tiny Tim was dead these 16 years. There can be no doubt about that. His plucky heart first gave out at a ukulele festival in a grange hall in Massachusetts; two months later, while he was hitting the high notes for The Women’s Club of Minneapolis, he had his final heart attack. And on November 30, 1996 he stopped tiptoeing through the tulips … and started pushing up daisies.

This is not entirely true. He was never laid to rest underground but was entombed in a mausoleum. 

But that made me no less surprised to see him.

If you asked me yesterday, I wouldn’t have been too sure Tiny Tim was indeed dead. But seeing him at the foot of my bed, floating six inches above the ground, there could be no doubt. His long hair was dry and wiry against his skull, which seemed to be attached to his body only by the grace of a red checkered cravat—obviously the one he was buried in. (Pardon me, entombed in.)

“Mercy,” I croaked. “What are you doing here?”
 

“A tisket. A tasket,” the long-croaked trebled to me. “For 16 years, I have floated from bedchamber to bedchamber, invading the dreams of those who repose in sweet slumber. I have borne falsetto witness to the music inside their heads—those very melodies that tug at their brain, tightening their lips into whistles or even causing them to burst into song.”

“Yes, we all get a tune stuck in our heads. Nagging things,” I said.

At this, the spirit of Tiny Tim cried out, hitting a high register that cracked the glass on my nightstand. “Nagging things? You think a catchy tune a nagging thing? Do you find the fur on a kitten’s head scratchy? Do you bristle at the lingering aroma of lilacs? You should drop to your knees and thank the Almighty Paul Simon for the lyrical bliss you find so … nagging.”

“Why do you tell me this?” I asked.  And in retrospect, my question should have been “What the hell did I eat?” to actually see—let alone converse—with the ghost of Tiny Tim. Were those flaxseed oil pills I took at breakfast or something else? Was I completely losing my mind or had I just temporarily misplaced it?

 

Tiny Tim sat on the end of the bed. That is to say he assumed a sitting position six inches over the end of my bed. He flipped his hair and a wad of it dislodged from his skull and floated towards the dresser. “In life, I made a mockery of music and fame,” said the ghostly troubadour. “Although pitch perfect in a world before Auto-Tune, I sang songs that no one wanted to dance to … to sing along to … to whistle to … or even remember in a dream.”

“You were always a good con man of the business, Tiny Tim” I said.

“SILENCE!” screamed the wraith. “That’s all I require of you. Silence. Because in life I plagued the airwaves with a goofy brand of singing, I am now forced to spend the afterlife warning those on similar paths. I’ve heard you sing. … Shut up.”

“It’s just in good fun, Tim.”

“Shut up. I mean it.”

“Or I will end up sharing your gruesome fate?”

“Yeah, let’s go with that.”

“OK. I guess I could stop singing. Will that bring me salvation?” I asked.

Tiny Tim rose, floating toward the ceiling. “First, you will be visited by three spirits,” he said. “All Bee Gees. The two dead ones will stop by at one and two a.m. And then at 8 a.m., Barry will stop by to try to sell you some magazines.”

And as the ghost of Tiny Tim disappeared behind the ceiling of my bedroom, I distinctly heard inside my head .... "Staying alive. Staying alive." 

Damn.   

I may be right. You may be crazy.

The Swedes are at it again—studying who’s nuts and who’s not. According to research done by the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, creative people are treated more often for mental illness than others.

Well, brilliant deduction, Sven et al.

It only took a study of 1.2 million people to figure that out, did it? I could have named that tune in two notes. … Literally, just give me two notes written by a creative person, and I could have told you they’re generally bonkers. I wouldn’t even have had to read them.  

First of all, creative professions are not something rational people pursue. They historically pay a pittance. And anecdotally, everyone says they can do the job better. What normal person would do that to himself or herself? Whether you paint, draw, dance, act, write, or trip the light scientific, everyone is a critic. (Some people even think they can do a better job at studying the correlation of mental illness and creative professionals. Jeesh. The nerve. )

You want to be an artist? You must be nuts.

Second of all, what profession isn’t creative? With tax codes the way they are, accounting may be the most creative job out there. Politicians and customer service representatives make things up all the time. Detectives recreate crime scenes. Bus drivers think they can send their wives to the moon with a single punch. Even ditch diggers are creative. After all, they’re creating ditches. 

The syllogism is easy. If everyone is creative and creative people are more prone to mental illness, everyone is a little nutty.

It’s nice to belong to a big common social group, isn’t it?

I would argue that it’s not just people. Animals are crackers, too. For instance, I recently gave my cat some flea powder. Now she can magically play all Red Hot Chili Pepper songs on the bass. That’s pretty creative. Moreover, it’s downright insane.

My cat plays bass. But she prefers slapping a salmon. 

So I don’t mind the Karloninska Institutet—whose sports teams are, by the way, the Fighting Turnips (Go, Nips!)—saying that creative people have issues. We all have issues.

But the study goes further and says there's “a particularly salient connection between writing and schizophrenia.”

I’ve been arguing myself over this one.

In a nutshell, the argument goes as follows: I’m the sanest person I know. And that’s hard to take given this study. Surely, my sanity hinders my creativity. So that’s depressing.

But depression is a mental illness, right? So maybe there’s hope for me after all.