Why I'm Afraid of Clowns, Part II

Cave paintings recently discovered in Lascaux depicting a Clown Hunt
Clowns. Clowny clown clowns. Man has feared clowns since the dawn of time. Whether we're pitting them against our super heroes, or turning them into sewer-dwelling giant spiders, man has looked to clowns as inspiration for dredging up our darkest fears.

But clowns are funny, you say? Clowns are harmless. Well then, riddle me this: whenever you think of circus clowns, what song instantly plays in your head. It goes something like this "Do do doodle-oo do do do do do...", right? Do you know what that song is called?

Entry of the Gladitors by Julius Fucik, a Czech military orchestra composer. The clowns are mounting an army. On Bozo's command, unleash Hell.

Incidentally, if you've ever wondered the name of a classical piece that you always hear in movie trailers or when Jerry is setting Tom's tail on fire, check out kickassclassical.com.

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The Stinkening

There was a weird smell emanating from our pantry. So Michele asked me to go find out what it was and get rid of it. I walked over to the big white cabinet, but before I could open the doors, before even getting within a foot of the thing, my nose was assaulted by the most foul smell it had ever encountered. I opened the doors and to my horror, the stink was even worse, but I couldn't immediately find it's point of origin. It could have been coming from anywhere, so I'd have to...ugh...sniff around.

I started with the top shelf. Some time during the summer, the shelf had collapsed, cascading all manner of dried and canned goods all over the other shelves and onto the floor. We never did find the last of the four tiny L-shaped bits of plastic that hold the shelf in place, so ever since then, it's been teetering on three pegs. To keep the whole thing from tumbling down again, the heavier stuff was moved down the the lower shelves and the top shelf held mostly spaghetti and other dry noodles, maybe a couple of those seasoning packets for tacos, and nothing in the back left corner where the peg is missing. I checked to see if one of the packets had opened up and spilled out, but I couldn't find anything.

And so it went, moving down to the next shelf, and then the next, trying to locate an expired can of...something, or a broken bottle, leaking putrid stink juice all over. But again, I didn't find anything.

Finally, I reached the bottom shelf. There, we have some onions and potatoes. Deep in the back was a bag of little yellow potatoes. Little yellow potatoes leaking terrifying brown stuff. I'd just found ground zero.

Who knows how long they've been there, only that it was too long. It looked like the potatoes were secreting their own soy sauce. That bag was without a doubt the culprit, but because the onions had other potatoes had been trapped in there with the soy-sauce potatoes, they suffered from second-hand stink and had to go, too. Fortunately, the onions and potatoes were all in bags which in turn were sitting in wooden crates that oranges come in, so the smell had a buffer in the wood that prevented it from seeping into the white plywood cabinet. All I had to do was lift up the orange crate and toss those suckers in the trash.

But then the most awful thing happened. When I picked up the crate containing the smelly potato bag, the smallest, tiniest droplet of liquid stink dripped onto my bare forearm. The drop was so small, it couldn't sustain a flea, (assuming a flea would drink rancid potato juice) but a little goes a long way. I brought my arm up to my nose to assess the damage. Dear God, it was even worse than I'd imagined!! My options were few, reign as Prince of the Land of Stench, or that arm was going to have to come off.

In the end, I decided against amputation because the loss of an arm might throw me off balance, so I just scrubbed it with soap and water for a good half hour or so until only my own pleasant musk remained.

But heed my warning, ye who would touch little yellow potatoes leaking soy sauce: don't.

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Nuts to You

Let's say you're walking down the street, when suddenly you see a car parked alongside the road with a license plate that reads "NO NUTS." It's probably the best thing that's happened to you all day, perhaps all month. Now, you have you're trusty camera phone with you, but all around you are...


PEOPLE!!!!


And you suddenly feel a bit awkward whipping out a camera to take a picture of a vanity plate, regardless of how hilarious said vanity plate is. You briefly consider a cover story in case someone wonders why you are taking a picture of someone's license plate (apart from the obvious, "It says NO NUTS"). You'd say that you were involved in an accident and you need photographic evidence for insurance purposes. But that won't work, because the car doesn't appear to have sustained any damage, and you are on foot, so there's no second car. You suppose you could say you were run over, but then you'd have to start limping until you turn the corner. And what if you run into the rare Good Samaritan who wants to help you, a poor injured pedestrian, while the jerk that ran you down is across the street, doing a sudoku and sipping a latte, chuckling to himself about the pain he's brought to you. Is it worth the escalating pile of lies, just to get a stupid picture? I offer that is it not.

Of course, you could just take the picture and not worry about anyone seeing you. So what, right? And anyway, if you had to, you could do that thing were you pretend you're on the phone, but you're really taking a picture. How many times have you gotten away with that one? Too many to count. Well, five. It was five times.

But then, then you think even if you did take the picture, well...then what? You can't put someone's license plate on the internet, can you? I think that's an invasion of privacy or something. Unless that person is a convicted sex offender. I'm pretty sure they put sex offender's license plates on the internet. But then how would you find out if someone's convicted a sex offender? I guess you could run the license plate. Although, if you're plates say "NO NUTS" you're pretty much announcing that you're libido isn't a threat to anyone. Unless that's what you want people to think. Very clever, possible convicted sex offender. Very clever indeed.

So let's say you took a picture, but decide not to post in online because it's probably illegal, or at least immoral to post someone's license plate and you don't want No Nuts tracking you down, because maybe "NO NUTS" doesn't describe the driver, but what he does to people that tick him off. It's a warning! Maybe the car belongs to a militant lesbian gym teacher out to castrate our patriarchal society one pair at a time.

All of this assumes that "NO NUTS" is referring to male danglies. Maybe "NO NUTS" is a former mental patient who was given a clean bill of health. What better way to announce your newfound sanity than with vanity plates? Or it could be someone who's had it up to here with these damn crazies and won't stand for them to be in or anywhere in the area immediately surrounding their car. NO NUTS ALLOWED. Maybe it belongs to a New Orleans fan.

It's probably just someone with a peanut allergy.

Well, whoever it is should have put a little bit more thought into what to put on the license plate.

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His Hair Was Perfect

Welcome to this, the first full week of 2008! I think I've let enough time roll by to throw Kimmie off my scent. What, that was my plan all along. I can't have people ripping me off-- inserting their wenis wherever they see fit--and the best way to prevent that is to not write anything at all, right? Sounds like a perfectly reasonable excuse, err...explanation to me. How about you, LL?

Okay, so back to business. The Friday before New Years, we gathered at Nick's house to exchange Christmas presents. No, we don't do anything on time. Nick gave Jose that little robot guy from FOX NFL Sunday that jumps around and points at people. Well, the CGI one does, I don't think this one does anything expect look like the one on TV. Actually, did he get that from Nick? I thought Wah-Kee got Jose in the name-pool, because then Kee handed him a Carolina Panthers jacket to wear when he moves down to South Carolina later this year. Oh yeah, Jose's moving to South Carolina because he met some girl online. What is the world coming to? Anyway, someone got a FOX NFL robot and someone got Jose a Panthers jacket. I think either Nick or Jose got my gift. How am I supposed to remember, it was like three weeks ago. Whoever it came from, I ended up with a Best Buy gift certificate and Michele and I each got a tickets to a movie and a gift certificate to Smokey Bones. Other gifts exchanged hands, but all I really remember are the Mojitos. I don't think it's a gay drink. Mo-ji-to.

After the gifts, Heidi announced that she had a new game/social experiment gone awry for us to play. It was called The Werewolves of Millers Hollow, and it plays pretty much the same way as Mafia, if you've ever played that, which I haven't. The story for the game goes that there is a village that is being slowly picked off one-by-one each night by werewolves. So during the daylight hours, the villagers gather in town hall or wherever villagers gather (Village Hall?) and try to weed out the werewolves by way of democracy and lynchings, the chocolate and peanut butter of lycanthrope-plagued-townships. Whoever the majority of the village accuses as the murderous beast is strung up by their necks until they're dead. Only after their death is it revealed whether the village has finally destroyed the werewolf, or just offed another one of their own dwindling numbers. The battle of wits has begun. The game is over when either all the werewolves have been hung, or when the last villager is eaten.

For replay value, and to a lesser extent, legal and moral issues, no actual blood is shed during the game. Instead, a non-playing moderator holds out a deck of cards and a group of eight or more chose one card each. On the back of the card is either a werewolf, or a villager (or one of the various subsets of villagers with special abilities). When everyone has chosen their cards, the moderator informs everyone that it is night, and all players close their eyes. Then the moderator, in our case Heidi, says the werewolves wake up, recognize each other, and chose a victim. The werewolves merely point to the unsuspecting chump, and when Heidi says it's morning everyone opens their eyes, with one person discovering they've been killed. And how do you know when you've been killed? When you've got shiny purple beads tossed at your feet. Once everyone's eyes are open, then the accusing begins. And that's when it really comes in handy to have a poker face. A poker face not being one of the things Santa left in my stocking, I was in for a long night. My problem is, I always look guilty, even when I'm just a lowly villager, which was the case in the first round when they metaphorically strung me up just because I kept smiling. Well that's just great. I was actually the Fortune Teller, a villager who is allowed to look at one person's card during the "night" each turn to try and learn the identity of the werewolf or werewolves. But instead, I sat out the rest of the game. Lousy stupid villagers. The werewolves turned out to be Wah-Kee and his girlfriend, Des. Pssh! I could have told them that. They were both even worse at lying then me.

After that first game, I managed to not get myself killed through most of the others, except for the one time I actually WAS the werewolf. For that game I was also voted as the sheriff, which is a position that gives that person two votes. But no matter what kind of math you use, two votes are never going to beat six, I was voted out, and of course I was the only werewolf and at under two minutes it was the shortest game of the night.

Several games in, Heidi passed the moderator duties onto someone else so that she could play for a while. And I got her voted out in the first round. That was perfect. Michele wasn't immune, either. During one of my stints has a werewolf I gleefully pointed to her and danced in my seat. I can't really say why I did. Maybe I was afraid that if I didn't pick her, it'd look like I was playing favorites. I wanted to keep an even playing field. I suppose I could have done that without dancing, but why do anything if you can't do it while dancing?

On Nick's first go-round as the moderator, he left out the all-important "the werewolves go back to sleep" before saying "the fortune teller wakes up" so the werewolves, including me, had our eyes wide open when Des, the fortune teller, opened hers, so we had no choice but to kill her. Rookie mistake.

I don't know how many times we played, but it seemed like Wah-Kee and especially Des turned out to be werewolves an inordinate amount of times. We didn't keep a running score, so I don't know how many times the villagers won versus the werewolves, but considering the werewolves were usually outnumbered two to six, the village got wiped out a lot more often than I would have expected. I think that says something about people being more interested in "revenge killing" for previous games than trying to win.

The final game of the night answered a question that had come up a few times earlier in night; what happens when there are only two players left; a werewolf and a villager? If the two are remaining, during the "daylight" hours, the werewolf wins, because each one would obviously claim the other was the werewolf, resulting in a draw and no lynching, and the werewolf would claim it's final victim that night. That actually happened a couple of times. But, in the case of the last game, the final two were Josh (my understudy for when I'm not around to hang out with Nick and co.) and Michele. Each accused the other of being the werewolf, which would have been a draw, but...Josh was the sheriff, so his vote counted twice. So then we had two votes for hanging Michele and one for Josh. Josh wins, right? No! Michele had the hunter card. And the hunter, if voted out, is allowed to kill any other player with their dying breath. So Josh, the sheriff/werewolf hung Michele and Michele shot Josh. Nobody wins. It was awesome.

I don't know how to end this one. I guess I'll leave you with this advise for 2008: If you're constipated, DO NOT TAKE KAOPECTATE! That stuff is for diarrhea. Taking it for the other thing makes it much, much worse.

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Mark As Spam

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