Tuesday, December 29, 2009

The Elephant’s Butt: Nature’s Bomb Shelter

I’ve weathered a great deal of mockery for my recent decision to hide myself from the world—to hole up, as it were, inside an elephant’s butt. I can withstand this teasing with ease and good humor from my pungent place of safety and solitude, but what I won’t stand for is the notion that setting up shop inside the asshole of an animal, like Luke Skywalker squeezed into an eviscerated Tauntaun,1 is somehow weird or unusual.

Nothing could be further from the truth!2 Establishing a Hathienda is a reasonable and effective away of escaping attention, assassination, the pressures of unrelenting fame, and even jealous mistresses and/or future ex-wives. Ask yourself this: have you—or has anyone else you know—ever heard of someone being found hiding in an elephant’s butt? Admit it, you haven’t, and nobody else has either.

This proves it works.

The human race has a long and distinguished history of pachydermal posterior peregrination, and among its proud practitioners you’ll find a Who’s Who of memorable missing persons.3 Among the notables who have taken up temporary or permanent residence between an elephant’s buttcheeks are:
Jimmy Hoffa.
Union leader Jimmy Hoffa disappeared into an elephant’s ass on July 20, 1975, and after almost a third of a century still has yet to reveal himself. Not only are his whereabouts unknown, but searchers—including several police departments—have yet to even agree upon whether he’s hidden in an Asian or an African elephant, or whether he’s hiding in a zoo or has found his way back into the wild. The theory that this elephant was subsequently buried under Giants Stadium has yet to be seriously addressed.
Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna.
Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia (perhaps better-known to Americans simply as Princess Anastasia), daughter of Tsar Nicholas II, escaped death at the hands of the Bolsheviks by hiding out in the last surviving Siberian woolly mammoth. This woolly mammoth—quite conspicuous in early twentieth-century Russia, even in the midst of a violent revolution—then escaped detection by shoving itself inside the bunghole of a passing squirrel and tip-toeing off across the Ural Mountains. The squirrel is known among Russian folklorists as The Saddest Squirrel in the World.
Amelia Earhart.
Earhart, the famed aviatrix—which, weirdly, is apparently what female pilots actually were called at the time—flew her Lockheed L-10E Electra directly into the asshole of an especially large (and presumably irritated) elephant at an airspeed approaching 150 miles per hour on July 2, 1937, on the island of Nikumaroro. How the gifted pilot was able to discreetly ship such a large animal to this remote Pacific island—not to mention spiriting it away secretly after parking a five-ton airplane in its atoll4—is part of the enduring mystery of Amelia Earhart.
Tiger Woods.
For the sake of what’s left of his reputation, both with the general public and with the ladies, let’s hope he’s not taking dates back to his place at the moment.
Osama bin Laden.
Tora Bora translates from Farsi as “wrinkly grey buttocks.” The U.S. Military searched all over Tora Bora, but found neither hair nor hide of bin Laden there—again, this proves it works.
Bill Buckner.
It’s widely believed that former baseball player Bill Buckner, a veteran of twenty-two major league seasons with more than 2,700 hits and 1,200 runs batted in, retired to a life of seclusion in an elephant’s butt several years after making a memorable fielding error in the 1986 postseason that allowed the New York Mets to escape elimination in Game Six and eventually win the World Series.5 This, however, is an urban legend. Buckner retired to Boise, Idaho, not to an elephant’s rectum—although confusing the two is understandable.

NOTES
1. And I thought they smelled bad on the outside.
2. Or is it “farther from the truth”? I can never keep these straight.
3. All the following information has been generously provided by the U.S. Government Office for Bullshit Statistics. They’re also in charge of the budget.
4. Ha! Sorry.
5. I for one believe that far too much attention has been paid to Buckner’s error—although I admit that, given the high stakes when it happened, I’m not surprised—at the expense of recognizing his workmanlike production over a long and consistent career. He wasn’t spectacular, but he was a good ballplayer for a long time. And given how quickly tens if not hundreds of thousands of Boston fans turned into cocky, insufferable dicks after their team finally ended their World Series drought in 2004, I think we owe all the 1986 Red Sox team a warm thanks for falling apart and keeping their fans quiet, bitter, tormented, and pathetic for an additional eighteen years. Here’s hoping they find a way to trade the Bambino away again.

5 comments:

  1. I love the picture of the toy Tauntaun. What, you couldn't find a movie clip? This post may have set the record for number of times using "bunghole".

    Do the faithful of Bowling in the Dark have any suggestions for those members of society who SHOULD have hidden in an elephant's ass rather than do something monumentally stupid? I for one think that everyone involved with the making of those Jackass movies should have been swallowed by pachyderm butt cheeks before making any "contribution" to the film industry.

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  2. I probably could have found a movie clip of the Tauntaun scene, but I thought it was a lot more fun to use the action figures. It was either that or a photo of a kid in a Tauntaun sleeping bag. I'm thinking about buying one of them.

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  3. I think it's ironic that you used the phrase "escape elimination" in a blog about elephant's butts...

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  4. Turbo - I am pretty sure that is not going to pass inspection with the Irony Police....

    My favorite part of the elephant picture is the guy in the foreground with the look on his face saying "The fifty bucks and carton of cigarettes they promised me ain't nearly enough for this crap!"

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  5. Can we get one of those in blue please? the family and i need a safe place for when the "big one" comes our here in the Bay Area.

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