Evidence That the Human Race is Weird, but Worth Saving

On Saturday, July 7, 2012, Denver’s Highland neighborhood reenacted for the second consecutive year its own version of the Running of the Bulls, an event that has been a tradition in Pamplona, Spain, for nearly eighty-two thousand years.¹

Everything about this looks fun. Educational, too—this photograph
gave us good reason to look up the phrase “carotid artery.”

While the Running of the Bulls is held in many other Spanish cities and also in various other parts of Europe, Mexico, and even (oddly enough) Nevada, the spectacle did not gain worldwide attention until the 1926 publication of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises and—of far more cultural significance—the 1991 release of Billy Crystal’s enduring classic City Slickers.

The event, which is a prelude to a series of bullfights in the Plaza de Toros de Pamplona, has garnered quite a bit of negative publicity in recent years and even protests from the kinds of folks who, for weird reasons they probably can’t even articulate, object to living creatures being stabbed to death for our entertainment.

What the Denver event lacked in injuries, violent deaths,² and Billy Crystal’s buttcheeks, it more than made up in terms of fishnet stockings, wheels, and blind terror,³ as the bulls in this case were not actual bulls but rather members of the Rocky Mountain Rollergirls, who chased participants around a one-kilometer course with wiffle-bats in hand and, without a doubt, murder in their hearts.

Fool—never look behind you! This was almost certainly the last thing this man ever saw.
Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post.

Proceeds for the event are to go to the Tennyson Center for Children. If we were forced to decide between risking getting killed by an angry 2,000-pound bull to get an adrenaline rush, or getting bopped by a pool noodle for charity, we know what we’d pick. But, of course, both options involve running, which is stupid—so screw ’em both, we’re staying right here on the couch.

It beats being trampled and gored to death, for any number of reasons.
Photo by Kathryn Scott Osler, Denver Post.

NOTES
1. All numbers approximate.
2. Fifteen bull runners have died in Pamplona since 1910. But that number reaches into the thousands or even hundreds of thousands if you count all the bull runners who have died in Pamplona of other, non-bull-related causes, such as fright, cancer, old age, and death. So, really, running with the bulls is horrifically dangerous.
3. Possibly nose rings, too.

Sad Clown Actually Smiling on the Inside

Originally posted April 4, 2011 

In many ways, Squeaky B. Sasparilla¹ (above) is like any other clown: he has a gift for creating balloon animals; walks with a natural, unaffected grace despite his oversized shoes, baggy pants, and slack suspenders; has an expressive face that shifts quickly from muted discomfort to brooding gloom; hangs one wilted flower at his lapel, and another atop his ill-fitting bowler; and laments his innate ability to effortlessly creep out everyone from small children to grown men. His defeated slouch, dark stubble, and checkered knapsack-on-a-stick paint a vivid, touching, memorable picture of the sad hobo clown.

But Squeaky harbors a dark secret, one that he cannot bring himself to tell his fellow clowns, and can barely admit even to himself:

Underneath his carefully constructed exterior, Squeaky B. Sasparilla is desperately happy.

“I’m not even sure how it happened, or when,” he intones morosely, his restless fingers idly tapping an empty Seltzer bottle. “It just crept up on me. Once in a while I’d find myself whistling—Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah, sometimes, or The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down—and all the other fellows would look at me like I was out of my head. Eventually my wife had to start warning me in the mornings not to skip on my way to work, because of what the neighbors would say. I couldn’t help myself. I was ashamed.”

We talk at the dimly-lit bar at a quiet midtown diner, several miles from the Big Top. He doesn’t want to be recognized, doesn’t want to have to explain to his peers—to the friends that thought they knew him—the somber tears failing to fall from his eyes. Squeaky B. Sasparilla has run out of stories to hide behind, but still he hides.

“This was never what I wanted.”

   
He softly squeezes a bicycle horn to draw the attention of our waitress, orders black coffee and two dozen banana cream pies, and sighs deeply. It is the burdened sigh of a man deeply, crushingly contented.

He lists a litany of reasons for his happiness problem, ticking them one off in turn on puffy white-gloved fingers. Each reason is more dishearteningly cheering than the last: his 401(k) is rebounding; he’s just bought his first new car, a subcompact with seats for eighteen; he received a clean bill of health from the Gesundheit! Institute, and he and his wife, Petunia Bloomers, have recently brought their infant twins home from the hospital.

Zoe M.L.T. Pennywhistle

Merely thinking of young Abernathy Aloysius Pennyworth Tinwhistle and Zoe MuuMuu Lederhosen Tinpot Pennywhistle (right) brings a near-smile to his makeup-pancaked face, despite his pervasive worry that they may have inherited, from him, a genetic predisposition for happiness.

Squeaky has come forward to tell his story because he fears for his children, and because he knows there must be others out there like him, scared and silent. He hopes his story will give them hope—not the fake hope you see in movies, but real hope, like on TV. He wants to stand on the table and shout “I’m happy, and it’s breaking my heart!” but he can’t come clean, not yet. The pain is too deep, the stigma too strong. He still tries to deny, tries to change who he is.

“I’ve tried everything—prescribed depressants, Nine Inch Nails albums. Ethan Frome and Anna Karenina. I’ve probably watched Where the Red Fern Grows three dozen times now. One night I even went down to the animal shelter and asked what happens to the puppies that don’t get adopted. Even that didn’t work.”

“Nothing worked.”

He sits in silence for a long moment, staring through the windows into the deepening night as the dregs of his coffee cool at the bottom of his mug.

“But hey, it could be worse,” he adds with a dejectedly happy shrug as he stands to go. “I could be a rodeo clown. Hell—you know what most of those poor bastards are doing on the inside? Bleeding.”

And with one last brittle, superficial frown and a honk of his bulbous nose, he steps out into the night, his shoes squeaking a mournful tune that he cannot carry in his heart.

NOTES

1. Not his real name.

Time-Lapse Video of Colorado Springs's Waldo Canyon Fire

Photographer Steve Moraco, using time-lapse photography over five days from June 23 through June 28, 2012, created the following video of the Waldo Canyon fire that killed two and destroyed more than 340 homes in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

To give you some sense of the scale of the smoke and fire, the peaks visible in most of the video rise some 3,000 to 3,500 feet above Colorado Springs’s 6,000-foot elevation, and the Air Force Academy’s Cadet Chapel—visible just to the right of center near the bottom—is 150 feet high.






You can view the video in full-screen high-definition video here.

Stupid Internet Stole Our Joke.

As of this writing, the film Battleship, having opened on May 18 to lackluster reviews, has made nearly $300,000,000 worldwide. With average prices just shy of $8.00 per ticket, this means that some 37 million people actually paid to see this movie—some of them, like perhaps the director’s mother,¹ probably more than once.

While that number of presumably un-coerced moviegoers is disappointingly high, it should be noted that Battleship did make significantly less than expected among U.S. audiences. It would be hilarious to pretend this means that people have suddenly developed taste (see Figure 1.1), but it is encouraging to see that for now, at least, some brave and discerning portion of the American public remains picky and snobby enough to save its hard-earned money² to waste on some other crappy movie.

Figure 1.1. We watch stupid shit—possibly because of, rather than in spite of, its stupidity.
See the full graphic at http://frankenspace.com/projects/bayhem.html

Battleship, then, has made only around $60 million in the United States against a $200 million budget, leaving film-industry experts who live in houses you aren’t rich enough to even dream about scratching their heads, flabbergasted as to why a child’s game with no sound, movement, plot, backstory, characters, or dialogue didn’t lend itself to a compelling movie.³

Exactly which part of this says “action movie” to you?

The intrepid Bowling in the Dark writing staff anticipated this movie’s inevitable failure several months ago, and had a high-quality, hand-crafted joke lined up about how Battleship’s bombing will make it really tough for us to sell our screenplay based on the most cinematic and tension-fraught of our childhood pastimes—Hungry Hungry Hippos. Things were coming together nicely until we got online to make our usual search for uncredited illustration from folks who haven’t given us permission, and came across this:

Image courtesy of we don’t really know whom.

As best as we can figure it, somebody plagiarized our great idea before we even thought of it, and had the nerve to do a way better job of it than we could.  If you are or know a lawyer who’s familiar with both plagiarism law and the intricacies of time travel, please contact the Bowling in the Dark Legal Attack Fund. We look forward to hearing from you.

NOTES

1. Assuming she’s alive, of course, and that she survived watching the movie the first time—both of which would make us feel better about mentioning her.
2. For those of our readers who are members of the Occupy movement, we deeply regret the offensive implication that the 1% actually earns their money in any way other than taking it from you. For those of our readers who are among the 1% richest in America, we deeply regret implying that the 99% earns their money in any way other than taking it from you. Everybody but you really is a crook.
3. Apparently, if you’re not paying very close attention, every board game is basically the same as Clue, which ended up being a pretty fun movie, even if it was a bit of a poor man’s Murder by Death.

How to Fail at Marketing, Lesson 4

American athletic equipment and apparel retailer Dick’s¹ Sporting Goods—quite possibly the most single most successful non-pornographic enterprise ever to make use of the word “Dick”—isn’t actually failing, per se, with the bit of marketing phraseology that is the topic of today’s discussion.

On the contrary, it may actually attract business in this country, and if it convinces some portion of America to get off our giant fat collective ass and start working out, we’re all for it.²

However, we hope that Dick’s, having missed the boat on our earlier advice about marketing, will seriously consider changing this sales pitch if they decide to expand into, say, India:

Just a suggestion.




NOTES
1. Hello, random internet browser who’s never visited this site before. Welcome! We’re far too polite to ask you what Google search brought you here in the first place, because we all know that it had the word “dicks” in it. Perhaps this is what you're looking for. Thanks for stopping by, and please leave a catastrophically punctuated message in our comments section, along with a link to your drug and/or pr0n site!
2. We recently bought a pair of running shorts there, and have so far been disappointed with their inability to make running anything less than the Worst Activity in the World.

Irony, Illustrated?

Whether this genuinely qualifies as situational irony is a decision we’ll leave up to today’s honorary guest judge, Alanis Morrissette. No matter what she concludes, though, we thoroughly enjoy knowing that this particular member of the National Society of Collegiate Scholars—ostensibly an organization for bright, highly-educated people—couldn’t figure out how to apply a windshield decal so it’d be readable.

Maybe that’s not irony, but it sure ain’t smart, either.

“Well, that’s at least as ironic as a plane crash.
Those are ironic, right?”

Owed to the Spell Chequer

author unknown
 

 

I halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plane lee marques four my revue
Miss steaks aye ken knot sea

Eye ran this poem threw it
Your sure reel glad two no
It's vary polished in it's weigh
My chequer tolled me sew

A chequer is a bless sing
It freeze yew lodes of thyme
It helps me awl stiles two reed
And aides mi when aye rime

To rite with care is quite a feet
Of witch won should be proud
And wee mussed dew the best wee can
Sew flaws are knot aloud

And now bee cause my spelling
is checked with such grate flare
Their are know faults with in my cite
Of nun eye am a wear

Each frays come posed up on my screen
Eye trussed to be a joule
The chequer poured o'er every word
To cheque sum spelling rule

That's why aye brake in two averse
My righting wants too pleas
Sow now ewe sea wye aye dew prays
Such soft wear for pea seas

 

It could be worse. For a while there they were thinking
about renaming the school after Anthony Weiner.