Uncle John’s Briefs (18 page)

Each year
, The Onion’s
A.V. Club receives thousands of records from up-and-coming bands, some with really, really strange names. Here are a few that we can print (but we can’t vouch for their music)
.

• Dear and the Headlights

• The Dead Kenny Gs

• Human Being Lawnmower

• Happy Butterfly Foot

• Orb of Confusion

• Best Fwends

• The Color Fred

• Tigers Can Bite You

• To Live and Shave in L.A.

• Butt Stomach

• Shapes Have Fangs

• Harmonica Lewinsky

• Earth Dies Screaming

• Shoot for the Stars… and Kill Them

• Secret Lives of Freemasons

• Unicorn Dream Attack

• Chevy Metal

• The Pleasures of Merely Circulating

• Garrison Killer

• Penguins with Shotguns

• DD/MM/YYYY

• Mel Gibson & the Pants

• Doofgoblin

• Ringo DeathStarr

• General Patton & His Privates

• Let’s French

• The Shark That Ate My Friend

• I Would Set Myself on Fire for You

• Dyslexic Speedreaders

• Clown Vomit

• Les Breastfeeders

• Happy Mothers Day, I Can’t Read

• Neil Diamond Phillips

• Broke Up This Year, Alas

• Juzt Nutz

• If Your Hands Were Metal That Would Mean Something

• We All Have Hooks For Hands

• The House That Gloria Vanderbilt

In Flowery Branch, Georgia, it is illegal to yell “Snake!” within city limits.

NUDES & PRUDES

Nudity can be shocking…and so can prudery. Which side of the fence do you fall on?

N
UDE
In April 2000, a state trooper stopped a car in the Houston suburb of Sugarland and discovered that all four passengers—three women and a three-year-old girl—were naked. God, the women claimed, had told them to burn their clothes and drive to Wal-Mart to get some new clothes. “It’s always something,” the state trooper says. “No two days are the same in this job.”

PRUDE

Police in Brazil arrested a minor league soccer player named William Pereira Farias after he stripped off his uniform and threw it into the crowd to celebrate the scoring of a goal. “He broke the laws of respectful behavior,” police officer Alfredo Faria told reporters. “He offended the townspeople and will likely be suspended from the team.”

NUDE

Norway’s Radio Tango has become the first radio station to offer live nude weather reports. The reports, billed as “more weather, less clothes,” air on the station’s morning show; listeners can view the naked weather forecasters on the Internet. “This is a world exclusive,” says morning host Michael Reines Oredam. “It has never been done before. It brings a certain atmosphere to the studio which we hope our listeners are able to pick up on.”

PRUDE

Police in Seremban, a town south of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, have raided several cellular phone stores and seized “obscene” plastic cellular phone covers that feature naked images of well-known celebrities. “The phones are modified to light up the private parts of actors or actresses when a user receives or makes a call,” says police superintendent Abdul Razak Ghani.

NUDE

Portland businessman Mark Dean hopes to expand his topless nightclub
business by running it as a topless doughnut shop during breakfast hours, with his strippers doubling as waitresses. What are the odds that his new venture will succeed? Not as good as you might think—a topless doughnut shop in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, went under after less than a year; a topless car wash operated by the same businessman lasted only a few months.

MIT students built a computer out of Tinker Toys. It plays Tic-Tac-Toe. (It’s never lost a game.)

PRUDE

The executor of the estate of the late basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain reports that he is having trouble selling the Big Dipper’s Bel Air estate, even after reducing the price from $10 million to $4.3 million and tearing out the “playroom,” which featured a waterbed floor covered with black rabbit fur and a wraparound pink velvet couch. (The retractable mirrored roof over the master bed has been preserved; so has the traffic light in the bedroom that signals either a green light to “Love,” or a red light for “Don’t Love.”) Executor Sy Goldberg admits that Chamberlain’s boasting that he slept with more than 20,000 women in his lifetime may be part of the problem, but he says that holding that against the house is “ridiculous.”

NUDE

A Dutch telemarketing company has found a novel way around the tight labor market in the Netherlands: They’ve created a special division of the company that allows employees to work in the nude. “We had about 75 applicants in the first four hours,” a spokesman for the company—which did not release its name “for fear of offending existing clients”—told reporters. “With a normal call center, you’d be lucky to get one or two applicants an hour.”

PRUDE

Officials at Los Angeles International Airport covered images of “bounding nude men” with brown paper in 2001 pending a decision on whether to remove them permanently. The naked men, who were supposed to represent the earliest human attempts at flight, were sandblasted into the granite floor of a newly renovated terminal at the airport. American Airlines paid Los Angeles artist Susan Narduli $850,000 to create the work, which was approved by both the airline and the city’s cultural affairs commission. The figures’ private parts were “completely obscured,” but no matter: “If the city decides it wants the artwork changed,” said an American Airlines spokesperson, “we’ll change it.” Several weeks later, city officials said the artwork could remain…and the brown paper was removed.

Barely known fact: “Naked” means to be unprotected; “nude” means unclothed.

HE SLUD INTO THIRD

Verbal gems actually uttered on the air by sports announcers
.

“If only faces could talk.”

—Pat Summerall, NFL announcer

“Hector Torres, how can you communicate with Enzo Hernandez when he speaks Spanish and you speak Mexican?”

—Jerry Coleman, San Diego Padres announcer

“A lot of good ballgames on tomorrow, but we’re going to be right here with the Cubs and the Mets.”

—Thom Brennaman, Chicago Cubs announcer

“Lance Armstrong is about to join a list which includes only himself.”

—Mark Brown, ESPN sports analyst

“I don’t think anywhere is there a symbiotic relationship between caddie and player like there is in golf.”

—Johnny Miller, golf analyst

“Referee Richie Powers called the loose bowel foul on Johnson.”

—Frank Herzog, Washington Bullets basketball announcer

“It’s a great advantage to be able to hurdle with both legs.”

—David Coleman, British sports announcer

“The Minutemen are not tall in terms of height.”

—Dan Bonner, college basketball analyst

“Jose Canseco leads off the 3rd inning with a grand slam.”

—John Gordon, Minnesota Twins announcer

“The offensive linemen are the biggest guys on the field, they’re bigger than everybody else, and that’s what makes them the biggest guys on the field.”

—John Madden, NFL announcer

“Watch the expression on his mask.”

—Harry Neale, hockey analyst

“The game’s in the refrigerator, folks. The door’s closed, the light’s out, the eggs are cooling, the butter’s gettin’ hard, and the Jell-O’s a-jigglin’.”

—Chick Hearn, L.A. Lakers announcer

It’s impossible to create a beverage of more than 18% alcohol by fermentation alone.

WORD ORIGINS

Ever wonder where words come from? Here are some interesting stories
.

J
ACKPOT
Meaning:
A huge prize
Origin:
“The term goes back to draw poker, where stakes are allowed to accumulate until a player is able to ‘open the
pot’
by demonstrating that among the cards he has drawn he has a pair of
jacks
or better.” (From
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Vol. II
, by William and Mary Morris)

GRENADE

Meaning:
A small, hand-thrown missile containing an explosive
Origin:
“The word comes from the French
pomegrenade
, for pomegranate, because the military missile, which dates from the sixteenth century, both is shaped like the fruit and explodes much as the seeds burst out from it.” (From
Fighting Words
, by Christine Ammer)

SNACK

Meaning:
A small amount of food eaten between meals
Origin:
“A snack is something grabbed in a hurry, from the Dutch
snacken
, meaning to snap at something, although that word was only used for dogs.” (From
Word Origins
, by Wilfred Funk)

AMMONIA

Meaning:
A potent, odorous cleaning fluid

Origin:
“Ammonia
is so called because it was first made from the dung of the worshippers’ camels at the temple of Jupiter Ammon in Egypt.” (From
Remarkable Words with Astonishing Origins
, by John Train)

HEATHEN

Meaning:
An ungodly person

Origin:
“Christianity began as primarily an urban religion; people in rural districts continued to worship older gods. The Latin word for countryman
was
paganus
—whence, of course, pagan; the Germanic tongues had a similar word, something like
khaithanaz
, ‘dwelling in the heath’ (wilderness)—whence heathen.” (From
Loose Cannons and Red Herrings
, by Robert Claiborne)

Nearly 200 people a year die of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from sitting in their cars with the engine running.

CALCULATE

Meaning:
Add, subtract, divide, and/or multiply numbers or money
Origin:
“In Rome 2,000 years ago the merchant figured his profit and loss using what he called
calculi
, or ‘little stones’ as counters. So the Latin term
calculus
, ‘pebble,’ not only gave us ‘calculate’ but our word ‘calculus,’ one of the most complicated forms of modern mathematics.” (From
Word Origins
, by Wilfred Funk, Litt. D.)

MUSEUM

Meaning:
Building or collection of art, music, scientific tools, or any specific set of objects

Origin:
A shrine to the Greek Muses. “Such a shrine was known as a
mouseion
. When the Museum at Alexandria was destroyed in the fourth century, the word nearly dropped out of use. Three hundred years ago, a scholar rediscovered the word.” (From
Thereby Hangs a Tale
, by Charles Earle Funk)

DOPE

Meaning:
Drugs

Origin:
“This word was originally a Dutch word,
doop
, meaning a sauce or liquid. Its first association with narcotics came when it was used to describe the viscous glop that results from heating opium. Then, by rapid extension, it came to mean any narcotic.” (From
Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, Vol. III
, by William and Mary Morris)

RIVAL

Meaning:
Competitor

Origin:
“A rival is etymologically ‘someone who uses the same stream as another.’ The word comes from Latin
rivalis
, meaning ‘of a stream.’ People who use or live by the same stream are neighbors and, human nature being as it is, are usually in competition with each other.” (From
Dictionary of Word Origins
, by John Ayto)

LITTLE WILLIE

These morbid “Willie” poems were popular in the 1950s, although most were written in the 1890s. Either way, they’re still funny (in a sick sort of way)
.

Little Willie hung his sister,
She was dead before
we missed her.
Willie’s always up to tricks!
Ain’t he cute? He’s only six!

Willie poisoned Father’s tea.
Father died in agony.
Mother was extremely vexed.
“Really, Will,” she
said, “What next?”

Into the family drinking well
Willie pushed his sister Nell.
She’s there yet
because it kilt her.
Now we have to buy a filter.

Little Willie, on the track,
Didn’t hear the engine squeal.
Now the engine’s
coming back,
Scraping Willie off the wheel.

The ice upon our
pond’s so thin
That Little Willie’s fallen in!
We cannot reach
him from the shore
Until the surface freezes more.
Ah me, my heart
grows weary waiting—
Besides, I want
to do some skating.

Willie saw some dynamite,
Couldn’t understand it quite;
Curiosity never pays:
It rained Willie seven days.

Willie with a thirst for gore
Nailed his sister to the door.
Mother said with
humor quaint,
“Willie dear, don’t
scratch the paint.”

Little Willie fell down a drain;
Couldn’t scramble out again.
Now he’s floating in the sewer
The world is left
one Willie fewer.

Willie, in one of
his nice new sashes,
Fell in the fire and
was burnt to ashes.
Now, although the
room grows chilly,
We haven’t the heart
to poke poor Willie.

Willie coming
home from school,
Spied a dollar near a mule.
Stooped to get it,
quiet as a mouse.
Funeral tomorrow
at Willie’s house.