Today's Topics:
(2 msgs)
ferret legging
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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 1994 02:54:54 -0400 (EDT)
From: Victor Story <story@acad.csv.kutztown.edu>
Reply-To: Victor Story <story@acad.csv.kutztown.edu>
Subject:
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Cc: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Message-Id: <Pine.3.89.9406160213.A19624-0100000@acad.csv.kutztown.edu>
If you are too shallow to appreciate the religious significance of the
following, well, I feel an ititty bitty sorry for you:
[Stranger than Fiction! These stories really happen!]
,,,,,,
o#'9MMHb':'-,o,
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dMMM*""'`' .oM"HM?.
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. "*H - &MMMMMMMMMH:
. dboo MMMMMMMMMMMM.
. dMMMMMMb *MMMMMMMMMP.
. MMMMMMMP *MMMMMP .
`#MMMMM MM6P ,
' `MMMP" HM*`,
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-. . .-
''-.oo,oo.-''
A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed
on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new
game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the
pilots searched the beach where the birds gathered and fly slowly along it
at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand Penguins turn their heads in
unison watching the planes go by, and when pilots turn around and fly back,
the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a
slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports, "The pilots fly out to
sea and then directly to the penguin colony and overfly it. Heads go up,
up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall gently onto their backs."
-- Audobon Society Magazine
*$$$$$$$$*
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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 1994 22:02:29 -0400
From: Michael L Turyn <mturyn@world.std.com>
Message-Id: <199406170202.AA21777@world.std.com>
To: Subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject:
Cool. So that means that I can put this little
<<<<<=====---_-=====>>>>> I can rant and rave at all you Pinks out
there, and call you names, and no-one will ever know. This is GREAT.
All I have to do is to make sure that I get that little protection
glyph right, and I can flame without being caught. HA-HA...YOU CAN'T
HEAR ME. Oops, it looks like I made a little mistake there No "BoB",
don't press that return-period macro key I 've got to go back and
corr-
[The preceding has been a dramatisation. Kids, don't try to
hide behind a magic symbol so that you can onanistically flame
people you don't know. Do it for real, to friends and New
Yorker staff writers. Good night.]
A paid message from BobCo and the People of Stackerley.
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Date: Thu, 16 Jun 1994 08:54:18 -0400
From: Eric Haines <erich@eye.com>
Message-Id: <9406161254.AA02926@hemlock>
To: subgenius@media-lab.media.mit.edu
Subject: ferret legging
[if you've seen this before, then kill me - Eric]
This is from the November 1992 Harper's.
Mr. Reg Mellor, the "king of the ferret-leggers," paced across his
tiny Yorkshire miner's cottage as he explained the rules of the English
sport that he has come to dominate rather late in life. "Ay, lad," said
the seventy-two-year-old champion, "no jockstraps allowed. No underpants--
nothin` whatsoever. And it's nogood with tight trousers, mind ye. Little
bah-stards have to be able to move around inside there from ankle to
ankle."
Basically, ferret-legging involves the tying of a competitor's
trousers at the ankles and the insertion into those trousers of a couple
of peculiarly vicious fur-coated, foot-long carnivores called ferrets.
The brave contestant's belt is then pulled tight, and he proceeds to stand
there in front of the judges as long as he can, while animals with claws
like hypodermic needles and teeth like number 16 carpet tacks try their
damnedest to get out.
From a dark and obscure past, the sport has made an astonishing
comeback in recent years. When I first heard about ferret-legging, in
1972, the world record stood at forty painful seconds of "keepin' 'em
down," as they say in ferret-legging circles. A few years later the
dreaded one-minute mark was finally surpassed. The current record--
implausible as it may seem--now stands at an awesome five hours and
twenty-six minutes, a mark reached last year by the gaudily tattooed
little Yorkshireman with the waxed military mustache who now stood two
feet away from me explaining the technicalities of this burgeoning sport.
"The ferrets must have a full mouth o' teeth," Reg Mellor said as he
fiddled with his belt., "No filing of the teeth; no clipping. No dope for
you or the ferrets. You must be sober, and the ferrets must be hungry--
though any ferret'll eat yer eyes out even if he isn't hungry. So then,
lad. Any more questions 'fore I poot a few down for ye?"
"Yes, Reg."
"Ay, whoot then?"
"Well, Reg," I said. "I think people in America will want to know.
Well -- since you don't wear any protection -- and, well, I've heard a
ferret can bite your thumb off. Do they ever -- you know?"
Reg's stiff mustache arched toward the ceiling under a sly grin.
"You really want to know what they get up to down there, eh?" Reg said,
looking for all the world like some workingman's Long John Silver. "Well,
take a good look." Then Reg Mellor let his trousers fall around his
ankles.
A short digression: a word is in order concerning ferrets, a
weasel-like animal well known to Europeans but, because of the near
extinction of the black-footed variety in the American West, not widely
known in the United States. Alternatively referred to by professional
ferret handlers as "shark-of-the-land," a "piranha with feet," "fur-coated
evil, " and "the only four-legged creature in existence that kills just
for kicks," the common domesticated ferret -- Mustela putorius -- has the
spinal flexibility of a snake and the jaw musculature of a pit bull.
Rabbits, rats, and even frogs run screaming from hiding places when
confronted by a ferret.
Ferreters -- those who hunt with ferrets, as opposed to putting them
in their pants -- tell tales of rabbits running toward hunters to surrender
after gazing into the torch-red eyes of an oncoming ferret.
Loyal to nothing that lives, the ferret has only one characteristic
that might be deemed positive -- a tenacious, single-minded belief in
finishing whatever it starts. That usually entails biting off whatever it
bites. The rules of ferret-legging do allow the leggers to try to knock
the ferret off a spot it's biting (from outside the trousers only), but
that is no small matter, as ferrets never let go. No less a source than
the Encyclopedia Britannica suggests that you can get a ferret to let go
by pressing a certain spot over its eye, but Mellor and the other ferret
specialists I talked to say that is absurd. Reg favors a large screwdriver
to get a ferret off his finger. Another ferret legger told me that a
ferret that had almost dislodged his left thumb let go only after the
ferret and the man's thumb were held under scalding tap water -- for ten
minutes.
Reg Mellor, a man who has been more intimate with ferrets than many
men have been with their wives, calls ferrets "cannibals, things that live
only to kill, that'll eat your eyes out to get at your brain" at their
worst and "untrustworthy" at their very best.
Reg says he observed with wonder the growing popularity of
ferret-legging throughout the '70s. He had been hunting with ferrets in
the verdant moors and dales outside of Barnsley for much of a century.
Since a cold and wet ferret exterminates with a little less enthusiasm
than a dry one, Reg used to keep his ferrets in his pants for hours when
he hunted in the rain -- and it always rained where he hunted.
"The world record was sixty seconds. Sixty seconds! I can stick a
ferret up me ass for longer than that."
So, at age sixty-nine, Reg Mellor found his game. As he stood in
front of me now, naked from the waist down, Reg looked every bit a
champion.
"So look close," he said again.
I did look, at an incredible tattoo of a zaftig woman on Reg's
thigh. His legs appeared crosshatched with scars. But I refused to "look
close."
"Come on, Reg," I said. "Do they bite your -- you know?"
"Do they!" he thundered with irritation as he pulled up his pants.
"Why, I've had 'em hangin' from me tool for hours an' hours an' hours!
Two at a time -- one on each side. I been swelled up big as that!" Reg
pointed to a five-pound can of instant coffee.
I then made the mistake of asking Reg Mellor if his age allowed him
the impunity to be the most daring ferret legger in the world. "And what
do ye mean by that?" he said.
"Well, I thought since you probably aren't going to have any more
children --"
"Are you sayin' I ain't pokin' 'em no more?" Reg growled with
menace. "Is that your meaning? 'Cause I am pokin' 'em for sure."
A small red hut sits in an overgrown yard outside Reg Mellor's door.
"Come outta there, ye bah-stards," Reg yelled as he flailed around the
inside of the hut looking for some ferrets that had just arrived a few
hours earlier. He emerged with two dirty white animals, which he held
quite firmly by their necks. They both had fearsome unblinking eyes as
hard and red as rubies.
A young man named Malcolm, with a punk haircut, came into the yard on
a motorcycle. "You puttin' 'em down again, Reg?" Malcolm asked.
Reg took one of the ferrets and stuck the beasts head deep into his
mouth.
"Oh yuk, Reg," said Malcolm.
Reg pulled the now quite embittered-looking ferret out of his mouth
and stuffed it and another ferret into his pants. He cinched his belt
tight, clenched his fists at his sides, and gazed up into the gray
Yorkshire firmament in what I guessed could only be a gesture of prayer.
Claws and teeth now protruded all over Reg's hyperactive trousers. The two
bulges circled round and round one leg, getting higher and higher, and
finally...they went up over to the other leg.
"Thank God, " I said.
"Yuk, Reg," said Malcolm.
"The claws," I managed. "Aren't they sharp, Reg?"
"Ay," said Reg, laconically. "Ay."
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End of Subgenius Digest
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