Posthumorous

Sports, sex, and the Soviets: Oldies but goodies from a decade of Postscripts.

    You learn a lot in the news business. For example, until I became a journalist, I did not know that Dutch people lose more left clogs at the seaside than right clogs, but in Scotland, right footwear falls into the sea more often than left, which proves something. This study was conducted by bird-watchers, who I presume got bored just watching birds, and the statistics are stunning: right shoes washed up onto Scotland at a 59.6 percent rate, lefts in Holland a staggering 63.5 percent.
    For about 10 years, as editor of a corner of the paper called Postscripts, I ran odd little stories like this. I recently came across a long-forgotten collection of my favorites, and so, with nothing to write about these days -- current events are too bizarre to parody -- I figure what the heck, let's forget about everything else and have a few laughs.
    I also learned that the graphite in one pencil can draw a line 115 kilometers long, former cannibals in New Guinea now get their protein entirely from Japanese canned mackerel (that's right: wholely mackerel), North America's oldest river is called New River, and the official state sport of Maryland is jousting.
    (I'd like to go on record as being the inventor of a new sport, train jousting. It works like this: instead of riding horses, the jousters are on trains going in opposite directions. The jouster who knocks the opposing train off the tracks, wins.)
    Six-year-old Javon Saucier of New Haven was playing football when he made a 30-yard dash to complete the greatest reception of his life: he caught a three-year-old toddler falling from a second-story window. (Good thing he wasn't jousting at the time.)
    A football fan in Woodinville, Washington, was watching a game on TV when the shit hit the fan. A huge chunk of frozen feces, accidentally released by an airplane, crashed through his roof into the living room. Firefighters at first feared it might be a meteorite, and quarantined the house while the missile was checked for radiation. Then it melted, and all doubt was dispelled. 
    In other sports news, Barbados beat Grenada. But it's not that simple. It was the most bizarre soccer game ever played, thanks to a poorly-conceived rule. Barbados was winning 2-0, needing to win by a margin of two to advance to the finals of the Caribbean Cup. With 20 minutes remaining, the Barbadians accidentally scored into their own net. That was when the farcical rule came into play: to ensure a result, it had been decided that a game won in overtime would be deemed the equivalent of a 2-0 victory.
    With three minutes left in the 2-1 game, Barbados suddenly stopped attacking the Grenada goaltender, and attacked their own net, scoring on themselves to tie the score at 2-2.
    The Grenada players, momentarily stunned, realized what was happening -- and proceeded to blitz their own goaltender. But they couldn't score on themselves because the Barbados players were ... defending the Grenada goal!
    The tactic worked: Barbados won the game in overtime.
    What's a soccer player worth? Back in the Soviet Onion, not much: a professional team in Poland acquired two top players from a Kiev squad for a truckload of potatoes.
    For the man course (sic, and sick): A Moscow family preparing a holiday dinner offered some of the meat they were preparing to their dog. The dog sniffed, whimpered and ran away. Then they found a bullet in the beef, which they'd bought at the state store. They called in the police, who informed them that they were about to eat human flesh.
    In a related development, chef Wouterus Lap of the Tel Aviv Sheraton was working at a hotel in Libraville, Congo, when a group of revolutionaries invaded the hotel, taking the staff hostage. Lap got to chatting with one of the guerrillas about his favorite subject: cooking. Turns out, his captor knew something about food preparation: he was a cannibal. The warrior told him not to worry, because he didn't find Lap appetizing: "White men have a bitter taste." Lap did get an interesting culinary tip from him: The best part of a person is the fingers because "they make for such good nibbling." Gives new meaning to the term "finger food."
    Remember the famous speech by the Soviets when they left Afghanistan? No, you wouldn't, and here's why. Lt. Gen. Boris Gromov was directed to proceed with the departure ceremony precisely as follows: "At 10 o'clock local time General Gromov will be the last to cross the bridge. He will pass without looking back. Then he will stop and deliver a speech, but just to himself. It will last one minute, seven seconds. It will not be written down or listened to." You could call it Marx & Censor. 
    The military and bureaucracy go together like Karl Marx and Groucho. Take Second Lieutenant Ilyin, who tried to assassinate president Brezhnev in 1969. He was thrown into an insane asylum, his military career pretty much over. Now, when there's an attempted assassination, what must inevitably follow? The paperwork. The Soviet army forgot to formally sack Ilyin at the time, and 21 years later, he resurfaced -- to sue the army for back pay.
    Of all the wacky news stories from the USSR -- including the one about the so-called "tobacco minister" who was fired because of a cigarette shortage (his name, believe it or not, was Vladilen Nikitin) -- this might be my favorite:
    In 1990, a Soviet cosmonaut returned after 11 months in orbit. He had to be administered smelling salts when he was told the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

POSTSCRIPTS provided important coverage of world leaders. The UK's John Major was reported to have dyed his hair -- gray. Muammar Gaddafi suggested shipping off all Jews to either Alsace or Alaska (he apparently gave this a lot of thought). The Sultan of Brunei, the richest man in the world who lives in a 1,788-room, $400 million marble-and-mahogany palace with gold-plated bathroom sinks and 2,000 telephones, said of democracy: "We tried it. It didn't work." It's easy to get rich, according to Paraguay leader General Andres Rodriguez. Described in a newspaper article as "a symbol of how the military have enriched themselves," the report says: "Once challenged how, on a general's salary of $400 a month, he was able to own a $5 million property, he is alleged to have replied: 'It is because I gave up smoking.'"
    If you had read Postscripts religiously, you would have learned a lot about literature. We told you about such classic books as Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice. And Big And Very Big Hole Drilling. The Joy of Chickens, and its very antithesis, Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality. How to Avoid Big Ships.
    How to avoid bad children's books is what we have censors for. Two-thirds of 105 British authors of children's books have been censored. How excessive does this political correctness get? One writer was asked to remove a scene involving a grassy lawn, because many children do not have a garden.
    I'm sure many Postscripts readers promptly subscribed to Foreskin Quarterly, the journal of circumcision. You wouldn't think there's much to write about, but there is: the magazine makes a mountain out of a mohel.
    There is no museum for circumcision enthusiasts, which is a dumb idea, but in New Carrollton, Maryland, there is a Museum of Menstruation, which is even dumber.
    If any organization contributes less to civilization than that museum, it's the UN. (Not for no reason is the regional UN headquarters located on Jerusalem's Hill of Evil Council.) Israel can only wish to be as popular in the UN as pedophiles. The 54-nation UN Economic and Social Council voted to grant recognition to a gay group that included the North American Man Boy Love Association. Later, the US tried to change its vote when it was realized that NAMBLA advocates sex with children.
    Like those five teenage girls in San Antonio, who had sex with an AIDS-infected gang member as an initiation rite. They were trying to prove they're tough.
    The epitome of tough is Bernadette Obelebouli, 34, of the Congo. She embarked on a three-day, 100-kilometer walk, which is admirable in itself, but she was pregnant. When she got to the village of Otslaka, she paused for a moment to give birth, scooped up the baby, and kept right on going. A day later, 50 kilometers on, and now in Lekana, she had to take a break because a second baby was born. No problem -- who can't carry two infants for 50 kilometers? She wound up her trek the next day in Djambala, where, not feeling quite herself, she checked into a hospital and completed the most amazing triplet birth in history.
    Hard to conceive.