Getting In Touch With Your Inner Elmer Fudd

Here I am, at the computer, pounding my brain against the keyboard, trying to think of something to write.

“Dearest God of muses and creativity, breathe your essential nectar into my soul, so I may continue to inspire the languishing masses with my mediocre writing skills, and collect undeserved paychecks.”

And there, as if on cue, a flock of wild turkeys crosses the road and starts to pick all the rye grass seeds out of my garden.

I wouldn’t mind shooting one of them, but I don’t own a gun. So I have to settle for running out and scaring them away, which is fun (it turns out turkeys do fly), but it doesn’t help me with Thanksgiving Dinner.

If you’re like me, you would rather shoot your own food than have it delivered to you via an inefficient system of corporate farming and trucking that leaves a larger carbon footprint than the entire city of Houston, Texas.

While it may be hard for us animal lovers to pull the trigger on Bambi’s mommy or daddy, it’s better than contributing to the cruelty, torture, and corruption of the meat industry.

(When you hear the word “slaughterhouse,” do you think happy thoughts? No. There’s a reason for that.)

Therefore, everyone should learn to hunt.

Think about it: if every family in America got its meat from hunting instead of from the grocery store, we’d run out of wildlife faster than you could look up “cannibalism” on Google.

With everyone eating each other, the daunting problem of unfettered global population growth would go away on its own.

The alternative would be giving up meat. Ha! As if.

Widespread vegetarianism is hardly a realistic choice, even if it would result in a much more efficient food distribution system.

So I’ve decided to learn how to hunt. But there’s a problem. I come from the generation that can’t learn anything without the help of the Internet, and when you look up hunting on the Internet, you get very scared.

It turns out hunters get up very early, like 3 a.m., an hour when no human should ever wake up longer than it takes to fish a slice of leftover pizza from the fridge.

Hunting is expensive. Every hunter has his own lucky combination of deer-urine scents, skinning and dressing knives, binoculars, camouflage, and blaze orange, which have the combined effect of making the deer double over with helpless mocking laughter, which makes them much easier to shoot.

The best site out there for hunters is www.maine-hunting-camp.com, where you can find all kinds of useful stuff, including pictures of guys named Leon and Bert posing with recent kills. They also have links to hunting tips and video of a guy dressing a whitetail doe.

I thought “dressing” meant he had some pretty blouses and panty hose for it to try on. Turns out I have a lot more to learn.

Instead, he unseamed the poor animal and scooped out her entrails, all the while narrating his actions as if he was hosting his own show on the Food Network.

“Hear that? That’s gasses escaping.”

“I’m pushing down on the intestines as I slice through the meaty portion, to keep them out of the way.”

“Now I’m going to reach up and grab the esophagus and pull it down as far as I can.”

Yeah… maybe I’ll learn to hunt next year.

I Miss Information

I would like to apologize for using this blog/column (blogumn?) to recklessly and shamelessly promote the sport of badminton.

If you have been a regular reader of my work, you might be a little confused, since I have written more than 60 of these things and have never once mentioned badminton by name.

Bear with me. I'm following the logic of Randy Thomasson, president of the Campaign for Children and Families, a conservative activist group that opposes a new gay rights law in California.

According to the Sacramento Bee, a daily newspaper with a tremendous reputation in spite of its absurd name, the law prohibits public school personnel from “demeaning gay, bisexual or transgender orientation.”

The law is intended to prevent teachers from telling students that homosexuality is immoral.

Thomasson's take: "If you can't say anything negative (about homosexuality) … that means you have to promote it."

So, again, I must apologize for not saying anything negative about badminton. I hope my fervent support of this lawn game has not offended those of you who prefer croquet.

While I'm at it, I should also apologize for constantly pressuring my readers to love and accept carpet mold, swordfish, Sweet-n-Low, brothels, Idaho, and the St. Louis Blues.

I am ashamed of myself.

My regret would not be so intense if it weren't for something I read in a recent Bangor Daily News column by Pastor Lee Witting.

Witting wrote about this law, telling his readers that it prohibits the use of the term “mom and dad” in public schools so as not to offend kids with homosexual parents. He also said a similar regulation had been instituted in Britain against the the terms “mum and dad.”

As someone with more than three functioning brain cells, I immediately suspected this was complete hogwash; such a bill would never be signed into law by a Republican governor, not even a steroid-crazed one from California.

I emailed Witting and asked him to tell me where he got this info. He was kind enough to reply with a link to a website called WorldNet Daily, a pseudo-news organization with an obvious conservative agenda (the giant Ronald Regan T-shirt ad was my first clue).

A quick Google search turns up other sites, some of which repeat WorldNet Daily's claims about the law, and some of which identify them as products of a false “e-rumor.”

Whom to believe?

Eventually I hacked my way into the California legislature's public database and read (gasp!) the actual law itself. It says: “No teacher shall give instruction nor shall a school district sponsor any activity that reflects adversely upon persons because of their race or ethnicity, gender, disability, nationality, sexual orientation, or religion.”

As the Sacramento Bee points out, the law “does not specify what kinds of statements or activities would 'reflect adversely' upon gays.”

So it turns out Pastor Witting and WorldNet Daily were spreading lies.

At least, that's how it looks until you read between the lines.

Just like if you've been reading between the lines of this column, you would realize I'm actually trying to convince you to convert your children to a diet of monkey entrails.

You have to be careful where you get your information these days.