Tag: general silliness

Word has just come in that a male centaur has escaped from a Velociraptor breeding facility operated by the Internal Revenue Service in Ongs Hat, New Jersey. NJ State Police are on the hunt for the monster, which broke down a high-security picket fence and disappeared into the Pine Barrens.

Government emails dealing with the centaur, and with the day-to-day maintenance of the bloodthirsty dinosaurs, cannot be found.

Why was the IRS breeding raptors? “Don’t even ask!” says our confidential source. And why was an adult centaur being held captive at the raptor farm? “He didn’t pay his taxes,” says our source, “and they were going to make an example of him.”

The raptor farm is part of the IRS’s “Smart Growth” program, established for the purpose of finding new and unexpected ways to extract money from the American people. The facility at Ongs Hat costs $22 billion a year to operate.

“They’re going to have to get that centaur before he has a chance to talk about all the things he’s seen at the raptor facility,” said our source. “You know, they always underrate centaurs. Just because you have a horse’s a** doesn’t mean you are a horse’s ass! Let this one get hold of a Fox News reporter, and a lot of major figures in this government are not going to be around tomorrow.”

I am sorry I ever got involved in the controversy about centaurs being real or not. Feelings on both sides are running high, and it’s not much fun getting caught in the crossfire.

Among famous, well-respected, highly reputable persons who have actually seen centaurs, at least supposedly, are Theseus, Davy Crockett, Pliny the Elder, and H.P. Lovecraft. None of these witnesses is available for further questioning. It is also said that Jimmy Carter saw a centaur once.

For the time being, here are the facts.

*The best time to see a centaur is when you are intoxicated or asleep.

*California is the state with the most centaur sightings.

*Centaurs constitute a small but important voting bloc for the Democrat Party, especially in swing states.

*No centaur has ever been seen riding a bicycle or driving an SUV.

*The world’s greatest living expert on centaurs, Professor Jeremy Coldsore, has been hired by NASA to provide definitive proof of their existence–the centaurs’, not NASA’s.

To those who continue to email me with passionate arguments for one side or another, I can only repeat that it’s not up to me to make a ruling on this issue. Please direct your questions to a higher authority.

I have re-entered the Book of Judges in my Bible-reading, and yesterday the name Chushanrishathaim (in Judges 3:8-9) jumped out at me. He is mentioned as a “king of Mesopotamia” who oppressed Israel and was overthrown by Israel’s first judge, Othniel, the nephew of Caleb.

It isn’t every day you run across a name like this. It consists of two elements: a proper name, “Chushan,” which can also be rendered “Cush,” and relates either to a region north of Babylon or south of Egypt; and a kind of title, “Rishathaim,” which, in ancient times, meant “double wickedness,” and also could mean “governor of two presidencies,” or both at once. So the name belongs to a powerful bad guy named “Chushan” or “Cush” who came into Israel from, probably, somewhere to the north of Babylon.

If we could pin the man down more precisely, we might have a shot at getting a firm date for the beginning of the period of the Judges. But no such luck. The Book of Judges harks back to a very unsettled era from which little hard information has come down to us from non-Biblical sources–kind of like the 5th and 6th centuries in Britain. The Bible is not concerned with events in Egypt and Babylon; and they had troubles aplenty of their own.

As I pursued my research, I came upon a website called “Names of Cute Baby’s [sic]” ( http://namesof.com/name-Chushanrishathaim ). If you want to name your baby “Chushanrishathaim,” they’ll teach you where the name comes from, what it means, and how to pronounce it.

“What should we name our baby, dear?”

“Oh, I dunno. How about Chushanrishathaim?”

“Oh, I like that! It has a certain ring to it! Wasn’t he on Dancing With the Stars?”

Why in the world would you want to name your baby Chushanrishathaim? It was bad enough when every other baby boy was being named Zack, and baby girls got stuck with names like Cadence and Destiny. But Chushanrishathaim is going a bit too far.

What ever happened to names like Tommy and Susan?

 

See that guy over there–the one who seems to be always leaning his rump against some object completely covered by a drop-cloth? From the waist up he’s normal, even handsome. But from the waist down he doesn’t look quite right, although he wears very baggy pants to disguise whatever’s wrong about him. It would be bad manners to go up and ask him what he’s got under the drop-cloth, or what’s funny about his hips and legs.

Chances are he’s a centaur. The back half, the horse half, he hides under the drop-cloth. He wears baggy pants to hide the horse’s forelegs. Female centaurs wear long, loose dresses.

You’ve been seeing them lately, haven’t you? Just sort of hanging out in front of the Seven-Eleven, or outside the laundromat: any old place. Where have they come from? According to the Liberal Bible, Book of Kerry, 6:66, “The centaurs are here to protect the Hispanic world from Global Warming.” But you can’t get a centaur to confirm this or deny it. In fact, it can be dangerous trying to get a centaur to say anything at all.

It has been suggested that centaurs are the product of genetic engineering by the mysterious beings known as Slim Jims, who come from inside the Big Dipper. This remains to be proved.

Why are they here? What are they getting set to do?

Blamed if I know.

I have been getting a lot of flak from centaurs lately, email from all over the country.

“You are completely wrong about us centaurs,” writes Tomble Gezunt from Montana. “The centaur community is mad at you for depicting us as animals and savages. You seem to have got us mixed up with taurcents, which are backwards centaurs–horse up front, human behind. We don’t appreciate it!”

What about the objection that, even with genetic engineering, a centaur is impossible because the horse half would grow so much faster than the human half? Mrs. Haffa Horsy, from right here in New Jersey, answered that one.

“What do you know about it, buster? So the horse half grows faster. So what? Eventually the human half catches up. My horse-body was full grown while my lady-piece was still a baby. Don’t you think my parents knew how to deal with that? To us centaurs, that’s no big deal at all! In fact, it’s normal.”

From Washington, D.C., came this angry comment from a centaur named Roy Patterson.

“You make out like we are just a bunch of drunks, as bad as satyrs. But you don’t know ****. In my neighborhood we got centaurs who are lawyers, public servants, and even one who is a veterinarian. It’s them satyrs who run around drunk all the time. Centaurs are too busy earning an honest living!”

Well, who would’ve thought it? Apparently there are a lot more centaurs out there than I imagined. I wonder why it’s so unusual to see one.