5/25/05: Would this man harm a squirrel?

Question for our male readers: say you have a burger for lunch, a big greasy one, fast food style, with some kind of special sauce oozing out all over your hands as you eat it. And say you also have some fries along with that. Oily ones dipped in ketchup. And that oily ketchup blend mixes with the burger grease and the special sauce and coats your fingertips as you shovel the food into your gaping mouth-hole. And maybe you go through like five napkins over the course of this lunch, trying as best you can to keep your face and fingers from getting too grimy.

Then as you finish your lunch and you're throwing out the wrappers, you get a strong urge to pee. Do you stop in the bathroom to wash your hands properly before handling your pecker? Or do you get right in there and pee, knowing you're going to wash up on the way out anyway and just accepting the fact that you may get a little food slime on your member along the way? It's a toughie.

Speaking of things that make you want to wash your hands, I saw old friend Mike D. Hunt on Monday night for a couple of beers at our lonely old hangout Shades of Green. Very good to see Mike, and he seemed in excellent spirits. Although I should mention that he wasn't too pleased when he heard that Big Jim Lang has been talking mess about him on the monkeyweb chatboards.  He did, however, grudgingly admit that he could probably slay at least one lion on his own without using a weapon. He didn't elaborate on a plan (Mike, feel free to do so), but I wouldn't bet against him. The thing about Mike is that he possesses an almost superhuman combination of physical prowess and mental acuity, and he is always being tempted strongly by the Dark Side. You really just don't want to fuck with the guy, even if you're a 500 pound lion. It's a losing proposition.

Mike and I punished his co-worker Matt with a barrage of stories about our drunken college exploits. I can think of almost nothing more excruciating than listening to two other guys talk about their shared glory days, and I give Matt props for his patience. There was the night in 1992 or '93 when we drunkenly drove Mike's beat-up Nissan pickup truck to Chicago from Madison and made it as far as the parking lot of an oasis McDonald's somewhere in Northern Illinois before growing too tired to carry on. The two of us passed out in a tangle of sore arms and legs and nearly froze in the cab of the truck. I gently woke Mike at around 8am by rattling a bone-cracking fart off the top of his head. Perhaps my finest hour. Before we had departed the night before, I left a note for my good buddy, roommate and co-worker Brian, asking him to please tell our boss that I wasn't feeling well and couldn't make it to work the next day. Of course, Mike had flipped the note over and written on the reverse side, "I am going to die tonight and I'm taking Hans with me."  I still don't know if he meant it.

See, other people's stories are torture, and I could fill an entire book with tales of Mr. Hunt. Feel free to share your own, but keep them on the clean, unincriminating side or you can best believe you will awaken to find Mike staring in your bedroom window at some point later this week. And he will almost certainly bludgeon you to death with a metal rod.

Speaking of which, today a co-worker's girlfriend saw a Catholic priest bludgeoning a squirrel to death on the front steps of a church. The priest had a wild look in his eye and was practically foaming at the mouth with rage as he repeatedly struck the squirrel with a large metal rod. The squirrel was emitting an ungodly scream for several minutes. During the assault, a young female parishioner stepped forward to protest, and she was forcefully ushered back inside the church by a nun who slammed the door behind them.  Eventually, the priest decapitated the squirrel. Then he went back inside the church and returned with a dustpan and broom. He swept the squirrel and its head into the dustpan, heaved it into the garden adjoining the church and walked back inside. My friend's girlfriend stormed into the church and found the priest washing his face off with some holy water or somethin', mumbling some prayers, still red with anger. She confronted him about his savage attack and he replied, with a laugh, that the squirrel had desecrated the church. Someone called the ASPCA on his ass and within minutes, there was a cop car and an ASPCA team on site. They took the squirrel out in a little squirrel body bag and apparently they are going to press charges on this dude.

Verbungle.com wants it made clear that we do not condone the slaughtering of squirrels on public streets in front of small children, no matter how much shit the squirrel has deposited on your steps. I say let the guy spend a night at Rikers and maybe he'll learn a thing or two about desecration.

I kind of get the feeling that Manu Ginobili has given up on his hair for the time being and is planning on addressing it in the offseason.

Sorry about the lack of a softball recap last week. We assigned it to two of our top sports columnists, both of whom were unable to get their arms around the story. I think there may be a work slowdown in progress around here. The whole sports department wants more money. Don't they know the dot-com boom is over? Ah, well. We may fold last week's recap into next week's, we'll see, In the meantime, you should know that D. Lee got off the Schneid.  His team, Predator, dismantled my team, Alien, in both halves of a twin bill. Called shots abounded for Predator. Kissel hit a called grand slam. Pete B. went called yard again. D. Lee and Justin and plenty of other dudes did as well. I even went out of the park lefty a couple of times, once illegally called. When we don't have a real nice mushy ball, the called and uncalled home runs seem to dictate the outcome of the game, perhaps too much so.  Predator had a lot of the former, we had a lot of the latter. No good. We may need to do something about this.

As predicted, Brian Castro steamrolled to victory in the lyric stumpah game. He's still got his doubters, and the private investigator we hired to check up on him has gone so far as to seize his google search history, but until the results from that analysis are in, all we can say is the man knows his god damn lyrics. Pretty unreal. Congrats and expect your prize in the next few weeks, depending on Cafe Press lag time. We may roll out a new stumpah game in the next couple of weeks, we'll let you know.

For now, though: whodat? (#7, 10 points.) And whodat? (#8, ten points.) Oh, and wheredat? (7 points.)  You may begin answering immediately.