Greetings everyone, and welcome to another edition of the news you wish were the news every single day of the year.
I have to admit that 2010 has kind of a dark theme to some of the funniest events, especially concerning President Obama and his personal plague of vermin.
I mean, come on. Have we ever seen a commander in chief with such a magnetic attraction for flies, bees and rats?
White House buzz
Let's start with the fly that just couldn't seem to get enough of Mr. Obama. During a speech by the president June 22, this single insect found Obama's words so enthralling, it just had to become one with the face of "the One."
In fact, despite the president's best efforts to shoo the fly away, the pest made a succesful landing on Obama's face, prompting many websites to dub him "Lord of the Flies."
President Obama's official 2010 portrait: "Come fly with me." |
Radio and TV host Glenn Beck remarked: "Does he have nerve endings in his face? Seriously, have you ever had a fly walk across your face and you left it there?"
Now that we know Obama's not a no-fly zone, it's also strange to recall how a swarm of bees delayed his important court business on a basketball court.
According to the Hill, a swarm of "thousands of bees" gathered outside the White House in May. The small army of insects hovered as Obama tried to leave 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue to shoot hoop at Fort McNair. And by the time the president returned at noon, the bees were mysteriously nowhere in sight.
Just days later, some sort of rodent scurried in front of the president as he was delivering a speech on the steps of the White House.
To this day, no one has said with absolute certainty what kind of rodent it was that upstaged Obama, but "Today Show" host Al Roker noted, "All we know is, these little Secret Service mice wrestled it to the ground."
And once again, with all the critters showing the president such undying love, Glenn Beck proffered: "At some point, the president's gonna come out and go, 'OK, look, I am lord of the underworld.'"
The springtime plague was all but forgotten until mid-October when Obama hit the campaign trail for Democrats seeking re-election. That's when a series of photographs by the Associated Press and Reuters moved on the wires, making the president appear, well, as if the promoter of change were himself a victim of a transformation.
By the light of the silvery loon? |
"These pictures, they look demonic. And I don't say this lightly," radio giant Rush Limbaugh
said. "An American president has never had facial expressions like this. At least we've never seen photos of an American president with facial
expressions like this."
Limbaugh's comment about the president resembling a demon was reminiscent of a Hillary Clinton glamour shot taken by Reuters and posted on the Drudge Report with its own fiendish headline:
Hillary Clinton appears to be the "secretary of stare" in this Reuters photograph posted on the Drudge Report. |
The devil's in the detailing
Scary images weren't just limited to the United States.
In Budapest, Hungary, of all places, Satan himself apparently felt the need to show his face in a Hungarian family's newly renovated bathroom.
Laszlo Csrefko of Budapest, Hungary, says an image of Satan the devil mysteriously appeared on his brand-new shower tile, prompting his family to seek an exorcist. (courtesy Orange News) |
"I was naked coming out of the shower and I could suddenly see his eyes
staring into me," said a horrified Andrea Csrefko, after
bathing for the first time with her new shower tile. "I just screamed and ran."
"We can't clean it off and it wasn't there when we put the tiles up," said
Andrea's 52-year-old husband, Laszlo.
"It just appeared overnight and nothing can move it. The room is always ice
cold no matter how high we turn the heating up and we've just stopped using it
because it's too spooky. We wash in the sink downstairs now."
The family reportedly sought assistance from an exorcist to purge any evil spirits
from the commode.
"We need some help from God or from the spirit world or we're going to seal
up the room forever," Laszlo said.
The story doesn't end there, though, and gets even weirder. After I posted the Satan-in-the-bathroom story, people started e-mailing me to say the face in the tile looked eerily similar to the mysterious face that was seen in the smoke of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks. You decide:
The face that launched a thousand conspiracies about the Sept. 11 attacks. |
I'm not from around here
Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, a self-proclaimed witch told a traffic cop she wasn't subject to earthly laws since she was, of course, "a being from another world." That was right before she sped off with the policeman attached to her car.
Since Eilish De Avalon claims to be a being from another world, we just can't be certain of what we're looking at here. |
The out-of-this-world scene took place in Geelong, Australia, when the speed demon was pulled over.
"When asked to produce her driver's license, Eilish De Avalon replied that she did not have one," said Officer Geoff Lamb. "When asked why not, she said, 'I'm a being from another world and don't require one.' When asked to state her name and address De Avalon replied, 'I have a universal name that is not recognized here.'"
Lamb said that, when asked for identification, De Avalon replied, "Your laws and penalties
don't apply to me. I'm not accepting them, I'm sorry, I must go, thank you." That's when she drove off, with another officer pinned to her car, as he tried to snatch her keys from the ignition.
I just want to know, if indeed she's not from Earth in the first place, why is she driving a car? Don't they have better means of transportation in other parts of the universe?
Saving grace
With all that spookiness, thank God, literally, we had more than our fair share of trumpeted appearances by Jesus to keep us safe. It never ceases to amaze me the variety of locations at which images of what many people believe to be the Son of God seem to manifest themselves.
This year, we had purported apparitions in bread, pizza sauce, chicken feathers, a frying pan, a sock and the center of a tree branch, dubbed by some in the media as Tree-sus.
Not living by bread alone |
Pizza pie in the sky sauce? |
On a wing and a prayer |
From the frying pan to the friar |
The holier-than-thou sock |
Has the tree of life finally been found? |
I really hope that when Jesus does come back to Earth, people won't say, "Oh, that can't be Him because He doesn't look anything like He did on that piece of bread or in the frying pan."
No escaping this
Every year, there are noteworthy flatulence stories that get aired by the media, and 2010 is no exception.
For instance, at the Kirseberg prison in Malmö, Sweden, an inmate was warned over a series of concerted, noxious attacks on others, with jail staff suspecting he intentionally shared his foul bowel to express disdain toward the system.
"I had an upset stomach while I was playing cards but did not want to fart there," the 21-year-old convict said. "So I went over to the guards instead."
The inmate claimed his blasting was "all noise and no fragrance," but he was warned that any future floating of air biscuits would not be taken lightly.
Meanwhile, in the good ol' USA, a woman was being blamed by her own daughter for causing global warming due to her personal brand of gas. The issue raised such a stink in her household, she wrote a doctor in the local newspaper to ask advice.
Her question: "My daughter complains that I flatulate more often than most individuals. Furthermore, she claims that the gas an individual passes contributes to global warming. I don't know if I am physically able to keep my gas to myself to go green. Is my daughter really right?"
And the doc's response: "Is your daughter for real? No human can stop the production of intestinal gas. Every human passes gas, including your daughter. People do so from 10 to 20 times a day."
I'm just glad someone had the intestinal fortitude to say the word "flatulate."
And while we're visiting the best bathroom humor of the year, we can't forget the British town that's so proud of its name, it etched it in massive granite to make sure everyone knows it's No. 1. Or in this case, No. 2.
A solid movement led this British town to make sure its name is known by all. |
 Apparently, the regular welcome sign was just so irresistible, thieves kept stealing it.
"We would get a nice new shiny sign from the council and five minutes later, it
was gone," said Ian Ventham, chairman of the local council.
"It was my wife's idea to carve it out of stone. We thought, 'Let's put in a ton and a half of stone and see them try and take that away in the back of a Ford Fiesta.'"
Chew the fat
On the police blotter, everyone needs to keep an an ear out for Anna Mae Godfrey.
It seems this 21-year-old Nebraska gal did not take kindly to being called "fat" outside of a house party in Lincoln.
According to reports, Godfrey allegedly ran half a block to chase down and tackle the man who called her a chubster, then proceeded to chomp off a chunk of his right ear.
Anna Mae Godfrey: Can you ear me now? |
This story is just loaded with irony.
First of all, her Facebook photo shows her wearing a peace sign around her neck. But even more delicious is her solution to being called "fat."
I mean, if you don't want people thinking you've got an overactive appetite, maybe you should cut back on gobbling off parts of their noggin.
See me, feel me, pummel me
It was a tense year at U.S. airports, where many people objected to their private parts being scanned or groped by airport security.
At the Raleigh-Durham airport in North Carolina, the Raleigh News & Observer reported how retired Army officer Tim Ely was subjected to an intimate pat-down because of a false alarm from the body scanner.
After an agent groped around his private parts from in front and from behind, the 63-year old challenged him to explain what sort of anomaly had turned up on his full-body scan to prompt the hands-on treatment.
"He said there was something suspicious hanging from between my legs," Ely said.
"I told him that something suspicious was my [manhood], you dummy."
TSA screener Rolando Negrin: Size doesn't matter |
In an even more bizarre case, TSA screener Rolando Negrin in Miami went ballistic after he himself was scanned.
He actually ended up battering a fellow worker with a police baton.
And what sparked his anger?
According to the arrest affidavit, Negrin objected to the constant ribbing about the size of his own "equipment" revealed in the airport's full-body scanners.
Negrin, a.k.a. "Tiny," said "he could not take the jokes any more and lost his mind."
Smooth operator
Megan Barnes of Florida considered smoothest driver of 2010 |
Meanwhile, a few miles away in the Florida Keys, a woman driver caused a car crash because she was a little preoccupied with some personal grooming.
Megan Barnes, 37, was busy multitasking, specifically shaving her bikini area while her ex-husband took the wheel from the passenger seat.
"She said she was meeting her boyfriend in Key West and wanted to be ready for the visit," Trooper Gary Dunick told the Key West Citizen.
"If I wasn't there, I wouldn't have believed it. About 10 years ago I stopped a guy in the exact same spot ... who had three or four syringes sticking out of his arm. It was just surreal and I thought, 'Nothing will ever beat this.' Well, this takes it."
The tipping point
Politicians are always under a microscope for the silly things they say, but this year, there's one congressman who deserves a special tip of the hat.
During a House hearing on sending extra U.S. Marines to Guam, Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., actually suggested the weight of the additional military personnel could make the entire island flip over in the water.
"My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize," the former judge told the Armed Services Committee. His remarks were immortalized on YouTube:
In the wake of his comments, Johnson has said he was only joking. Yeah, that's the ticket, just joking.
What's interesting is that in a year when Democrats across the nation were tossed out of the House in a political wipeout, Johnson was re-elected with 75 percent of the vote.
With such a one-sided concentration of backers, I wonder how long before his district capsizes.
And then there's this.
Phil Davison, running for treasurer in Stark County, Ohio, gave a clinic in how not to give a campaign speech. Watch and learn from this video that became an Internet sensation:
While Phil had the gonads to give his speech without a teleprompter, he apparently forgot to bring his brains that day.
Law is a many-splendored thing
Finally, it's time to share one of the tackiest and funniest commercials ever.
It was originally produced by South Florida divorce lawyer Steve Miller three years ago, but it went viral in 2010 for some odd reason. It's 59 seconds' worth of pure marketing magic:
As Miller says in the ad, "Pay up, and you're on your way to getting rid of that vermin you call a spouse."
Just classic.
And how fitting it is to end on the vermin note, since we began with vermin all over the White House occupier in chief.
That's it for another year.
I hope everyone has a wonderful feeling for 2011 – everyone, that is, except the TSA airport screeners.
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