Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Just because I love to laugh.









This next one has a slow start. Give it time. And not speaking Japanese is not a problem. Funny stuff.



There is one, spur-of-the-moment prank which I wish I had caught on tape. A friend of mine, Dylan, was a performer who had to do a show one weekend. Since I was involved with his management I traveled with him. After the performance we decided to take the long way back and just travel some of the back roads and see what happening.

We came across a very remote reptile park someplace where we did not expect it. So I suggested we stop and look around. The park was mostly outdoors. There were buildings that housed the reptiles which were behind glass. We were on the outside looking in. This was not your state-of-the-art reptile center by any means. The area outside was not paved so much as it had dirt paths with weeds and grass growing.

It was rather hot and Dylan was in shorts. As we walked from display to display I grabbed one of these long weeds with a cat tail like fluffy piece at the end. We stopped in front of one glassed enclosure but couldn't see a snake inside at all. Dylan bent over for a closer look and I took the cat-tail of the weed and ran it across the back of his leg. With snakes on his mind you can imagine precisely what he thought. I don't think I stopped laughing for the next hour. And once he realized that it was the weed he joined in --- thankfully since he was built like a brick shit-house and could beat the crap out of me if he wanted.

The other great prank took place at my home. The property was rather large for the area, with losts of bushes and trees. I think the best count we had was that there were something like 40 trees on the property. When I first moved in there was a problem with spiders. And when I say spiders, I'm talking about the King Kong of spiders. At least it appeared that way to me. It was known as the baboon spider. They are basically relatives of the tarantula—though thankfully I didn't know that at the time.

These things look even bigger than they are when their legs are spread out. The garden was quite large and there was heavy bush and vines around the back fences offering total privacy and quiet. It was one of the reasons I liked the house so much and decided to buy it. There was a cottage on the property as well and next to it was the car port and the parking lot. The entrance to the garden was there.

At the time I had just hired a friend of mine, David, to work for me. And one of the tasks he was going to undertake, since I hadn't yet hired a gardener, was mowing the grass in the back yard. Earlier in the day I had come across another one of these spiders, far more scary than they are dangerous. That it is unlikely to actually hurt me didn't mean I wanted them crawling all over the property, especially since they didn't seem to find it difficult to get inside. When I came across one of them I, without any guilt, and with premeditation would spray the hell out of them with a can of Raid. Due to their size it did take a while to take effect.

I had trapped one in large jar and with the bug spray had sent it on to its reward. But I wasn't going to open the jar until I was completely sure. David was getting ready to mow the lawn. The mower was brand new and still inside the box and needed assembly. We had opened the box earlier to check it out. Since the spider was clearly deceased I opened the top lids of the box and placed the spider on the side set of lids below the main lids.

The mower was under the car port and David went over to open the box. He wasn't paying much attention and opened the main lids without seeing the dead spider lying on the smaller, side lid. He reached for that lid and started lifting it up as well. But as he lifted the lid the spider slide down the lid. This was working better than I had hoped. The movement of the spider caught his attention just it slid off the lid of the box and landed on his foot. He was wearing sandals so the spider actually landed on his foot.

With a rather loud scream he tried to kick the spider off his foot. Since it was dead that wasn't a problem but his sandal flew about 40 feet across my parking lot into bush on the other side. I guess you had to be there.

The last prank I will bore you with is one that I committed as a wee lad. Like many I had a fascination of snakes and would scour the nearby fields for them. If I found one I caught it and kept it. I had an aquarium with a snake in my room. The neighbor lady came to babysit one day and I called her into my room to show her my snake. As she walked in I had the snake in my hand and handed it to her saying: "Here, hold this."

She did. She had the snake held right behind its head and looked at what she was holding with complete horror. She screamed and screamed and screamed. Her problem was that she was afraid to let go and horrified to hold on. The poor snake was looking straight at this crazy woman rather bewildered. She stared back at the snake screaming. Good thing for the snake that air born sounds are not heard by them since our poor babysitter had a pair of pipes. Eventually she threw the snake down and ran out of the room and out of the house. Mother was not amused but then I didn't do it to entertain her. Considering I was around eight at the time I can say that one prank has given me decades worth of chuckles.

What is your best prank.

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