Editor's Note: This article is not one of mine. It was sent by Andy Olsen (see Web site here), an old friend from Seattle, who is responsible for many of the "Joke of the Week" submissions. This item deals with felching, an activity so new that it has not yet made it into the lexicon of respectable dictionaries. I think you will be able to come up with a definition of this intransitive verb on your own from the context of the article below. The town shown in the background of the picture below is Provincetown, Massachusetts. The reason for its inclusion may not be obvious to those who don't live in the Northeast.
"In retrospect, lighting the match was my big mistake. But I was only trying to retrieve the gerbil," Eric Tomaszewski told bemused doctors in the Severe Burns Unit of Salt Lake City Hospital. Tomaszewski and his homosexual partner, Andrew "Kiki" Farnum, had been admitted for emergency treatment after a felching session had gone seriously wrong.
"I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum and slipped Raggot, our gerbil, in," he explained. "As usual, Kiki shouted out "Armageddon," my cue that he'd had enough. I tried to retrieve Raggot, but he wouldn't come out again, so I peered into the tube and struck a match, thinking the light might attract him."
At a hushed press conference, a hospital spokesman described what happened next. "The match ignited a pocket of intestinal gas, and a flame shot out the tubing, igniting Mr Tomaszewski's hair and severely burning his face. It also set fire to the gerbil's fur and whiskers, which, in turn, ignited a larger pocket of gas further up the intestine, propelling the rodent out like a cannonball."
Tomaszewski suffered second degree burns and a broken nose from the impact of the gerbil, while Farnum suffered first and second degree burns to his anus and lower intestinal tract.
THE TOP TEN SCARIEST THINGS ABOUT THIS STORY
10. "I pushed a cardboard tube up his rectum ..."
9. "So I peered into the tube ..." (I'm sorry, but that's like looking through a telescope into hell. I'd rather use binoculars to stare at the sun.)
8. That poor gerbil (who obviously suffers from low self-esteem) being shot out of the guy's ass, like Rocky the Flying Squirrel on the old "Rocky & Bullwinkle Show."
7. Suffering a broken nose from a gerbil being launched out of someone's anus. I'm just guessing, but I seriously doubt that said gerbil was springtime fresh after his little journey into Kiki's "tunnel of love."
6. This happened in Salt Lake City. What kind of people are those Mormons? I'm starting to get a whole new image of the Osmond family.
5. People who do this kind of thing and then admit what they were doing when taken to the emergency room. Sorry, but I think I would have made up a story about a gang of roving, pyromaniac, anal-sex fiends breaking into my house and sodomizing me with a charcoal lighter before I admitted the truth. Call me old-fashioned, but I just can't imagine looking at a doctor and saying, "Well Doc, it's like this. You see, we have this gerbil named Raggot, and we took this cardboard tube ..."
4. "First- and second-degree burns to the anus." Wouldn't this make the burning itch and discomfort of hemorrhoids a welcome relief? How does one ever take a healthy dump after something like this? And the smell of a burning anus must be in the top-ten most-horrible scents on the face of God's green Earth.
3. People named "Kiki," which is obviously the Polynesian word for "idiotic white men who insert rodents up their butts."
2. What kind of a hospital would hold a press conference on this?
1. People walking around with these volcano-like pockets of gas in their rectums.
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