[106] in Humor
HUMOR: SPECIAL OLYMPIC DAVE! (part 6)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (abennett@MIT.EDU)
Thu Feb 24 22:01:43 1994
From: abennett@MIT.EDU
To: humor@MIT.EDU
Reply-To: drewsome@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 24 Feb 94 22:00:02 EST
Subject: Norwegian Super Bowl
LILLEHAMMER, Norway -- I went to see cross country skiing,
an Olympic event that -- talk about your poor planning -- was held
OUTDOORS. This was very unfortunate, because the weather, in
defiance of the known laws of physics, has gotten even colder. You
have to walk very carefully for fear of tripping over body parts
that have fallen off of visiting journalists without their
noticing it. It is so cold that the Norwegians won't tell us the
real temperature; they are using a secret temperature code, called
"centigrade."
It was approximately 740 kilometers below zero when I
arrived at the cross country ski stadium, which was, needless to
say, jammed with thousands of happy Norwegians, bouncing up and
down, ringing cowbells, blowing horns and emitting cheerful puffs
of salmon breath into the frigid air. Some of them had been there
all night. They LOVE cross country skiing. This is a huge event
for them, very much like our Super Bowl, except that at the Super
Bowl, you can actually see the game.
This is not the case with cross country skiing. You do
catch a brief glimpse of the skiers at the start; they take off
one at a time, 30 seconds apart, wearing their aerodynamic Spider
Man outfits, while the crowd roars insanely. But the skiers
immediately ski OUT OF THE STADIUM. Just like that, they're GONE,
possibly to Sweden, and sometimes they don't come back for hours.
It's as if you were at a football game, and on the opening
kickoff, the player who caught the ball sprinted out the stadium
exit, with all the other players running right behind him, and you
spent the rest of the game ringing a cowbell and waiting for them
to come back.
Speaking of freezing to death: I have formulated an
alarming new theory as to why the Norwegians do not seem to notice
the cold: they are eating radioactive reindeer. Really. According
to the Norway Tribune, an English-language newspaper here, there
is still a lot of radioactive material that drifted over after the
Chernobyl nuclear accident, and it is showing up in the reindeer
meat, thus giving a whole new meaning to the famous song lyrics:
"And if you ever saw it,
"You would even say it glows."
And speaking of scary animals, there has been a:
MAJOR NEW DEVELOPMENT IN THE WOLF-URINE STORY
I have now been in contact with TWO high-level Norwegian
State Railways officials in regards to this fast-breaking story,
which is threatening to overshadow even -- Dare I say it? -- Tonya
Harding. According to a maintenance official named Knut Langballe,
the Norwegians are NOT, contrary to published reports, merely
using synthetic wolf urine to repel moose from their railroad
tracks; they are using a synthetic MIXTURE, which simulates wolf
urine, lynx urine and -- get ready -- WOLVERINE urine. I swear I
am not making this up. These people are truly on the cutting edge
of moose-repellent science.
Langballe did not reveal the exact chemical formula, which
is probably a Norwegian state secret. But he did state, for the
record, that "it smells really bad."
I can vouch for this. After I spoke with Langballe, a
photographer and I met in downtown Lillehammer with Arild Vollan,
information director for the state railways, who brought a small
plastic tube of moose repellent with him and let us actually sniff
it. All I can say is this: If we had dropped this stuff on
Baghdad, Saddam Hussein would be a distant memory today.
In addition to the moose repellent, Norwegian State
Railways tracks moose by helicopter and radios their locations to
Moose Command Central. Despite these efforts, more than 300 moose
have been hit by trains so far this winter, often causing
considerable damage to the locomotives.
"Also," stated Langballe, "the moose gets minced."
I don't wish to be an alarmist, but it seems to me that,
sooner or later, one of these locomotives is bound to ram at full
speed into one of these atomic reindeer, and the entire Nordic
region is going to be engulfed in a giant fireball. That's the bad
news. The good news is, we would be warmer.
(C) 1994 THE MIAMI HERALD
DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.
