A joke is never funny if you have to explain it,
so here goes...
Dead Weasel Advent Calendar
Monday, August 28, 2006
I think I first ran across Tufty the Traffic Safety Squirrel at Scary Squirrel World while I was searching the web for advice on raising some orphaned baby squirrels (needless to say, SSW were no help at all).
Tufty Squirrel is an invention of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA). Beginning in 1960, Tufty starred in a public awareness campaign aimed at teaching safety to British children. For the most part, RoSPA taught safety by running over Tufty's friend Willy Weasel with an automobile. Again and again. Also running him over with an icecream truck, dunking him in water, setting fire to him, and feeding him mummy Weasel's prescription headache pills. On Willy's good days, he loses his new jacket up a tree. Willy's life totally sucks.
Why? Beats me. Willy Weasel is a handsome brown-and-white mustela nivalis with jaunty green trousers and a blue stripey shirt. He is a good-natured and cheerful chap, despite...everything. Plucky little mustelid. There is no justifying his appalling abuse, and no excuse beyond the relentless, endemic societal prejudice contra weasels.
RoSPA's most memorable ad was a short film of Tufty Two Shoes visiting the icecream van with his mummy. Tufty always goes with his mummy to buy icecream. Tufty has mummy issues. Willy buys an icecream without his mummy, so naturally RoSPA runs him over with a car. I've seen three versions of this animation: in one, we hear a thump but are spared any sight of violence. In another, we hear a thump and see Willy spin 'round and 'round in the air before landing in a heap. In the most disgraceful version, Willy's tragic pinwheel of horror is accompanied by the comical Woo-Woo-Woo of a slide whistle. I would much appreciate a copy, if anyone has this damnatory and callous piece of evidence. And then there's Sgt Badger. Always nearby. Scolding Willy. Making cruel remarks about Willy's mom. Running Willy down in his four-door Saloon of Pain. Snatching up Willy's lithe, broken body by the scruff and giving it a good shake.
On a happier note, the Tufty Club has left to posterity what is easily the worst musical number ever recorded. See if you don't agree. Lollipop Man is sung by Warbling English Matron, with harmonies provided by Oldfashioned Enthusiastic Guy. They are accompanied by the jaded, cynical piano/saxophone/drum/flute/electric guitar ensemble borrowed from a local burlesque house. The band was paid in smack. Before the performance. This monumental work of suckitude was clearly recorded in a school gymnasium using a rotary telephone jammed down Sgt Badger's pants. In particular, I call your attention to the poignant and revealing moment about halfway through, when the saxophone player suddenly realizes his whole life has been a terrible lie. Enjoy! My badger, Uncle Badger, finds the whole business hi-larious.
"Hey, Weasel!" he says, "want an icecream?" Much waggling of eyebrows.
Meh. Eat worms, Stripey Face.
Deck your balls with boughs of holly
Changing the subject, do you know what the Advent is? It's the month leading up to Christmas. The English apparently don't think their kids work up enough of a howling, frothy lather in the run-up to the holidays, so they give them with what is called an Advent Calendar. A typical one of these might be a shallow carbdoard box printed to look like a calendar or a Christmas tree, with a little swing-out door for each day of the month leading up to D-Day. Behind each door, a festively-shaped square of chocolate. Thirty days of slowly peeling open those little doors is guaranteed to overclock an infant's processor, quick as you can say grand mal seizure. Personally, I think it would be more useful to commemorate the sad, empty feeling the day after Christmas. You're never too young to learn that "what goes up, must come down" applies to feelings, too. One last, sad cardboard flap with nothing at all behind it. That should do it.
Of course, Brits observe the day after Christmas as a holiday. They call it Boxing Day, because that had to be what you were doing all day on the 25th to earn the hangover you wake up with on the morning of the 26th.
I spend Christmases in the Olde Worlde with Uncle B. It isn't as Dickensian as one hoped, but it's mighty jolly all the same — what with all the huzzahs and the hippocras and the jingle dancers and the hot spiced hedgehog balls an' that.
And the fruitcake. Leave us not forget the fruitcake.
Uncle B sent me an Advent Calendar one year, to help me count the days until I stepped aboard the plane. Every day, I'd peel open a door and tell him what shape my chocolate was.
"Oooo! This one's a big round turd with a bow on its head!"
"That's a Christmas pudding with a sprig of holly, stupid weasel."
"Meh. Eat worms, Stripey Face."
Hours of harmless, educational fun. So last December, I decided to return the favor.
Thesis + antithesis = synthesis
Okay, that's not exactly true. I didn't decide anything, I woke up one morning and realized I'd been sending Uncle B pictures of road accidents involving weasels and icecream for days, as a jolly way of counting down to the Advent of Weasel. Sometimes I think the insulation on my wires isn't very good; I'm forever getting ideas mashed together that don't belong. Poor Willy Weasel, the Advent, frozen confections.
Like most people, I keep a folder of weasel pictures on my computer, to use as inspiration and to cheer me up when I'm feeling blue. Periodically, I trawl through images.google.com, keyword "weasel" or "stoat" or "erminea" or whatever, and I save copies of all the good ones to hard disk.
I'm careful not to use these images directly, nor even to contemplate any one image too closely when I use them as models. If you make images for a living, you become sensitive to the niceties. For example, it's not nicety to steal. Also, if you're a professional picture maker and you pinch somebody else's pictures and claim them as your own, that makes you what we in the picture-making industry call a jerkface loserbag.
Still, I figured this one was just between Uncle B and me, and he hasn't turned me in for international copyright violation in ages and ages.
Anyhow, I couldn't have done it any other way. Turns out, there are no pictures of dead weasels actually taken by me in my portfolio.
Dead weasel photographs taken by others, however, are surprisingly numerous. This is partly because weasels are quick little boogers, and dead is the easiest way to see them. And it is also because murdering weasels is such a popular pastime. You heartless bastards.
Even so, I've only posted a few of the images here, and I've tried to stick with ones that look like snapshots or field documentation. Stuff I don't think the owners would mind being nicked and reposted. I'd still be happier if I knew where I'd gotten them so I could give proper credit at least, but I don't keep URL information in my weasel folder. Who does? So if you see a dead weasel that belongs to you here, and you'd like credit (or nothing whatever to do with me and my deranged rambling), do let me know.
But don't be sad; many of the weasels pictured here have been tranquilized. That's right, they're just asleep. Tomorrow, their eyes will open and their whiskers will twitch in the breeze and the sun will dapple their glossy coats as they gambol through the...oh, what's the use? They're all dead. Damn you! DAMN YOU STRAIGHT TO HELL, you flakey pink two-legged stoat murdering psychopaths! Ready for the punchline?
I'm not a vain woman. Oh, no...wait a second. Yes I am. I'M AN INCREDIBLY VAIN WOMAN. I didn't think anything of it at first, but when a whole week went by during which I sent Uncle B a new dead weasel pic faithfully every day, and he didn't say word one, I began to get a little...miffed. Peeved, even. Downright irked, if you want to know the truth.
Then I had a horrible thought. I doubled checked my outbox. Sure enough, I'd sent the Dead Weasel Advent Calendar to .com, and Uncle Badger's address is .biz! The messages had no text, so I simply re-sent the same email every day with a different attachment, hence perpetuating my error for a week.
The .com version is live, alright. There's somebody on the other end of it. A stranger, to be sure. A stranger TO WHOM I'D SENT PICTURES OF DEAD WEASELS FOR SEVEN DAYS.
Think about it. You receive a series of emails, one every day. They are apparently not spam. The return address is real. It traces to a real human. Each one is nothing but a photograph of a small dead animal, with a nonsensical caption about icecream or candy or something. You're not sure. Is there ANY WAY you don't see that as a threat? Could there possibly a nice explanation for this, assuming the attentions of a deranged stalker don't strike you as particularly "nice"?
And there's my personal email and my real contact info attached. All my pen pal had to do was forward a couple to the FBI, and the next thing you know, I'm getting knocked up in the middle of the night. And not in a good way. Next stop? No Fly list.
So I sat down to compose one more email. "Hi! You don't know me, but I'm the one that's been sending you pictures of dead animals..."
Hmmmmmm...maybe not.
"Boy is my face red! You know all those dead animal pictures ? I meant to send those to my boyfriend! Quelle boo-boo, huh?"
Um, no.
"Do you know what an Advent calendar is? Have you ever heard of Tufty the Traffic Safety Squirrel? Do you like icecream? I sure do!"
In the end, I did what I usually do. I poured myself a giant scotch and trusted in the devine benevolence that watches over weasels and keeps them safe.
Because, that always works out so well.
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