Did you read about the six beer-drinking elephants in India? The elephants found drums of fermenting rice beer on a farm, partied too hard, then uprooted utility poles and electrocuted themselves. The fascinating part is that because they are elephants, they still remember that night.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21432722/?GT1=10450 [no longer available]
My first reaction to that story was, “I’ll have what they’re having!” You don’t get to use that joke often, and I don’t like to miss an opportunity.
I’m no marketing expert, but if I were the farmer whose beer they drank, I’d start calling it “Shocking Elephant” and I’d design the coolest beer bottles ever. They’d be in the shape of an elephant with his trunk straight out, and that’s the part you would drink from.
On the back label, I’d include a handy guide to what level of stupid you could expect after consuming each bottle. At the top of the scale, after ten bottles, you would have “probable accidental electrocution.” At the bottom of the scale, after drinking one elephant or two, the problems would be “Thinking you are witty” and “Mild attraction to your friend’s mom.”
As I understand it, when you get electrocuted, it makes you crap. Imagine being the first person to find these six dead elephants, in 40 tons of elephant poop, wrapped in live power cables. I would dive into the bushes and hope no one saw me. My fear would be that my neighbor who owns the land might say, “Can you help me clean this up?”
They say there’s a tool for everything, but I checked my toolkit, and there’s nothing there for cleaning up six electrocuted elephants in a mountain of shit. How do you even approach this problem? Do you wait for them to harden, then cut them up with chainsaws, put them in plastic garbage bags and distribute them to dumpsters all over town?
In the short run, you could charge admission to see the six dead elephants. I’d pay a rupee or two for that. I might even take the kids. There aren’t many things the whole family can enjoy, but I’m pretty sure this is one of them.
Perhaps this is why I’m not in charge of planning weekends.
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