By Buster McNutt
My S-10 pickup has a sports hernia. Apparently, 20-year-old compact pickup trucks were never meant to tow 24-year-old, 24-foot pontoon boats, especially once the “hard roads” end and the dirt roads begin — nothing about that in the owner’s manual. Now, I was paying attention when the previous owner, whose “unfaithful” (not exactly the word he used) wife had recently run away, told me he occasionally towed it with his Ford Ranger pickup, so I figured this was a no brainer for the S-10, being as how it was equipped with the optional 170 hp “stump puller” engine, stainless steel trailer hitch ball, and retractable mud flaps to decrease “drag” and lower the odds of a small, too-late-to-cross-the-road varmint hitting the flap, bouncing back, and then getting jammed between the tire and the wheel well, which would certainly have reduced towing capacity until such time as the now deceased and decaying varmint’s road kill innards could be tire flossed away, and who among us flosses his tire treads more than every 5,000 miles or so? Why can’t someone come up with a really good and easy to use tire tread water pick?
But unfortunately what I did not pay attention to was the location of his occasional “tow daddy” Ranger pickup — it was parked behind a small shrub, up on blocks, with its “bottom end” most definitely “bottomed out.” And the shrub didn’t look like it had been planted that long ago, making me wonder just how far away his “unfaithful” wife actually ran. Think, “Hidden in plain sight.” I mean, when you buy a boat from a man who has dirt under his fingernails and is leaning on a shovel, you just have to wonder.
Now this is a small town, and as in many small towns some of the locals wear multiple hats. The owner/chief mechanic at the town auto repair shop is The Reverend Ike (think, “The Ohio State”). He is also the preacher at the local Good Faith Primitive Pentecostal Church, which years ago switched from communion crackers to fruit cake wedges, largely because it’s a small congregation and you can’t buy communion crackers in boxes of fewer than a thousand, whereas donations of unwanted fruit cakes in the weeks after Christmas are bountiful and amazing. The BIG GUY truly does work in mysterious ways.
Reverend Ike said I got off lucky and just needed to replace every motor mount, most suspension bushings, and the duct tape, twisty ties and bungee cords that were holding the rear bumper on. I got out for something like $400 and a promise to go door to door next January handing out pamphlets and collecting fruit cake donations.
The first thing I did with my born-again S10 was to wash it, which normally happens about as often as: (a) it snows in Death Valley, (b) a billionaire reality show star/Hair Club for Men lifetime member gets elected president, and (c) Oprah Winfrey buys Sports Illustrated magazine so she can be in the Swimsuit Edition.
There was no way to get 20 years of bug splat “impressions” off the S-10, which got me to thinking (“Danger, Will Robinson!”). I had recently read that NASA was testing an aircraft wing coating that, to use the technical term, “allows bug guts to slide off.” Apparently insect “residue” splattering on the wings of big aircraft as they take off can “impact the airflow.” It went on to say that impacted airflow decreases efficiency and increases fuel consumption, but I’m thinking that is not their real concern. In case you haven’t noticed, insects are bulking up and getting bigger. My understanding is that this is caused when mosquitoes, ticks, chiggers and so on suck the blood of humans who have taken human growth hormone, testosterone “therapy” or any GMO modified processed food whose contents label includes the words “corn,” “tomato” or “soylent green.” It has been estimated by those same three scientists who first issued dire warnings of the cataclysmic effects of global warming (government code names Moe, Larry, Curley), that by 2100 these same insects will be the size of chickens, and we are not talking free-range, worm-and-you-know-what-else-eating chickens, but the Tyson Foods D Cup GMO birds. You think an aircraft impact with a few thousand of those wouldn’t “impact the airflow,” like by maybe, oh, I don’t know —snapping off the wings?
So I’m thinking we need to get that Wiki Wacky Leaks guy to give us the NASA formula for the Slip-N-Slide Bug Goo Be Gone, and we can spray it on all our vehicles, and the car manufacturers could spray it on all new vehicles, and pretty soon unsightly bug splatter would go the way of the purple dinosaur, American help line employees, and fat free Little Debbies.
Now, this raises the question of what happens, in the splat-free future, to all those bugs that keep sliding off one vehicle to another and another, given all the GMOs, testosterone, and mutated inhuman growth hormones in their splat free bodies? I’m thinking they have achieved insect immortality — we are talking Bugageddon here! They’ll be calling their local Humanex technician to come spray their houses to get rid of us!
But it’s not too late to take action. We’re not talking about saving Social Security, curing male pattern baldness, or even going Christmas shopping at the mall. We’re talking about keeping bugs in their place, and that place is splattered on our vehicles! Go on the Internet and buy one of those Bugbits that straps to your vehicle and counts the number of bugs you splatter each day. Make it a friendly contest with your neighbors and co-workers to see who is the first to reach 10,000 splats a day!
Save the human race: Be One With the Splat! •
