GREAT SCAT FESTIVAL IN COLIFORM CITY MICHIGAN

By Tim Colin
This past weekend I attended the 14th Scat Festival that is held every other six months in the Northern Michigan town of Coliform City. The festival celebrates the opening of scat hunting season which runs from October until September each year. There is of course the crowning of the Scat Queen and her court along with the Scat Festival parade and family oriented beer tent complete with a hard liquor bar and people dressed up in wild animal costumes to celebrate the wildlife that produces such an abundance of scat in our Northern Michigan woodlands.

In addition to the family fun under the beer tent there are other activities designed to both educate and fascinate everyone who enjoys Michigan festivals. One tent is dedicated to the merchants and vendors who have always worked hard to give Coliform City the name it deserves. Inside the merchant tent you will find an abundance of items which are partially or completely made from scat. I personally bought a tee-shirt with real scat on the front and the back which depicted a wilderness seen. I could not resist the beauty of the shirt with its many different hues of browns, grays along with the old standby black scat.

In addition to the tee-shirt I also bought some scat scented candles for my ex-girlfriend. We only went out on one date before she broke up with me but, I’m hoping these scat scented candles will make her want to come back to me and get married or something.

One of my favorite places in the Scat Festival Merchants tent is the long row of people offering up consumables made from the most versatile material known as scat. There was a variety of items including scat scampi which is made from scat retrieved from the catfish ponds at the Willows farm. There were scat burgers and scat hotdogs which have just a touch of mint added to each to heighten the aromatic fragrances emanating from the scat. I chewed down on scat sausage and later had my fill of rhubarb/scat berry pie. The pie of course was made from bear scat retrieved from a grove full of blackberries. Boy was that delicious.

The rarest consumable in the merchant tent was the scatsup. Scatsup comes from the Hildebrandt Tomato Farm. Scatsup is one of Michigan’s major exports to foreign countries like Pittsburg and Seattle. Scatsup is an expensive commodity as it sells for more than $800 for a half oz. After talking to Dominick Hildebrandt at the scatsup both I realized that scatsup was expensive because it is made from the scat of green tomato worms. It seems that because the tomato worms are so small that each worm only produces about a teaspoon of scat before the tomato worm surcomes to malathion poisoning. Of course it is the malathion that produces the hallucinogenic affects which is what makes scatsup so sought after by the best restaurants around the world. So anyway, the Hildebrandt tomato farm covers about 900 acres but produces just eight gallons of scatsup each year.

Dominick pointed out to me that many entrepreneurs have tried to make large amounts of money by selling a knockoff scatsup product known as sketchsup. The sketchup schemes begin with an entrapanuer donating like a truckload of overly ripe tomatoes to a homeless shelter. Twenty four hours later these men show back up to the homeless shelter and ask for their tomatoes back. Most of the people at the shelter oblige the men and give back to the entrepreneur human scat which contains the tomatoes. Of course human scat has a very foul pungent taste and odor and that is easily detected by connoisseurs who have a trained nose and palette.

After leaving the festival I could not but help wishing to return to the next Scat Festival in the little town of Fecal Michigan. I was also starting to become anxious to receive my license in the mail which would allow me to hunt scat anywhere in Kalkaska County. I hope to get enough scat this year to invite to a scat cookout all of my friends and, family and, hopefully my ex-girlfriend.

POLAR BEAR HUNTING IN NORTHERN MICHIGAN

By Ted Colin
So far this year I have had no luck at all bagging a polar bear during the month long polar bear season we have here in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan. It’s not that I have not seen plenty of polar bears in Michigan but the polar bears that I have seen were at outdoor events where there were thousands of people from down state Michigan. My high powered rifle that might take down a polar bear if I hit him directly in the brain or the heart, would most likely take out forty or fifty man-sized tourists from downstate. In Michigan there is a fine of up to $100.00 for each tourist you accidentally shoot. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to scrape up the money to pay off a $4,500 fine just because I wanted a polar bear rug for my office.

Now the reason you find polar bears around tourist from downstate is that many people downstate fish in Lake Erie for a creature called a sauger. Many fishermen downstate believe that saugers are a fish related to a walleye. In fact, saugers are not a fish at all but instead, they are just a species of freshwater seal. Of course seals are one of the main animals that polar bears eat. The problem for people who eat sauger is that the smell of the animal comes out in the pours of the person that eats it. Saugers are like onions. If you consume them their smell creeps out under your armpits and when you raise your arms everyone around you knows what you’ve been eating.

So, from the perspective of polar bears, when tourists from downstate lift up their arms it is just like ringing a dinner bell. Of course people who eat tuna and then go swimming in Lake Michigan have the same problem with sharks.

Now polar bears are not native to Michigan. Instead they come from Canada. The reason there are so many creatures like polar bears, big foots and lizard men in Northern Michigan is because Canadian children are so spoiled by their parents and grandparents. Every Canadian child wants a baby polar bear, big foot or lizard monster for a pet and so, their parents and grandparents give the kids an adorable and very little monster as a pet. Unfortunately, once these creatures start to grow it becomes harder and harder to afford to feed them. Soon, things start to go missing like the mail man and the paper boy. Inevitably, the parents finally decide that the creature has outgrown their home and so they take them for a ride down to the Lower Peninsula of Michigan.

The parents take these monsters down to the Lower Peninsula of Michigan because the parents figure that the creatures would never be able to find their way back home from there. The parents figure that none of these animals could afford to pay the toll at the Mackinaw Bridge let alone pay the toll going into Canada. The problem is that then these creatures become a menace for Northern Michigan tourists. The area I live in is beautiful so lots of people who eat sauger want to come and visit here. So please, people of Canada; if you have a big foot, polar bear or lizard monster as a pet won’t you please just have it spade or neutered. This has been a public service announcement.