TAGGING THE NORTH AMERICAN BIG FOOT

By Tim Colin
Associate Editor,
Humor News Nuts Publications
Although there is not much that you can legally hunt this time of year, it is good to be preparing yourself for hunting season. This year I intend on bagging me one of those big foot monsters that scare away the entire tourist from Northern Michigan. The problem with the typical big foot monster is that they are dark colored and very hard to see at night. Nighttime is the best time to hunt big foots because that is when most of the conservation officers are sleeping.

I have come up with a unique way of solving the coloring issue of the big foot monster. I intend on creeping up to the big foot monsters while they are feeding and paint a large fluorescent ‘X” on the sides of the creatures. In order to minimize the danger to myself, I have with me my younger brother Mike who is going to assist me by actually painting these large, powerful and, hungry beasts. While my brother paints the beast with an “X” I will be hiding in the bushes ready to dial 911 in case something bad happens to my brother. I am just glad that I had the foresight to realize that this was a job that would take two people.

The paint I was using was some I picked up at the county garage. They had a lot of it sitting around so I figured they wouldn’t mind if I borrowed a five gallon bucket. That just made one less can that they would have to deal with.

The bait I was using to lure the big foots in was a garbage sack full of Walleyes. My uncle Mike had gone fishing down south of a chemical plant in Midland. He scooped up a whole bunch of fish with his net. The fish couldn’t swim too well because of all the large tumors they had growing all over them. My uncle soon found out that he couldn’t clean the fish because the stuff oozing from the tumors was eating through the steel of his fish fillet knife.

After my brother poured out the fish on the ground we both hid in the bushes. It was only about ten minutes later when a large brown big foot showed up. It ate on the fish for a couple of minutes before my brother finally got up the guts to go out there to paint an “X” on the creature. My younger brother had a dripping paint bush in his hand as he slowly edged up to the big foot monster. “Hurry up,” I yelled at him, “We don’t have all day,”

Well my hollering must have got the bears attention since he immediately charged my brother and swiped him across his belly with his enormous claw. My brother fell to the ground like a sack of flour. He just laid there shaking and bleeding. AS for the bear, he just turned around and went back to eating the fish. I starting laughing and had an awful time stopping long enough to call 9-11. Just thinking abut my brother lying twitching like he was still brings a smile to my face. The only bad thing is that the big foot ate up all my bait and I didn’t even get him tagged with florescent paint.

My brother only ended up having the front of his shirt tore to shreds and a few scratches. After a hundred or so stitches my brother was ready to go home. It looks like this year I am just not going to have any advantage at all hunting big foots here in Northern Michigan.

1623

LAKE MICHIGAN IS LEAKING

By Tim Colin
Last summer I decided to go over to the town on Frankfort which is located on Lake Michigan. The problem is that when I got to Lake Michigan I found that it was almost gone. Lake Michigan had been reduced to just a hole that was less than a hundred yards across. I could see Utah. If I could get a valid Visa I would have swam over there to see my Mormon cousins. I love to travel to foreign countries.

Looking at Lake Michigan I could tell something was wrong. I have a scientific background (I took a geosciences class in 10Th grade). I kept looking at looking at Lake Michigan and it suddenly struck me that if this great lake had almost no water left in it then, the question should be “where did all the water go?’.

I started to remember that there was some guy named Al Gorekon, or Gornon or Gorman or something who said that the world was getting warmer. I wondered if maybe the world had gotten so warm that the water had boiled away out of Lake Michigan. All this thinking was giving me a real headache. After all, I only wanted to go fishing that day so, I decided to head over to the nearest pizza/bar and eat/drink my headache away.

After about a half hour at the pizza/bar, I started to feel comfortable talking to the strangers who sat around me. I said that it looks like Lake Michigan is boiling away. Two people got up and left the bar. The bartender then told me that if I didn’t shut up about global warming he’d kick my commie ass out the door. I decided to move to a private table. I ordered a pitcher of beer and went over to a table that was in a remote corner of the bar/pizza establishment.

I did not sit there for long before a scruffy, bearded old guy from the bar came over to my table and sat down with his mug of beer. I immediately thought that this guy is either gay or he wants me to share my pitcher of beer with him. In either case the answer would be “no”. The bearded, weirdo then said to me that he knew where there was a secret hole. He said I needed to come with him and he would show it to me.

“Now why would I want to go see your hole? I asked.

“Because I’m telling you I’m a scientist. I know why Lake Michigan is drying up.”

After I finished off my pitcher of beer I was pretty much game for anything so, I agreed to go and look at the scruffy mans old hole. I told him that looking was all I would do. I was emphatic that I would never climb down into it. I said that ever since I was a teenager I was very afraid of cold, dark places.

The old guy and I walked down to Lake Michigan. True to his word he showed me this deep hole which seemed to be sucking everything into it. I was truly amazed. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Lake Michigan was gurgling down into an abyss. It was not global warming that was destroying Lake Michigan. Instead, it was some sort of large hole that seemed to be sucking Lake Michigan water into some sort of alternate dimension. But, where is the water ending up. If I had my brother with me I would have sent him into the hole to find out. For now, it must remain a great mystery. The water might be flowing into an alternate universe or, it might be getting sucked up by the bottled water plant down the road.

GUN SAFETY IN MICHIGAN

By Mike Colin
You have to be really careful with guns. I once shot my toes off when I was a kid but they grew back. For most people their toes don’t grow back but I guess I’m some sort of mutant because my dad used to feed us kids fish he caught at a nuclear generator cooling pond. I was born with webbed toes, webbed feet and a functioning set of gills. I’d be a regular fish-man excerpt I can only dive down two feet and then my ears start to pop.

Well, enough with my personal stuff. What I’m really trying to tell people is that gun safety is important. For one thing you should never walk around with a loaded gun and the safety off. Of course many backwoods people defunctionalize the safety on their gun because in the backwoods they think that safety is for sissies. But, the problem is that most people will not grow back a second set of toes if they happen to blow the first set off with a shotgun. Not only that but take it from a guy who did loose his first set of toes: it really hurts. Besides that mutants don’t have toes that grow back instantly like in the movies. It took nearly ten minutes before my second set of toes were completely back and functional.

Now, walking around with a gun that isn’t loaded still makes you look cool to the ladies. I know most of my friends can easily find a date just by driving around the county with a gun rack in their pick-up, with a variety to weapons of course and, a couple of half drank 40 oz beers on the top of the dash board. Chicks just love 40 ouncers. The size of a man’s beer bottle is very important to the kind of women you find in the backwoods. The half drank beer bottles also signal to the ladies that the man is safe to date. Because the bottles are half drank it means that this man has been dating women and that he has been giving them his 40 ouncers. If the guy had full 40 ouncers it would signal to a woman that he had never had a date before and that he was some sort of city slicker weirdo out in the county for heinous purposes.

I just hope that by reading this article you’ve learned a lot about gun safety. Let me end by telling you a little story about my aunt May. Now aunt May was blind as a beaver pup. She could not see anything and she also had a bad limp so, she always walked around using a double barrel shotgun as a cane. Well, one day when her cousin Big Hairy Larry came up behind her she turned around, thought she saw a big foot monster, and blew his head off. Of course she went to prison. The jury didn’t believe her story that she was just trying to protect herself from Bigfoot. Instead, they believed the prosecutor who said that May killed her husband because she had found out he was having a fling with her sister.

MY NEW BUSINESS: INCOME TAX PREPARATIONS

By Tim Colin
So many people are concerned about making out their income taxes that I decided this week to start a little income tax preparation business on the side. I have absolutely no training at tax preparation and have never filed an income tax form. I’ve seen a lot of people advertise that they can do income taxes. My uncle Mike does income tax in his insurance office. He said he makes sure people buy an IRA from him when he makes out the taxes that way he greatly increases his profits.

I looked into selling IRA’s to my clients but it seems you need some sort of license. It seems like you have to have a license to do anything now days. I need a license to sell securities, a license to drive, a license to go fishing. As far as a fishing license is concerned I’ve been permanently banned from fishing in most of the mid-west.

And as far as Canada goes I am banned from even crossing the border for the next five years. I guess it has something to do with the Winter Olympic Games they recently held. It seems you just can’t go out and compete in the down hill skeet shoot without being sponsored by a country. I also found out that skeet were just round disks people shoot in the air. I thought “skeet” was just another name for “skeeters” which is what we call mosquitoes in Northern Michigan. I was shooting at every pine tree I passed hoping that I might just wing a few skeeters.

I kind of wondered before I strapped on my skies, why you would be shooting at mosquitoes in the middle of winter. But, I figured Canadian mosquitoes are a lot larger than the variety we have in Michigan so they must have enough blood stored up in them to survive a cold Canadian winter. In Michigan our mosquitoes hibernate in places like my parents screen door. That way when spring first comes and you‘re lying in your bed the mosquitoes are ready to buzz around your head.

Now getting back to my income tax business, it seems that a lot of people need help filling out the forms. I started out offering tax services for just $10.00. I got almost 40 people to come in and have me fill out their forms for them. Of course I only charged $10.00 for the first week because I’m just getting started so the first week of customers is sort of practice. Next week I’m going to look at filling in some deductions for people. This week I just gathered up the basic information and sent the forms into the IRS. Nobody this week will be getting any money back from the government. Of course just to make people happy I made sure that I entered a zero for “taxes owed”. The people that come in next week will be getting some deductions and money back since I’ve decided to charge $5.00 for every deduction I fill in on the forms. There are a lot of forms that deal with deductions so I hope to make my clients and more importantly myself, a lot of money.

Making a lot of money by filing tax forms for people should be really lucrative so there might be some question as to why I’m not filing any tax returns on my tax return business. In addition, I am a bit concerned that since I am new to this business, that some of the forms I fill out might not be filled out correctly. Therefore, to avoid any problems I decided to fill in the name “Abraham Lincoln” where the tax preparer is supposed to sign. I believe that no one would question the integrity of “Abraham Lincoln” and besides, he’s not just a former president but, he’s a lawyer so who would want to haul him in for an audit.

NORTHERN MICHIGAN INTERNATIONAL CRICKET CHAMPIONSHIP

By Ted Colin
Each year the Northern Michigan International Cricket Championship draws people from all over the world. We have people come from places as far away as Grawn, Fife Lake and, Mancelona. Many of the people who show up each year speak different languages and have very different customs. For instance, many people who attend these games can’t understand why we have pay toilets when the competition takes place in the woods. Personally, I really can’t understand the pay toilet deal myself. Especially, since the pay toilets only take $5.00 bills. I put in a $10.00 bill and I didn’t get any change back. I guess I won’t be buying any more pop from the concessions stands since it costs more for the pop going out than going in.

Well, although there are many differences between the teams and spectators at this year’s cricket event there is one overriding factor that brings everyone together: we all love watching those little critters duke it out in the ring. The main ring this year is an old hula hoop I found out behind one of the pay toilets. It looks like a car ran over it but, it is still holding together well enough to be used as the main ring. The other rings are just drawn in the sand.

Now before you can compete in a cricket match you have to find a cricket. The best way to find a cricket is to leave your front door wide open for a couple of days. Sooner or later out of all of the bugs, animals or looters that comes into your house there is bound to be at least one cricket. Of course getting a cricket into your house is just the first step in catching one.

In order to catch a cricket you have to stay up real late and get really, really tired. Then, when you turn off the lights and try to go to bed the cricket will start chirping so loud that you will rise up like a zombie from the dead but, instead of yearning to eat brains like a zombie the only thing you will yearn to do is get a hold of that cricket. Of course the cricket creature itself has the ability of a ventriloquist in that it can throw its voice to any place in the entire house. It is almost like the cricket just sits and watches you as you look all around under furniture and in closets, in the cloths hamper and behind the washer and dryer. Sometimes you just want to yank out the gas stove even though it has a gas line hooked to it. You are so tired and desperate for sleep you just don’t care anymore. After a while you can almost hear him laughing when he sees you about to find his hiding spot and then the cricket suddenly stops chirping. Then, you just stand there waiting for the creature to start chirping again hoping beyond all hope that you can find the little monster and get him to stop his hideous sounds so you can finally get some sleep. Of course he doesn’t start up again until you’ve turned off the lights and climbed back into bed.

Eventually, the cricket will make a mistake and you will catch him mulling around in the shower or just outside of the refrigerator. Now although the temptation to get revenge upon the cricket for keeping you up all night is strong, it is important that you keep a cool head about you and try to capture the little beast without harming it. After all, a squished bug is not going to win the cricket boxing tournament for you. And, if you accidentally rip off its forearms then he will be disqualified because the bug will no longer be able to wear the tiny boxing gloves that are mandatory in the sport of competitive cricket.

Once you have your cricket you have to put him through a vigorous training program which includes getting your bug to bulk up. Lots of sugar water is a good start to any weight gaining strategy whether it is for humans or bugs. Most people train their crickets to box by at first placing a tiny little mirror in front of the bug in order to get his competitive juices flowing. Then, placing live crickets with your potential champion in a confined area like a shoe box will be all you need to do to hone those talents that are the stuff that all champion bugs have pent up deep within their souls. Of course several hours of meditation should be a part of your potential champions training regiment. That way by the time of the big match-up your bug will be in complete harmony with the universe and he will have gained inner peace. At that moment your cricket will be able to rip the exoskeleton off his competition and eat those blue-green cricket guts all the way up to the eyeballs.

This years champion was named “Killer Bug”. Now Killer B. was not the actual last bug left with its insides in tacked. The last bug left was Spider Snyder but Spider S. was disqualified when the officials realized that he really was a spider and therefore was not really eligible to compete against crickets. The rules might have been bent a little if Spider Snyder happened to be a grasshopper or even a fly but, spiders are not even insects; they are arachnids. The officials just decided that an arachnid fighting an insect just was not a fair fight so Killer B. won this years championship posthumously since Spider Snyder had already devoured all of Killer B’s soft tissues. Hopefully next year the officials will be more on the ball and disqualify non-species entries before they are allowed to compete in the cricket matches.

THERE WERE THREE WOLVES

By Tim Colin
Three stray wolves have been menacing the people of Northern Michigan lately. In particular, they have been hunting down and eating severely overweight snowboarders. Local Department of Natural Resources officials believe that the reason the wolves eat severely overweight snowboarders is that thin snow boarders race downhill too fast for the wolves to grab them but, severely overweight individuals jump on their snowboards and just sink into the snow. Thus, they become the perfect treat for wolves that have been starving in Cedar Swamps most of the winter.

Investigations by area officials have determined that overweight snowboarders who are full of hot cocoa are the main victims. One official speaking with anonymity said that the wolves seem to crave the taste of hot cocoa. “Overweight individuals full of hot cocoa are just like giant thermoses to the wolves. The layers of fat evidently keep the cocoa warm and steamy. There is nothing better than hot steamy cocoa on a cold snowy day.”

A zoologist from Sea World has disagreed with the cocoa concept. She believes that the wolves are actually attracted to the taste of marshmallows. Since severely overweight people put lots of marshmallows in their cocoa then, it does stand to reason that the wolves would pick them out for eating due to their sweet marshmallow goodness.

To be on the safe side the Department of Natural Resources has banned all overweight snowboarders who drink hot cocoa loaded with marshmallows from going out on the ski slopes of Northern Michigan. This ban will remain in effect until the wolves are captured and transported to an island in Lake Michigan where marshmallows grow naturally.


























THE YETI IN THE OUTHOUSE

ICE FISHING CARNIVAL

By Tim Colin
Ice Fishing Carnival is an event held each year in Michigan. The event takes place out on the ice covering Lake Birdie. This event has been going on for decades and has always been exciting for participants and spectators alike. Many people participate in the sanctioned fishing and snowmobiling events. These events are very safe and great for family entertainment but, I don’t go to watch these events.

Instead, I like to watch the unsanctioned, showoff your snowmobile driving skills event. These people crank up their snow machines for exciting slides across sometimes treacherous ice. Watching people fly across the ice at 100 mph on their snowmobiles is really exciting. I especially like it when someone is going too fast and they are heading directly for someone’s cabin up on the shoreline. Watching the machines flip over and over as the drivers try to swerve out of a certainly fatal skull on cabin siding collision, can really give you a thrill. It is so much better than auto racing. Snow machine riders have almost no protection against frost bite let alone crashing into objects like cabins and ice shanties. Of course if there is an explosion, their clothing is usually highly flammable. Luckily they can roll around in the snow.

Another unsanctioned event that will give an onlooker a cheep but, no less exciting thrill, is the annual “Who is the stupidest person in Michigan?” event. In order to participate in this event you need to own a late model pickup truck with a blue book value of $50,000 or more. Each year there are at least a dozen people who participate in this event. The goal is to see how many of these trucks can park next to each other before the ice gives out underneath them and the vehicles become aquatic habitats for fish and other lake plants and creatures. Boy when that ice gives way those trucks really go down fast. You don’t dare make a trip to the port-a-potty or you might miss the whole show.

I get even greater thrills when the conservation and sheriffs officers start showing up and issuing citations to the truck owners. In addition to loosing their expensive trucks, these dim wits also get a nice hefty fine for polluting the lake. But, wait, there’s more. They also have to pay to have their sunken big trucks hauled out of the lake. For someone who likes to watch really dumb people loose lots of money doing something really stupid well, life does not get any better than a day out on the ice during Ice Carnival.

Of course you don’t have to go to a sanctioned event like on Lake Birdie to watch people do really crazy things out on the ice in Michigan. They do the same thing on every lake and river in the state as soon a there is a thin layer of ice on the water. The only thing is that during Ice Carnival you can get a hot dog and use a port-a-potty while you are waiting for someone to do something really stupid.