Read Online Blame It on the Dog by Jim Dawson - Free Book Online

the big blow-out I made?
It scared me stiff—I hope you-uns was not too much afraid?
But now I best be crawlin’ out o’ this dog-gasted wet.…
For what I aim to figger out is—WHAT THE HECK I ET?”
    What initially arouses skepticism about poor John Jenkins’s misfortune is that the media ran a similar story in the past that turned out to be false. In 1988, the wire services Reuters and United Press International picked up a specious item from the
Jerusalem Post
about a bug-phobic Israeli housewife scooping up a big, nasty-looking cockroach, tossing it into the shitter, and, to make sure the critter was dead, spraying it with a full can of insecticide. We all know what happened when her husband came home. Tossing his cigarette down between his legs, he “seriously burned his sensitive parts,” according to the newspaper, and oy! the
schmutz
was everywhere! Only later, after the story ran all over the globe, did the truth come out. “The [Jerusalem]
Post
was not the victim of a deliberate hoax,” the editor said in a statement. “Rather, a good tale got so tangled in the telling that it assumed a newsworthiness it should never have had.”
    More recently, in April 1998, several news agencies picked up an item about a German camper who died just outside Montabaur, near Bonn, when an outhouse exploded as he lit a cigarette and propelled him through a closed window. The cause was either gas leaking from the septic tank or a defective natural gas pipe. Was this story true, or a hoax like the report from Israel? Either way, it sounds like John Jenkins’s real-life gas attack in West Virginia.

GOOD OLD HOLLYWOOD RAZZMATAZZ
    F irst they moved (1895)!
    “Then they talked (1927)!
      “Now they smell!”
    So said the ad for Michael Todd Jr.’s 1960 whodunit
Scent of Mystery
, which introduced Smell-O-Vision, a process of releasing atomized fragrances into a movie theater to match what was happening up on the screen.
    But the blurb could also describe the hundreds of stinkers that Hollywood pumps out every year.
    No wonder an aficionado of bad movies named John Wilson decided back in 1980 that it was time to honor Hollywood’s most execrable crap in the only way the film industry knows how: with an awards show. He called it the Golden Raspberry Awards, or the Razzies for short.
    In
Who Cut the Cheese?
I talked about the
raspberry
, an orally mimicked fart created by sputtering air with the tongue and lower lip. The term comes from London cockney slang, in which words were rhymed and then their sources hidden. For example, the word
dick
(penis) was known as
hampton
—or
’ampton
, as the cockneys would say it. The original rhyme was
hampton wick
(for a borough in London), but by dropping the
wick
(as in “So I pulls out me ’ampton”), they effectively severed
hampton’s
connection to
dick
for any eavesdropping outsider.
    In the same way, as early as the 1870s, cockneys turned farts into
raspberry tarts
, and then dropped the
tarts
. When Americans got hold of the cockney
raspberry
, they changed the spelling to
razzberry
and sometimes broke it in half. You could give someone either “the razz” or “the berry”—both were fart imitations—and
razz
was also extended to mean teasing or heckling, since people generally used the razz to show displeasure or contempt. A fart-sounding toy with a wooden mouthpiece attached to a flat rubber tube is called a razzer. It was used on a 1942 million-selling Spike Jones recording called “Der Fuehrer’s Face,” an anti-Hitler novelty whose chorus was “And we’ll [razz! razz!] right in der Fuehrer’s face.”
    As a side note, the original English term for the razz was the
buzz
, or
buzzer
, which showed up in Act II of Shakespeare’s
Hamlet
, when the Danish prince invited a donkey-riding theatrical troupe to his castle to reenact the murder of his father.
    P OLONIUS : The actors are come hither, my lord.
    H AMLET :
Buz, buz!
    P OLONIUS : Upon my