Sturgeon! Emergency! And other bad Feola behavior

My favorites jokes are little mental land mines

Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 26

Sturgeon! Emergency!
Sturgeon! Emergency!

Sturgeon! Sturgeon! Sturgeon! Sturgeon! Emergency!

The Sunday Reader, Jan 12, 2025

She was furious, feet planted, arms akimbo, with the sort of white-hot righteous anger only available to teenage girls. You tricked me!

I sipped my coffee calmly, then said to my daughter I’m gonna need a lot more detail to know which trick we’re discussing.

Now I’ll never be mistaken for an upright citizen. Oh, I’m not a bad person – I’d like to think not, anyway – but I’ve generally followed my own path, regardless of what others thought of where it would take me. For example people were shocked when I got in so much trouble with the Pentagon that they banned me from the Pacific Rim.

But no one was really surprised.

I followed some paths out of fascination, and some out of the sheer stubbornness of my Sicilian blood.

But I must confess I often simply did what amused me.

I prefer jokes that no one gets except me. My favorites are little mental land mines that lay coiled up and hidden in the weeds for days or weeks or even years until some unsuspecting victim trips them.

Earworms, for example.

I like to make up my own lyrics to popular songs and sing along while others are listening. This works better than you’d expect. When I was working my way through college as a chef the entire wait staff would sing along with me to Foreigner’s hit song about a very large freshwater fish: Sturgeon! Emergency! I even once heard a waitress arguing with a customer over the lyrics, insisting that Sturgeon! Was correct.

Another of my tedious tendencies is the way my patience switches off when people are caught in a problem loop. When people have a problem I do try my very best to help find a solution.

But when people persist in the conduct that caused their in the first place, and then complain over and over and over and over that they STILL have the problem, and then go out and do act the same way over and over and over…and then ask for advice that they clearly won’t take…

Well, then it is entirely possible my advice will switch from things likely to solve the problem to things likely to amuse me.

That’s how I ended up doing Tuco impressions.

The American Press Institute was housed in an architecturally significant Brutalist building. Sure, it was ugly as sin, but at least it was the single most miserable place to work that I've occupied. The American Press Institute's Marcel Breuer raw concrete building was so ugly that locals called it The Bomb Shelter. And this was in Reston Virginia, where you'd expect people to like such things.

But as ugly as it was outside, inside was worse. It leaked like a sieve if the sky so much as drizzled. Ventilation was terrible, so the windows were always fogging up. Not that there were a lot of windows; it looked like a bomb shelter from inside, too.

But the worst part was that it was apparently designed to test and torture humans. Take, for example, the grand fan of stairs as you entered the building and descended to the lobby.

We called them the Stairs of Death. Because while they were a not-generous but at least manageable 12-inches wide to the right as you entered, maintaining that perfect fan shape meant they narrowed down to roughly SIX INCHES to the left. Despite constant warnings and the occasional roping off of the left side, every single API event began with a woman in high heels venturing too far left and face-planting down the stairs.

The Media Center at the American Press Institute had its offices down the tail end of the API building, and for some inexplicable reason had giant picture windows looking into the corridor. David Swint was the Media Center assistant director; his desk faced those windows.

The corridor ended at the offices of some editor’s association that rented space from API. A little while after we started The Media Center a young blond woman started working at the editor’s association who simply mesmerized David. He’d be talking about this or that, and simply lock-up mid-word until she’d passed by the windows.

I spent months offering advice that ranged from practical to whimsical. Go next door and borrow some staples! Walk out in the corridor and say “Hello!”

David refused to even acknowledge the situation. So after a few months more I decided it was time.

Time for Tuco.

Tuco is the titular “Ugly” in Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. He has one of the greatest lines in the history of cinema. A gunman catches Tuco taking a bubblebath, and starts explaining why he’s going to kill Tuco. Tuco shoots him with a gun hidden in the bubbles, and says When you have to shoot, shoot! Don’t talk.

And when Clint Eastwood would pass by Tuco would say some variation of Hey Blondie! I KEEEL you sometime, ok?

Everytime David locked up, stopped talking midword, I’d do my best Tuco, sotto voice: Hey Blondie! I KEEEL you sometime, ok?

One day David stopped talking…and then there was a loud crash. He’d knocked over his chair as he leapt to his feet and turned to me, furious. YOU @#$%!!! Now every time I see her I hear Eli Wallach’s voice!

The Tuco trick took months. The deal with my daughter took more than half a decade.

I’ve always believed it is a mistake to make things like alcohol mysterious for children. That’s partly because of my Italian culture and the Catholic church; sips of wine were just part of growing up. And they are going to learn somewhere from someone; I wanted my children to learn from me somewhere I could keep them safe.

So when my young teenage daughter asked about the beer I was drinking I let her have a sip. She was not a fan, and would tell anyone who would listen that beer was horrible and disgusting.

The better part of a decade later she was back, old enough to drink and convinced I had played some kind of despicable trick on her.

And I had. Just not the way she thought.

You tricked me! I had a beer, and it didn’t taste anything like that horrible stuff you were drinking.

Well, my love, there’s beer, and then there’s beer. What did you try?

I had a Miller Lite. Why? What were you drinking?

Guinness Stout.

For those of you unfamiliar, Guinness Stout is to Miller Lite as blue cheese is to those orange American cheese food slices.

So I had told the truth. It was beer! Just not the beer 99 percent of drinkers imbibe…