Strange Things and Filthy Lies Sanitized – May 2020

Due to recent extreme weirdness and truth suddenly becoming stranger than fiction, Strange Things and Filthy Lies has been sanitized for your protection this month. Feel free to drag your eyeballs around without worry of contamination from anything other than a few much-needed laughs. We’ll return to our regular scheduled programming of “nekkid as hell characters” and filthy lies as soon as circumstances provide reasonably attainable satirical content.

As bizarre as the news has been, let me assure you the rumors have been exponentially stranger. Sorting emails and running down COVID-19-related tips so good information is relayed has been fairly all-consuming for a large portion of the magazine staff. If you ever doubted the dedication of these folks to providing the most relevant, up-to-date information to professional drivers, rest your mind. (Remember, this a nonfilthy lie version of STFL. Carry on.)

By the same turn, if you ever doubted that there are some sandwich-shy-of-a-picnic folks out there, you are absolutely correct-umundo. Stress and uncertainty sometimes brings out the worst advice from the most well-meaning individuals.

“If you sleep with a clove of garlic in your ear and drink 8 ounces of salt water as soon as you wake up, you won’t get the virus.”

Um. No. Please don’t tell people things like this, no matter how well it worked for your fourth cousin’s granny’s uncle. Really. Stop it. (There are real-life suggestions for prevention and personal protection on Page 70. Follow them.)

Hell froze over and took traffic on the 285 loop in Atlanta with it

“I made it from Forest Park to Sandy Springs on the loop in 32 minutes. On a Friday afternoon.”

Back in the olden days (a month ago), when someone told you they made a half-a-loop around the Watermelon 500 in Hotlanta during Friday afternoon traffic in anything less than an hour, you generally expected them to be sitting on their hindquarters, holding court at the Counter of Knowledge.

Not anymore, friends. CB Rambos and social media might lie but DOT cameras don’t. Two weeks into quarantine status (at print time) and there’s nothing but trucks on the highways. Drivers telling of 30-minute rolls around Atlanta 285 loop or 25-minute jaunt through Dallas on I-30, have become commonplace.

Also no surprise that preliminary statistics point to a much safer highway when professional drivers are the majority on the road. If nothing else good comes from the COVID-19 crisis, it is an all-around new appreciation for truck drivers and the job they do.

Meanwhile, in the la-bor-ah-tory…

If necessity is the mother of invention, crisis is the inspiration for necessity. Nothing fuels the flame of scientific discovery harder than finding ways to combat a previously unknown illness.

Early on in this miasma of madness, face-touching became the most abhorrent thing you could do in public. Besides outright coughing directly into someone’s eyeball, that is.

“Wash your hands, do not touch your face, rinse, repeat,” has become the mantra, Public face-touching has been shamed like window-licking. Heaven forbid someone see you touch your face anymore, it might start an international crisis.

Which is exactly why Australian astrophysicist, Daniel Reardon, set about designing a necklace that warned face-touchers to cut it out before they ever got their filthy fingers on so much as an eyelid.

Reardon’s initial contribution to disease-control consisted of magnets worn on the wrists of probable face-touching offenders that would cause a circuit in a special necklace to trip and “warn” the wearer of immediate death, or at least a steep fine from the authorities, upon their insistence to caress their own cheekbones.

Fortunately for face-touchers everywhere, Reardon couldn’t work out the kinks in his Pavlovian nightmare necklace. Unfortunately for Reardon, he got bored and lost the wrist-magnets in his nose.

No, really, he did.

I mean, who wouldn’t expect a curious scientist to clip the powerful magnets to his earlobes and nostrils? (I’m not even a scientist and I’d totally do it.) The problems began when he got nutty and studded both sides of his nose. Turns out, the magnets were powerful enough to attract to one another from the inside when he removed the outside pieces, clipping his septum firmly in place.

Using what can only be described as scientist logic, Reardon then tried to remove the lodged magnets via attraction from other magnets that were immediately ripped from his grasp and lodged firmly inside his nose. By the time Mr. Reardon ended up receiving medical attention, he had multiple magnets lodged in both nostrils.

And progress marches on.

Join us next time when we go into a deep trance to solve the shallow mystery of how to wash our faces without touching them. Until then, STFL radio silence. LL