Saturday, October 8, 2011

Snakes On A Plane

A man was apprehended recently trying to board a plane with several snakes and three tortoises in his pants. Officials were tipped off when the x-ray equipment revealed a surplus of spines. There's no mystery about why a man would do such a thing. He carries tortoises in his pants because mice are too fidgety, and he carries snakes in his pants because they are too large to fit in a four-ounce container. Nor is there a question why the perps in these cases are invariably men. There isn't a woman in America who would attempt such a dastardly deed. We don't have the pants for it.

Pants perform entirely different functions for men and women. Men's pants permit them to appear in public while concealing random peregrinations of the penis. There is always room in their trousers to hang their personal scratchable items as well as perform actual scratching. This much space affords ample temporary shelter for a fleet of reptiles and maybe the terrarium they came in.

Women's pants, on the other hand, function strictly as butt and belly containment vessels. They are fully occupied and you couldn't slide a greased skink in sideways. If at any point we do develop some atmosphere in our pants, we've got a pair of skinny jeans on the shelf waiting to pick up the slack. No one is able to throw away the skinny jeans, which remain neatly folded as a symbol of hope. They are stacked in strata upon previously retired skinny jeans, where climatologists of the future will be able to core them for samples of antique air.

It's a crapshoot whether the skinny jeans will have swung back into fashion when they are finally deployed. I lost weight recently and discovered that my skinny jeans are now known as mom jeans, designed for maximum containment. The high-waisted jean is the gold standard of flesh corrals. Many of your major organs and their adipose insulation can be safely impounded in them and any escapee flesh is neatly covered by the bra and contents, which snap right over the top like Tupperware.

Conceivably a woman could shelter reptiles by wearing 100% Spandex pants, except that they would make a trio of tortoises look like roaming boils. Stretch pants did exist when I was young, but they were for older women with beehives, afternoon martinis and a cigarette cough. We teenagers wore pants with no give at all. We winched them up as far as we could by rocking back and forth and then had to lie down on our beds to seal the deal, rolling off sideways because our pants had taken the bend out of us. If we did tip over, we'd go down like a plank. It didn't look too bad. These were the days before kids were routinely infused with corn syrup from infancy. And we didn't realize it was uncomfortable because we had nothing to compare it to.

Except for a brief decade with pleated-front trousers, which we also managed to fill up, nothing has changed. My most recent trip to a store revealed racks of jeans that could rub the fuzz off a pipe-cleaner person. They don't leave room for a mosquito bite.

The truth about the airport incident is that there is a nasty, lucrative trade in exotic pets and some men will do anything to get that money. A woman would never stoop that low. Stooping is problematic anyway, and we only got room for bacteria and yeast.

30 comments:

  1. Jeeze! you've nailed it again, Murr. Of course, a nail is about as much as you can can get in there.
    (In Australia [see Oz] we have a term "budgie smugglers." You and the readers can Google it.)

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  2. Funny. Still trying to picture greasing up a skink.

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  3. I've noticed lately that my butt and belly containment devices are plum (or should I say plump) full. Time to add another pair of skinny jeans to the stack.

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  4. Now, who in the world can bear to part with those perfectly good size two jeans, even though there isn't a snowball's chance in hades of ever squeezing into them again? Not I. So, there is, indeed, a box of skinny jeans sitting on the shelf of my closet. Ya got me. (Hey! They aren't hurting anybody!) While we're talking about britches, how about those low-riders that are all the rage? You know, the ones that are cut so low, plumbers ain't the only ones in danger of showing their cracks. Sure, we used to wear hip-huggers, but back then, we didn't have an avalanche of blubber to squish up and over the top of them. So, I put on those damned pants, which actually don't feel all that bad, wear a long loose shirt over top of them, and hope to hell a good stiff breeze doesn't come along to reveal the horror story underneath.

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  5. How did you know about my skinny jeans? I didn't realize this is expected of us women. And you are right: although I've got no chance of ever wearing them again, I do take them out and try every once in awhile. I got the creepy crawlies when I thought of that guy on the plane...

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  6. "...you couldn't slide a greased skink in sideways." This will forever after be my measure for the fit of skinny jeans.

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  7. Thank you for a treasured moment: my wife and I reading your post together, laughing in turn.

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  8. I totally gave up skinny jeans. In fact I gave up women's jeans altogether. I buy my jeans in the men's department. Not that I have anything to hide except maybe an occasional greased skink.

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  9. Susan, I have to quote from myself from an old piece of mine: "soon, giant cumulonimbus mounds of flesh were thundering out of pants all over town." And you're right: we didn't have so much to spill out over the top. Then.

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  10. Ah, but those voluminous long summery skirts some women wear could conceal more serpents than a platoon of Pentecostalists could handle. So the opportunities for smuggling aren't entirely confined to males.

    Tortoises have quite a powerful bite (I owned one as a child), and any man who would confine one in close proximity to his most treasured anatomy is not thinking ahead.

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  11. Always men, but never gay men because they are far too fashion-forward to be caught in baggy-ass pants.

    Your observations and the way you express them always make me laugh. Thanks for a nice start to the day.

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  12. Like Ellen, I stick with men's jeans. I've never owned a pair of skinny jeans--oh, maybe when I was in my latter 20's but that was a different life.

    I love this because it is so true --
    "older women with beehives, afternoon martinis and a cigarette cough"
    Some women just should not wear stretch of any sort.

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  13. Love this! "Injaynesworld" alluded to a potential sidebar discussion -- that is, the moment in fashion history when gay guys in the 1970's felt compelled to wear impossibly-skin-tight jeans. The object, of course, was to show off our, um, merchandise to potential takers. ("Ill take the Calvin Kleins, in one size smaller, please.") Yours truly admits to having been part of this scene. (Picture me about 100lbs thinner, with a 31-inch waist.) At some point, the look was enhanced when every gay guy in the world decided to dispense with the wearing of any undergarments, with the goal of squeezing into even-tighter jeans and having a more, um, life-like display. I jumped off that bandwagon when the look was escalated even further -- when guys started wearing specialty undergarments designed to "lift and re-arrange" the merchandise. By that time, I was living with bra-less feminists, and The Look started to seem a bit absurd to me. When I look at photos from the swinging '70's now, I realize that there wasn't much subtlety in the Sexual Revolution for us gay guys. But then again, I suppose that's universal.

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  14. Thank you for the laugh this afternoon. I am about to go put on a pair of Stretchy jeans that are low cut so that my belly hangs out and hide all that under the big shirt.. LOL I always had a J-Lo butt in high school. I hated it.. It was not popular like today. Now my gut pops out in front and my butt is still in the back!! Odd looking....

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  15. When I was a lass, the bad girls wore their stretch pants so tight that if she had a dime in her pocket, you could call it heads or tails. Now, I see women of all ages and sizes prancing around in leggings and t-shirts, with the thong undies and cellulite clearly delineated, but I notice that we have, for the most part, taken to wearing bras again.

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  16. Hmm. I'll be eying skinks with a certain suspicion, now, looking for telltale gleams.

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  17. Ever since I heard the label "mom jeans" it has annoyed me. Who ever thought that one up? Grrrrr.

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  18. Ah,I remember the lying down on the bed to zip the pants up. And I only weighed 100 lbs then! Nowadays if I cannot zip up standing up, lying down is not going to help at all! Wait! I do not have any zip up pants--all are now elastic! As Gilda Radner's character, Emily Litella, would say--"Never mind."

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  19. I struggle with the concept of putting snakes and tortoises in one's pants. Don't those things bite? And there would not be too much around to gnaw on, except for.... Oh, I don't even want to think about it.

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  20. In a pair of snug jeans, I already look like I'm smuggling tortoises, the occasional greased skink, and on really bad days, a water buffalo. Why would anyone do that on purpose?

    "Beehives, afternoon martinis, and a cigarette cough" describes my dear late Aunt Alice to a tee. Except it was afternoon Manhattans. The memory made me smile, and the blog post, as usual, made me laugh. Thanks, Murr.

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  21. I vote to popularize harem pants/MC Hammer pants. They're loose, breathable, and have a unique flair.

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  22. Oh, if yours are mom jeans, then I have moved on into grandma jeans. In my faded memory, there are flashes of lying on the bed whilst zipping up red jeans. I recall a photo of me trying to do some sort of movement in those jeans, not being able to bend my leg. No wonder all of the adults in my world shook their heads. Now I am shaking mine.
    Those young 'ns.....tsk, tsk!

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  23. Don't let sociaety sway you! Don't take this laying down, Murr! Go without pants! Be a rebel!

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  24. I knew that woman with the stretch pants and beehive! She worked at the convenience store my mother would send me to buy milk and cigarettes for her at (I'm showing my age). I assume you're referring to the type of stretch pants with the stirrup (?) that would go under the foot to assure maximum stretchage. She also wore white moccassins all the time which I guess was part of the uniform. She scared me.

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  25. My skink thanks you for the honorable mention, now that I know what it is.

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  26. Once again, you made me laugh myself silly(er)! That "greased skink" comment nearly killed me. Thanks for being you. :-)

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  27. What really slayed me was the advent of those droppy-drawer pants that guys wore (along with the baseball cap on backwards) where the crotch gathers somewhere below the knee. That particular style of pants only makes sense to me when the wearer also wears white face paint and enormous bright red hair and a big round red Bozo nose. Without the added makeup, those pants poopy pants are less than laughable.

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  28. This is depressing because it is so true. Excuse me, I have to go let in the climatologists so they can take a core sample of my decade-deep stack of skinny jeans.

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  29. Some time ago I embraced my now-body with abandon and rehomed all the wrong-sized clothing (in both directions) to people who could use it. No one ever told me that one of the joys of being middle aged was that I could completely ignore 'fashion'. I feel bad for the girls squinching around in pants that make them look like a tube that someone has squeezed from the botttom, flattening as they go up.

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