Bat Shit Hall of Fame - Running with the Bulls

The dudes in this photograph running from angry bulls during last week's Festival of San Fermin are crazier than bat shit.

So much crazier than bat shit that we feel its almost as useless to write about this craziness as it is to elaborate on the finer points of Michael Jackson because really, what are we telling you that you don't already know?

Well, the first thing we can share, having actually taken the above photo, is that semi-drunken men gather along the bull-running course at an alarmingly early hour for the 8 a.m. three-minute "oh-shit-fest" that is the actual event.

At around 7 a.m., the street is still littered with empty cups, beer bottles and spilled drinks and various and sundry shady characters, but then cops with berets ferret them away and a very traditional street-cleaning truck takes to the course to pick up the refuse to at least minimize the damage.

By minimize the damage we mean try to make it so that people don't slip on actual trash while they RUN FROM SEVERAL TONS OF ANGRY BULLS who had been sleeping peacefully until some asshole shot a canon near their heads and some dudes in green shirts decided to heard them along the course... Yeah. They make sure the people and bulls don't slip. Much!Except when that one did, throwing the crowd for a loop and eventually head-butting at a tourist with a camera. Thankfully, the bull wound up hitting the wooden beam in front of him instead of the actual tourist, who probably has a much cooler photograph than we do.

(This was captured on Spanish television, which the Spaniards thought incredibly amusing....)

The day we watched the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, some poor Irish sucker almost wound up getting a hoof on the lower spine. In the initial television footage, it looked like he had just become either paraplegic or dead. Later shots showed that his pants had actually been torn down, so what looked like his ass was actually the space just below his balls. Where the several-thousand-pound bull just stepped in a fit of rage.

Right where your spine should have been, dude. Wow. You should be prayin' to Jesus right about now.

If we need to go on about why this is in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame, perhaps you too should attempt the Running of the Bulls, and let us know how it goes.

If you really think about it, with their ubiquitous white clothes and red scarves, the people and city of Pamplona are crazier than bat shit too for hosting this thing, but God bless España.

Bat Shit Hall of Fame - Smoking

No matter how you dice it, smoking cigarettes is crazier than bat shit.

Bla bla bla freedom to do what you want with your body. Bla bla bla no link between smoking and cancer because the tobacco company said so. Bla bla bla. Stop being an asshole.

The arguments dished out by smokers about why what they're doing to their lungs isn't anybody else's business are crazy enough to land the entire practice in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame. Second, note, only to Michael Jackson.

Not only does smoking cigarettes give you lung cancer and kill you, it harms those around you with its noxious chemical sprawl. Cigarettes contain 4,000 chemicals, 43 of which are known to cause cancer and 400 of which are considered toxic including nicotine, tar, carbon monoxide, formaldehyde (what that frog in biology class was preserved in), ammonia (window cleaner), hydrogen cyanide (obvious), arsenic and DDT.

Delicious! Please exhale on my baby!

Even worse than killing you, smoking can make your life a living hell, like it did for Debi above, the subject of a 1996 California Department of Heath Services anit-smoking campaign.

After smoking three packs of cigarettes a day for 30 years, Debi had her larynx removed. The larynx is a very important organ in your body. Without it, you can't speak.

Debi also had a tracheotomy, meaning her body was so fucked up from 30 years of smoking that doctors had to CUT A HOLE IN HER THROAT so that she could breathe. In the picture above, Debi proves that addiction to nicotine is so strong that she's actually still smoking, exhaling the smoke through the hole in her throat. If that doesn't make you want to put your tongue in her mouth, nothing will!

Smoking also makes you look both old, because it gives you tremendous, cavern-like wrinkles, and stupid. There is a direct correlation between level of education and the likelihood that you're a smoker.

"Smoking prevalence was highest among adults who had earned a General Educational Development diploma (42.3%) and lowest among those with graduate degrees (7.2%)," the Center for Disease Control reports.

Also, you are probably poor. "The socioeconomic status of U.S. adults is inversely related to their likelihood of smoking," the CDC finds.

Since in America its the smart people who tend to be able to get their hands on the money (or a system of meritocracy that rewards itself, but that's a different story), it would make sense that smoking would be less common among the elite.

Smokers are therefore walking advertisements that they're both dumb and poor. Good job guys!

As we put smoking in the Bat Shit Hall of Fame we'd like to make one more point. The age-old Libertarian argument that since its your body, your life, you can do with it what you will, is crazier than bat shit.

Because guess who's going to be paying your Medicare bills when you're dragging an oxygen tank around because you've got Emphysema?

You're welcome.

Bat Shit Hall Of Fame - Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson is so obviously crazier than bat shit that this post is almost an insult to our own intelligence.

In fact, there are so many little nuggets of crazy gold one could highlight with Michael Jackson that it's almost unfair, like taking candy from a retarded baby. Yeah. We just went there.

Let's start simple by deconstructing the photo above. First of all, someone needs to tell him that wearing silver AND gold at the same time is just tacky. And the space monkey arm pads? Is he planning on having an inter-galactic joust? It also goes without saying that in this photograph, Michael Jackson is white.

Which he wasn't when I went to the Thriller Tour when I was seven. Back when he was still a human being and awesome.

Michael Jackson's descent into bat shit has been steady since 1984, when his "Off the Wall" nose was replaced by "Thriller" nose. Over time, the nose morphed into a perfect triangle with holes, but more remarkably, he has magically turned from a black man to a white man.

He claims its a skin disease called Impetago, but um, that kind of strikes in patchy blotches. Not quite the smooth milky sea of skin he's managed to buy, I mean cultivate. It strikes me as oddly Silence of the Lambs, if you can see what I'm getting at. (It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again!)

Unfortunately for his supposed offspring, Michael Jackson's crazy seems to be contagious.

His children are named Paris, Prince Michael and BLANKET. He once dangled BLANKET over a balcony to show him/her/it off to paparazzi, and he made his children wear creepy masks out in public. As if it would be somehow LESS damaging to their fragile young part-Jackson psyches to have to wear masks and hoods everywhere than to have people taking pictures of them constantly. Your kid is not anonymous if he's the one wearing the duck mask.

And finally, he has a giant ranch/amusement park/porn den that he calls "Neverland" where he invites children to come stay, and where he sleeps in bed with them. Because somehow that's appropriate.

So, hats off to Michael Jackson, the first inductee into the Bat Shit Hall of Fame. You make us proud!