The McDougal Campaign Tour - Day 27

CAMPAIGN MANAGER'S JOURNAL - 9/18/2006 - DRIVE-THRU AFRICAN SAFARI

We had been making good time over the past couple of days, but early this morning the convoy came to a screeching halt, causing me to tumble out of one of the bunk beds at the back of the bus. I ran to the front, thinking there had been some sort of accident. I found McDougal standing outside the bus, gazing up at a billboard, saying over and over "Sweet Baby Jesus, this is the greatest thing I have ever seen." The billboard featured a cartoon image of a giraffe driving a Volkswagen Beetle, advertising a Drive-Thru African Safari. I knew there was no point trying to talk McDougal out of seeing this roadside attraction, so I just walked down the stopped convoy alerting all of the drivers of our new destination. The managers of the Drive-Thru Safari would not allow the bus or any of the trucks to go through (thru), so we had to divide up among the four wheel drive vehicles. Of course, these vehicles could not accommodate the entire staff at once, so we had to go through (thru) in several groups. When my turn to go thru finally arrived I was assigned to drive one of the Jeeps with several of the female interns as my passengers.


Before you enter the Safari, each vehicle is issued a small bucket of alfalfa pellets that you are supposed to use to feed the animals. Naturally, this has led the animals to associate cars with food. Immediately upon entering, we were set upon by a flock of vicious emus. Their long, flexible necks enabled them to peck at the food bucket no matter where is was positioned in the Jeep. After the emu assault, all of the interns steadfastly refused to even touch the food bucket, so it was placed in my control in addition to my driving duties. I did not have to do double duty for long though. Immediately after escaping the emus we were mugged by a herd of moose. While one moose blocked the road, another stuck her head in through the window and bit down on the edge of the bucket. A brief tug of war ensued, but realizing that I had no chance of defeating a hungry moose, I let go of the bucket. We had only been in the Drive-Thru Safari for three minutes.



Although it is billed as a Drive-Thru African Safari, most of the African animals are kept inside pens, I assume for the safety of the park guests. But "safe" animals like goats, deer, llamas, elk, moose, buffalo and longhorn steers are allowed to roam free and assault motor vehicles as they see fit. Previous park visitors were obviously more successful at maintaining control of their food bucket in the face of a full-on moose onslaught than we were, because all of the animals were similarly conditioned to attack vehicles in search of treats. At one point, while I was distracted by the interns cooing over a baby deer that wandered up to the Jeep, a longhorn managed to get his enormous head into the driver's side window and began licking the steering wheel. I pushed on his head with both hands, but he refused to budge, so I punched him square between the eyes as hard as I could. I think the steer was more startled than hurt, but he jerked his head back so fast that he ripped the sideview mirror off with one of his massive horns. It hurt the hell out of my hand, I'll tell you that much. My knuckles are still swollen and purple.


Unfortunately, I don't have any pictures of the really large and scary animals, just the small and cute ones. The aggressive animals kept us too busy defending ourselves to take pictures, but if you click on the picture of the llamas surrounding the Jeep to enlarge it, you can see a Bison lurking in the background. McDougal went thru the Safari with the last group and shot two elk before park employees could stop him. The management of the Drive-Thru African Safari were extremely irate. I had to pay them a considerable bribe to keep them from contacting the local law enforcement. The elk carcasses are currently strapped to the top of the bus. McDougal plans on barbecuing them at our next campaign stop.

NOTE: As several of the animals pictured are endangered species, we have chosen to protect their identities.

The Battle of Scotland

That reminds me of the time McDougal decided he was going to train a quarter million head of cattle to fight the Irish Republican Army in a duel to the death - Winner Takes Dublin. He was really fired up about the chaos in Palestine in the late 60s and because he was at the time regularly banging a couple of Israeli sisters, he put all the blame on the IRA.

So he buys up, no shit, about half the beef herds of Nebraska and Lower Montana, puts them on a couple of oil tankers and sets sail for Ireland. Only, he was leading the convoy in a speedboat meant mainly for pleasure skiing, and he thought Ireland was in Africa. Damned if he didn't lead those oil tankers around the globe three times, feeding the cows fish that he caught himself with a extra sharp gardening hoe and bag of baby bottle nipples.

It took him 20 years to reach the port of Glasgow. When he pulled in the people cheered as if the Beatles themselves were crushed and dying in those oil tankers, but McDougal didn't even look up at them. He immediately unloaded the few surviving cattle into a 1962 Aston Martin DB4, packed his satchel in the boot, and sped off leaving the couple of thousand crew and cattle tenders on the docks with not a penny of their two decades' pay.

Did they say so much as a harsh word against McDougal?

You tell me.

The next few months were spent in isolation in the jagged peaks of Mull Kintyre of Oa, teaching the blank eyed cows to fight a pistol-brandishing man with their bare hooves, to fashion weapons out of everyday lanyards, and to live off the streets, hiding in the shadows for weeks at a time without moving a muscle. By the end of winter McDougal had a bovine army 4,000 strong, living in the shadows of Kilmarnock and Glenluce - the residents of those towns never had a clue they were sharing their bars, houses, bathrooms, and wives with thousands of cows painted all black and silent as the wind.

The morning of April 3rd, McDougal woke, cast aside some Irishman's besotted wife, and stood fully erect.

"Today is the day," he seethed, "that the dirty Irish swarm will pay their blood to me through broken teeth."

He then violently bleated the Call to Arms, practiced so many times over the years and across the miles, and at once the sleepy townspeople found the ninja-like cattle appearing from behind their dressers and moving out of the patterns of their dining room wallpaper. The cows slaughtered mercilessly, women and children alike, and the men they sliced and dried into jerky for the boatride home. McDougal fought more lustily than them all combined, single-handedly removing three small provinces and a waterslide park from the earth and grinding them into a sort of spreadable paste not unlike olive tapenade.

They rode the verdant hills in modified Mini Coopers for 6 days and 5 nights, raping and pillaging anything over 10 centimeters tall and gathered in a satiated heap on the peak of Ben Vorlich. The jugs of whiskey were flowing, the jerky stores were full, and McDougal sat back fat and happy. He looked over his mooing crew with a paternal eye, and then realized he was in Scotland.

Was he embarrrassed about his geographic error? Would an embarrassed man trim his mustache, buy a horse, and host a morning talk show on Oakland's NBC affiliate?

McDougal sure would.

McDougal Saves Christmas (Part 2)

As I began to regain consciousness I expected that whistling to fade, but if anything it grew louder. I soon realized that I was hearing the wind shrieking through the shattered windshield of McDougal's Landrover. In the glow of the headlights I could see the hindquarters of eight reindeer the size of clydesdales, and beyond that only darkness. I turned my head slowly to the right, fearing a flashback from whatever was in those awful capsules. McDougal sat in the driver's seat holding not onto the steering wheel, but onto a pair of reins that snaked out through the hole in the windshield. He was wearing Santa's red coat and hat, and for a minute I would have sworn that he had somehow managed to grow a white beard while I was out cold, but as my head cleared I realized that he was merely foaming at the mouth. He seemed to be in unusually high spirits.

"Where are we?" I mumbled.

"Over East Berlin, I think," McDougal shouted out with glee. "Either that or Detroit. It's hard to tell the difference at this altitude!"

I was fairly certain this was a joke, but to this day I'm still not sure. McDougal's sense of humor is nearly as warped as his sense of direction. A surface-to-air missile arced toward us out of the darkness below, which did not entirely rule out Detroit, but seemed to point more heavily to somewhere in the Eastern Bloc. McDougal rolled down his window and tossed out an empty whiskey bottle. It struck one of the missile's stabilizer fins, sending it spiraling off in a safe direction.

"We're going to need to stop soon so I can refuel those reindeer," McDougal yelled over the howling wind.

"Refuel?" I asked.

"Yeah, the pills didn't really seem to agree with them. Completely uncontrollable! So I gave the ones on the right some mescaline and the ones on the left got absinthe. That seemed to level them off."

"Reindeer will drink absinthe?"

"They didn't go for it at first," McDougal explained, "but I mixed it in with a little egg nog and they really seemed to love that!"

He snapped the reins and the Landrover began to descend. As I began to get my bearings I realized that the roof of the Landrover was partially collapsed. The damage from our earlier accident was confined to the front of the vehicle. I wondered what McDougal had gotten into while I was out. The answer was immediately clear when, after a rough landing on the roof of a Bulgarian orphanage, I stepped out of the truck. Balanced precariously on the Landrover's roof was an oversized burlap sack. McDougal climbed up and began tossing toys down to me.

"We aren't seriously doing what I think we're doing?" I asked. McDougal laughed.

"Why the hell did you think I took the reindeer?"

"I don't know," I replied. "Just for shits and grins?"

"Oh come on," McDougal said, sounding hurt. "Does that really sound like something I would do?"

I remained silent and carried an armload of toys toward the roof's service access. When I returned McDougal was digging around in the back of the Landrover. Dozens of long crates were stacked inside.

"What are those?"

"Daisy air rifles," McDougal replied, pulling a roll of parchment out of his pocket. "Check this out."

He held the parchment out toward me and it unrolled down to his feet. Scratched upon it in tiny archaic script were thousands of names. As I looked at it the script snaked around, weaving itself into a new set of names. The letters held their positions for about a minute and then went through their transformation again, forming a third set of names.

"Naughty list," McDougal said, by way of explanation. "Do you believe that fat fuck was going to give all of these kids coal? Anyway, I dropped all of that coal off in Newcastle then made a beeline for the Daisy factory. There are more rifles in the sack."

"Where is the fa... Er, Santa, anyway?" I asked, still trying to absorb McDougal's BB gun distribution plan.

"Ah, I dropped him off at a safehouse in Cape Town. Come on, we've got a lot of work to do tonight if we're gonna pull this off." And with that, McDougal descended the stairs into the orphanage, dragging a bag of toys behind him. "Grab a couple cases of vodka too," he barked. "These little Ivans love that shit."

McDougal Fast Facts

• McDougal's had the bird flu 311 times. The last time he caught it was in 1683. When he recovered, he slaughtered the entire dodo species. He hasn't had as much as a cold since.
• McDougal has flat feet with 1" discs on the bottom. They allow him, when barefoot, to climb walls like a spider. Sadly, due to an embarrassing nail fungus, McDougal has not taken his socks of since 1986.
• McDougal can will hair to grow on anything. He killed Sirhan Sirhan by causing him to grow hair on his heart, lungs, trachea, and eyeballs.
• McDougal's first home was made of egg whites. It provided excellent shelter and was a source of protein for an entire village in the Ozarks.
• McDougal taught Jesus and Abraham Lincoln how to walk on water. Lincoln was not the kind of man to show off.
• McDougal is a robot who runs on 132 AAA batteries, which have to be replaced every four hours.
• McDougal lives in a 6,000 square foot ice castle in Ecuador.
• McDougal has a collection of unicorns that graze freely on his secret compound in Nigeria. Wait, not unicorns ... eunuchs.
• McDougal once ate a log cabin on a dare. When his army buddies weren't impressed, he shat out an arc and forced it to rain for 40 days and 40 nights and flooding the Earth. He then sailed his arc to the moon and started a new race of genetically modified superheroes.
• McDougal has won 13 spelling bees.
• There is no Hebrew word for McDougal.
  

McDougal Slow Facts

Fact: McDougal has been at war with the Portugese for over 1200 years.

I'm not trying to suggest that McDougal is actually that old though. That would be ridiculous. He's only about half that. So how is that possible you ask?

Fact: McDougal owns and operates the world's only functioning time machine.

He stole the design from the Nazis back in WWII. Actually, he thought he was just stealing a priceless painting by Sandro Botticelli, but the time machine design was hidden on a microfilm embedded in the frame. The Nazis never built the machine because they couldn't figure out how to power it. In case you are wondering, McDougal wasn't an Allied soldier during the war. He preferred to work freelance.

Fact: McDougal's time machine is steam powered.

To create the enormous amount of power required to send himself back and forth through time, McDougal re-routed a river in central Africa to pour directly into the couldron of an active volcano. The steam serves the dual purpose of powering the time machine and hiding it from Portugese spy satelites.

Fact: No one knows exactly why McDougal hates the Portugese so much.

I have heard rumors that one year someone accidently gave McDougal a copy of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets form the Portuguese as a Christmas gift. McDougal was so enraged that he vowed to destroy whoever was responsible. He probably should have destroyed the gift-giver (who intended it for his fiance) or even E.B. Browning, but that kind of rational thinking has never been McDougal's strong suit.

Fact: McDougal's war with the Portugese is the only war in history to be fought backwards chronologically.

Obviously, the Portugese are now fully aware of McDougal's operation even though they are unable to stop it. But by travelling through time McDougal is able to fight each subsequent battle a few years prior to the former, thereby catching the Portugese completely unaware.

Fact: If it weren't for McDougal's interference, the Portugese would have discovered the Americas a full twelve years before Columbus.

The expedition was fully outfitted and consisted of six ships, each of them larger than Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria. There is every indication that it would have been a monumental success and would have given Portugal a massive influence in world affairs that would have lasted to even the present day. However, at the last minute McDougal showed up and convinced them to abandon the expedition and instead sail East in search of an island which grew a fantastic spice the likes of which Europeans had never tasted. He provided them with a map to the island and a sample of the spice as a gesture of goodwill.

Fact: McDougal provided the expedition with a Shoney's kids menu and a Crown Royal bag full of Lowery's Seasoned Salt.

Mountain Otter

Last year, I was on an expedition in the Ruwenzori Mountains (Ugandan side) with McDougal.

We were about ten days in when we came across a misplaced sea otter, who was obviously lost and far from his natural home in the sea.

The poor thing was terrified and alone.

We spent about two hours crafting a plan to return the lost creature to his natural habitat.

After considering the logistics, and realizing, "Hey, we could do this!" we opted to club him to death and eat him.