Planet Proctor # 5

(It's hot - I'm not)

ANYTHYNGE YOU WANT, TWO

Our man in London, Larry Belling, confirms that during the official opening week of the newly reconstructed Old Globe Theatre which I and my wife visited recently on the banks of the Thames, actor George Innes slid down a rope onto the stage during the last preview of "Two Gentlemen of Verona," and promptly broke a leg.

He was unable to carry on, so Mark Rylands, the troupe's actor/manager, carried him off. The British press headlined the incident and several quoted the oft-told cliche "break a leg" as being taken too literally. He was replaced for the opening, but it was not reported by whom. (Perhaps Dudley Moore's one-legged thespian?)

And by the way, the term "break a leg" which is commonly assumed to be a way of indirectly wishing one well on opening nights, actually refers to a deep bow, which "breaks the leg" at the knee, in response to an audience's heartfelt ovation and signifies a wish for a successful performance. And everything you know is wrong.

WELCOME SEEKERS

From Reuters news service we learn that a British broker claims to have become the first insurer in the world to offer a policy against impregnation by beings from another planet. Specialist broker Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson (known to his friends as GRIP) offers a policy to adults living in Britain that for an annual premium of 100 ($155) insures against two sorts of extraterrestrial hankypanky. Abduction by aliens would net the victim 100,000 and double that sum for impregnation -- a risk against which both men and woman can insure, affirming the Firesign Theatre's oft-quoted assertion that "men and women are the same sex."

GRIP managing director Simon Burgess states that though he would personally would not buy such a policy but adds that "if there is the fear of these things out there, we are justified in offering to cover people against them.'' Some U.S. insurers have offered policies covering abduction by aliens, cashing in on ID4 fever and the possibility that life may have existed on Mars, but Burgess adds that they are the first company to insure against being knocked up by Zippo from Gorko.

NAZIS FROM OUTER SPACE?

From the L.A.Times, we learn that New Jersey farmer Joe Goodenough in Mansfield Township, was informed by a local newshound that visible from the air, hacked out at knee-level in 10-foot-wide swaths of sythed stalks in his 30-acre corn field -- was a 60-foot swastika. Farmer Joe and family were nonplused and outraged and are deciding whether to harvest the corn immediately or just cut back more stalks to efface the offensive crop crap.

The article did not mention that the traditional swastika, formed from a Greek cross with the arms bent at right angles, is the ancient cosmic Sanskrit representation for "good luck" and to the Hopi symbolized "the four corners of the earth" long before the Nasties bent it to their insane design to conquer the four corners of the earth. So who did this, anyway? The good aliens or the bad aliens?

GIVE ME SOME HEAD

Directly to the right of this article is a picture of a small casket toted by men in civil-war uniforms and draped in a Confederate flag, containing the skull of a Southern soldier who is being laid to rest at the Spotsylvania, Virginia battlefield where he was slain 132 years ago. The skull, designated as "Rebel Butler" by the doctor who found it there in 1865, a year after around 20,000 men lost their lives, was on display at the Henry County Historical Society Museum in New Castle, Indiana from 1923 and was returned for a military interment by the Sons of Confederate Veterans who took great pains to point out that their actions had "nothing whatsoever to do with slavery." And Hitler was a Hopi.

GIVE ME MORE HEAD

It made Newsweek that our Tiny Doctor Tim may be laughing his head off from beyond the grave. At the end of Paul Davids' documentary titled "Timothy Leary's Dead," there is a gruesome scene that ostensibly depicts the surgical decapitation and subsequent cryogenic preservation of the late Doctor's noggin. It is generally believed that the scene is a concoction, probably designed by the playful trickster before his death, and completely in keeping with his famous last words: "Why? . . . Why not?"

POLITICS AS UNUSUAL

My friend Eugene Volokh at UCLA Law forwarded the following tidbit from an unknown source: The word "politics" is derived from the word "poly," meaning "many," and from the word "ticks," meaning "blood sucking parasites."

STUPID CROOK TRICKS

The South Coast Repetory newsletter is the unlikely source of the following funnies:

Two armed robbers in Michigan entered a record store and one of them shouted "Nobody move!" When the other thug made a sudden move towards the cash register, his cranked-up cohort -- shot him.

In Kentucky, two clever crooks attached a chain from their bumper to the front panel of an ATM machine, stepped on the gas -- and promptly ripped off their bumper. They peeled off in a panic, and left "the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain and their license plate still attached to the bumper."

In South Carolina, some cracker blew into a police station toting a bag of cocaine, complaining to the desk sergeant that it was of poor quality and demanding that the guy he bought it from be arrested.