Revisionist History
August 31, 2009 in A Birthday With Shoes
The world is still reeling from the news that haggis is not, in fact, a Scottish dish. But the revelations don’t end there—oh, no, my friends. The following is a short list of shams perpetrated on the world by the devious people of Scotland.
Golf did not, as is commonly believed, originate in 12th century Scotland. It was first played by a group of expatriate midgets living in Geneva in the early 1930s. They lived in a fanciful, hilly compound peppered with tiny windmills, castles and lakes, a design which would later be re-created in slightly larger scale the world over.
The Bay City Rollers were a quintet of unusually fair Mexican teenagers kidnapped from their homes and enslaved by Bell (later Arista) Records for over ten years. Several members were quietly replaced after achieving puberty too quickly and are rumored to have been killed in privately circulated snuff films.
Sean Connery was born in Fresno, CA, and from an early age was groomed to take over the family stationery business. A boating accident on his 30th birthday left him in a coma for three years; he awoke claiming to be immortal and spoke with a foreign accent, demanding a dry martini in a deep champagne goblet, made with three parts Gordon’s gin, one part vodka, and a splash of Kina Lillet, garnished with a thin slice of lemon peel.
Sheena Easton, “Scottish” pop star, was created by two horny teenage boys in Shermer, Illinois in the mid-1980s. After hacking into a government mainframe and uploading photos of various hot chicks, they put bras on their heads, blew up a Barbie doll and gave us the woman who would later invite us inside her Sugar Walls.
Scotch—ha!— Tape is all American, invented over eighty years ago by Dick Drew, the bespectacled 3M technician who first came up with masking tape. The initial batch of masking tape wasn’t very effective, causing the auto painter who gave it a trial run to say ”Take this tape back to those Scotch [cheap] bosses of yours and tell them to shove it!” Nevertheless, the nickname stuck, and would eventually be given to Drew’s 1930 invention, cellophane tape. (Curiously, Scotch Tape is called “sellotape” in the UK.)
“Virus With Shoes,” alleged Scottish person, beloved Wordsmoker editor, dear friend, and lust object of smart women the world over, is actually a sentient supercomputer housed in the garden shed of a retired NASA engineer.
