April 4 2009
Well, gang, a few weeks back, Gino Beano, one of our original members and a great lover of beans, got to thinking, as we all do from time to time, of what it would be like to fire a 60 cal. Pistol.
He wrestled with it for a couple of weeks and finally went out and bought a second-hand 60 cal. elephant gun and cut it down into a single shot pistol. Made a nice walnut grip for it too.
He reasoned that, used as a house gun, even if you didn’t hit the intruder, just the sound of it going off would probably freeze the blood in the guy’s veins.
Anyway, he finished it up and took it over to Carl Potter’s spread where Carl raised plants and shrubs for sale to professional landscapers.
Carl and a couple of helpers oohed and aahed at the terrible thing while Gino fired up a big cigar. Then Carl took Mr. Beano to the barn door, for him a snifter full of 151 rum on the work bench, and stepped back, careful not to tread in the giant pile of goat manure laying there.
Holding the cigar with two fingers of his left hand, and the snifter with the other three, Gino took a sip of rum and pointed the unlikely pistol at a terra cotta pot sitting on a fence post about 25 feet away.
He squinted, held his breath, and pulled the trigger.
The big gun went off with a roar that was just a little bit this side of a 75 mm field piece.
The pistol itself, left Gino’s hand and came straight back and struck him smartly on the forehead.
Those who were there say that what followed all happened in slow motion.
He immediately dropped the tumbler full of rum, and his left hand, with the cigar still in it, dropped to his side in the vicinity of the seat of his trousers.
As Gino, out cold, was falling toward the rum covered ground, the seat of his trousers suddenly burst with a raspberry sound and whoosh of blue flame. And when his rear parts hit that 151 rum puddle on the ground, all around him took on an eerie flickering blue glow.
Thinking quickly, Carl and his boys proceeded to cover Gino’s body in goat manure in order to put out the flames. Maybe a little too energetically perhaps.
When Gino came to, you’d think that he would have been grateful. . .but no, not even a little bit. He was just itching for a fight.
That’s what you get for helping a guy out.

Till next week
Helga Biermeister
Secretary