Off-Kilter
Till Death Do Us Start: Here’s a personal ad you rarely see: Single white male seeks woman to share his grave. According to the Internet news service https://www.tabloid.net, Irishman Donal Bredin-Smith, 65, began advertising for an afterlife companion after getting divorced, apparently because he didn’t want to waste the double cemetery plot he purchased in 1994. So far, two dozen women have replied to his classified ad, which ended with, “First one in takes bottom berth. Garlic eaters and smokers need not apply.”
Creating a Scene Department: Some people try to dodge fans and paparazzi. Others try to rent them. According to this month’s Marie Claire magazine, aspiring celebrities can now hire fake groupies through an L.A. company called Rent-a-Fanclub. For a fee of $50 per fan, the service supplies personalized mobs for any occasion. Clients include struggling actors as well as such celebrities as Burt Bacharach and Ed McMahon.
In a related story, former Congressman Bob Dornan now accuses Loretta Sanchez of using Rent-a-Fanclub to edge him out in the 1996 election.
Love Drug Patrol: Late-night comics aren’t the only ones who can’t resist cheap jokes about the new anti-impotence drug Viagra. Even so-called family newspapers are succumbing to the temptation. The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, recently ran a front-page story titled, “Viagra: Big and Getting Bigger.” And the New York Post has published two headlines of questionable taste (of course, we would never stoop to that). One said, simply, “Hard Line.” The other was a first-person account headlined, “Our Man Takes a Stiff Dose of Viagra: Finds It Has Its Upside . . . and Down.” The writer nicknamed the drug “Daddy’s little helper” and called it “the sexiest thing to come out of a bottle since Barbara Eden.”
Having It Both Ways Department: Presidential hopeful Steve Forbes says he favors California’s June ballot measure to dismantle bilingual education, but that hasn’t stopped him from opening a Spanish-language Web site (https://www.spanish.ahgo.org) for his campaign.
Off-Kilter has also learned that Forbes plans to solidify his support among Latinos by offering the vice-presidential slot to the Taco Bell Chihuahua.
Chef Boy-Are-We Wrong: Our item two days ago about which product spokesmen are real and which are fictitious prompted several calls from readers who insisted Chef Boy-Ar-Dee really did exist. They’re right. Hector Boiardi, an Italian immigrant who owned a Cleveland restaurant and spelled his name phonetically on food packages because nobody could pronounce it, sold his company to American Home Products in 1946. He died in 1985.
Wackiest Supermarket Tabloid Headline: “Man Spends Eight Years With Hatchet in His Head!” (Weekly World News)
The best part is the photo: Hatchet Head (a.k.a. Excedrin Headache No. 124) is sitting at the breakfast table looking at a box of Wheat Chex, completely oblivious to the fact that an ax is lodged in his skull a la Steve Martin’s arrow-through-the-head character. “An occasional headache is the only pain he feels,” the story says.
* Roy Rivenburg can be reached by e-mail at roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.
Contributors: Susan Carpenter, Chicago Sun-Times, Kari Howard