For O’Callaghan Awards, another group of…ummm…iconoclasts?
By Sage Warlockheart
Herald Staff Writer
NEW YORK - A chef who whimsically combines scraps of used latex yoga mats with benzocaine to feed out-of-work circus podiatrists; an Austrian poet based in Brazil who uses dental floss to suspend live bullfrogs over pools of ketchup; and Lucy from “Peanuts” are among the 14 recipients of the $385 “abstruse grants” to be announced Tuesday by the Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan Foundation.
While no one has ever heard of most of the fellows, a few are so obscure it was difficult to confirm whether they were even real people. They include Pishel Hoal, a 66-year-old former gemologist who lives underground near Coober Pedy, Australia, and who occasionally surfaces from his hole to wander about.
“Four of the kings have been beheaded and the rest have followed me here,” Hoal said in an interview conducted via Skype from the Opal Blossom Hunan Buffet in Coober Pedy. “If I tell them we have the goats, they’ll be still. They’ll be still.”
This year’s O’Callaghan fellows range in age from 6 to 93 and are evenly divided between men and women. As in past years, most either have struggled with emotional problems or have been in prison. This year’s judges stuck to the O’Callaghan awards tradition of naming fellows whose accomplishments square with the foundation’s stated mission to “shine a light upon work that seems unimportant to the rest of the world, only because it is unimportant.”
All 14 fellows will receive $27.50 a year for five years, and must use the grant to purchase either playing cards or cat food. Since the inception of the program in 2007, 18 people have been named Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan fellows.
Besides Mr. Hoal, other winners this year include retired lepidopterist Belinda Pandoe-Crapht, 56, whose study of the Common Blue Morpho, the Red Admiral and the Camberwell Beauty butterfly species has informed and influenced her music as lead singer of the punk-metal outfit Ass Typhoon; Trisha Bloorkie, 23, a Sacramento prostitute who also serves on the board of the Santa Clara Valley Water District; Robert Simpote, 44, who enjoys US Weekly and is thinking of subscribing; Maladraiga Hernandez-Mushi, 78, a pioneer in the Electric Boogaloo, Popping and Crazy Legs movements of the 1970s; Maxim Dityatev, 49, a mixed-media artist who works mainly with Sour Apple Berry Bubble Yum, ejaculate and chicken skin; Jennifer “Zothecula” Miller, 15, a Goth teenager known for cranking up The Sisters of Mercy and wearing eyeliner to bed; and Herbert Rae-Boney, 48, a protégé of Dutch physicist Gerardus ‘t Hooft, whose theoretical work on gauge theories, quantum gravity and black holes earned him the Nobel Prize in 1999.
Mr. Rae-Boney left Mr. ‘t Hooft’s laboratory ten years ago to study circumplanetary dust physics, but instead has spent much of the last decade managing Ron’s Do-Nuts at the corner of Vineland and Conroy in Orlando with his wife, Cathy Rae-Boney.
Another fellow who failed to live up to his promise, Gillie St. Warche - an entrepreneur whose idea of putting “a professional water polo player in every home” has yet to pan out - said he would use the money to buy either playing cards or cat food. “I don’t have a cat, so I guess I’ll buy some playing cards,” said Mr. St. Warche, who was named a fellow because of his “extraordinary ability to read Proust while simultaneously lighting squirrels afire,” according to the judges’ notes. “Or I guess I might buy some cat food, because I have a friend who has a cat. And she could give the cat food to her cat.”
While all of the fellows do pointless, inexplicable or boring things with their time, the O’Callaghan grants are distinctive because they reward the truly inane. “I think it’s real fun,” Teague O’Callaghan, the foundation’s president, and grandson of Lochlan P. and Marta P. O’Callaghan, said of discovering and naming the fellows. “It’s fun, and it’s also funny. Both.”
As examples, Mr. O’Callaghan cited Sharon Haavish, 93, who has a different colored track suit for every airport she visits, and Kyle Ballantone, 28, a liquid helium salesman from Alfalfa County, Okla., whose cross-stitch embroidery designs of Grand Duke Leopold I and other members of the House of Baden-Durlach have captured the hearts of Swedish people everywhere, though mostly in Sweden.
Mark Sixypotch, who, at the age of 19 has already translated several seminal herpetological books into English - including (from the original Marathi) “The Snakes of India and Pakistan,” by K.G. Gharpurey; “Japanese Venomous Snakes,” by Seiichi Takahashi; and (from the original Azeri) “Amphibians and Reptiles of Azerbaijan” by A.M. Alekperov - is so gay.
“I have no idea what to think about winning this award because I’ve never heard of it and I’m quite sure no one else has either,” said Mary von Pahrtenfur, a junior at SUNY New Paltz who is well known on campus for her notion that a new pan-global alphabet could bring about world peace and get people to finally realize that Alan Thicke is the devil.
Wayne X. Hashago, 55, a familiar figure in journeyman tool and die making circles, called the award a “piece of shit.” Hashago has six fingers.
Similarities can be seen in the work of three fellows: Annette Fordol, 42, who has walked in circles around her own house in Lapeer, Mich. continuously for four years; Jaishree Dhurvasula, 29, whose musical compositions transcend classification, but range somewhere between Cambodian trip hop and traditional oom-pah; and Sebastian Pelicago, 81 who fashioned a popular line of pre-school toys out of used tattoo needles, carbolic acid, shards of glass and meat.
PHOTO: Maxim Dityatev: Mixed-media artist
