The King Did Not Hang

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

First Lady Michelle Obama recently outlined her initiative to eliminate childhood obesity within a generation. In her kickoff speech for what the Obama administration is calling the “Let’s Move” campaign, Mrs. Obama said “the physical and emotional health of an entire generation and the economic health and security of our nation is at stake.”

“This isn’t the kind of problem that can be solved overnight,” she continued. “But with everyone working together, it can be solved. So, let’s move.”

The administration has been putting the “Let’s Move” campaign together for over a year, and dismissed several other possible projects for Mrs. Obama along the way, including “Let’s Dance,” an appeal to resurrect post-disco, synthesizer-driven dance music from the early-to-mid 1980s; “Let’s Seriously Get Way Baked,” which was deemed too close in substance to Nancy Regan’s “Just Say No” appeal, and “Let’s Get It On,” a challenge to elderly Americas to don their rain coats more speedily.

Mrs. Obama’s “Let’s Move” initiative continues a long tradition of U.S. presidents’ wives taking up a social or political cause. Some of those efforts were either rejected by administration officials, or have simply been lost in the annals of presidential history.

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• Martha Washington never lived in the White House, but some historians have claimed that her hobby - and later commercial enterprise - of crafting dental implants from cherry wood was the first cause, of sorts, promulgated by a First Lady. Owing to an unspecified, but profound childhood trauma, the taste of cherry wood, gave President Washington an intense rush that allowed him to concentrate more fully on matters of state. Mrs. Washington realized that she’d stumbled into a money maker, and was soon peddling the inexplicably popular, “Martha’s (Splinter Free!) Cherry Bomb Chompers,” in Battery Park.

• Despite the rechristening of the Red Room as the Goofy Foot Room in 1809 when the Madison’s moved into the White House, few in Washington knew about Dolley Madison’s fascination with surfing. The “Bro, That is Perilous!” campaign sought to improve surfing etiquette on the increasingly crowded east coast shoreline. “I’ve inquired about promised sick big water off New Symrna Beach, for my plans are to depart on the morrow by carriage and I don’t mind reporting to you, Brosef, that I am so amped,” Mrs. Madison wrote in an 1802 letter to her friend, Margaret Rawlson Pauling. “And yet when last I was there, I spent the better part of sunrise turning my spy-glass in every direction, watching with unwearied aggro, hoping to discover the approach of some epic crunchers. But, alas! I descried only dick draggers in all directions. When those ass clowns get worked, they can cause full on dings in my stick and - Heaven forgive me - I pray a rip the size of a Redcoat regiment will take them far to sea.”

• Elizabeth Monroe became a foodie in France where her husband James had been named U.S. Minister by President Washington in 1794. Twenty-three years later, when the Monroes moved into the White House, Mrs. Monroe had become addicted to red meat. In 1821, she discovered a sublime steak sauce created by the head chef of England’s King George IV, and secretly began importing cases of it into Washington for her own consumption, and for presidential dinner parties. When the king found out about Mrs. Monroe’s fixation with his steak sauce, he ordered her supply cut off, partly in retribution for his father’s defeat in the Revolutionary War. In response, Mrs. Monroe founded an initiative promoting American-made steak sauce and called it, “Are You Fucking Kidding Me? British ‘Food’ Is Fucking Disgusting Anyway. Go Fuck Yourself, King Whatever Fuck Your Fucking Name Is.”

• When Sarah Polk and her husband James arrived in Washington from their native Tennessee in 1845, they brought with them a style of southern charm to which the White House has since become accustomed. But Mrs. Polk was wary of big city ways, and bristled at whispered insults about rural life in the south. To combat what she considered northern ignorance, Mrs. Polk undertook an educational campaign called “My Kinfolk Is Your Kinfolk.” The campaign highlighted the achievements of backwoods cornfed yokels to sophisticates in Philadelphia and New York. A favorite of Mrs. Polk’s was a poster depicting a young hillbilly, half his overalls unbuckled, urinating in a jug while shooing away a critter, and the tagline: “See? A American Did That.”

• Abigail Fillmore - “Who Doesn’t Love a Poached Egg?”

• James Buchanan, president from 1857 to 1861, is still the only president who never married. As First Lady, he chose Harriet Lane, his favorite niece. The two had been inseparable during Buchanan’s years as minister to the Court of St. James, where Queen Victoria gave Ms. Lane the rank of ambassador’s wife. Soon after Buchanan (or “Nunc,” as Ms. Lane called him) and his niece moved into the White House, Ms. Lane became the toast of social Washington, and launched “It’s Not Weird!,” a campaign aimed at de-stigmatizing intimate uncle-niece relationships across America.

• Lucretia Garfield was First Lady for only six months before her husband James died in office after being shot in 1881. While Mrs. Garfield did not have much time for causes during her husband’s presidency, she had always had two, unrelated, joys in life - lye and sad clowns. In the middle of June, three months after moving into the White House, Mrs. Garfield asked her husband if she could embark on two social crusades as First Lady - one to be called “Lye!” and the other to be called “Sad Clowns!” “Sure,” President Garfield responded, but then it never came up again and then he got shot and died.

• Epilepsy was a constant in the White House life of Ida McKinley, and her husband William. Perhaps because her own serious illness was such an obstacle to a normal, healthy life in Washington, Mrs. McKinley focused her public attention on an issue she believed would boost the spirits of Americans saddened by the plight of their First Lady. But Mrs. McKinley’s crusade promoting tiny shower caps to protect babies’ hair-dos, called “Keep Her Pretty,” was met with befuddlement rather than approval, and it was soon scuttled by President McKinley who called his wife’s idea “looney,” “batty,” “zany,” “moofie,” “shaapie,” “truggly” and “garbanzo.”

• Her years as an Army wife in a variety of posts around the world prepared Mamie Eisenhower for the many heads of state she and her husband Dwight would receive at the White House in the 1950s. But it was Mrs. Eisenhower’s concern for a domestic crisis that would lead her to declare her own personal war on the Chordettes. The songs “Mr. Sandman” and especially “that goddamned annoying ‘Lollipop’ shit,” were enough for the First Lady to create, The Whoredettes, a group of four slutty teenagers with terrible voices and worse hygiene that toured the country parodying the Chordettes and spreading rumors on stage about the original group members’ sexual dalliances with old women, donkeys and Mao Zedong.