Chief Hochohovito, circa 1936

Chief Jimpaba Hochohovito was the man who ruled the Hovitos tribe of Peru for over fifty years.  He saw many changes to the Peruvian jungle, and countless archaeologists attempt to steal the treasures of his empire.

One particular incident that irks him to this day is the clumsy and destructive raid on a Chachapoyan temple by Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, Jr. back in 1936.  We asked Chief Hochohovito if he would discuss with us his experiences as a Hovitos chief, and in particular that fateful day when Dr. Jones visited his neighborhood.

HD:  Chief Hochohovito, thank you so much for meeting with us.

CH:  Please, call me Jimmy.

HD:  Jimmy?  I must admit Chief, your English is incredible.  You have a perfect American accent.

Dr. Henry Walton “Indiana” Jones, Jr., undated file photo

CH:  Well I did go to college in Ohio.  I’m a Buckeye, you know.

HD:  No kidding?  A Buckeye?

CH:  My father insisted that my brothers and I get a good education.  It’s hard to be the chief of a jungle civilization if you don’t understand finance and contracts.  You know, all those logging rights and government grants?  Tons of annoying paperwork and if you just miss dotting one I or crossing one T suddenly you’ve got a thousand people without electricity, you know?

HD:  Electricity?

CH:  What?  Because I wear a loincloth I can’t use an electric mixer?

HD:  Well no, I just figured being this far out from civilization…

CH:  I get to fish every day, the air is clean, I see probably a thousand times more stars than you do at night, and we have a zero percent crime rate here in the jungle.  Can you top that, sir?

HD:  No.  No actually, I can’t.

CH:  So there you go.

HD:  This is definitely enlightening and I appreciate your candor, Chief Hochoho…

CH:  Please, Jimmy.  Just Jimmy.

HD:  Yes, sorry Jimmy.  Before I forget, let’s talk about Indiana Jones.

CH:  “Indiana” Jones?  That son of a bitch, really?  His name is Henry for Christ’s sake!  He’s a Hank!  Pretty sure he wasn’t even born in Indiana.  Besides, what the fuck is Indiana romantic for?  Goldfish?  You know the first goldfish farm in the world was started in Indiana, right?  Raiders of the Lost Goldfish.  Yeah, really macho.

HD:  Dr. Jones was born in New Jersey, I guess.  His dad was a professor at Princeton at the time and…

CH:  RAIDERS OF THE LOST GOLDFISH!  Christ.  Indiana Jones and the Hoosiers of Doom?  Don’t get me started.

HD:  Okay, so tell me about the day he explored the Chacha… how do I say this?

CH:  The day he desecrated the Chachapoyan Temple, you mean?

HD:  Yes, the Chachapoyan Temple.

CH:  Is was a really fucking hot morning.  My oldest kid was puking every ten minutes from some bad milk and the hut reeked.  Ever sit in a hut when it’s like 120 degrees out and the floor is coated in puke?  It’s nasty.

HD:  Sounds disgusting.

The Chachapoyan fertility idol

CH:  It was disgusting.  Needless to say, I feel bad for the little kid, but I’m grumpy.  Then one of my warriors by the name of Xomec comes to the door and tells me three guys are slashing through the jungle and they’re going to try to steal our fertility idol from the temple.  Can you believe that?

HD:  Well, I did see the movie.

CH:  The movie.  Fuck me.  Makes Jones look like a hero.  If I broke into your house and rolled your television down your stairs smashing everything to bits would I be a fucking hero?  Answer me that.

HD:  Well, no.

CH:  Precisely.

[Chief Hochohovitos takes a long drag from his cigarette and sighs.]

CH:  So I now have to find a babysitter for my kid, which is pretty near impossible in such a subsistence economy, you know?  But I get one and get my spear and call up my warriors and now we’ve gotta go trudging through the jungle to find these idiots and send them home.  In the meantime, this Frenchman by the name of Belloq is in our village on a research grant and he says he’ll come with in case they don’t speak English.

HD:  Rene Belloq?!?

CH:  Yeah, I know.  Don’t get me started.  But yes, that Belloq.  So we saddle up and march off into the jungle.  Just as we get to the temple door one of the guys standing there wheels around on me with a rifle.  Before I can say anything he aims at me and my guys fire like a billion arrows and blowdarts into his back to protect me.  We’re not there five seconds and already we’ve got an international incident, you know?

HD:  Wow.

The temple’s protective boulder rolling into place just behind Dr. Jones.

CH:  I tell all my guys to hold their horses because we don’t need anymore bloodshed at this point.  Just as I’m saying that, we all feel this powerful rumbling, and instantly I feel like I’m going to throw up.

HD:  Did you get hit with a blowdart?

CH:  No, nothing like that.  I knew immediately what the rumbling was, and now the shit’s hit the fan.  It meant that one of the idiots inside took the idol and triggered this defense mechanism which is immediately going to trash the temple and seal it off with this huge boulder.

HD:  Oh, right.

CH:  No, you don’t get it.  That boulder was probably twenty tons, and it’s carved to just fit the entrance tunnel.  Once that rock’s in place we can’t enter the temple without chipping the thing into pebbles.  It took probably about fifty years to carve it.  It’s easily going to take us twice that long to break it apart to get back in the temple and clean things up.  It means the two guys inside are dead meat and now everything’s gone all to shit.

[Chief Hochohovitos finishes his cigarette and taps the table between us.]

HD:  But Jones got out.

CH:  Of course he got out.  It’s like he can’t die or something.  Guy’s an asshole and an idiot and he survives falling out of a plane with a fucking rubber raft, and survives a nuclear explosion by hiding in a Frigidaire.  Meanwhile, my kid drinks bad milk and fills my floor with puke.  I don’t know what the fuck I did that Karma gives Jones a handjob while it punches me in the pants.

HD:  I thought Belloq hired you to help him steal the idol?

CH:  Belloq?  Oh hell no.  Jones could have had the idol on loan if he just asked for it politely!  For centuries my people had to go into that temple every day to polish that statue.  Ever see the size of the spiders in that place?!?  We walk barefoot, you know.  Nobody likes walking barefoot through caverns filled with cat-sized spiders, my friend.  We’d have loved to have loaned the idol to him for a while.  Would have been a nice break for us, and maybe generated some nice scratch to pay for a new generator or maybe some aluminum canoes.

Dr. Jones did actually survive a fall using a rubber raft.

HD:  But didn’t Belloq steal the idol?

CH:  No, not at all.  In fact, he had no idea the idol was there.  As soon as he saw it he figured he’d get even bigger grants if he brought it back to Europe so we penned a deal that let the Louvre Museum borrow it for twenty years for about a thousand francs a year.  It was a sweet deal and everybody made out well.

HD:  Except Jones.

CH:  Fuck Jones!  He trashed the temple and just before I could talk to him he bolts off into the jungle!  My guys chased him to the river but he had a plane waiting for him and he took off.  No “I’m sorry” or offer to clean up or anything.  Total dick move.

HD:  What happened then?

CH:  What do you mean?  What was I going to do, hike off across my country and go a few thousand miles to sue the guy?  He wasn’t coming back anytime soon and legally we were up Shit’s Creek.  It’s not like the United States trembled under the wrath of the Peruvian legal system back in the 30’s you know?

HD:  I’m sorry to hear that.

CH:  Yeah, well me too.  Anyway, we finally got the rock chipped out a few years ago and the place is back in shape.  The idol’s back inside but you know how many visitors we get each year?

HD:  No idea.

CH:  None.  All that bullshit we went through and the thing generates not even one dollar in tourism every year.  That whole project cost us a fortune and for what?  Nada.

[Chief Hochohovitos is currently on a tour promoting his new book, “Jimmy: The Life of a Jungle Chief,” and is in discussions with Warner Brothers to create a movie about his life.]

But, we WAS robbed!

So with this year’s Dead Pool I knew I had a lock: that old creepy lady from Poltergeist was absolutely on Death’s door, and I was going to sneak into first place and not look back.  And I did, albeit a few days late.

Only MillieJOW snuck in right behind me!

Millie lives in probably the best part of Florida, every night slinging drinks to happy people with loud, happy music.  She’s got a great place to live and great weather and if ever there was someone borrowing heavily from the Bank of Karma, it would be her.  But it was an absolute punch in the pants for me to take such a huge, important early lead only to have her pee all over it literally HOURS LATER!

J.D. freaking Salinger died only hours after Mrs. Creepy, and guess who picked him to die?  Fats Florida.

I feel like Millie’s avatars should be of famous gamblers and hustlers — Kenny Rogers, Paul Newman, or even Jackie Gleason.  I got played.  I got rooked.

I’m wondering… maybe I should start putting up Facebook fan pages to Millie, and trying to make her famous so that I can pick her as one of my choices for next year?  Maybe that’s how I’ll finally beat her?

Yep, those morbid contestants have put some serious thought into it, and have decidedly prognosticated upon which famous people around the world will not make it through 2010.

The names are from all over: actors, musicians, politicians, scientists, criminals — you name it!  All people that have made plenty of headlines, and are now expected to be getting some headstones.

So without further ado, we bring you the official selections of the 2010 HisDaddy.com Dead Pool!

BTW — red = dead

The Angels

The Devils

Note: we’ll be linking to more celebrity bios soon — this is painstaking!

Guy once again astounded funeral home managers everywhere with his incredible nose for picking the dwindling lifespans of the famous.  For the second year in a row, Guy is the HisDaddy.com Dead Pool Champion!

Prizes will be announced soon (as soon as our sponsors get over their guilt of sponsoring a Dead Pool) — but unfortunately for Guy, the first place prize isn’t a kiss on the mouth by HisDaddy, like he asked.

The final tally for 2009 went like this:

18 points - Guy (first place)
12 points - Bouch (second place)
11 points - Jay (third place)
9 points - Adam, MillieJOW
5 points - Meem
4 points - Kendall
0 points - Andy, Fil, HisDaddy, Kellie, Kermit, Lamont, Noel

Congratulations to everyone who finished much higher than Andy, Fil, HisDaddy, Kellie, Kermit, Lamont, and Noel — who all apparently suck at this.

If you would like to participate in this year’s Dead Pool and haven’t yet been invited, please feel free to comment on this post telling us why we should consider you.

The Dead Pool is comprised of experts from all walks of life.  Their prognostications are highly-valued, and thus we only invite people who show incredible knowledge of the life cycle.

Well that, and comedic value.

The Final Countdown — the album that doomed them.

In 1986 the superband Europe announced through their song “The Final Countdown” (off of the album, “The Final Countdown“) that they would be “leaving for Venus.”  Presuming they spent a year or so touring the Earth saying their goodbyes to their fans, it can be safely guessed that they left the planet in 1987.

The distance to Venus is tricky to calculate because it has a circular orbit, unlike that of the Earth.  So at times Venus is only 23.7 million miles from Earth, and at others it’s 162 million miles away.

The speed at which Europe would have traveled is also tricky to calculate.  The fastest any vehicle has left the Earth is 35,800 mph, set by the New Horizons space probe in 2006.  As we know technology increases significantly every year, the ship Europe traveled in 20 years before that must have been slower; probably closer to the Ulysses space probe in 1990 (34,450 mph) or the Pioneer 10 in 1972 (32,400 mph).

If Einstein couldn’t figure out how to travel at the speed of light, you better believe the guys who wrote a song called “Ninja” sure couldn’t.

More worrying about the speed issue is that the members of Europe honestly thought they were going to be traveling at the speed of light.  In their song “The Final Countdown” they note they have “many light years to go.”  This is a concern because the ability to travel at the speed of light still has yet to be discovered.  The rockers anticipated their top speed to be that of light, or 671 million miles per hour.  That means the five Swedes launched themselves wholly unprepared for the actual journey.

At the speed of light, Europe would have reached Venus somewhere between 2 and 14 and a half minutes.  Clearly the musicians thought they were in for a short trip — roughly the length of time it takes one to get to the top of the Eiffel Tower.  Unfortunately, even if they did travel at the speed of the New Horizons probe (35,800 mph) it would have taken somewhere between 27.5 and 188.5 days for them to actually reach Venus!

Experts agree that the average human can only survive between 4-6 weeks without food.  As Europe thought they’d only be a few minutes in space, it’s fair to say they only brought with them some light snacks.  Still, they didn’t mention in the song that they’d be coming back, so it’s possible they carried as much food as possible.  The average human needs about 440 pounds of food and 182.5 gallons of water (1524 lbs) each year to survive.  Presuming Europe didn’t bring any roadies or girlfriends, the five Swedes would need 9820 pounds of food each year to survive.  That breaks down to about 27 pounds of food a day for all five of them.  In order to be alive today (22 years later) Europe must have stowed away 216,040 pounds of food.

The Saturn V rocket was freaking huge!

Unfortunately, the biggest spaceship of all time, the Saturn V rocket, could only carry about 100,000 pounds to the moon.  The Soviet Energia rocket could carry even less, at no more than 44,000 pounds.  Presuming Europe obtained a Saturn V rocket, and brought with them nothing but food and water, they’d have enough food for a little over 10 years.

So they’re dead now.

Presuming they did bring fuel to return to the Earth, they wouldn’t have been able to bring enough.  Just the first stage of the Saturn V rocket (which has 3 stages) alone requires millions of pounds of fuel.  Even considering the gravity on Venus is less than that of Earth,  millions of pounds of fuel would still be required, and as mentioned earlier, the Saturn V rocket could only carry about 100,000 pounds of cargo.

Which means that if Europe landed on Venus, they wouldn’t have had the ability to leave, and would have run out of food and water 12 years ago — so they’re dead now.

Still, even if they DID find a source of food and water, the atmosphere of Venus is brutal.  Temperatures on the surface average about 870 degrees Fahrenheit, and the air is mostly carbon dioxide, which is poisonous to humans.  Since it takes about 3 hours to cook a 24-pound turkey at 425 degrees F, each member of Europe would have passed out from carbon dioxide poisoning, and been perfectly cooked in about an hour.

Which means the Swedish band Europe is dead now… and apparently very overcooked.

This is Guy. He just killed these fish.

You heard right, kids, the 2010 Dead Pool has officially been opened!

The event is still invitation-only.  This year we will again make it possible for people not invited to plea their cases, but until then, start thinking about who you think isn’t going to make it to 2011.

Our friend Guy tied for first in the 2008 match, and is clearly in the lead now in 2009.  There’s still another week or so left, so maybe somebody can pull a miracle out of a coffin?

If you haven’t checked out the official rules for the Dead Pool, click on the link at the top of the screen!

If the song “Return of the Mack” is off of Mark Morrison’s first album, “Return of the Mack,” then from where was Mr. Morrison returning?  And if he was never around before, how can he return?

So I get a call today from this blind woman that I had been dating.  She told me she didn’t want to see me anymore.

I was at a loss for words.

I was a little upset by it, because I dumped her last week.  I was about to point out how she never listens, but I figured that would just make it look like nothing’s ever good enough for me.

Tick… Tock… Tick… Tock…

Noel gets all the credit for this horrific, terrible, ghastly joke:

What are Farrah Fawcett, Ed McMahon, and Michael Jackson all getting for Christmas?

Patrick Swayze.