Flirting ... With Disaster

Hello. Welcome to the Weekend Gene Pool, where we solicit your personal anecdotes and wretched confessions in return for entertainment, occasionally in the form of jokes about excreta or lurid crime or sexual events. Today is a lurid crime and sexual event day.

One of the most intriguing facts about the assassination of the insurance company exec is that we now have a photo of the killer’s face — typically the case-breaker in a criminal investigation — which he momentarily bared while flirting with a female employee of the hostel at which he was staying. He appears to be cinematically handsome, by the way.

Sexual desire is a powerful and sometimes self-destructive force. Flirting can go awry. That’s my question for you today: In your life, has flirting ever resulted in something less ideal than what had been angled for? You can interpret “flirting” loosely, and it can be about you or or someone you know. The funnier the better.

Send your stuff here:

My story: When I was in high school, there was a girl I really liked. But I was afraid to approach her because, in my cartoonish romantic imagination, she resembled Veronica from “Archie,”

and I resembled Dilton Doily, the bespectacled dweeb with no discernible libido.

To give myself an edge in the pursuit of this girl, I decided to learn everything I could about her — in modern-day patois, this would be “stalking” — which turned out to include that she was studying to be an interpreter for the deaf. So I went to the library and learned to sign a few simple words in that old spelling-out, hand-to-letter mode. And the next time I ran into her in the hallway, I hand-signaled what I’d intended to be a friendly greeting.

Afterward, as I was standing there alone, I realized that what I had signed was not “Hi” with an exclamation point after it, but “Ho,” with a finger pointing at her.

We never went out on that first date.

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Today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

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Finally, we present the results of our competitions to win one of four free one-year subscriptions to The Gene Pool, worth $50 apiece. As in the past, these gifts were bestowed by a mysterious benefactor I call John Beresford Tipton, after the mischievously generous rich old coot in the 1950s TV show “The Millionaire.”

This modern-day Tipton and I are the only people who know his or her identity.

Today, I bring a message from this Mysterious Benefactor, to the winners:

Hello. Normally I wouldn't lower myself to speak to you and other recipients of my largesse, but my token Jewish acquaintance, Gene Weingarten, has asked me to break my longstanding custom of sending a second-rate actor to do my bidding, and instead to address you directly. So: Use my gift wisely. I’ll be watching. They let me have the internet one hour a day here.

— JBT

The winners come in two categories: People who told the best relatively obscure joke, and those who wittily answered my challenge to come up with their biggest hope for America in these new, politically terrifying times.

The winning joke:

A urologist called for the next patient, and in hopped a tree frog. “I am a handsome prince who has been turned into a frog by an evil witch,” it said. “I need the kiss of a beautiful woman to restore me to my former self.”

The urologist was stunned, and intrigued. She was, indeed, beautiful, but like many professional women, she had put her romantic life on hold to start her career. What the heck, she decided, and planted a kiss on the frog. Instantly, he turned into a real hunk. A NAKED hunk.

Completely overcome, the urologist stripped off her clothes and made love to him, right there on her examining table. Afterwards, as she lay there stroking his cheek, she asked him: “Darling, of all the women in the world, why did you choose me?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I almost forgot. My evil witch of a wife turned me into a frog when she caught me with a hooker. So I haven’t had a chance to see someone about this burning sensation I get when I pee….”

-- Heather Kennedy, Dripping Springs, TX, is a current subscriber. So she regifts her subscription to her friend Megan Amram, the comedian and comedy writer. Ms. Kennedy wrote this joke herself, and submitted it years and years ago to my chat in the Wapo.

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Hopes for America:

My hope for America is that it finally joins the world in adopting the metric system so that I can figure out how to draw lines to center a 1 5/8" wide 2x4 between lines that are each 13/16 of an inch off the center line in a 23 7/8" space. — Tom Zeller, Bloomington IN

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My hope for America is modest; but from tiny acorns, mighty oaks spring.

I would like to see/hear the unsingable, racist “ Star Spangled Banner, written by a slave-holder, replaced as the National Anthem by the 1975 masterpiece “Why Can’t We Be Friends?,” by the ironically named funk band, War.

There are many reasons — just watch the video — but prime among them is that it contains this great and terrible lyric:

“Sometimes I don't speak right / But yet I know what I'm talking about…”

And while we’re at it, replace “ God Bless America” with “ Low Rider.”

— Jon Ketzner, who is also a subscriber, and regifts his gift to his sister, Beth Ketzner.

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My hope for the future is somehow different today than it was just a few weeks ago. I assumed we were on the well-trodden path towards a golden age when people would come together in peace and harmony, where we would solve our differences as well as solving the many problems facing the world. Seeing the path we are now on, the path less taken, I hope in the future I can get out of bed for long enough to make it to the packaged goods store. — Timothy Young

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Thanks. Please send in anecdotes/observations about flirtations that went awry, or any other subject on your mind.

See you on Tuesday.

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Also, alms for the wretched, please.