‘Tis been a long five-year wait for watchdog website The Smoking Gun to follow-up their self-titled 2001 compendium, but the lag proves worth it. Anyone who’s able to expose James Frey in the meantime earns my eternal devotion.
Frey commands just one of hundreds of glorious pages in THE DOG DIALED 911: A BOOK OF LISTS FROM THE SMOKING GUN, a just-what-it-says collection of legal documents, police reports and other Freedom-of-Information-Act periphery culled from their popular, Court TV-owned site, organized into subject-specific chapters dealing with sex, drugs and Bill O’Reilly, and given fun-loving titles like “2 Tom Cruise Proclamations of Heterosexuality” and “82 Magazines to Which Our Brave Soldiers Will Never Masturbate.”
All the major celebrity cases of the past half-decade are covered: Kobe Bryant discussing his predilection for ejaculating onto the faces of his sexual partners, parental complaints lobbied against Oprah’s infamous “tossed salad” discussion (“so offensive my child’s head literally exploded”), a police sketch of Billy Joel’s alleged drunk-driving route into a tree, Rush Limbaugh’s grocery list of painkillers, a collection of post-arrest statements made by perennial arrestee Courtney Love.
In non-celeb news, you’ll see how pedophiles were duped by the FBI in an online sting, learn the uniform rules at Hooters and get all the skinny (or girth, as it were) on the never-flaccid tale of Oklahoma judge Donald Thompson, who was sentenced to four years in prison for using a penis pump while presiding over jury trials. Not all of it is fun ‘n’ games; witness the chilling page from one of the Columbine killers’ day planner (ironically sporting a definition of the word “optimism” at the top).
While the documents themselves are usually unintentionally hilarious (do all cops spell “buttocks” as “buttox”?), the Smoking Gun scribes are no slouches themselves in the humor department, providing zippy, stinging intros to each entry: “Amazingly, not every man is entranced by Ann Coulter’s long gams, short black cocktail dresses, and denigration of 9/11 widows.”
Yellow highlights permeate the pages, helpfully guiding the eye to the more outlandish phrases and events. The chapter collecting mug shots of strippers, paint huffers and other oft-Miranda’d riffraff needs no such guidance. Design firm Heavy Meta deserves a shout-out for the look of the book, even if (or perhaps because) it resembles “the lists issue” of HITCH Magazine (issue #36, 2004), right down to the use of the Poppi font for graphic accompaniment.
In the spirit of this deliriously pleasurable book, I present a list of my own, 8 Favorite Out-of-Context Sentences from THE DOG DIALED 911:
• “I asked if he knew a penis was drawn on the side of his neck” (pg. 18)
• “How long did Mr. Polanski have his mouth on your vagina?” (pg. 51)
• “All I see is Butt all day!” (pg. 145)
• “YOU CAUGHT ME ALAN, I TRIED TO FUCK YOUR SHEEP” (pg. 147)
• “Petitoner, EARL KENNETH KAUFMANN … hereby petitions the Court to change his name to the legal name of ‘The Scary Guy.’” (pg. 172)
• “Mrs. Lieberman’s remains were not in her niche. Instead, an open can of Pringles Sour Cream and Onion Potato Chips was in her place.” (pg. 184)
• “Ronald W. Castle Sr. on several occasions did rub his penis against the coffee mug of co-worker Mary Ellen DiBello.” (pg. 192)
• “Please excuse Marion’s parking violation. She has Alzheimer’s disease and Neuropathy.” (pg. 216) –Rod Lott
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you are a f_cking as_h_le for putting my wife’s ordeal in your book. I truely hope that some day something like this happens to a close family member to you…………..
You said “member.”