Hubris Comics

So… when you’re out on your adventure trips, funny things are said, right?  And then repeated, and they finally become sort of a running gag for the week or the weekend or whatever.

Once upon a time, buddy Dennis Rhodes heard the phrase “Let’s go boating” enough times while trying to get everyone up and moving one morning that he realized that we were no longer saying “Let’s go boating.”

We’d done what people have always done to language.  We’d shortened it the same way “Worchestershire” is supposed to be pronounced “Wooster”, at least if you have an English accent.

Our whole crowd now said ” ‘Skoboten”.  One word instead of the usual two words and a contraction of two more.  Once the magical ‘Skoboten was said, people got up from their breakfasts or from the campfire or whatever, and put on their wet gear (I’m assuming it was cold, wet gear.  Otherwise, we wouldn’t have to be badgered into getting up and going boating, right?) and headed to the river with their whitewater boats.

And Dennis pointed out that it was a new word.  Not only that, but it was a new word the way that Volkswagen ads used “Fahrfergnugen” or whatever the heck THAT word was.  There were a few spoof Tshirts going around, of course, that made something less bizarre and usually more obscene out of “Farfehgnugen” or whatever the heck.

I still had some contacts within the screen printing community, so stickers were made.  And, I think we did a number of hats.  I sold a couple of hundred stickers to a couple of retailers, but that sort of thing fizzled when the original Volkswagen ads became ancient history.  I probably still have a few of the hats.  I never broke even on them, but that wasn’t the point.  It was mighty fun.

We saw the stickers all over the place.  We wore our hats. There were some even younger people that ripped off our sticker design but theirs was so bad no one cared.  We were even spotted in one retail shop where the employees said, “Hey, you’re those Skoboaters!”  I doubt the girl got the joke, but she knew we were the ones shouting “SKOBOTEN” at the put-ins, so we were Skoboaters.  Cooooool.

So there you go.  Hats off to Dennis Rhodes, who probably got a dozen stickers for his brilliant idea.  I got a pile of stickers and went a little money in the hole, but we had us some fun.

Wonder what the kids are yelling now at the put-in.  Probably something less bizarre and more obscene.