This Could Happen to You

For as long I can remember, I've always told people that my greatest fear in the world is going to prison. And I think we can all agree for obvious reasons that being locked up in the big house is a very frightening prospect.

However, I was thinking about it recently and it dawned on me that I can conceive of a far more terrifying scenario:

being mistaken for a piñata.

Think about it: If people thought you were a piñata, their primary objective would be to grab the largest nearby blunt object they could find and beat you unmercifully until candy started pouring out of your belly. And since you're not actually a piñata, there will be no candy, and the sugar-crazed masses won't stop swinging away until your guts and internal organs are mashed up like a partially-blended smoothie.

Friend of the blog Frank G. Yak has raised the point that you could potentially defend against the piñata destroyers of the world by carrying around loads of candy in your pockets, and when they started to club away, you could fling the candy onto the ground as though it had just been extracted from your brightly colored cardboard stomach. But frankly I think such a smokescreen would only serve to anger the piñata smashers, who are a very savvy and irritable sort.

In any case, there's obviously no cause for panic at this point. But should you wake up one day and find that you're shaped like a small horse or goat and you have a string on your back and brightly-colored skin that looks vaguely like papier mache, you really have only one option: leave town immediately.

But don't relax when you get out to the countryside. They really like to smash piñatas out there. And they have lots of scary farm implements with which to do so.