6 Completely Ridiculous Cons

Comic Con is fast approaching and that means it’s time to consider all the terrible cons you’re not going to attend in favor of the cool ones, like Comic Con. For every worthwhile con that caters to your awesome nerd yearnings, there area dozen that will blow your mind with their complete ridiculousness. Behold!

Bigfoot and UFO

There are innumerable UFO societies, conventions and festivals and it’s too late to do anything about these people any more than it’s possible to do something about Scientology. Just smile and pretend Tom Cruise is still famous. But the Pennsylvania UFO and Bigfoot con is special because, well, Bigfoot is there.

One can only wonder if the Bigfoot people sneer from across the room at the UFO people and vice versa, each side confident that the other side is full of idiots and lunatics, or do they embrace each other and try to one up each other with tales of how an anal probe from a lizard man is more or less unfortunate than becoming Bigfoot’s hillbilly bride.

Knitting

Welcome to the 11th annual Maine Fiber Frolic, which is completely insane. Not insane in the fun way, insane in the people who have staring matches with toilets way. This is a fest for knitters, people who make shit with yarn and whatever synonyms there are for yarn that I, as a reasonable adult, have no knowledge of.

I was geared up to detail the events of this particular fun fest when I was taken off guard by this;

I don’t even give a shit what the context of this image is, who that guy is, what’s happening here or anything – this is everything you’ll ever need to know about this knitting fest. This is like staring into the Devil’s eye, but after you walked in on him jacking off to pictures of that lady from Sesame Street dressed as a man.

Cougar

Ever wonder why we call cougars cougars? Sure you do. Like most modern words, the origins aren’t 100% transparent, but it seems there was once a dating site out of Canada called Cougardate that wads founded in 1999 by two women who were, apparently, cougars. One of the women had latched onto the term after a nephew called her a cougar, saying she preyed on younger men. In turn, he claims to have heard the word from friends he played hickey with, because what else would a Canadian be doing. And in 2001, in an article about the website, is the first verified instance of the term “cougar” being used to describe a saucy old wench who likes the affections of a younger man. Fun!

So that’s the kind of cougar that this convention is for, and there’s more than one. You can go to Vegas and enjoy them, if that’s the right word, and Toronto has one too. Are you excited? Don’t be, it’s horrible. I know society has developed a cutesy tolerance and even acceptance of the whole cougar ideal, there’s even a damn TV show, but it still smacks of mid-life crisis desperation when a leather-bound woman in her 50’s opts to define her being by her ability to defile college boys. Feel free to bone people of all ages, but don’t make it into a club and a nickname, that’s just terrifying.

Celebrity Lookalikes

Have you ever dreamed of standing in a room with 16 Austin Powers’, a handful of Chers and one desperately sad Liza Minelli? Of course you haven’t. No one has. No one could. But hey, there’s a con for it anyway.

Looking over the website it seems as though there’s not much more to this event than showing up and looking like someone else, which is the best way to rob a bank or commit various voyeuristic crimes as well, so that’s something. Plus there’s also the tribute band, so that’s fun. Maybe a guy who looks like Prince sings Prince songs. That’s probably fun. Maybe someone who looks like Stevie Wonder will sing a Stevie Wonder song. People who look like people are fun. So are things that look like things. Ever seen a chip that looked like a llama? That shit’s wild. Yep, things that look like things. Very exciting.

Testicle Festival

This festival makes no sense whatsoever. It purports to be a festival to celebrate balls –actual, real balls. From bulls. That you eat. But you’ll also notice if you peruse the website that this seems to be 3 days of naked biker chicks. There’s a wet t shirt content and greased pig wrestling and stripping and I have no idea what else because the thing you need to do before you get all excited is that bull testicles and biker chicks never cross paths in a happy way. These are exactly the sorts of people who intentionally show up and get naked at an event dedicated to the balls of bulls.

Also, there’s a big ball contest. It’s not for bulls. You think about that.

Hobo Con

Do you know who deserves a con less than hobos? No one. How the hell do hobos get to their own con? How do they know the date? And how do they afford overpriced con food once they get there?

Reading about the convention it’s hard to tell if it’s a joke or a metaphor, as it seems to be real enough, but maybe not for real hobos. What town wants to invite dirty transients in anyway? And if it’s for fake hobos, which is sort of seems ot be, why the hell does anyone want to pretend to be a hobo? Isn’t that the ultimate obnoxious, middle class charade?

At any rate, the hobo con features a coronation for the king and queen of hobo, a hobo museum and something called the hobo jungle which we assume probably doesn’t feature any mentally suspect old men undressing near a pool of tepid water to wash feces and syrup from their pubes. Even though in real life that’s what every hobo jungle would be like.