WORSE THINGS
HAPPEN AT SEA.
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You are shipwrecked on a remote, desolate island and forced to eat your fellow castaways in order to survive. Your fellow castaways are Wayne Newton, Margaret Thatcher, Phil Spector, Robert Novak, and ZZ Top.
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Stranded 800 feet deep in the South Australian Basin, your Seawolf-class submarine develops a critical hull leak. To save the vessel, you must don an experimental atmospheric diving suit and perform a risky deep-water repair. The slightest change in water pressure will crush you like a grape and split the sub wide open, dooming all inside. At the exact moment you slide cautiously from the No. 3 torpedo tube, the entire population of Melbourne flush their toilets simultaneously.
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You are swept overboard and swallowed by a whale. The whale's previous meal consisted of half a ton of jellyfish and several dozen electric eels.
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Your Antarctic research vessel founders and you are marooned in a frigid wasteland of snow. You look on helplessly as your fellow scientists succumb one by one to frostbite, starvation, and madness. As you lie semiconscious on the ice, watching your remaining fingers and toes turn black, you pray for a polar bear to come and put a swift, merciful end to your living nightmare. Then you remember that polar bears only live at the North Pole. And you notice a peculiar gleam in the eyes of the approaching penguins.
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Everyone onboard is relieved when your monomaniacal captain finally succeeds in killing the great white whale that was his nemesis. However, he then insists upon sailing around and around the South Pacific, looking for a great mauve whale.
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Your battleship is torpedoed and sunk by an enemy destroyer, leaving the survivors floating helplessly among hundreds of man-eating sharks. The sharks attack you with single-minded ferocity and are only driven away by the approach of a giant man-eating squid. The squid also attacks you, but it has attention-deficit disorder and plays with its food.
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Captured by pirates, you are given a choice between walking the plank or joining the crew. The crew are all Yankees fans.
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A long voyage and many stops in notorious foreign ports leave the entire crew of your ship riddled with scurvy, dysentery, and the clap. You and your shipmates must endure the primitive ministrations of the ship's surgeon, who treats you with his vast pharmacopoeia of virulent emetics, scorbutics, weekly bleedings, leeches, and arsenic. Two-thirds of the crew succumb to these therapies in various degrees of agony, but you survive. The treatments even seem to have a mildly salutary effect on your scurvy. Unfortunately, they have no effect whatsoever on the rare tropical parasite you picked up in Chittagong, which, unbeknownst to you, is slowly eating its way through your brain stem.
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When your luxury cruise ship, featuring Las Vegas–style live entertainment, sinks in midocean, you find yourself adrift in a lifeboat with a tiger, a chimp, and an Herbalife salesman. On the second day, the tiger and the chimp commit suicide.
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Caught in a freak November storm, your freighter breaks up and sinks in less than 90 seconds. As the waves close over your head, you realize that not only will Kevin Spacey probably depict you in the motion picture based on your fate but he will also want to direct.
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OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
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Worse Things Happen at Sea By Susan Schorn
The Press Release for My Attempt to Break the Guinness World Record for Holding Breath Underwater By Rick Stoeckel
Lit 101 Class in Three Lines or Less By Ben Joseph
Van Gogh's Ears By Mike Richardson-Bryan
The Letters of Abelard and Heloise: Mattress Salesman and Customer By Marianne Hess
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