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Today's Featured Biography
Bryan Gruner
Boy, things have been busy for me since June of ’97.
For starters, I was abducted by gypsies just outside of Tijuana in July ’97 and spent the better part of that first summer learning Spanish with a Romanian accent while being forced to make collectable whittled handicrafts out of driftwood. During one of my driftwood collection swims off the Baja Peninsula, I was bitten repeatedly by a 22-foot great white shark and though I tried to fight it off with my whittling knife, the shark eventually swallowed it along with my right hand. My good hand missing, bleeding profusely, I managed to gouge out the shark’s eyes with a spare whittled handicraft I kept around my neck for good luck. I then gripped its tailfin between my teeth and with my one whole arm towed it 3 miles to shore (having spent months in high school towing John Cook around the pool in lifeguard training, I was well prepared for this ordeal). Back on shore, I killed and gutted the shark using a piece of fractured obsidian I found on the beach (this later turned out to be the world’s largest star sapphire) and retrieved both my whittling knife and my whittling hand. The knife I sheathed immediately, the hand I sewed back on using the dried fibers from a rare variety of Mexican sea kelp known to the locals as "quelpo de la mala hierba del milagro", and a fish bone from one of the great white’s previous meals as a needle. At this point, having gained the respect of the gypsies for sewing my own hand back on, and in the process becoming an inadvertent blood relative of their alpha mule, I was released from my servitude and opted to parts ways with the gypsy troupe. The first thing I did was to build a seacraft by hollowing-out the great white’s carcass, preserving its cartilage as sub structure using a mixture of coastal yucca ash and my own urine. I would be sustained in the many months ahead by consuming the shark’s flesh, which I had dried on the baking coastal cliffs of Baja California (I later marketed this shark jerky, or Sharky™, and used the proceeds to fund my education). The shark canoe proved to be an ideal ocean craft. The fins provided natural navigation instruments, and the fearsome, tooth-serrated grin of the shark thwarted any would-be predators or pirates. On one occasion, however, I was boarded by a loathsome group war mongering seafolk who demanded tribute to their late captain, Chester ARRRRgyle for an apparent trespass on what they claimed were their territorial waters. Well, thinking that “Micronesia” sounded like an awful silly name for a sovereign nation, I slew each one of them for liars using a walrus tusk harpoon that had been given to me by the Gypsy honcho Rumenko when I parted ways with them several months earlier. After that minor international incident, life on the open ocean was decidedly dull, so I caught a Tsunami to the Mekong Delta where I gained small time fame sailing between villages in my shark canoe and wrestling giant catfish to the delight of the locals. Fame tasted, I opted to trade my shark canoe to some local fishermen in exchange for a water buffalo which I would eventually ride across Indochina. It was there in Indochina, leech-deep in a bomb-cratered rice paddy outside Saigon that I met a girl called Thuy. She lit up my world and immediately agreed to ride side saddle on my water buffalo. That is, uh, she agreed to continue traveling with me. So after having paid to her parents a handsome dowry comprising fourteen pounds of dried shark meat, a crate of durian, and the giant star sapphire I found in Mexico, we set off into the tepid jungles of SE Asia. (By the way, the sapphire made her family the wealthiest in all of Vietnam, so if you ever need a place to crash, they own huts everywhere over there.) Well, the next few years were a blur, traveling westward through foreign lands, leading revolutions, learning local languages and customs, training elephants to swim and easing tensions between rival clans and tribes. Once, I debated the Dali Lama about whether a government of the people could levy taxes on the people without the consent of the people. He merely waved his hand and stated that people and governments do not actually exist, and we left it at that. I spent seven years in Tibet but I did it in only 2. I witnessed a reenactment of the October Revolution in May. And I discovered the Unifying Theory and found that it comprises 6 separate equations. Thuy and I toured Europe, teaching Italian to the French, German to the British, and Dutch to the Portuguese. Because of my gypsy connections, I served as a key intermediary in the negotions for the induction of Romania and Bulgaria into the EU in 2007. I invented a way to cook impeccable French cuisine in a microwave. I came up with the symbol for the Euro (€) while doing shots with Gerhard Schroder and Tony Blair, and later that night, completely piflicated, we thought it would be funny to make Scandinavia look like male genitalia on the 1 Euro coin. While studying engineering in Munich, I convinced BMW to build and market a car that runs on gasified dung and gets 223 mpg (miles per globule). I also consumed fourteen liters of beer in a single sitting at the Hofbrauhaus and, unphased by the blood in my alcohol, boarded a train to Salzburg where I revised Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 12 to make it more coherent. Not long after that I returned to the good ol’ US of A where I campaigned unsuccessfully for the US Senate (being barred only by my tender age, but still winning the popular vote). Feeling like I had accomplished nothing to this point, I enrolled at MIT, Stanford, Harvard and UW simultaneously and completed a four year degree in only……5 years. My mortar board fixed proudly upon my head (at the UW commencement) I asked the commencement speaker, Tom Brokaw, to propose on my behalf to my girlfriend. Surprisingly, Thuy said yes and we were married that afternoon atop the Washington Monument in DC. Later we shopped at the National Mall. Not wanting to wait the requisite nine months for a baby, we meditated for three straight days and at the end of that period Thuy gave birth to our daughter, Ava Xuan. She came out, stood up, stretched, and asked if there was enough hot water for a long shower. She has since gone off to college in Tunisia and we miss her dearly.
The years since high school have been good to me. I was selected for the Navy Seals, flew a plane over the hump, located Saddam’s hiding place and shot Osama bin Laden in the ass just before he crossed into Pakistan*. I learned to speak over forty languages (though mostly local dialects), beat Bobby Fischer at chess and Gary Kasparov at darts. I created an amusing and whimsical rapid transit system for Seattle that would’ve been entirely funded by a legal and ethical pyramid scheme I devised while roaming with the Gypsies in Mexico, but the plan was vetoed because it would have disturbed the sea lions eating steelhead at the Ballard Locks. I single-handedly diffused a repeat of the WTO riots in 2000, took the LSAT without studying and aced it, performed the world’s first interpretive dance of the mating rituals of Andean ground sloths (It ran for weeks, and that was just the first performance!), saved some octuplets from an apartment fire on the 88th floor of the Sears Tower, sold Ross Cowman his first yurt, and translated the Kama Sutra into Hebrew. Speaking of brew, I also reformulated the recipe for Budweiser so that it makes people better looking but without the side effects.
So there it is, a brief summary of my exploits, though my list is still long and I have many more things to accomplish before I’m through. I hope you are all well down the path to adventure and intrigue in your own lives.
*Though my own military service is fictitious, I am forever grateful to the classmates of ours who’ve served our country in these especially tough years since high school.
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