This Perfect World

The older I get, the more sure I am that I've been assigned to the wrong planet. Just for instance: I don't even breath oxygen.

Moreover, it literally never occurred to me that homo sapiens did things like those mentioned in this 1992 Sports Illustrated article:

For a decade the cherubic 30-year-old had made a sporadic living as a hit man hired to destroy expensive horses and ponies, usually so their owners could collect on lucrative life-insurance policies. But no owner had ever ordered Burns to dispose of a horse by breaking one of its legs—that is, by causing a trauma so severe that a veterinarian would be forced to put the animal down with a lethal injection.

Burns's preferred method of killing horses was electrocution. It had been so ever since the day in 1982 when, he says, the late James Druck, an Ocala, Fla., attorney who represented insurance companies, paid him to kill the brilliant show jumper Henry the Hawk, on whose life Druck had taken out a $150,000 life-insurance policy. In fact, says Burns, Druck personally taught him how to rig the wires to electrocute Henry the Hawk: how to slice an extension cord down the middle into two strands of wire; how to attach a pair of alligator clips to the bare end of each wire; and how to attach the clips to the horse—one to its ear, the other to its rectum. All he had to do then, says Burns, was plug the cord into a standard wall socket. And step back.

I only found out about it recently because it was mentioned in stories about John Edwards' squeeze, Rielle Hunter. It turns out she's the daughter of James Druck. She was a show jumper, and Henry the Hawk was her horse—something which understandably put a crimp in their father-daughter relationship.

Also: I think this allusion of this post's title is very clever, and would like someone to understand it and then compliment me on it.

—Jonathan Schwarz