Want to be strong like the Skunkmeister? Try this Swedish delicacy:

If you still have any places where hair does not grow (unlikely among real men), this stuff will do the trick! The Skunk Report is negotiating with the manufacturer for exclusive North American marketing rights to this fine product. This really means the United States. Canadian men are too bland to appreciate this spicy offering, and Mexican men won’t even be able to read the label, which, surprisingly, is not in Spanish. Wait a minute, I can’t read the label, either.

Forget what the article says about problems about importing and so forth. We at the Skunk Report have ways of avoiding the fussbudgets in Customs. For your free sample of surströmming, send $525.00 for shipping and handling to the Skunk Report today. Start eating like a man and grow some hair!

Email your entry to the First Annual Skunk Report Complete-the-Corny-Saying contest.

There is a real prize that you will really be ambivalent about owning and that has the potential to actually help you catch a fish, or at least have a good time while losing fish.

There are only 10 days left! Great entries are already in the hopper! Where’s yours!

Take it from the Skunkmeister. Don’t get skunked. Send entries to: bigjohn at skunkreport dot com.

Every year, the boys at On The Water magazine hold an informal, totally non-competitive contest to see who can weigh in the biggest striper. At the Christmas party, the winner gets to keep all the entry fees. They let me participate because my $25 entry fee makes the pot bigger without any chance of my actually winning. It’s like free money to them. But this year it will be different.

Now, these guys know how to catch fish, and the annual OTW Striper Contest, also known as the OTW General Management Benefit Fund, is supposed to be done on your own time, but you know how that is. It’s hard to break into that elite echelon of winners. We need some fresh blood in here. So how can someone like me have a chance to win this thing? I have a strategy.

According to the OTW Striper Contest accountant, no one has put his money into the pool this year. Now, the rules say that if your money isn’t in, you don’t win, no matter how massive your striper is. So, I have quietly slipped my $25 to the OTW Striper Contest accountant, who has promised me that she will stop reminding everyone else to pay up. Now, these guys are always very busy, especially in the fall. Stay with me on this. They all forget to put in their cash, I catch one measly, barely-legal striper (or borrow one in a pinch), and voila, I win! It’s brilliant!

I am so confident that I was up early practicing my celebration dance:

Hey, wait a minute, if no one puts cash into the kitty, the only thing I will win is my own $25. Oh, well, that’s $25 more than I usually have at the end of this thing. I can’t wait to see the look on everyone’s face!

Announcing the first annual Skunk Report Complete-the-Corny-Saying contest! This year we will be completing this old corny saying: “Give a man a fish and (fill in the blank).” The winner is guaranteed to get a real prize of the judge’s choosing, plus recognition on the nation’s premier web site devoted to the fine art of fishing without catching. If your saying is morally acceptable, it may even wind up on a genuine bumper sticker! Can’t beat that!

For example, “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will sit in a boat and drink beer the rest of his life.”

My own personal favorite is: “Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and you crush his spirit for life.”

The contest ends September 30, 2007. Send your entries to bigjohn at skunkreport dot com. If you can’t figure this out, you get this attractive booby prize:

Good luck and slack lines!

Every July 4th, we have a tradition. We sweep the kitchen floor, grab some live lobsters, paint numbers on their backs, set ‘em down, and bang, they’re off at the gun. First lobster to the other end of the kitchen floor wins and gets to live an extra three minutes. Usually, no lobster makes it to the other end of the kitchen floor, so we just take the one who has worked the hardest and proclaim him the winner. Gentlemen’s bets are common, because throw-away money is scarce in these parts.

Well, I was planning to video the lobster race this year, so that I could share the fun with you all. But this year has been busier than most, so I made an executive decision at race time. I looked in the bag, called it a draw, and, about 20 minutes later, here we were. Believe me, this photo is more exciting than the video would have been anyway. There may be a few who can fish better than I can, but there is no one who can eat lobster better than I can.