Return to the Bermuda Shorts Triangle

Once again, sir, I am confounded by a mystery by which I've already been confounded. For I have returned to the place of my last great defeat—Brunsley, Idaho, well known to all its inhabitants and supernatural buffs as the Bermuda Shorts Triangle.

Before you foul-mouthed skeptics can say, "Fuck this bullshit" and return to searching for more Internet info about that movie with the Dakota Fanning rape scene, I urge you to think about this: What would you do if there were a 12-block radius in a moderate-sized town where your finest undergarments mysteriously disappeared? That's right, such a place really exists, and it's in Brunsley, Idaho. Seldom can a man, or especially an attractive woman, walk from the Bed, Bath and Beyond to the Citgo gas station with their underpants untouched. Even the most conservative among you will find you go from securely hammocked to freeballing in record time, with no answer as to where your Fruit of the Looms have gone.

I first stumbled across this mystery in 1998, just before I founded the commune. In fact, all of my first columns were about this puzzler, though I decided to withhold my claims before I had any solid proof because I wanted to write a kick-ass bestseller about the phenomenon, and didn't want any competition drawn to my big moneyhole by an ill-timed commune column. If only I had known how few people read the commune, despites its being available for free on the Internet, I would have thrown caution to the wind, as well as my columns, and published them as a warning to all underwear-lovers who might wander into the area.

I discovered it quite by accident, when I attended Brunsley's annual Halloween Dunk-the-Witch contest. I'll save all the anticipation by saying it turned out to be a woman in a costume; but while my search for proof of horrible Wiccans ended up a dead-end, when I went to buy a drink at a local café they call Starbucks here, I found my BVD's didn't make it across the street with me. I went searching for pocket change for my $3.50 cup of coffee and found the fabric between my digits and my goodies a lot thinner than expected—only pocket stood between my finger and my boys.

I knew I hadn't taken them off, so of course, I looked to the simplest answer—an underpants pickpocket. But the locals told me of the Bermuda Shorts Triangle, a 12-block perfect circle in which all manner of undergarments mysteriously disappear. Or as my colleague Dennis at the Wendy's in that area summarized, "Yeah, people end up losing their skivvies all the time around here." Of course, the name is something of a misnomer, since it's not a triangle-shaped area, and if you're wearing Bermuda Shorts they actually make it through the area without being stolen—underwear only appear fair game. But you have to admit, it's damn catchier than "The Circle of Panty Theft."

The first time I passed that way, I was close to launching the commune, and had to return to attend to that business after losing over $400 in underwear in my attempt to solve the riddle. But now the commune is successful, by my own narrow definitions, and I can at last return to figuring out where these shorts are going, maybe even why. Thanks to my painstaking statistics as of last time, I can tell you panties are taken more frequently than male briefs, and boxers are taken least frequently while thongs seem to disappear more than anything else. Expensive underwear and cheap underwear tend to be taken indiscriminately. I only really tested this underthing-theft on myself, but my survey of victims revealed women were targeted more frequently than men, even men wearing thongs, but it seemed to happen across gender and age lines. You've got to admit, outside of discovering where these undershorts are disappearing to, why they are being taken, and how to prevent it, I've practically got this case fully answered.

Like many people that work here, I'm starting to wish I had never founded the commune. Sure, disseminating the truth to the masses is an important job, maybe the most important of them all next to the man who maintains erections on pornographic movie sets. But still, it keeps me up at nights knowing the great mysteries—like who's stealing the underwear in Brunsley, Idaho by the Bennigan's—are going unsolved because I chose this different path.

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