Where Are They Now?

Good evening and welcome to Where Are They Now? The show that brings you up-to-date information on the whereabouts of news-makers from the past. I’m your host, Dr. Gooch, here to bring you the what’s-what about the who’s-who that you totally forgot about, because nobody really cares about these social leeches.

Tonight, we begin with the perpetrator of the biggest earworm of 2012. Psy.

PSY: We all remember that little South Korean dough boy and his always handsomely coiffed hair. And the reason for that is because his chart-topping song Gangnam Style was parodied and “memed” in our culture so much that the amount of people who were admitted to hospitals with aural injuries due to them violently shoving sharp implements into their ear holes quadrupled in four short months.

Psy followed up that massive hit with a couple of other songs, but by then it was too late. 

Everybody’s minds had been shattered by his song, and we no longer remembered what the light and the warmth of the sun felt like. So he quietly slunk away back to South Korea, where he could plunder as many Korean thrift shops as he wanted for new clothes. But where is he now?

The researchers here at Where Are They Now? Were able to track down Psy, and where they found him may surprise you. It seems that Psy (real name Alfred E. Neuman) became a deep-sea fisherman of mermaids. It’s not a luxurious job, and the hours and commitment can be quite demanding, but every time Psy and his crew return to shore with even one or two mermaids, it’s all worth it. 

Mermaid’s are valued for their delicious and tender upper body meat. Their lower halves are used for extremely expensive sushi, usually reserved for the very rich and heads of state. The iridescent shine of the scales makes for beautiful dresses and other haute-couture clothing. The rugged sea life has benefited Psy. Gone is his poppin’ fresh belly and love handles. He now proudly wears the squinted-eyes and sun-tanned leathery face of a true fisherman with majestic pride.

All we can do is watch with a tear in our eye as he horsey dances into the sunset.

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Up next we have a person who captured the nation’s attention and tugged at our heartstrings for a full five minutes before we all got distracted by the oddly weightless karate people in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, (yo, remember that shit? Back before Ang Lee did movies about gay cowboys and neon green gamma monsters).

Elian Gonzalez: The year: 2000. The place: Southern Florida. The event: Trapped in a closet.

Elian made the news at the turn of the century when he and his mother and mother’s boyfriend attempted to leave Cuba to get to America and make it to Epcot Center before the Body Wars Exhibit was shut down for good. The five-year-old’s mother drowned in the attempt and without a steady stream of “getting some” the boyfriend ghosted the scene. Elian was subsequently placed with relatives in Miami. But his father wanted him back in Cuba, where the cigars and rum are plentiful and the cars are all from 1954.

And thus began an international tug-of-war for Elian’s very soul. So much pathos and drama! Let’s skip all that nonsense.

Eventually, after a whirlwind tour and press junket across these fruited plains, Elian was forced to end his engagement to Rosario Dawson and return to Cuba, where he became best friends with Castro. Although, Castro was on so much medication at this point that he just assumed that Elian was a imaginary munchkin friend that only he could see.

After a few years of living in Cuba, Elian managed to leave again for the glorious shores of America, on a makeshift boat he created out of banana leaves and pelican spit. He made it to shore, but by the time INS reached where he had landed, Elian, otherwise known as the “Cubano Dynamo” had disappeared into the bushes, never to be seen again.

Until today!

Our team was able to hire world-renowned tracker/hunter Robert Muldoon, who led them to an amateurishly built one-room shack in the middle of the Florida swamps. There, we discovered an extremely fast cigarette boat and a table with about five keys of white power in brick form, a money counting machine and a Glock pistol. Clearly, some illicit things were going down in the bayou.

On their way out of the shack, the team actually ran into a bearded hulking man with a machete and a burner cell phone. It turned out that this man was Elian himself, now an autonomous businessman. As it so happened, Elian was in the Swamp Thing hunting trade. He would travel the marsh, seeking the elusive Swamp Things that inhabit the bogs and burn their repugnant bodies into a powder form that he would sell to idiotic tourists as authentic Cajun Seminole Seasoning. He lived on a healthy two million dollars a month and actually had a gorgeous mansion outside of Miami proper. He just kept the shack because it added a touch of realism that the brainless tourists expected. 

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That’s all the time we have today on Where Are They Now? Again, I’m your host Dr. Gooch. Join us next time when we discover, where the hell in the world is Carmen Sandiego?!