The American Who Went to Scotland Hoping to Spot a Fat Bastard in the Wild

There are trips you take to see castles, and there are trips you take chasing a legend. Ben Frachs, an American tourist, apparently believed Scotland owed him the latter.

By his own account, Frachs arrived in Edinburgh outfitted like a man on safari — binoculars, a telephoto lens, the whole rig — convinced that if he just positioned himself correctly, he'd catch sight of a genuine Fat Bastard shambling across the highlands in its natural habitat. Not a metaphor. Not a t-shirt slogan. The actual creature: gargantuan, foul-mannered, flatulent, and, as far as Frachs was concerned, as real and findable as the Loch Ness Monster's better-fed cousin.

He'd done what he believed was his homework. Subway franchises, he'd heard, were prime viewing grounds this time of year. He tracked the drone of distant bagpipes across the countryside, certain they'd lead him to his quarry, and found instead — his words — "a handful of regular bastards." Ordinary, unremarkable, entirely undocumentable bastards. Not one worth a photograph.

By the time he boarded the bus back to the airport, sighing into the Scottish drizzle, Frachs had the look of a birdwatcher who'd flown across an ocean for a glimpse of some rare, elusive species, only to go home with an empty memory card and a stronger opinion about Subway sandwich meat than he'd planned on developing.

His disappointment didn't end at customs, either. Waiting for his connecting flight from London, he was overheard grumbling that the plane wouldn't be, in his words, "shagadelic" — apparently expecting international air travel to come with its own theme music and a groovy paint job, the way it does in the movies that convinced him any of this was possible in the first place.

Which is really the whole story in miniature: a man who went looking for something invented purely for a punchline, followed the clues as if they were a field guide, and left mildly heartbroken that reality didn't have the decency to cast a costume actor for him.

Some tourists come home with shortbread and a kilt. Frachs came home having confirmed, at some expense, that satire doesn't actually live anywhere — not even in the country it's supposedly from.

Distilled from The Onion