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| Because in one month, he's off to Japan. To move. For good. Yeah.
That said, I've mapped out a few choice activities to take part in. I hope everyone can make at least one of these. :)
Saturday, February 7 | 0900-2100:
12 Hours in Waikiki! Just hang out! Eat, maybe shooting range, maybe eat some more... let's be tourists!
Tuesday, February 10 | 1045-????:
Birthday Curryoke! Curry House McCully opens at 11 AM, so get there by 10:45 and prepare to swarm the place! Once we're done eating, it's a walk to GS Karaoke for singing and good times!
Wednesday, February 11 | Approx. 1100 - ????:
Gaming at UH! I'll be stopping by UH to run a few errands and to play some games. This includes the fated First to 100 Tetris Royale with Tyler. I'm going to get slaughtered.
Saturday, February 14 | 1200-????:
Magic Island Potluck! I know it's also Valentine's Day, but if at all possible please stop by sometime. There may or may not be swimming involved, so bring swimwear just in case.
Sunday, February 15 is reserved for my family. I depart on the 16th.
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| It just occurred to me, while I listen to Dragon Ash in my pajamas at 9:13 in the evening, that if both my math and Ayaka's estimate are correct, I am moving to Japan in exactly 100 days.
Huh.
| | |
| Having
cleared Professor Layton with the wife earlier, I suppose you could say
I've been forcibly inspired. Hence, here's a simple riddle I came up
with today.
3 = 5
4 = 4
7 = 3
8 = ?
Here's a few hints for you:
1) The answer is a number.
2) The order of the examples is irrelevant.
3) The answer is practically right in front of you.
Send
me a private message / text / IM if you know the answer. I can only
tell you if you're right or not if you tell me why you're right. | | |
| The Battle of Launaloha (Director’s Cut)
They called it “routine patrol,” but we knew it as mass suicide. Mr. Potato Headquarters wouldn’t feel safe unless it sacrificed one or two men a day making sure graffiti artists or, worse yet, trapeze artists didn’t break through our defenses. How could they? Our walls were made of equal parts titanium and cheddar cheese, the finest stuff on earth. In fact, we hadn’t been invaded since I was 21, when Baron Von Supermarket swept the gates with a chain reaction of explosive “Tic-Tac” dough, twenty-one firewheels of fortune, and a horde of horrid game show references. It took three consecutive seasons of “What’s My Line?” to escape that particular jeopardy.
Since then, Headquarters had been gung-ho with its protective measures, these death-trips being just the beginning. The gimmick was that they didn’t “sound” that bad. After all, a “routine patrol” was but a single lap around Headquarters’ gigantic π-shaped walls. Alas, the walls were surrounded by marshes: specifically, the jellyfish-plagued marshes of Launaloha Valley. Why there were jellyfish in a marsh, or marshes in a valley, no one could say for sure. What remained certain was that in the end, no one could be trusted. Not even my high school geology teacher.
At Headquarters, we were never told what day of the month it was. We weren’t even told the year. All we knew was that today was Friday, and that was fine by us. At 1800 hours, Private Rick James and I found ourselves lounging inside Headquarters’ mile-long bowling alley. Rick had been my partner for ten years running, even when we were sitting down. He was always there for me. In fact, last week he took a bullet for me. I ran out of room in my ammo closet, and Rick was happy to hold it for me. He never did say where he put it. He was just funny like that.
Just as I was about to bowl a perfect 300 against the Persians, an all-too-familiar sound (the theme from Cheers) signaled the arrival of Generals Statler and Waldorf. Both men wore professional toupees, brilliant sheepskin numbers that matched their equally antiquated uniforms. The sheep on Statler’s head was still alive, braying a sheepish bray, yearning for a quick release. Statler obliged, immediately taking off his toupee, and set it on the edge of our booth. Statler’s toupee gave a sheepish smile. Waldorf was to Statler’s right; he picked up Statler’s toupee, ignorant of its earlier pleas, and put it on his head, adjusting both toupees to cover his scalp. Statler’s frowned and turned to Waldorf’s, attempting complacency with remarkable failure.
“Eh, it beats being armpit hair, right?” Statler’s toupee leaned forward, seemingly hoping for a laugh, but Waldorf’s simply shrugged. Rick and I, too, were leaning in, hoping for further chatter between the two hairpieces. A stern cough from Waldorf interrupted our disappointment. Reddened, we left our booth and stood at attention, double-armed salutes given by the four of us as was customary. Statler turned to Waldorf, speaking in a macabre mixture of Mandarin and Simlish. Waldorf replied in Hawaiian Creole Pidgin, clearly the more sadistic linguist of the two.
I understood nothing of their dialogue, turning to Rick with hopes of his being at all competent in either language. He shook his head as if refusing a vasectomy from Leatherface. The generals nodded and despondently turned to us. Waldorf snapped his right hand’s fingers, using his left hand to scratch his neck. Rick and I were stunned: it was our turn to go on patrol.
“Now, wait a second!” Rick pleaded. Waldorf waited exactly one second before replying.
“Done. Now what?” The general lacerated my partner’s gut with his razor-sharp wit. Rick clenched his stomach, bleeding violently in alternating hues of crimson and mauve. With his free hand, Rick reached out to me, staring at me, looking for a way out. His retinas found one first, turning around from inside his eyes and exiting out of tiny wooden doors connected to the spine. With that, Private Rick James fell, his head splitting against the left edge of the booth.
“The poor man. He died as he lived,” Statler muttered to himself. Waldorf was quick to reply, here with a wry, inappropriate smile.
“What, so he was cracked in the head?” They both shared a guffaw as I kneeled down to my partner, shaking him by the arms. My eyes would have shed tears; that is, had my tear ducts not gone on strike following a particularly humiliating trip to the zoo. Neither of them had yet to settle, so instead they shed drops of Jupiter. Rick was still shaking, mere ounces of life left.
“Tell me,” I sung to him, caressing his charcoal-black hair, trying to ease his pain one strand at a time. “Did you sail across the sun? Did you make it to the milky way to see the lights all faded?” I would’ve finished the chorus had the Pope himself not burst into the bowling alley, wearing a neon flak vest and a giant black “Censored” bar as a pair of pants. Surrounded by the cast of Hogan’s Heroes, the Pope moved towards Rick and grabbed him by his shoulders. Before I had a chance to react, the Pope dragged Rick’s dead-looking body out of the alley. Bob Crane and Ivan Dixon gave Statler and Waldorf double-armed salutes before following the Pope out. I stared at the door, dazed, confused, but more or less disgusted. Wiping charcoal stains from my hands onto my jeans, I stood up to face the generals, torn between fury and constipated agony.
“I’m assuming I don’t get a word in edgewise?” This was my last chance; my collection of Community Chests were likely unusable at this point. Statler and Waldorf shook their heads and pointed me towards the door. A small “SAVE FERRIS” had been written on the door in what must have been the Pope’s holy handwriting. I couldn’t smile after what had just happened, so I grinned instead. It was the least I could do. With one last salute, I walked out of the bowling alley, through the Room of the Golden Idols and past the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. A Temple Guard helped me through the rest of the building; despite my 3,141 days at Headquarters I never did learn how to get from one place to another. How those kids managed to do it is beyond me.
So, armed with nothing but my wits, a large trout, and a bloodstained pack of peppermint Altoids (it’s a long story), I left Headquarters at 1830 hours en route to the checkpoint 30,000 meters north. Or was it south? In the Launaloha Marshes, no one could tell north from south, right from wrong, Betty White from Lewis Black. I tried figuring that one out a while back, and all I got was a lousy t-shirt. I blamed the Canadians. It seemed the right thing to do at the time.
Fifteen seconds had passed. I arrived at the checkpoint, my legs in pain indescribable after running some two kilometers per second. My mind was decidedly elsewhere: during the first half of the patrol, a whopping 37 jellyfish were slaughtered, four and twenty blackbirds were baked in a pie, John Leguizamo farted, and an angel lost its wings. You see, the angel and I dated back in high school, but it didn’t last very long. She always had this holy attitude towards herself, something I couldn’t quite stomach then. I still couldn’t stand it; in fact, the moment we ran into each other in the marsh, we froze, glaring at each other like a fat guy and chocolate cake. We had a vicious argument to settle, for which there was but one solution: rock-paper-scissors.
The antes were clear: her wings or my testicles. The angel and I pulled our fists to our sides, and as a pink jellyfish floated between us we thrust our arms and made our signs: paper versus rock. I emerged victorious, having been trained in the arts of Jankenryû for ten years running. (A word to the wise: anyone who tells you "nothing beats rock" is a liar and deserves to be kidney-punched.) My ex took off her wings and angrily threw them to me, then ran off into the distance. Her wings were made of hair-thin pasta; I started eating them posthaste (you’d be hungry too if you were running 7200 km/h). To my chagrin they were far too salty. The bitch; I always told her eating those Godburgers would catch up to her. I hope she rots in hell.
The checkpoint’s gate, about the size of the Great Wall of China, was a macramé of animal crackers and Teflon. (I never questioned our construction crews. It’s for the best, really.) Established in 1492 ½ CE, the checkpoint hosted a wide variety of unlucky soldiers over the centuries, including Heath Ledger’s character in The Patriot, Tom Hanks’ soldier from Saving Private Ryan, and the guy from Glory who gets his leg taken off by a bouncing cannonball. The cannonball joined Headquarters a year later as a token of apology. She and the one-legged guy played Go Fish in the checkpoint’s Champagne Room every Tuesday until her passing at the ripe old age of two. Services were held in North Atlantis, with RuPaul as Master of Ceremonies.
Two low-ranking soldiers guarded the gate, each of them equipped with a copy of Driving Miss Daisy on Betamax and a purple clarinet. When I approached the gate, the soldier to my left coiled back, the combined scents of jellyfish blood and angel hair pasta destroying his nostrils. It is important to note that this particular soldier was, in fact, a pickle. Due to the general unpopularity of pickles, we can safely say the soldier died a terrible death, one without question involving Roseanne Barr and a zamboni. As a token of thanks for getting this far in the story, please choose from one of the following character replacements-slash-Mike Myers-references-slash-characters:
(1) If you’d like to see the weak-nosed pickle replaced by a bum-looker, turn to page 12.
(2) For a man who asks if you would like to touch his monkey, turn to page 32-18.
(3) For an axe murderer's fiancé, turn to page 64/(82+44).
(4) For Margaret Thatcher, naked on a cold day, keep reading.
You have selected (4). You sick bastard.
A neon green light shone in the sky as Cadet-Baroness Thatcher fell from the heavens. Rather than being naked, though, Thatcher wore Whose Line is it, Anyway?-brand pajamas and a leather thong. Screaming till her voice turned hoarse, Thatcher hit the ground with a vivid thud. The second guard and I rushed to her side; I was stunned to find that she had neither bled nor broken a bone, but instead turned into Silly-Putty. Trained for any situation, the second guard pulled a pocket vacuum from out of his ear and consumed Thatcher in three seconds.
Here I noticed the second guard’s nametag: “Sir Robin,” in bold, mauve letters. I thought to myself how brave he must be as we took the contained Cadet-Baroness into the checkpoint’s War Room. The War Room proudly doubled as the Mr. Potato International Air Hockey and Truth-or-Dare Coliseum. Why there was a coliseum in a marsh in a valley, or an 82-year-old British woman anywhere in this story I can’t say for sure. What remained certain was that for the past 23 years, I had been the undisputed Air Hockey Grandmaster. To add to that, I’m only 22.
Sir Robin and I passed the War Room’s front desk, restrooms, and mandatory teddy bear factory, and headed towards its Victorian-era Dining Room. Taking off my shoes (and, in the process, killing thousands of ants with an odor unlike no other), I entered the room after Sir Robin, who had already begun emptying the contents of his vacuum. Cadet-Baroness Thatcher oozed out onto the dining table. Within moments, the nitrogen molecules in the air connected to her skin, pulling her slimy body apart until it had returned to her so-called human form.
Thatcher was unconscious. Her Whose Line? pajamas apparently changed while inside Sir Robin’s vacuum into a sacrificial robe. I didn’t notice at first, but Sir Robin’s vacuum had a warning label: “Caution. May turn objects into sacrificial fodder. Not for use in Temple of Doom.” Sir Robin pressed a button on the vacuum. Thatcher’s robe suddenly burst into silver flames, the dining table seemingly unaffected. I, too, was unfazed by this; I had heard rumors of the Sacrificial Pocket Vacuum before, but I never thought I would live to see it in action.
Sir Robin opened a drawer and offered me a fork and a knife. I politely declined, instead deciding to watch him gleefully hack into Thatcher’s brain, cutting deep into her leg and pulling out the juicy nerve. I laughed, proceeding to give him the standing ovation he so immediately deserved. (In case you weren’t aware, that was a Monty Python's Flying Circus reference, albeit a comparably obscure one. There will be at least one more. You have been warned.)
Sir Robin's feast took fifteen minutes, every one of them the happiest moment of his life. I supposed that even if I got to know him further, I would never understand the joys he took in eating politicians. Then again, his hunger would prove itself a viable excuse for the demise of the Kennedy Family. After he had finished Maggie off, the two of us cleared the dinner table and discussed religion over tea and crumpets. Despite the blossoming camaraderie, here I felt fiercely uncomfortable due to an allergy to crumpets following a traumatizing Blue's Clues experience.
Sir Robin picked up on this quickly, discarding the crumpets and, again out of his ear, revealed a box of Nilla Wafers. Green ones. The kind you can find at the grocery store so long as they’re two to three weeks past their expiration date. (Hey, screw you. I have my tastes.) With this culinary blessing I was able to conduct myself honorably. Our conversation became vibrant. We waxed on anything and everything, from the psychological implications of To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything, Signed Julie Newmar to obscure soft drinks. We soon promised to meet next month for a Seinfeld marathon, watching the entire series in fast-forward. At one point Sir Robin asked me, "Do you think they’re still reading this?" I didn't have an answer.
It had just hit 1930 hours when Sir Robin and I finished the Godzilla Wafers and left the Dining Room. The checkpoint’s interior, which was torn down and rebuilt every time the Angels won the pennant, was even more complicated than that of Headquarters. Its basic layout featured 500 rooms, one bathroom (hilarity must have ensued because of this), and a security system that sent miniature koalas into random hallways at four in the morning. While walking towards the Game Room, we spotted the koalas in their own room (called the Giraffe Room for immensely confusing reasons). They were playing a fierce game of jai alai, red Speedos versus blue blazers. It should be mentioned that the guys in charge of Headquarters’ wardrobe used to live with our construction crews. Birds of a feather, you could say – the most macabre feather in history.
Ten minutes and a box of midgets later, Sir Robin and I arrived at the Game Room. As we opened the doors, a pair of buffalo holding martinis in their hooves walked past us. They were naked, probably the best wardrobe decision considering the options given to them. Between humans, koalas, buffalo, and Gary Busey, the buffalo at Headquarters had it best. Think of it this way: would you ever tell a buffalo how to dress? I wouldn’t, but I asked Rick about it last week. He responded by poking my nose with a high-pitched “Boop!” I told you he was funny.
What do you mean you didn’t get that one? Come on. You’ve seen Dogma, right? Ben Affleck? Chris Rock? Alanis Morisette as God? No? Anyone? Dammit, fine, keep reading.
Sir Robin and I said farewell to our buffalo friends and entered the Game Room. The Game Room was massive, about the size of a foosball stadium. To the left was a shooting range extending for miles on end, an assortment of paintball and water guns aimed directly at pictures of Fran Drescher, Bette Midler, and Jerry Bruckheimer. To the right was a very lonely pony. Between the two, though, was the equipment necessary to play one of our favorite war games, thankfully one that had nothing to do with Matthew Broderick. This game was called Decapitato.
Decapitato, as defined by the editors of Electronic Gaming Monthly about a decade or so ago, involved the throwing of Frisbees across a room with hopes of making comically violent impact with other people’s necks. Think of it as paintball, only metal. The first of our soldiers to play this game were Hugh Grant and a copy of the Chicago Sun Tribune with “Dewey Defeats Truman” written in Arabic. The paper won within seconds; this inspired a whopping two-thirds of our soldiers to try the game out. There were no survivors, save for a terrified Elián González.
After the self-massacre, players were required to use chopsticks and jump ropes instead of Frisbees. The first year of this Special Edition of Decapitato increased the value of Enron stocks with every game. No one was sure how. When Enron died the cancerous death that it did, Headquarters switched back to Frisbees, this time ones shaped like guitars. Sir Robin and I took a moment to reflect on the history of the game, deciding that it was comparable to an acid trip.
The game began. We each grabbed a set of Gibson SG Automatic Frisbees, Sir Robin’s in black and mine in pink. (Shut up. Like I said, I have my tastes.) The moment we took our first Frisbees in hand, the Game Room speakers exploded with music: polka, at first, so as to anger us enough to play at our best. When the music switched to Rage Against the Machine, there truly was no shelter. We were renegades of funk: bulls on parade, killing in the name of guerilla radio. Frisbees flew like baseballs into pigeons. Sir Robin demonstrated years of Wushu training in dodging and throwing Frisbees, while I utilized drunken boxing. (Side note: drunken boxing while sober is harder than it looks.) As the game progressed, bowls of popcorn were knocked over, Jimmy Stewart decided not to kill himself, and that bitch ex of mine got her wings back.
To our absolute horror, the game ended in a draw. As per the rules and regulations of formal Decapitato play (which, by the way, was initially written on a used tissue), a draw would result in our sudden death. We ran to opposite sides of the room and grabbed the bloodiest-looking weaponry we could find (a piñata for Sir Robin, a stick of butter for myself). The Game Room’s doors burst open with a squeak. Sir Robin and I turned and gasped in perfect harmony; standing at the doorway was my high school geology teacher, Mr. Eric Praline, buffalo naked. His right eye had been replaced with a miniature Magic 8-Ball, his feet were painted blue, and judging by the incisions in his chest his ribs had been rearranged in alphabetical order. A parrot had been jammed through his rectum, though luckily for the parrot it was comparably unharmed.
Oh, and he was dead, too. I probably should have mentioned that earlier.
Mr. Praline’s corpse wavered ever-so-slightly before falling to the ground, precisely 42 copies of Carrie Underwood's Some Hearts stuck inside his back. (Come to think of it, that’s probably what killed him.) A pair of sadistically pale children came into our terrified view. Girl A wore a bloodstained University of Nevada sweater. Boy B wore a body wrap made from the skins of 101 Dalmatians. Each child held Mr. Potato soldiers’ greatest weakness.
Pillows. Goddamn, fothermucking pillows. Pillows laced with cyanide, donkey piss, and the sweat of Charles Barkley. Recalling with disdain the Massacre of Area 51 ½, I threw my stick of butter at the children. Boy B split the stick in half, revealing what looked like paper-thin blades on his pillow’s edges. The twins consumed the halves as they fell, swallowing them in an instant. The butter was poisonous, but to our terror it had absolutely no effect. In retrospect, the butter may have caused a bit of indigestion, since one of them farts later in the story.
I searched through my pockets, looking for anything else that could be used against these twin terrors. Shockingly, the large trout I had kept so dear to me had died, seemingly after eating my bloodstained Altoids. My wits were fading fast to boot, but I didn’t have time to put my shoes back on. The twins started to walk towards us, stepping over Mr. Praline's ex-body and crushing the ex-parrot in the process. (See, I told you there’d be another one coming.) Sir Robin, who had already put down his piñata in favor of the Guitar Frisbees, launched two of them at Girl A. To his horror, the girl caught them with her eyelashes and, after twirling them in the air for exactly 11 seconds, launched them through Sir Robin's belly button. He fell in an instant. I rushed to his side. I already lost Rick. I didn’t want to see another soldier die in front of me.
"Sir Robin! Get up! Don't you die on me! We still haven’t had our Seinfeld marathon!"
"Hey..." His voice was already shaky, like a middle-school geek with a stutter.
"What?" There was a long pause, the longest this side of Gone With the Wind.
"You've been writing this story for days, and only NOW you put in more dialogue? You frickin’ reta--" I closed his eyes, allowing for his death to come naturally. There was nothing else I could do. Accepting this, I turned to face the pillowed beasts. Both of them were wearing pillow-shaped ammo belts wrapped around their legs. Both of them were staring at me with eyes filled with murderous lust. Both of them looked like the kids from Children of the Corn. I ran away, immediately pulling my walkie-talkie fingernail trimmer from my pocket. As I stumbled to signal headquarters, a pillow grazed my left thigh. I fell to the ground with a groan, upon impact throwing the walkie-talkie to the floor. I heard a familiar voice from the trimmer:
"You've reached MovieFone! If you know the name of the--" My heart stopped. It was Rick. But how? He died eight pages ago, didn’t he? Frankly, I didn’t have time to care.
"Dammit, Rick! I need backup! Launaloha checkpoint! Pillow code alpha-five!” A pause.
"Pillows, huh?" Rick sounded like he was enjoying my plight. "What do they smell like?"
"They smell like I’m about to die here! Hurry! Use the Hindenburg if you have to!”
Three more pillows cut into my arms and sides as I screamed in pain. Rick said nothing for some four seconds, then:
"Hey, this is going to sound mean, but The Adventures of Pete and Pete is on now, and--"
"You son of a --"
"Happy New Year." A click, then elevator music.
I turned to the children, both of whom were clearly enjoying their work. They reloaded their pillows and, communication to each other through semaphore signals, decided to finish me off. They raised their arms as I closed my eyes, fearing the inevitability of death.
One of the twins farted. I couldn't help but to chuckle.
[Page 12]
Haha. Made you look.
| | |
| No word yet on the gender game. I'm going to be VERY busy during the
next few weeks, so chances are we won't have any results there for a
while. For now, though, a question, happily stolen from the blog of one
Kelli P. Kachu.
Tell me what your favorite memory/memories involving you and me is/are.
It's that simple. Go. | | |
|
