The FooDaddy's Adventures in Pipe Land - Conclusion

I'm going come right out and spoil the surprise right now: I did manage to get my drain unclogged without calling a professional.

I figure I had better get that out of the way so my hordes of adoring fans can finally rest easy. No more lying awake at night wondering whether or not I had defeated the Mashed Menace. "Did he prevail?" you were no doubt asking your haggard reflection in the toaster at 3AM. "Did the pipe burst and coat his basement with goo? Wouldn't it be easier to butter the bread, then toast it?"

Since I'm pretty certain that answers from your toaster were not forthcoming, I will answer them for you. No. If you butter the bread first, it makes a huge mess. If you did get answers from your toaster, reading this blog is probably the last thing you should be doing if you value your mental health.

If you don't, why, read on then! When you're done, you and I should get some cardboard, make some signs and go yell stuff in public. I'll wear my tuxedo.

And what of the pipes? I'm pleased to report that after a trip to Wal-Mart and $11 later, water and assorted solids and semi-solids are once again trekking happily through them. I had to make the trip to the store, because I did not have the clogbusting equipment I needed here at the house. This isn't to say that I did not have any equipment at all. I did.

It's just that it sucked.

You may recall that I had decided to resort to chemical warfare after the miserable defeat of my twin plungers and Sink-Perched-Drain-TurboHumping (patent pending). Sadly, the half-bottle of dollar-store drain slime I half-heartedly tipped into the sink had no effect whatsoever on the diabolical potato flakes. All it did was add a bleachy smell and an "in case of skin contact, flush thoroughly with water for 5 minutes" to the festering bog of spudwater.

Instead of fixing the problem, I'd gone and made it stinky and poisonous. I also couldn't try plunging it again, because I had to open the window to let the bleach fumes out, and the neighbors might see me. I settled for swearing and stomping around the kitchen in an angry little circle.

Ah, but hope was not lost! There was always the basement. The basement of this house is full of ancient tools left behind by three generations of people I'm named after. Also, spiders.

Oh, I spoke too soon. Hope was indeed lost. The only thing I found was this misbegotten piece of equipment designed in the dark by vengeful elves with access to only 19th century metallurgy and bottomless buckets of mischief.

Have you ever opened the back of an old spring-driven pocketwatch? Have you ever then proceeded to drop it? The part that goes "twaaannng!" and sends a cloud of microscopic bits of brass raining down all around you is the mainspring. It is a ribbon of steel twisted into a reluctant coil that spends the rest of its miserable existence fighting to untwist itself. Harnessing this struggle is what powered your watch during its non-dropped phase of life. Freed, its years and years of pent-up hatred for you comes out in a catastrophic explosion of tiny gears and bits of glass.

Now imagine a coil fifty times the size of the one in your watch. Imagine that it has been rusting away in a basement for untold decades, getting shit on by spiders. Also imagine that it is inexplicably tipped with a little spring-loaded brass dildo.

Now imagine that I want to heap insult upon insult and stuff this thing into a pipe full of bleach-flavored potato gunk.

Needless to say, it did not end well. Thirty minutes of wrangling the wretched thing around the cramped space under my sink, fending off its attempts to lacerate my face and arms served only to splatter everything with unspeakableness and to fill me with a deep hatred of pocketwatches.

"Screw this noise," I said, casting the springsteel demon into a corner. I pointed at it. "Fuck that thing and everything that looks like it," I announced to the cats. "I'm going to have to break down and do what I'd been trying to avoid all day: put on pants."

I cleaned myself up and, fully pantsed, drove to Wal-Mart. I believe I have mentioned before my reasons for hating shopping. This had to be done, though, so I sucked it up and strode purposefully into the store.

Let's see now...I need plumby stuff. Bathroom stuff? That's gotta be close enough. Bathrooms are, like, 90 percent plumbing. Right?

I found myself staring at a veritable cliff-face of toilet seats. Thousands of them, stretching to the ceiling and yards to the left and right, in every color you can imagine. More colors than the screen on my laptop is capable of reproducing. Some of them were cushioned. Some of them had the logos of professional sports teams on them.

"Why would anyone want to crap on the Detroit Lions?" I asked the wall of seats. "Oh, yeah," I answered myself, rolling my eyes.

I moved on to a section labeled "Do It Yourself," which yielded results. I found a device called a "pipe auger" that looked like some sort of surgical tool designed by perverts for use on other perverts. It was a big funnel with a bunch of (electrical conduit?) coiled up inside and a corkscrewy bit of wire coming out the end. It had a handle mounted perpendicular to the funnel's pointy end, and a wingnut, and a sort of crank knob thing, and...


Yeah. Like that.

I picked the thing up by its knob and carried it at arms length to the checkout aisle. I threw it down on the belt and watched it glide up to the cashier.

"Did you find everything okay?" she asked, eyeing the device.

"God, I hope so," I said, wishing that she would hurry up and put that thing in a bag. It sort of scared me.

"What's so funny?" she asked, this time eyeing me.

"Those potatoes don't know what they're in for," I said. I pointed to the auger. "I'm going after them with that." I winked. "Fuck them," I added.

As I left, I saw the cashier carefully place the bills I'd paid her with into a plastic bag and then place the bag into a small cardboard box and then set that box on fire.

Once home, I placed my auger on the floor in front of the sink. I gathered a few towels and a pitcher of water and a crucifix and made sure my cellphone was charged up. Confident that I was fully prepared, I grabbed a bottle of beer out of the fridge. if I was going to do this right, I was going to need fortification.

Basically what I'm saying here is that my bottle of Michelob had a better idea of how to go about this project than I did, and that I would have to drink it if I wanted to absorb its precious, precious knowledge.

Holding the auger by its handle, I gave the crank on top an experimental twist. The bit of wire on the end turned lazily. Ah HA! So this was the part of my ultimate weapon that was going to claw its way though the clog! This fearsome, chrome-steel...tiny...bit...of...corkscrewy wire on the end of a cable that rotated in a slow-motion ballet of flaccid unremarkability no matter how fast I hauled away at the crank.

Awesome.

I dunked the corkscrew into the pipeful of goo. Then I loosened the setscrew on the end of the auger and fed in some more of the auger's cable. I tightened it back up again, and tried the crank.

A noise like a chipmunk trying to claw its way out of a bowl of pancake batter drifted out of the pipe. This was followed by the situation displaying a stunning reluctance to improve.

The next twenty-five minutes or so was pretty much a repetition of this. I shoved more of the cable down the pipe until I encountered resistance and cranked away until my arms hurt. Shove. Crank. Repeat. Shove, swear, crank. Swear. Pull some cable out. Marvel at how much gunk was stuck to it. Swear at gunk. Take off pants. Swear at pipe.

Toward the end, the situation had degenerated into this scene: a pantsless man, covered in splattery bits of mashed potatoes furiously stabbing a pipe with a cable and yelling insane threats into the end of it. "Don't make me come down there! God help me, I'll use the gasoline if I have to!"

Finally, miraculously, the potatoes gave way under the sheer brute force of my assault, and with a parting "blorrrrk," they shoved off downstream to trouble me no more.

I cheered. I poured pitcher after pitcher of water into the pipe, cheering each time the contents went down without impediment. I pulled out the nearly fifteen feet of the auger's cable I'd stuffed down the pipe and watched helplessly as wad after wad of gunk pattered onto the floor before I could catch it with a towel.

There was a lot of cleanup and the plumbing still had to be reassembled. Before I tackled that, though, I had to get something to eat.

A dish involving mashed potatoes.

I would eat them with the pointiest fork I could find.

I would eat them angrily and out of spite.

And I don't care what the restaurant people said, I wasn't going to wear pants while I did so.

The FooDaddy's Adventures in Pipe Land

No, not that kind of pipe. Or that one. Or...eeew. What's wrong with you people?

It's a plumbing mishap, you sickos. Or, rather, it turned into a plumbing mishap. It started out really really fun. But in order to pad this thing out and make a story about plumbing even remotely interesting, we're going to have to go back in time about eight years.

Wheeee! Wasn't that fun? Now, let's fast forward six years. We didn't need to go back eight. We just did that because we could. Wave a big middle finger at time-space and its stupid continuum.

When I moved into the house I'm in now, it was full of stuff left behind by its previous occupant, my grandmother. This meant that in addition to entire drawers full of unopened toothbrushes, lipsticks or hair curlers, there was enough food stashed around the place to feed a man with an undiscerning palate for years.

As a side note, I would just like to mention that my grandma was awesome. Sure, when I was little she scared me, but when I got older I learned to appreciate people who scare little kids. She also blamed my dad for any and all of his children's deficiencies, which was handy, since I am quite deficient and the last thing I need is to feel guilty about it.

But she was a homeowner and parent during World War II and the Vietnam war. Living through this taught her two things: never throw any food away because you never know when it might be rationed, and that her government was comprised of thousands of dopes galumphing around inside big marble buildings and making moron decisions.

Combine the two, and you get a government that may, without warning, start rationing nonsense food. Like Jell-O or cupcake sprinkles. Her strategy to out-maneuver the dopes was to stockpile these items so that when the inevitable rationing reared its crosseyed head, she'd be ready.

This is what I found when I moved into the house after my grandmother decided that she'd had enough of her deficient grandkids and stupid leaders and went to hang out with Jesus instead; a house full of Jell-O and lipstick and sprinkles. If you want to find out what I did about it, you're going to have to get back into your time machine and fast forward to yesterday. Because it took me two years to finally get around to tossing this stuff out.

To be fair to myself, it wasn't just laziness. Part of it was an ingrained reluctance to throw out anything that might conceivably be useful to someone someday, maybe, possibly, on the offchance. "You kiddin'? This Jell-O still works! I ain't gonna just throw it away!"

Evidently, two years is my limit. If you didn't come to me with your five-pounds-of-ancient-Jell-O needs during that time--whoop! You had your chance. It's gone now.

It was kind of fun, this little cleaning spree I went on. It was equal parts archaeology, accidental cat punting and garbage disposal use. I would open a cabinet whose contents I'd been frowning at for two years, marvel at the 1980s-era packaging, accidentally kick a cat that had wandered over for a marvel of its own, and then dump the contents down the garbage disposal. If I haven't mentioned it before (I have) I love garbage disposals. They're the funnest holes in your house.

All was going smoothly down the drain (even the entire drum of Quaker Oats) until I got to the box of instant mashed potatoes. It was unique in being the only thing in the house (besides me) that was an affront to both God and nature. Potatoes don't come in a box. They come in a bag. A bag that you leave in a dark cupboard until the potatoes get all rooty and sprouty and creepy and then you stuff them, one by one, down the garbage disposal being very careful to not touch them with your skin.

Never in a box.

So after I wrestled the box of abominations out of Satan's grasp, I dumped the contents into the sink where they formed a deceptively innocent-looking heap. Like a child's sandbox filled with asbestos, they were trouble in jaunty clothing. I turned on the water and the disposal and began shoveling the demon flakes into the grindhole.

They waited until the last of their number disappeared down the drain before springing their trap. I heard them laugh, then the drain went "blorp," and stopped being a drain. Water started to pool in the sink, and the disposal's merry whir became a desperate growl. When the whole counter started to shudder, I powered the disposal down.

"Fuck," I said. Don't worry, I was by myself. I was also in my my boxer shorts. Which was awesome.

Repeated utterances of the fuckword did little to remove the diabolical potato flakes from the plumbing, so I fetched a plunger. I hate plungers. They linger in your bathroom, next to the toilet, signaling to guests that you are prone to problems in that area. Nothing says "um, why don't we have the party at YOUR house, Cloggy Flushmaster?" like a prominently visible plunger.

And you can't put them in your closet, because they might touch your towels. Ugh.

I brought the plunger to bear. All this did was amuse the potatoes and splash water all over the counter and floor. "It's like a water park up in this piece!" I could hear them yelling from way down in the pipes. "Like a wave pool!"

I needed more leverage and another plunger. You see, this is one of those double sinks with two drains that meet up downstream. You can plunge one drain all you want, and it's just going to make fart noises come out of the other one. That kind of thing is only amusing for about twenty minutes.

I took off my soggy, potato-scented shirt, and climbed, with a plunger in each hand, atop the counter. The light from an overhead reflector flood glistened on my chest, and I might have appeared for a moment like the god Zeus, astride mount Olympus. If Zeus was a pale, angry man waving two of the most retarded lightning bolts ever.

I prepared to cast down the lightning. Perched on the edge of the sink, bent at the knees and using my entire body as leverage, I basically plunge-humped my plumbing until absolutely nothing changed. The sludgy mess in the sink made the plungers slide all over the place and I could hear the potatoes laughing derisively the whole time.

Then I noticed that the window above the sink was open, and that anyone who happened by would see a sweaty man in his underwear standing on his counter and performing the world's plungiest and angriest rain dance.

I immediately abandoned this approach, and decided to escalate the fight with chemical warfare.



...to be continued!

I've Been Away

Wow, it sure has been a while, hasn't it? If you can't hear me, that's okay. I kind of expect that my fans have all wandered off by now. I mean, I can't blame you. If there was a site whose material I loved, I'd only spend a month, maybe a month and a half tops, refreshing the page every hour before the lack of new content drove me to become depressed and jump out a window.

Fortunately for us both, your window is on the ground floor and all you've done is ruin a hapless bush. I apologize about the bush, and will see about helping you find a new one.

I have an excuse, though, the telling of which is littered with the brand of intrigue and lack of respect for my readers that you've come to expect from me.

It was late February, and I was in my office preparing to write another brilliant post. I figured I'd go with something involving pirates or maybe computers. Maybe tie it together with computer pirates. "Y'arr! Keygen ho, matey! T'will unlock me digital booty!"

Nothing was getting written if I didn't have a cup of coffee at hand, so I had to take care of that first. I spun my chair around, and came face to face with a stranger.

The honed machinery of instinct that millions of years of selection had painstakingly assembled in my body powered up and was online in milliseconds. Just as quickly, my brain bumbled in and leaned casually on the Emergency Shutdown switch, like the comic-relief fat guy who's always accidentally shutting things down in the movies. It sort of realized what it had done and stood there looking sheepish before dropping its sandwich and scampering sweatily off to resume tampering with my memories.

I was so stunned that I just kept spinning. I came face to face with him three more times before I stopped.

"Eep!" I said.

"You'll be wondering why I'm here," the stranger said. He peeled back the lapel of the white lab coat he was wearing to reveal a red nametag stuck to the sweater vest underneath. "Hello, my name is The Government" it read. "As you can see, I am with The Government."

I cleared my throat and regained my storied cool. "If this is about quartering troops, we've been through this before," I said.

"No, no, Mr. Daddy," the stranger said. He brushed some PCI cards off a chair and seated himself. "We've had our eye on you for some time now," he paused to stroke his beardless chin, "and we at NASA think you'd make an excellent candidate for our first manned trip to Mars. Arrangements have already been made, if you are interested in participating."

I was taken aback. No, more than that. My aback wasn't just taken, but wrenched forcefully from my grasp and driven at high speed through rush-hour traffic to be hastily disassembled in an abandoned warehouse and sold for parts on the black market.

"Really and for true?" I said lamely, wasting the buildup.

"For true," the man said, offering his hand. I shook it. "Excellent!" he said, nudging his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose before standing. "Follow me. We have a vehicle waiting."

Now, I don't know about you, but television and the movies have conditioned me to picture government officials driving around in shiny black Cadillac Escalades or other chunky vehicular monstrosities. The bigger, shinier, blacker and uglier the SUV, the more governmenty it looks.

This man had arrived in a red Focus hatchback. "Just throw those boxes in the back seat," he said, starting the engine.

"Snickers bars?"

"Not ordinary Snickers bars," the totally beardless man said, peering officiously over the top of his glasses. "Those are Space Snickers. In fact, the 'Snickers' is an acronym meaning 'Space Nutrients In Chocolate Knickers Enhanced for Rare Sorts'. They're only for our most valuable space cadets."

"Can I have one?"

"Oh, my, no," the agent laughed. "We're here."

We had parked behind a low brick building with a big plate-glass window out front. A pink sign above the window declared it to be a bakery.

"A bakery?"

The man leaned in close enough for me to see that he had absolutely no trace of a beard on his face. "It's just a front," he whispered. "It's actually a seeeeecret entrance."

I was definitely interested now. I loved secret entrances. "Is it? To what? To where? Can I go in?"

"Whoa! Easy there, buckaroo! One at a time." His brow wrinkled as if he were deep in thought, and he again stroked his luxuriant lack-of-beard. "To answer your first question; shut up. Follow me."

With one last, longing glance at the box of cutting-edge, government-issue Snickers bars, I shut the door of the Focus and followed the monstrously un-bearded man into the secret facility.

"Here. You'll need these," he said, handing me a pair of cardboard glasses. The "lenses" were rectangles of thin plastic. One was tinted red, the other blue. "Do not put them on until I tell you to. Go on in."

When I pushed the door open the tinkling of a small bell greeted my ears, and the smile of a matronly woman greeted my eyes. She was standing behind a glass counter full of doughnuts. "What can I get for you two?" she asked.

The man nudged me. "Okay, put the glasses on," he said, "but keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them. The only way to reach a target as distant as Mars is to launch at extremely high velocity. We accomplish this with a terawatt magnetic rail driver, and if some of that magnetism gets in your eyes, it itches like a sonofabitch. Those glasses can only block so much."

I complied. My world went dark, although I could hear the barren-chinned man order a dozen glazed doughnuts. I heard some rustling and then the clang and clatter of a cash register.

"Okay. We're on Mars," the man announced. "You can open your eyes."

I almost didn't. I'd never been on Mars before, and I wanted to savor it. I think I might have even been a little frightened. I was planning on using part of the travel time to sort of psych myself up for what was certainly a journey fraught with peril and the beardless unknown, but it was over so fast.

"Hey," said the man with the defoliated beard area. "I said you could open your eyes. Here. Hold these doughnuts."

I opened my eyes. The world before me shimmered with an unearthly purplish light. Objects appeared to have two edges, one gilded in red, the other in blue. They shifted in space when I forced my eyes to shift focus.

"Have a nice day!" said a voice. Startled, I whirled 'round to locate its source. A purplish matronly woman behind a purplish glass counter full of purplish doughnuts waved goodbye purplishly. I'm pretty sure my mouth dropped open, and I took a few steps backward.

A little bell dingled, and before I knew it, I was outside on the surface of an alien world, looking at a bizarrely alien Ford Focus. It was so different, but so oddly familiar.

"I thought Mars was supposed to be red," I said, surprised at how well my voice carried in the thin Martian atmosphere.

"Close one of your eyes," said the man without any discernible facial hair, unlocking the Focus.

I did. The landscape before me lost its strange double-edged appearance and turned blue.

"It's blue now," I said. "That's worse than before."

The man started his car. "Then close the other eye. Your door's unlocked."

I did. My field of vision went black.

"Shit! Now it's totally dark! What'd I do? Oh, fuck, I've doomed the mission!" I wailed.

"Jesus Christ. I meant close the other eye and re-open the first one. Get in the car, willya?"

I did as my beardless guide instructed. The scene reappeared, washed in a deep red. That was more like it! The Mars I'd read about in books and seen on TV since I was but a lad! Evidently, human society had put in a lot of very hard and very impressive work since the last time I'd taken in any Mars news. I could have sworn I was in an Earth neighborhood.

I seated myself in the Martian Focus, balancing the doughnuts on my lap. They seemed to weigh less, now that we were on a planet with only a third the gravity of Earth's.

"Where are we going now?" I asked the man, who hadn't the faintest beard about him. "Can we see that big canyon?"

"Tomorrow," he said, remaining beardless. "Let's get to the base. I'm sure you'll find the accommodations very accommodating."

He was right. We pulled into the driveway of a house shockingly similar to the one I had lived in back on Earth, except that it was all reddish. Very cool.

"Now," said the man, after we had seated ourselves at a space table and eaten a couple of our Earth doughnuts; doughnuts that had made a 60 million mile voyage that very few other doughnuts had, "I must make a confession."

He stood, and removed his beardlessness with a flourish, revealing a beard. "Ha! It's been me all along, boy!" said my dad, tossing his false un-beard onto the table in front of him. "Got that from Hong Kong. They must have accidentally packed it in with one of my flashlights. Hee."

I gasped. Unbelievable! How could I have missed it? It was right there in front of me the whole time! My father works for NASA!

"Wow!" I squealed, like one of those insufferable kids from 50s sitcoms. "How long have you been involved in the space program?"

Stunned silence.

"And how come you never brought home any space candy when I was little?"

"No, um, boy, I'm not involved in the space program. And you can take off those glasses now. This was all just a little prank," he said, slowly lowering himself back into his chair, as if he were an inflatable man with a slow leak.

"Ha, it's okay, you can tell me! I'm your son!" I said, winking with my open eye.

"Jesus Christ. Just eat your doughnuts."



Well, as you can imagine, that is why it has taken me so long to write a new Blog post. Adjusting to life on a new planet really takes it out of you. It's a good thing the Internet has made it to Mars too, or else I wouldn't have even been able to write this much.

x86 Core Euthanasia

My computer is sort of like my pet. I buy nice things for it. I'm wary about how it will get along with the other computers, and I'm always excited to see what it can do after I install new parts. (The cats, by the way, love their new spider monkey tails. If you haven't made the plunge yet, it's totally worth it. If you've ever seen a cat running around with a can of soda clutched in its tail, you'll know what I mean.)

Unlike pets, however, if a computer part dies, there's usually a warranty. My current flock of USB ports weren't real wild about being hit with the arm-shaking jolt of static electricity I gathered from the cats, carpet and fuzzy office chair. They showed their displeasure by going on strike.

"Oh, we just can't have nice things," read the statement issued by the Motherboard, which represents the Amalgamated Union of Universal Serial Bus Ports.

So I did what any nerd would do when one of his under-warranty parts goes on the fritz: I bought some new, faster parts. In this case, I played the role of the evil industrialist, shaking his cane at the hordes of underpaid wage slaves waving signs outside one of his factories.

"To hell with all of you!" I shouted from the half-rolled-down window of my Bentley. "I'll replace you all with robots!"

Now, I'm afraid I've gone too far. You see, my new processor has the ability to "put individual cores to sleep." If they were defective or in pain, I could see a good argument for this, but according to Intel's spec sheet, these cores are perfectly operational! Never did harm to nobody, and Windows 7 is allowed to put them to sleep on a whim.

It may not be as bad as it sounds, because presumably these cores can be resuscitated. It does seem needlessly cruel to keep killing and reviving them over and over again, and I'm sure that my tacit approval will haunt me later.

It's just so fast, though! I'll just stop thinking about the poor little cores and their families, and maybe all the bad thoughts will go away.

The Assault on Something or Other - Part 2

06:00 arrived right on time: at six o'clock in the morning. Cheddar Company awoke to an enthusiastic bugle call, which was followed almost immediately by some enthusiastic swearing, enthusiastic punching, and the enthusiastic eating of a bugle.

"I don't think Major General likes bugles much," said Randy Sourhill, rubbing the sleep and some frost from his eyes.

"Either that, or he likes them a lot. That's the fourth one he's eaten. Ol' Chester just keeps making more, though. Think maybe there's something wrong with that guy?" said Jake Toboggan.

"Definitely. Normal people don't eat that much brass."

"No, I mean Chester."

Randy buckled on his fanny pack of .30 caliber shells. "Oh? Well, yeah. That guy's a moron. He's the one who keeps trying to talk to the Germans while they're shooting at us. Stupid hippie."

"You know, we could probably shorten this war if we just understood each other better," said a voice from outside the tent. Chester's silhouette, distorted by the angle of the early morning sun, painted a streak of disapproval up the wall of green canvas.

"You don't even know German," said Jake.

The silhouette put its hands on its hips. "I don't need to. Love is a universal language."

"Judging by all the bullet holes in your natural fibers, I'd say Jerry's been speakin' to you in the language of lead."

Chester did not have a chance to respond to this witty rejoinder, however. A larger, angrier silhouette appeared on the tent wall and booted him offscreen.

"You two ass sandwiches better quit watchin' tent movies and get your balls in gear, dammit!" Major General Whack Buffalo thundered. "Fuck!" he added.

--------------

Cheddar Company stood in the snow in a semicircle around the Major General. He had a map in one hand and a bazooka in the other, and was furiously slamming them together.

"This is what we'll do to that place until we find every fucking ammo drop and Nazi sympathizer in the town of Somethinggrad! We'll stomp the damn out of it! We'll chew it up and," he stuffed the map into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, "we'll wait two to four hours and crap it into a fucking bush!"

"Hell yeah!" cheered Cheddar Company, with the exception of Chester. He was too busy drawing a picture of a swastika and a peace sign shaking hands.

"Sir? How are we going to find the town? That was our only map," said an unnamed private who was just begging to be punched. The Major General punched him. Then he angrily tore off his hat and twisted it into a baguette of felt and brass and held it up to the side of his head.

"Major General Whack Buffalo here. What the fuck, over?" He stood in silence, turning red. A little circle of bare ground appeared around him, steaming, as the snow melted. "Roger! Wilco! Goddammit! Over!" he shouted into his hat, before unrolling it and mashing it back onto his head.

"Control says the town of Somethinggrad is that way!" he bellowed, pointing to a town on the horizon. "Form up, you bunch of worthless hippo-lickers!"

The company packed up their gear and formed up. Single file, they stood with their packs on and their rifles hoisted smartly over their shoulders. Major General Buffalo strolled along the line, punching the soldiers he didn't like, which was all of them. When he came to Pvt. Jake Toboggan, he stopped and glared. The intensity of the General's hatred set fire to a small package of cashews in the private's breast pocket.

"Where the crunchy fuck is your rifle, soldier?" the General spat.

"I broke it, sir!" Jake shouted back, eyes front, back straight, cashew fire crackling merrily.

"And just how in the name of Hitler's damned elbows did you manage to do that?" the General said, in a dangerously quiet tone.

"I was melee attacking a tree, sir!"

"It'd be a waste of time for me to kill you now, since Jerry will do it for me soon enough," the Major General said. "March, fuckers!"

Cheddar Company marched. Overhead, the featureless gray sky was bruised here and there with clouds that portended snow. The tundra under their boots gave way to slushy roads as the boys entered the bombed-out rubble on the outskirts of Somethinggrad.

"Man, this looks bad," said Randy Sourhill. "Jerry could be anywhere in this mess." He looked over his shoulder at his best friend Jake. "So, you don't have a gun? None at all?"

"Nope!" Jake grinned. A blackened patch on his chest was still smoldering. "It's no big deal. I'll just kill a Nazi and take his."

"And how do you plan on doing that without a gun?"

Jake's grin melted. "Oh. Damn." He patted his pants pockets and searched through the pouches on his pack. He opened his mess kit. "I've got a spork," he said weakly. "Hey, did you hear that?"

"I dunno," said Randy. "What'd it sound like?"

"Sort of a 'thoomp' noise. Kinda like someone shaking a wet potato out the end of a pipe. And now something's whistling. You don't hear that?"

A two-story house on the other side of the road suddenly exploded in a maelstrom of fire and splintered wood. The gut-wrenching boom it made was followed by two more thoomp noises.

"Mortars! Cover your dicks boys, we're under fire!" shouted the Major General. He threw himself over a short stone wall and into what was once the basement of a house. Most of Cheddar Company followed him before the two mortar shells exploded behind them. One of them cratered the lawn in front of a barn, sending up a tsunami of soil and pebbles. The other hit the barn dead center, punching through the roof before exploding. The whole building looked briefly like a Fourth of July firecracker as flames burst from the top in a concentrated blast before the walls levered outward, still mostly intact, like a roofless house of cards.

For the men huddled in the basement, day quickly turned to a dusty twilight as one of the barn walls toppled over on top of them. It landed with a crash, sealing off the top of the square space, trapping them inside. Debris pattered down all around, pinging off the hulks of burned cars and the flak helmets of the only two soldiers who hadn't made it to basement safety.

Jake and Randy squinted through the haze. "This went downhill fast. Think we can make it to that church without getting bombed?" Jake shouted.

...to be continued!

The Survival Horror Genre

The plot of The Book of Eli in one long sentence:

After some sort of nuclear Holocaust and human society collapses, our hero Eli (who was told to take the last remaining King James Bible "west" by a voice he heard in his head) treks across the wasteland mostly on foot, defending himself with guns and a sword against cannibals and petty warlords to end up reciting the whole Bible (which he had memorized from his Braille copy that eventually falls into the warlord's hands) to a small group of intellectual people holed up in Alcatraz prison.

The plot of The Book of Eli in one short sentence:

If nuclear war wipes out most of humankind, the remaining people will be dirty and angry and won't bother fixing anything.


It pains me to say this, but the movie wasn't all that great. The critics concur. But you know what? I have a soft spot in my (head?) for this genre, and I'm willing to overlook quite a bit of nonsense in exchange for some shots of ruined cities and streets choked with derelict automobiles and cobwebby old houses with peeling paint.

(Because apparently nuclear fallout doesn't kill cobs.)

And there are a lot of things to overlook! For example, when society does collapse in these stories, people just accept it. "Collapse, you say? The zombies are nigh? Well, shit! Now I can go insane and push around a rusty shopping cart full of mannequin limbs like I've always wanted!"

Seriously? Nobody? I mean, you gotta figure on at least some looting after Armageddon, since there will probably be some assholes left. But I find it hard to believe that nobody would bother at least rebuilding the indoor plumbing.

Got it. Machinists, carpenters and literacy are particularly susceptible to nuclear bombs. Fine. I'll buy it. Let's just go look at some more burnt stuff, okay?

I think I like this genre so much because I think it's fun to imagine how I would survive in such a situation. Say I was the only survivor of some horrible plague, and everyone else turned into stabby, rapey zombies. Where would I sleep? What would I eat? Where would I brush my teeth and store my extra deodorant?

Because apocalypse or no, I don't want to be all stinky.

I figure the first thing I'd do is find myself a go-kart. I'd get one of the two-seaters, so I'd have room to carry all my shotguns around. Now, I'm sure you're wondering why I wouldn't go for something like a Hummer. I might have one of those on standby just in case, but the go-kart offers flexibility that a big vehicle does not. I could drive it indoors and I could maneuver it around or lift it over obstacles that would block a Hummer. Plus, I've always wanted to swipe one and take it off the track.

My base of operations would probably be a supermarket. Here in Michigan, we've got Meijer, but a CostCo would do just as well. Both of these places sell generators and extension cords, and have built-in gas stations. Bingo! Self-sufficiency right off the bat. The collapse of society and the constant zombie threat is no reason to put up with warm pop and no video games.

But a supermarket would be hard to keep warm in the winter, and it would be next to impossible to guard every wall against zombie incursion. So then what? What if I can't get my hands on a tank or a Brinks armored truck? A city bus, of course! Some cobbled-together armor, a couch and some extra fuel tanks, and you got yourself a mobile apartment. You could even run over zombies in it if you get bored.

Whoops. Better finish this up so I can leave the office.

Umm...ending ending ending....

And in conclusion, I would like to see more bombed-out landscapes and survival techniques in survival horror movies instead of being presented with a two-hour PSA about how being greedy will lead to my being eaten by zombies when the apocalypse comes.

The Moron Trains a New Employee

The Moron was sitting at his computer with a cup of horrible breakroom coffee in one hand and a chocolate wafer cookie in the other.

Needless to say, he was extremely pleased.

Because he was a Good Employee® who followed Proper Workplace Decorum, he had opted to manage his time wisely. To this end, he had created an Excel spreadsheet to help him research the different ways of consuming the cookie and coffee in tandem. Little bits of wafer and chocolate floated on the surface of the weak, oily Folgers, and the lonely cursor blinked in cell A1 of the barren grid onscreen.

Suddenly, inspiration struck! Knocking The Moron a full three feet eastward and causing him to accidentally eat his cookie, he found his head suddenly filled with ideas!

"It buuuuurns!" he cried, trying to claw the unwelcome invaders out of his head with his mouse.

"Are you okay?" his Supervisor asked, poking her head into his cubicle.

The Moron struggled to focus on his horrible coffee. He buried his face in the mug.

"Blughbubblrrrubbbble," he said, tiny spatters of coffee escaping the corners of his mouth.

The Supervisor stared.

The Moron put down his mug. "I think so. I had what I believe to be a species of headache, but it's gone now."

"It could have been an idea. They've been going around. Try thinking about musical ringtones or politics and they'll stay away. But I didn't come over here to dispense advice. I'm here because I need you to train a new employee."

The Moron climbed back into his chair and took a distinguished looking seat. "Anything to keep The Company operating like a machine with no squirrels in its parts. What's the new cog going to be doing?"

The Supervisor shifted nervously, but regained her composure quickly. "A job very nearly identical to your own. Ahem. His name is Clancy." She pushed a tall thin man wearing a bowler hat into the Moron's cubicle and left.

"Hi," said Clancy.

The Moron noted Clancy's hat, and allowed his brain unfiltered access to his mouth for two seconds. "I'm going to call you Duke Burpsworth, Lord of Snakes, if that's cool with you."

"That would be strange," said Clancy, pulling an extra chair into the cubicle and seating himself, "but I'm okay with it for the time being. So what do you do here at The Company?"

The Moron applied some Chest Puffing spray from an aerosol can and cleared his throat imperiously.

"I'm in charge of Excel," he said through the pompous fog. "I keep all the little squares filled with all the most interesting facts and figures. Would you like to hear one?"

Clancy nodded.

"Sixteen-point-three," the Moron said smugly

Clancy nodded again.

"Stunning, isn't it? I wrote that one just about ten minutes ago. It just came to me, right out of the blue. Wafer cookie?"

"Thanks."

"I keep a big box of them in this drawer. There were a bunch of folders and stuff in there, but none of them looked important, so I gave them to a hobo. Hey! It's break time! I plan to leave the building and wander to locations unknown during the next ten minutes. Wanna come with?"

Clancy shook his head slowly. "Oh, no, I'll hang back here and get to know the rest of the staff. I can keep an eye on your key card and ID badge for you, though. That way you don't have to lug them around."

The Moron skipped happily out into the parking lot, freed of more burdens than he knew, and aimed himself at the nearest bakery.