When her friends invited her to the Harry Harrison Make Room! Make Room! Noodle Bar, Stacy expected a fun night out. Perhaps they would drink too much sake, eat some noodles tinted with green dye (that they would jokingly call “soylent green”) and forget about the tiny zombies rampaging through the city.
To her horror, she was presented with tofu.
More terrifying tofu here. Thanks to Betenoir for the photo.
LONDON, ONTARIO (The Skwib) — After a courageous five weeks, Terry Bakker has abandoned his New Year’s Resolution to watch The Hunt for Red October every time it comes on TV.
“I had no idea how often TBS, Spike and American Movie Classics play this God-damned movie,” an enraged Bakker told The Skwib.
“I hate quitting anything, but I just can’t take it anymore. I’ve had to watch it 105 times. That averages to more than three times a day. On Saturday I had to watch it five times. I didn’t get any fucking sleep! Do you have any idea it takes to watch a two-hour movie on TBS after midnight? Four-and-three-quarter hours!”
Bakker made the resolution at a New Year’s Eve party after doing six rounds of Jägermeister shots, and declaring to everyone gathered that The Hunt for Red October was a “freakin’ cinematic masterpiece.”
Party host and designated driver Patrick Whalen asked if Bakker would care to back that up with a New Year’s Resolution and an accompanying bet.
“I honestly didn’t think Terry was that drunk. Or that he’d do it,” Whalen said. “So, he’s definitely lost the bet. Not that I’m going to hold him to it.”
If he didn’t succeed in watching the 1990 film starring Sean Connery and Alec Baldwin, Bakker promised to shave his head with a cheese-grater and a pair of toenail clippers.
Based on a Tom Clancy novel, the story follows Jack Ryan (Baldwin) as he tries to help Captain Marko Ramius (Connery) defect with the Soviet Union’s newest ballistic missile submarine, the Red October, which has a silent propulsion system that uses caterpillars in some way.
“I’d much rather shave my head than listen to Sean Connery masticate another syllable. The scars will heal. I mean, he’s supposed to be Lithuanian, so what’s with the accent? I know he only has the one accent, but God! And what the fuck is going on with the rest of the Russian crew? Some of them sound like Mr. Chekov from Star Trek: ‘Captain, we are on a nucwear wessel,’ and some of them sound like winners of the British Upper Class Twit of the Year Contest. And don’t get me started on Connery’s eyebrows. Those things just freak me out.”
The makers of the infamous digestif, Mast-Jägermeister AG, declined to comment.
I think your marriage is safe, as long as you can do two things.
First of all, you HAVE to wrap your head around Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Here’s the easy way to understand it: basically, the simultaneous determination of both the position and momentum of a particle each has an inherent uncertainty, the product of these being not less than a known constant.
In other words, you don’t know WHAT you’ve done wrong, and if you did know what you’d done wrong, you wouldn’t know WHEN you did it wrong.
Second of all, you have to tackle the other issue head-on. Invite the vampire over for dinner. When it’s time for desert, tell your undead guest that you’re having banana cream pie. Make a big deal about it. Say you took all day to make it, how much the werewolf you play pick-up road hockey likes your banana cream pie, and so on.
Go get the pie, and when you bring it in, pretend to trip and put the pie right in his face. Then when he’s wiping pie out of his eyes, stab him through the heart with a wooden stake. (Real wood, no Formica.)
Or you could just shoot him with kind of crossbow when he comes through the front door. (Wooden bolt, no aluminum!)
…in a Bavarian restaurant. I’m not sure how I never saw this Python sketch before, but I’m sure happy to present it to you now.
You can see it on YouTube if the embeddy thing gives it to you in the mush.
This week I’d like to give you, my curious Skwib readers, a chance to preview some other parts of my second novel, Marvellous Hairy. You can find all of Chapter 1 here. Chapter 2 is not suitable for this PG-rated blog. (So know you know you want to get your own copy. Details here, or just look for online stores in the right sidebar.) This is the third of three parts. First part here. Second part here.
Nick stared at the standing figure. The security officer at the computer poked his head out to look at Nick, and then ducked back.
“Have you heard of the Panopticon?” Nick asked.
“What!”
“He’s okay,” a second male voice — presumably that of the guy behind the computer — said. “He checks out.”
“The Panopticon was invented by Jeremy Benthaman — an 18th century English philosopher. Utilitarian. Had himself mummified and put on display in a wooden cabinet. He was some freaky Dude.”
“I’m going to come out and get you fill out the agreements,” the security guard warned Nick, not wanting to know anything more about the fetishes of 18th century pervert philosophers.
The man behind the computer pressed the intercom button and said: “I know about the Panopticon. It’s a prison designed so that the prisoners don’t know if they’re being watched or not, so essentially, they’re always being watched.”
“Right,” Nick said enthusiastically. He pressed his face up against the glass. “Just like this.”
The security door opened and the officer turned on the lights.
“Okay, here are the forms and agreements. You sign where there is a sticky. Then we can get you out of here.”
“I tell you, this is the insanity pink,” Nick shook his head at the guard. “You should do something about it, especially if you have to watch this room on a regular basis. It’s probably affecting your mind.”
“Yeah, or maybe I need a new job. Here are the forms, and then you can get the hell out of here.”
“Tourniquet onion powder,” Nick said.
The End of Chapter 3…
This week I’d like to give you, my generous Skwib readers, a chance to preview some other parts of my second novel, Marvellous Hairy. You can find all of Chapter 1 here. Chapter 2 is not suitable for this PG-rated blog. (So know you know you want to get your own copy. Details here, or just look for online stores in the right sidebar.) This is the second of three parts. First part here.
Nick sat in a small waiting area in the “public” part of the offices. It was somewhat reminiscent of the kind of waiting area you’d find at a LubeItUp or any car service outlet, without the smell of petrochemicals and stale coffee. There were four uncomfortable seats made of black metal tubing and worn cloth that looked like it was once teal in color. There were no magazines, or any other form of amusement. A large two-way mirror spanned one wall of the waiting room, which allowed the security team to watch people waiting to speak with them. The entrance door was locked, and controlled from a large room that housed security feeds from around the building. The rest of the security department was hidden behind another door that had both a keypad and a biometric lock. In other words, Nick was not able to leave the room, even though it was seriously fucking with his chi. He had his computer with him, but he was too distracted to write anything, sitting there, waiting for security to establish that he wasn’t an eco-terrorist, or plain-old regular terrorist, hoping to de-erect the great big Glass Dick with a pocket full of Semtex.
The room was extremely pink and it caused chi-fuckage.
“Can you guys hear me?” Nick asked, sort of speaking towards the two-way mirror.
There is a moment’s pause, and then a voice said from a speaker: “Yes, we can hear you Mr. Motbot. What is wrong?”
“This room is freaking me out.”
“I’m sorry.”
“There’s something wrong with it. It has a bad vibe. It’s not… right.”
“Mr. Motbot, the room is designed to be calming, even though you are essentially our prisoner.”
“Designed?” Nick asked the unseen security guard, ignoring the issue of his imprisonment.
“Yes. We’ve painted the room pink.”
“How is that going to make me calm?” Nick asked. “What if I don’t like pink?”
“Psychological studies show that pink reduces aggression and can have a calming influence.”
“What do psychological studies show about observing someone through a two-way mirror and forcing them to sit on threadbare mid-80s furniture?”
“We’re just checking your references and the government security databases so we can give you clearance,” the voice reassured him.
Nick was not reassured.
“I think you’ve got color wrong.”
“Excuse me?” the disembodied voice said.
Nick put his face right next to the glass, and tried to look through. He could not see anything beyond it, but he noticed that there was a set of light switches near the doors to the rest of the security offices. He turned them off, and then returned to the two-way mirror. He could make out a figure standing next to someone who was clearly sitting in front of a computer screen.
“What are you doing Mr. Motbot?”
“I like to see the people I’m talking with, unless it’s, you know, a dream. Or some kind of trip.”
“Please turn the lights back on, Mr. Motbot. We’ll be done here shortly.”
“I think you’ve got the pink wrong. Instead of the calming pink, I think you’ve painted it the insanity pink.”
“What?”
Nick could detect a note of panic in the security guard’s voice, and he could see him moving towards the exit of the room behind the two-way mirror.
“Insanity pink. Too much blue and platinum in the mix, so it makes the brain resonate at a lower frequency. Causes grand mal seizures in rhesus monkeys. It was in a study,” Nick said.
“Is that true?”
“Could be.”
“Stop looking at me,” the security guard said. “We’re nearly done… Stop looking at me.”