found_drama

We re-enter the house (she and I) after some outdoor chores. Immediately we can tell that something isn’t quite right. The air is an odd mix of hot and cold pockets and the smell of smoke is heavy and thick. She worries that something awful has happened (or is happening). We turn a corner to walk into the house’s living room and see what we feared. Someone (we guess correctly) has opened up all the windows in the house and then lit up a series of small bonfires throughout the living room.

She dashes into the adjacent bed room to find her corpulent worm of a house-guest (mother? aunt? cousin?) nesting snugly in her triple-stacked mattress. Why (we ask) are all the windows open? Why is the house (for
all intents and purposes) on fire? She looks at us like we’re crazy, like the answer should be obvious. She explains reluctantly. There was a weird smell, so she opened all the windows. But then it was too cold, so
she wriggled out of bed and set a few fires to warm the place up. But why not just use the heater? Because every idiot knows that’s where the smells come from.

Just then our cat dashes out from around a corner. He has always been frightful of our bloated guest. He freezes, turns, and careens into one of the fires. A hideous meow goes up and she and I chase after the cat.
We need to pin him down, we need to put him out. The fat guest only laughs. She never liked that cat anyway.

• Scott McCracken
  Interweb Extraordinaire
  (tags: Vermont friend)

• The 9 Most Badass Bible Verses
  via Cracked.com (via B^2): blasphemously hilarious!
  (tags: history humor religion)
• Road kill for Christmas?
  via B.G.: perhaps the awesome-est stuffed animals ever created.
  (tags: absurdist surreal)

• New Terrain Layer in Google Maps
  via LifeHacker: *H*A*W*T*!!! (also: it was nice to see that my guesses for the locations of the summits of various mountains was pretty darn close)
  (tags: google geotagging map)

The adolescent settler girl fancies herself in love with a doppelgänger of Dan Doherty.  Her family moves west through the valley on horseback (her farmer parents, younger brother, and herself) and they encounter him in one of these frontier towns.  He’s the vain cowboy — all too conscious of the receding hairline and a bald spot on the top of his dome; he wears a blue bandana cinched tightly about his scalp and an heirloom tricorner hat over that.  He is shifty, seldom making eye-contact with anyone, dodging the gaze of the maids in the hotel, and even giving only short replies to his partner.

On their way westward out of the town, the family becomes caught in floodwaters that rapidly fill the valley.  Their wagon becomes water-logged, one of the horses is swept away, and the girl becomes caught beneath a rock.  At first the family has feared that she has drowned but as the waters recede, they find her, one leg nearly crushed.  She is in and out of consciousness, mumbling fever-dream style about the man from the town.  The family struggles to come up with a plan.  They will already lose one day of travel time from this, they’re already two days behind, and the father knows that the Running of the Gremlins is imminent.  They opt to amputate the girl’s leg with a saw and retreat to the town to find a doctor.

As if on wings of the wind, the valley closes in around them, becoming the 10th floor of an office building.  They’re trapped up there with a few other travelers.  The father cringes, fearful that they tarried too long and are now caught in the Running of the Gremlins.  He quickly organizes the others, sealing off corridors, jury-rigging quick escape routes into safely guarded rooms, rounding up the few guns in the party’s possession.  The thunder that echoes down the grey halls taunts them.  The girl props herself up in a corner of one of the safe rooms, clutching her amputated leg to her chest, mumbling about how That Man From The Town would be there soon to save them.  She tells everyone to watch the elevator.  They would send up two hunters in exchange for one of them…

• WORLD’S ANCIENT MYSTERIES: The World’s 10 Most Famous Uncracked Codes
  (tags: cryptography history language weird research)

• Visual Dictionary Online
  (tags: dictionary graphics reference visualization)

A few years old. But still hilarious. Happy Turducken Day!

The three of us have parked the car on the outskirts of the park, slung our gear over our shoulders and are hiking in to the park. It’s a strange sight: the parking lot is like the kind you would find at a mall — dark black asphalt, brightly painted white lines to indicate the spaces, twenty-foot-tall lamp posts — but the parking lot is in the midst of some of the densest deciduous forest. Our destination is a tall column of rock that bulges up from the treetops; we are going to climb that son of a bitch. As we pick our way through the forest though, we come upon a massive visitor center. The visitor center has an ultra-modern architecture; round and dome-like, it falls somewhere between NYC’s Guggenheim and Vader’s Death Star. Uniformed people stalk everywhere (arm in arm) and a small cadre of snipers is perched on top of the visitor center. We joke that we must be invading something. The uniforms are all different colors; most of them are grey with black piping and gold accents but some are navy blue, others are teal, others still are pale green. There are not many civilian outfits but those that we do see are all dressed in formal wear. We overhear snatches of conversation about “the Norwich wedding” and the patrols that have been set up to keep the climbers out. We take a gamble and sashay into the visitor center, the idea in our heads that we can convince the DJ or the pastor or some other authority of the wedding that we are part of the patrol brigade. We’ll still get to the top of that rock column.