Filed under: The Greatest Joke Ever Told
“Wait,” joked Jack, “isn’t this where you say you could tell me, but you’d have to kill me?”
“I thought that was implied.” Nate continued to look serious.
“Ummm…yeah.” Jack leaned back a little as he remembered again that he was talking to a fifteen foot poisonous reptile with a reputation for having a nasty temper. “So, what is this ‘Bound by Secrecy’ stuff, and can you really stop the effects of the methanol?” Jack thought for a second. “And, what do you mean methanol, anyway? I thought these days they use ethanol in wiper fluid, and just denature it?”
“They may, I don’t really know,” said Nate. “I haven’t gotten out in a while. Maybe they do. All I know is that I smell methanol on your breath and on that bottle in your pocket. And the blue color of the liquid when you pulled it out to drink some let me guess that it was wiper fluid. I assume that they still color wiper fluid blue?”
Filed under: The Greatest Joke Ever Told
“I might suggest that we take care of that methanol you now have in your system with the next request,” continued the snake. “I can guess why you drank it, but I’m not sure how much you drank, or how much methanol was left in the wiper fluid. That stuff is nasty. It’ll make you go blind in a day or two, if you drank enough of it.”
“Ummm, n-next request?” said the man. He put his hand back on his hurting shoulder and backed away from the snake a little.
“That’s the way it works. If you like, that is,” explained the snake. “You get three requests. Call them wishes, if you wish.” The snake grinned at his own joke, and the man drew back a little further from the show of fangs.
“But there are rules,” the snake continued. “The first request is free. The second requires an agreement of secrecy. The third requires the binding of responsibility.” The snake looks at the man seriously.
Filed under: Shout Out
I needed to use Google to search for some technical materials. It failed. It finally happens. It just goes to show that nothing is perfect.
-the consultant
Filed under: super d's musings
I hope to make this as quick as possible. Grandma is watching Sun TV. She thinks I’m fast asleep in my crib. I am hoping she won’t check on me for the next 10 minutes or so. But chances are, with her attention transfixed on Sun TV, that isn’t likely to happen. That’s probably the only thing in the world that she’s obsessed about enough to be taken in completely by it. Uncle WUMmy once wrote about this dysfunction for an article for the KLK. That was a long time ago that.
I have a little trouble typing, because I have yet to recover completely from dislocating my shoulder last week. Pa was playing with me; and in his overzealousness perhaps exerted a tad too much force on my right arm. I felt a sharp excruciating pain, and the next moment I looked down to see my arm positioned oddly like a plasticine limb twisted out of shape. I let out a wail more out of sheer horror of the sight of the deformed state of my being than the actual pain itself. Pa rushed me to the doctor who promptly rectified the malady by with one deft manoeuvre on my arm. This is the second major accident I’ve had due to the carelessness on the part of my parents. A few months back, I rolled of the bed when Ma fell asleep beside me. Thankfully, I was alright and escaped with just a few minor bruises. When Pa returned from his school trip the next day, he was devastated to hear what had happened. He broke into tears and in the words of Uncle WUMmy ‘cried like a poof’. It is just typical of Uncle WUMmy to use this incident to ridicule Pa. One of these days, I am going to thump his nose.
Uncle WUMmy can be the meanest at times. In the last couple of weeks or so, he’s been described as being immature, unnecessarily critical, insensitive, uncaring, arrogant, disrespectful, and most recently ‘a sadist bastard’. Sometimes I cannot be certain if he’s actually proud of being described as such. He must have certainly been dropped too many times on the head as a child. The other day he stole my Yakult and got a good bollocking from Grandma. Then he snatched my balloon from me and tied it up at a height that I could not reach. I do not understand the motivation for such actions, but I find such behaviour extremely childish.
He must be in a fantastic mood today though; after the result of yesterday’s Champions’ League Final. Uncle WUMmy absolutely abhors Liverpool and takes pleasure in ‘taking the piss out of them’, as he puts it, at every opportunity he gets. Well needless to say, he has plenty of ammunition now; and if I were a fan of Liverpool I’d stay clear off him! Both Pa and Uncle WUMmy are Manchester United supporters, and perhaps I am expected to follow in their footsteps. But frankly, being a genius and all, I find the idea of 22 men running around the pitch chasing the ball a tiny bit puerile. And even if I eventually do attain an improbable interest in the sport, it is quite unlikely I would develop any kind of affection for Manchester United. Frankly, Uncle WUMmy’s cockiness drives me crazy and the last thing I’ll do is back a team he supports.
Ok, I reckon it is about time I saunter back to my crib. I think it’s about time for Grandma to feed me some of that vile porridge of hers. One of these days, the dreadful taste is going to kill me. I am certain of it. Well, I hope to be back writing soon.Till then… Ta.
- Super D
Filed under: The Greatest Joke Ever Told
Hmmm. Maybe the snake had no interest in biting him? It hadn’t rattled yet – that was a good sign. Maybe he wasn’t going to die of snake bite after all.
He then remembers that he’d looked up when he’d reached the center here because he thought he’d heard a voice. He was still very woozy – he was likely to pass out soon, the sun still beat down on him even though he was now on cool stone. He still didn’t have anything to drink. But maybe he had actually heard a voice. This stone didn’t look natural. Nor did that white post sticking up out of the stone. Someone had to have built this. Maybe they were still nearby. Maybe that was who talked to him. Maybe this snake was even their pet, and that’s why it wasn’t biting.
He tries to clear his throat to say, “Hello,” but his throat is too dry. All that comes out is a coughing or wheezing sound. There is no way he’s going to be able to talk without something to drink. He feels his pocket, and the bottle with the wiper fluid is still there. He shakily pulls the bottle out, almost losing his balance and falling on his back in the process. This isn’t good. He doesn’t have much time left, by his reckoning, before he passes out.
Filed under: The Greatest Joke Ever Told
He puts the bottle back in his pocket, and starts to stumble down the dune. After a few steps, he realizes that he’s in trouble – he’s not going to be able to keep his balance. After a couple of more sliding, tottering steps, he falls and starts to roll down the dune. The sand it so hot when his body hits it that for a minute he thinks he’s caught fire on the way down – like a movie car wreck flashing into flames as it goes over the cliff, before it ever even hits the ground. He closes his eyes and mouth, covers his face with his hands, and waits to stop rolling.He stops, at the bottom of the dune. After a minute or two, he finds enough energy to try to sit up and get the sand out of his face and clothes. When he clears his eyes enough, he looks around to make sure that the dark spot in the sand it still there and he hadn’t just imagined it.
So, seeing the large, flat, dark spot on the sand is still there, he begins to crawl towards it. He’d get up and walk towards it, but he doesn’t seem to have the energy to get up and walk right now. He must be in the final stages of dehydration he figures, as he crawls. If this place in the sand doesn’t have water, he’ll likely never make it anywhere else. This is his last chance.
He gets closer and closer, but still can’t see what’s in the middle of the dark area. His eyes won’t quite focus any more for some reason. And lifting his head up to look takes so much effort that he gives up trying. He just keeps crawling.
Finally, he reaches the area he’d seen from the dune. It takes him a minute of crawling on it before he realizes that he’s no longer on sand – he’s now crawling on some kind of dark stone. Stone with some kind of marking on it – a pattern cut into the stone. He’s too tired to stand up and try to see what the pattern is – so he just keeps crawling. He crawls towards the center, where his blurry eyes still see something in the middle of the dark stone area.
His mind, detached in a strange way, notes that either his hands and knees are so burnt by the sand that they no longer feel pain, or that this dark stone, in the middle of a burning desert with a pounding, punishing sun overhead, doesn’t seem to be hot. It almost feels cool. He considers lying down on the nice cool surface.
Cool, dark stone. Not a good sign. He must be hallucinating this. He’s probably in the middle of a patch of sand, already lying face down and dying, and just imagining this whole thing. A desert mirage. Soon the beautiful women carrying pitchers of water will come up and start giving him a drink. Then he’ll know he’s gone.
He decides against laying down on the cool stone. If he’s going to die here in the middle of this hallucination, he at least wants to see what’s in the center before he goes. He keeps crawling.
It’s the third time that he hears the voice before he realizes what he’s hearing. He would swear that someone just said, “Greetings, traveler. You do not look well. Do you hear me?”
He stops crawling. He tries to look up from where he is on his hands and knees, but it’s too much effort to lift his head. So he tries something different – he leans back and tries to sit up on the stone. After a few seconds, he catches his balance, avoids falling on his face, sits up, and tries to focus his eyes. Blurry. He rubs his eyes with the back of his hands and tries again. Better this time.
Yep. He can see. He’s sitting in the middle of a large, flat, dark expanse of stone. Directly next to him, about three feet away, is a white post or pole about two inches in diameter and sticking up about four or five feet out of the stone, at an angle.
And wrapped around this white rod, tail with rattle on it hovering and seeming to be ready to start rattling, is what must be a fifteen foot long desert diamondback rattlesnake, looking directly at him.
He stares at the snake in shock. He doesn’t have the energy to get up and run away. He doesn’t even have the energy to crawl away. This is it, his final resting place. No matter what happens, he’s not going to be able to move from this spot.
Well, at least dying of a bite from this monster should be quicker than dying of thirst. He’ll face his end like a man. He struggles to sit up a little straighter. The snake keeps watching him. He lifts one hand and waves it in the snake’s direction, feebly. The snake watches the hand for a moment, then goes back to watching the man, looking into his eyes.
To be continued
