this doesn’t fit my blog at all but i had to post it here because this story is legit the wildest thing i’ve seen this month and everyone needs to see it. unmute this I PROMISE YOU WON’T REGRET IT
Well out of the blue I just remembered today the time I accidentally joined the cast of a production of The Princess Bride….in the middle of the production.
And you’re gonna just leave us there
I mean, if you guys wanna hear the story, it is a pretty fun one
Okay, so this is what happened,
Some years ago (6? 7 years ago, I think?) there was a pirate exhibit at the state museum. We had actual artifacts from the Queen Anne’s Revenge, creepy wax dummies, historical costumes etc, it was awesome.
I was really into Pirates of the Caribbean at the time, because I played the mmorpg with some high school friends of mine (and some of their parents sometimes, who also got addicted to it), so of course when they announced “Pirate Night at the Museum”, in which visitors were encouraged to dress up, I was over the moon. So I’m there with my friends, my parents, and my sisters, running around the exhibits after the museum is technically closed.
They replaced the creepy wax dummies with people in costume at this point, and it was pretty epic.
The highlight of the night would be a showing of The Princess Bride. The movie would play on the big screen while actors would be on a stage below, acting the whole thing out word for word and shot for shot as it happened. Any audience members who knew lines were encouraged to shout them out as they heard them.
Here’s the thing. My parents love that movie. Like you don’t understand they were quoting it to us in its entirety when we were still in highchairs. I could reenact the battle of wits scene before I ever actually watched it. So my family sits in the front row, behind the railing, quoting everything right along with the actors and film.
And then comes the part in the Pit of Despair with the Albino. And the cast didn’t have anyone on the stage with Wesley. I don’t know if the Albino couldn’t make it that night, or if they’d never cast him, but it was really weird to see Wesley just lying on the stage awkwardly while the Albino is supposed to be treating his injuries.
I started twitching. My mom and sister look at me and they’re like “do it.” And one of the ushers is like “you know the part? do it”
So I launch over the railing, run up onto the stage, and take over from there, doing my best impression of the character. Being that I was a 5′2″ blonde girl in a corset and puffy sleeves, Wesley had some trouble keeping a straight face.
Then they got to the scene with Humperdink telling the guard to clear out the Thieves’ Forest, and…they didn’t have the guard either. So my twin sister up in the audience is like “hang on, I got this” and then she launches over the railing to make sure Humperdink isn’t just sitting awkwardly talking to thin air.
This meant that yes, I got bopped on the noggin by Fezzik, and yes, my sister got to do the “Give us the key.” “What key?” “Fezzik, tear his arms off.” “Oh, you mean this key!”
They made up stay on stage and take a bow with the cast when it was over, it was hilarious. Then the next year, since they still had the exhibit, the museum called my sister and was like, “So….that was super fun last year. Do you and your sister want to be audience plants and do it again this year?”
The answer, naturally, was heck yes. Since we had new volunteers playing Count Rugen and Inigo this time, this also led to my sister actually choreographing their fight scene herself. Which was awesome.
My favorite part is that this is entirely in tone for Princess Bride.
i Still cant believe sneaking out is an Actual thing that teenagers Do
this is just so unrealistic to me like what the fuck how do yall do it??? i have Arguments and Questions
1. like what am i supposed to do if i live in a building??? do i just wait for the elevator?? do i take the stairs?? mind me there could be a Lot of stairs 2. how THE FUCK do yall manage to do all this shit without waking anyone up?? this is So Fake!! if i so much as sneeze into my pillow my mom will come into my room and see if my ass is okay and then complain that i woke her up 3. HOW THE FUCK DONT YOUR PARENTS REALIZE YALL ARE GONE?? AND HOW DO YOU MANAGE TO COME BACK?? WHAT THE FUCK!! 4. if my mom found out that id been going places in the middle of the night u bet your ass id be dead the next day 5. i dont believe in this concept At All
i mean i guess it’s possible the way american houses are built but it’s still a bit far fetched imo but yea growing up in Puerto Rico in an urbanizacion it was like lmao you can’t sneak out in a house like that. first of all our windows are miami style of whatever, second of all there’s only 1 functioning door (technically our house had 2 but 1 of them had potted plants on both sides so it was never used but in any case both were on the same side of the house), and the house is so small like you would hear someone opening and closing it. plus you just know at least 1 person on your street would be up and would spill that piping hot tea to your parents the next day.
so my sister snuck out of the house one night because we live in an old house in the country that’s always creaking and “settling” which, good news: is perfect for sneaking out because there’s always weird noises anyway; bad news: we’re in the middle of the woods and there’s always creepy fucking noises
but hey, what are white girls gonna do except sneak out at night and through the woods to go have sex with their boyfriends?
what could go wrong??
and I do literally mean through the woods. our driveway is a quarter of a mile long through actual wooded area, and she wasn’t smart enough to grab a flashlight. but she could sort of see the headlights of her boyfriend’s car at the very end so it wasn’t so bad going down to be picked up
except when she got dropped off, she had to make the trip back up the driveway, through the dark scary woods, with no light whatsoever, at like 3 am or some other Gonna Get White Girl Murdered time
and she was high as fuuuuuuuuuuck
so she’s creeping her way back up the driveway, trying to move slow or else she’ll fall off the ground and get lost in the sky forever. really fucking high
then she steps on a frog
because we also have a 3 acre “pond” like our property isn’t fucking creepy enough already and my first-time-to-ever-be-high sister stepped on a FROG and apparently it both squished and belched, and keep in mind that with no light whatsoever she doesn’t know what the fuck just happened AT ALL
I wake up to a series of frantic text messages
hlp he lp HEL
dont’ tell momd and dad
i jsut murdered somtheing
also, just for context, this is also the sister that pierced her own ears and gave herself a stick’n’poke tattoo with a lighter and my mom’s sewing needle because she “got restless” and picked a fight with a girl two grades above, half a foot taller, and probably a hundred pounds heavier AND WON
(it doesn’t matter if you’re smol if you get ‘em on the ground and get on top)
anyway
so waking up to an “I just murdered something” text from her was … actually kind of inevitable. siblings are either ride or die or no officer I’ve never seen that person before, and that night, I decided I was ride or die
so then I take MY dumb white girl ass out into the woods in the middle of the night, but at least I’m smart enough to take a flashlight. sister had already texted me she was “onthe driveways” but again, that’s a quarter mile journey
finally I arrive at the scene of the crime
sister: sitting in the gravel, crying, makeup a Mess
frog: laying still beside her, looking like a slightly smaller Jabba the Hut
she points at the frog and sobs that it’s a heart. obviously a frog. a fucking BIG ASS frog, but still. I’m relieved, but also super pissed, because I drug myself out of bed, snuck out too, and dangled my sumptuous human body in front of all the Forest Monsters on my way down here and there isn’t even a fucking body
just a frog, which I pick up to show her is not a heart, and turns out to only be stunned! not dead! still very much alive and full of pee!!
so it pisses all over me and slimes out of my hand, escaping into the night
also, I totally held my sister’s hand with my Piss Hand as I led her back home because she deserved it
you should have offered them four 12×12 squares and a bottle of glue
As hilarious as that is…
… we’re out of glue.
Completely out of glue. The glue slime trend that has swept the middle schools in our area has maxed out all outlets of glue from December 18th to today’s date- February 6th. We keep getting shipments of glue, but they only come in 20-bottle boxes and they are completely gone by the time the weekend is out. Children are buying them by the armful.
And I would find this cute and honestly amazing that these kiddos are getting their first taste of entrepreneurship (mine was in high school, where I made novelty school ID’s) if it weren’t for the involvement of the parents.
Because the kids are like ‘aw, you don’t have any? Ok. We’ll try somewhere else- thank you! Where’s your glitter?’
The parents… oh gods the parents.
Calling us up at 9am- “What do you MEAN you don’t have any glue!? ITS A BASIC CRAFT ITEM! YOU HAVE TO HAVE GLUE!”
“You’re telling me that you DON’T CARRY GLUE?”
“I’m calling your corporate office to tell them just how wholly unprepared you all are because this is the fourth store I’ve called and NONE of you have any glue.”
“Can I pre-order? What do you MEAN I have to order from the website?”
“When will you be getting more? You don’t KNOW! HOW CAN YOU NOT KNOW!? Two weeks at the EARLIEST!?”
“Can you call me when you get some? YOU CAN’T EVEN CALL ME WHEN YOU GET IT IN?”
I once caught one of our framers taking a call like these and I saw her re-inact Winona Ryder’s entire range of facial expressions a la SAG awards, eventually ending in her left eye going slightly wall when the angry parent finally hung up.
And there are some that call every single day, asking the same questions and hoping that they’ll get a different answer. But no. I’m sorry. The Glue Fairy didn’t make a surprise visit last night. We did not plant the glue seeds in time for the harvest and now there is a glue famine. The small child that we sent to fetch more glue has been captured by witches- who are now intent on raising her as their own and we wish them luck.
One day, my brother will have children and they will ask me about the Glue Famine of 2017 and I will recall a very specific instance wherein I could feel flecks of spittle coming through the end of the phone.
One day I shall die and a team of necromancers will raise me from my crumbling sarcophagus and the very first words from my revived, husk of a maw will be ‘WE ARE STILL OUT OF GLUE, CRETINOUS FILTH!’
And this is how I knew that 2017 was going to be a bad year. Retail-mancy: I divine the fall of our nation by the fact that we are perpetually out of basic adhesives. And its not the children that buy them that make it a problem, but the parents who imagine that we somehow have control over the entire damn glue industry.
Why you want to yell at me for telling you the truth is beyond me when you could be putting all that energy towards not sucking. GIT GUD.
I just learned today that tomorrow our store will be hopping on the glue slime trend and making an end cap to make easy access to our stock of glues, glitters, and I suppose we might be adding borax to our inventory.
Need I remind you that this is what our glue stock has looked like for the past two months:
We just got some in two days ago and its already gone.
So you have to imagine the position we’re in here- where we’re advertising glue that does not exist for more than three days every two to four weeks because of these tots are hell-bent on selling slime to their sandbox buddies.
We’re not selling glue. We’re selling the concept of glue. We are selling the desire for glue. We are inspiring others to covet the glue we do not have. The glue is unknowable. It is invisible, intangible, ineffable. One day the glue uprising shall be upon us, and none shall speak its name.
So like just in case you didn’t get the message-
We are out of glue.
Glue we are out of.
Out of glue we are.
We glue of are out.
Because the dozen or so rows where we used to stock our glue is now a gaping cavity of woe, our heathen customers have decided that this is the perfect space to lazily put things that they just suddenly decide they don’t want anymore. And for some ridiculous reason, the most popular thing to leave where an associate can find it is fake flowers.
Not even the first time this has happened, people. People are attempting to build a memorial to the glue that was, and will never be again. The time of glue has passed, we shall remember it fondly. Ashes to ashes, goop to goop.
Rest in Particulate, Glue Aisle.
Its about to get…
…significantly worse.
I’ve had several people contact me about an email that went out from our company, advertising Glue Slime and giving out a recipe (instead of borax, using baking soda and contact lens solution… I weep for our local optometrists). Luckily, we were sent a large ration of glue on Thursday in preparation for the endcap that we just put up.
And for a moment, the balance was restored. We could rebuild! There was enough glue to fill the dozen or so places in its home and have a good amount for the display. Sadly, we were only given a few bottles of clear glue- which is the one that people really want because…. clear slime. But things were looking better!
But little did we know…
… President’s Day was coming.
And the children… needed something to do…
Here is a photo of the display on Saturday morning.
And here it is on Monday morning:
They have ravaged our glue surplus to 1/10th. The glue that filled its home space is completely gone. I am honestly surprised that the meager 40 bottles we have left are still there, and by the time I finish writing this- they may not be.
Why would you do this to us, Mr President?
So while we have those 40 bottles, we can at least fend off the screaming parents, but I anticipate that a considerable amount of screaming will have already started by the time I start my shift this afternoon.
I shall scream as well.
I scream, they scream- we all scream into the yawning void of the glue section in hopes that the Elmer, God of Cheap Adhesives, will hear our cries and grant us the glue we so desperately yearn for. We shall be united in our despair.
We have reached a place in our glue stock where we are consistently keeping up with demand, more or less. We get it in on Wednesday, they all come in on the weekend and we’re out by Monday- giving people one day to bitch and moan because what would these people do if they weren’t allowed to scream at us for a whole thirty seconds?
Well, I came in to work on Wednesday and I found this at our customer service desk:
Look out world- we have the gallons!
People asked for the gallons of glue, they got the gallons of glue.
There were 20 of them on that endcap. I saw a woman buy three of them at once (and of course she wanted to use a coupon on each and every one of them because ‘gosh- who knew that glue would be so expensive!’ Like… lady- you’re getting this at 20 cents an ounce if you get it without a coupon. It’s not expensive, you’re just a cheapskate.)
By the end of Wednesday, they were all gone. We sold 20 gallons of glue in four hours. People were laying down $60 for glue. I could feel my Great Depression-raised grandpa shaking his head from…. I dunno, probably Purgatory.
Now the entire area knows that we have the glue gallons- the word has spread. But we don’t have them in stock and guess what emotions they have over it! If you guessed ‘anger’ then you’re right! So they do what they’ve always done when they need a literal gallon of glue and there are no gallons of glue to be had: they buy a ton of individual bottles.
But now knowing that there is an easier way to do this that is yet inaccessible to them fills them with ennui, and as they walk through the store their excitement over their hoard wanes and they put some of it back.
Now, any person of the retail-worker persuasion will tell you that a customer never puts an item back where they’re supposed to. That would be, frankly, preposterous. So instead, as they lose their grip on their desire for glue, they leave a single bottle where it is most convenient to them- a symbol of their defeat.
This is a fancy way of saying that I found a bottle of glue in every aisle one night because someone got pissy about not being able to buy it by the gallon and forgot to get a basket.
THE EPIC SAGA CONTINUES
how the fuck did we get from 12×12 squares of paper the the glue famine
So this is a Chistmas story my mom told me while I was home recently and i thought y’all might enjoy.
So, one Christmas back in the 60′s, my great-grandmother was reminiscing about Christmas in England, and how they used to have pheasant for Christmas, but Ohio sucks and they’d never get to do something like that.
Well Shit! goes my grandfather, them woods are full of pheasants, I’ll get you one. So grandpa and a dubiously related man named “uncle popeye” went out with shotguns to get great-grandma a pheasant for Christmas dinner.
They’re gone for a LONG time. according to mom, they were basically expecting grandpa and Popeye to be gone for a few hours and come back with a store-bought chicken and apologies.
Instead, they come back eight hours later, covered in mud and freezing cold from the Cleveland winter, but Surprise! they have a Pheasant. Great-grandma gives them a lecture about staying out so long and worrying her, but agrees to dress the bird so they can all have a traditional English Roast Pheasant. Grandpa and Popeye retire to the living room to drink beer and talk about what great woodsmen they are when Great-grandma screams from the kitchen.
“TOM!!” She bellows and literally every male in the house jumps because literally every man has been named “Tom” for three generations at that point. “THERE’S NO BULLET HOLE IN THIS BIRD.”
They both look massively sheepish and eventually admit that they hadn’t had much luck finding pheasants in the woods and were about to go to the store to get her a chicken when they… backed over the pheasant.
“Then what were you idiots doing in the woods for eight hours?”
“We weren’t out there for THAT long-” Popeye starts before grandpa decks him. Grandma and Great-grandma have to menace them with wooden spoons to get the truth out, but eventually they take thier oversize hiking boots off to reveal bandages.
Turns out they had only been in the woods for Two hours looking for pheasants before LITERALLY tripping over one, and they both reflexively aim at the ground and… Shoot each other in the foot. They hadn’t backed over the Pheasant in the woods. They’d backed over it in the Hospital parking lot.
And that’s the story of how my great-grandmother made a Roast Pheasant and the ladies of the house got to eat the whole thing while Grandpa and Popey had to watch.
“dubiously related man named uncle popeye” wasn’t even close to the wildest part oh my god! This is such a good story!!!!
So you prompted me to call my mother and ask how Popeye was related to them, and apparently he’s my great-grat-grandmother’s first-husband’s cousin’s son.
The First Husband is the whole reason my mother’s family came to america in the first place apparently. in 1902, he decided he didn’t want to be father to 9 girls anymore, so he went out for a pint one night and fucked off to Chicago without actually divorcing GGG. For a few years she thought he’d been killed and dumped in the Thames (these things happened in Liverpool in the 1900′s) and shortly re-married, and Second Husband fathered two more daughters with her, including my Great-Grandmother.
In 1908, First Husband wrote from Chicago for money. This was a problem because despite fucking off to another continent, they were still married, and GGG was committing bigamy. Despite pleading her case before the courts that Really, Y’all gave me his death certificate when he didn’t turn up after a month, they fined her an outrageous amount of money and only commuted her prison sentence because “her brood would place undue stain on the orphanage”.
Yes, really.
Second Husband, who was a halfway decent man that only beat her sometimes, suddenly dies of knife wound in a Pub fight, and GGG is left up shit creek with 10 girls and nobody willing to hire a bigamist maid. So GGG attempts to woo First Husband back to England. She goes so far as to pay a photographer to take Nudes of her to remind him what he left.
That was an exciting Christmas, going through an old album and finding THOSE.
Despite GGG’s heartfelt efforts and godlike booty, First Husband remained in the US, enjoying his new life of running credit scams and bootlegging.
After another 4 years of this nonsense, GGG gets the money to ferry herself and her brood across the atlantic to America, where they weren’t so uptight about the sex lives of domestic workers and she could probably get a job. The ALMOST come on the Titanic- we found the tickets next to the nudes- but at the last moment, Great-Aunt Liz catches the Measles, forcing everyone into quarantine and saving them from an icy death. They instead come on the next boat, and have to pick up the survivors of the Lusitania. Everyone gets lice and has to be shaved at Ellis Island.
Once in america, GGG finds out First Husband has died, For Realsies, please come identify his corpse and also he owes the state of Illinois like $500 in court fees so-
To which GGG goes “LOL, NO.” and moves to Cleveland with her Youngest daughter (my great-grandmother) and her new Russian husband, and takes over as manager of the local grocery store and leads a life of relative american-lower-middle-class comfort until her death in 1928 at age of 58.
…So you understand our confusion that GG knew of Popeye’s existence at all.
This is the quality content I am on tumblr for! 😂👍🏻 Thank you for sharing this and bless you and your family! 💕
I just wanna know why GGG’s nude photos were just tossed in a family album along with all the other special pictures. Did they just stumble across them between a great-aunt’s baptism pic and another’s wedding photo?
They were in a plain brown envelope tucked in with the 1963 Christmas photos.
Right between the pictures of Grandma’s Dog Spooky wearing like seven christmas decorations (So named because she was totally black except for a white mark on her chest and a propensity for 4AM garbage disposal noises) and of Grandpa getting smashed on Great-Aunt Liz’s Rumballs, to be precise.
This person needs to write a book about their family stories. It would sell like wild.
I want to hear more every time this post comes around XD
Art. Pure art is what this is.
Ok, because several people in the tags have pointed out that the Thames is nowhere near Liverpool:
I called mom, again, to ask why the hell i would write that, because I distinctly recall the phrase “GGG was certain he’d been thrown in the Thames” when Grandma repeated the tale for me, but I am also ADHD as fuck and my brain might have invented that sentence.
Turns out, the truth is another Hot Mess.
The WHOLE line is “GGG was certain he had been thrown in the Thames like his brother, Who ran afoul of several criminal organizations while running cons in London and we’re not sure WHO actually did him in but it was a big affair to travel to London when they fished his body out with the eels.”
So “Thrown in the Thames” was GGG’s colloquialism for “was murdered due to gambling debts”
until the fourth grade, i lived with my dad, brother and sister in gentle suburban massachusetts where i could ride my bike to school. my mom, however, rode and trained horses for a living, so she and my stepdad lived on a big, beautiful farm in virginia. it was my favorite place in the world, but life on a farm is very different from life, like, anywhere else.
for one thing, i sometimes had to shovel another animal’s poop from one location to a different, slightly farther location. for another, i got to experience the miracle of life waaaaaay way way too early.
it gets a lot less magical and a lot more visceral when you’re a 10-year-old sitting in a horse stall watching your stepdad and the vet literally PULL A HORSE out of ANOTHER HORSE.
get up close and personal with placenta just one time and i promise you will never look at babies of any species the same ever again.
and of course, the first thing any farm kid will tell you is that living on a farm teaches you pretty immediately that Death Comes For Everybody, But It Comes For Your Animals First. i know that’s a terrible thing to just put out there in the universe, but it’s true.
mother nature is like if that girl from your middle school who was OBSESSED with horses–you know that girl, we all know that girl–wasn’t ever allowed to get a pony so she grew up to be a hoarder whose kleptomania was focused on all the neighborhood pets.
“all your pets are now my pets,” says mother nature, and we all let her get away with it, because she’s terrifying and will definitely murder you without hesitation.
like all life lessons, that’s a hard one to learn, and i had to learn it like five times before it stuck. anyway, the first time i encountered the whole concept of like, mortality, it was the summer before fourth grade. things around me had died before, but i’d been gently sheltered from it by both the tiny size of my undeveloped brain and the adults in my life.
once, my mother told me that two of our jack russells were being sent to live on a farm where they could herd sheep. i believed her.
i was thirteen.
thirteen is waaaaaay way way too old to believe that your dogs are really being sent to live on a farm.
honestly, i think the fact that i was so old is what convinced me? i was like, “i’m thirteen, there’s no way she would lie to me about death at thirteen. i’m basically an adult! so the dogs must really be going to live on a farm! how neat for them. tra-la-la.”
i swallowed this lie so completely that it wasn’t until i was literally in my twenties that i mentioned it offhandedly and my mom was like, “what? you…uh, no, honey, we for sure put those dogs down. those dogs have been dead for at least a decade.”
but at the tender age of either-8-or-9, i learned about death first hand, because i witnessed a murder.
haha, what if that was the end of the story? what if i just dropped, “i witnessed a murder,” and then left you all hanging and never brought it up again?
i’m not going to do that.
but you have to admit, it would be funny.
it was a sunny day in virginia, which i know because i remember very clearly wearing a very stylish outfit of neon pink soffee shorts and my billabong shirt with the orange butterfly on it.
it was late in what had been an action-packed summer: my mom finally married my stepdad, i decided to move to virginia, and nine days released “absolutely (story of a girl),” the best song that i had ever heard up to that point in my life. i’m not sure what exactly i was getting up to, but as a youth my usual MO in the summer was to wander around until i was struck by an idea for something. on this particular day, i was struck by the idea of going to see our newest barnhand, chipmunk.
her birth certificate obviously didn’t say chipmunk, but i don’t actually remember what chipmunk’s real name was.
on chipmunk’s first day of work her face was swollen from having recently gotten her wisdom teeth removed, and in my family you have to be prepared to live with the consequences of that kind of thing forever.
i have no idea how old chipmunk was, because when you’re younger than ten, everyone older than ten seems like they’re at least forty-five. but i think she was probably in college??
anyway, chipmunk wasn’t in any of the usual places, in the barn or in any of the paddocks, so i wandered over to the indoor ring. our farm had two riding rings, an outdoor one for the summer and an indoor one for the winter and rainy days. the indoor ring was made entirely out of this kind of tinny material that could get really loud when it was raining.
you could hear everything in that ring. the building had these high rafters on it that pigeons liked to perch on, especially when it started getting colder. and because of the ring’s terrible sound situation, horses would freak out every time one of those birds so much as ruffled its feathers. and the thing about horses is that they are really beautiful, soulful, majestic animals but they are also on the edge of a nervous breakdown, like, 100% of the time.
then again, aren’t we all?
let ye who has not spent a night crying for no reason into a pint of ben & jerry’s half-baked frozen yogurt cast the first stone.
a horse’s entire self-defense mechanism is “RUN AWAAAAAAAAAY” which, look, i get. all of my self-defense mechanisms are also “RUN AWAAAAAAAAAY” except usually that means turning down dates with boys i like and not, for example, getting scared by a fly and running into a tree and shattering my entire leg.
that really happened.
not to me; to a horse. just to be clear.
in an attempt to keep startled horses from accidentally killing themselves or their riders, my parents had to be pretty vigilant about what was going on both in the ring and outside it while people were riding. no fast cars, no loud noises, and absolutely no shenanigans.
which meant: the pigeons had to go.
i’m going to pause here for a second.
remember all that hogwarts, a history about death’s inevitability and that joke about murder?
i’ve given you fair warning. don’t @ me, folks.
now, the thing is, i was a gentle kid. i mean–terrible, like truly unbearable, but very gentle, ultimately. in my heart. i used to trigger the mousetraps in my mom’s house to save the mice.
well, it was one mouse, and his name was chubbychubbs, and i loved him even though we only saw each other once.
i think my mom thought we were dealing with like, pinky and the brain because chubbychubbs managed to evade her traps for so many years.
SORRY MOM!!!! IT WAS ME THE WHOLE TIME!!!
so you can imagine how i reacted when i walked into the ring just as chipmunk hit a pigeon with a pellet gun. you can imagine how a small round drama queen with a love of animals might respond to seeing a little gray pellet fall out of the rafters and land on the ground. you can imagine how someone with an underdeveloped understanding of how diseases are carried and transmitted might scream, “YOU’RE A MURDERER!” at the top of her voice, sprint to where the little gray bird is laying, stunned and bleeding, and scoop it up in her hands without bothering with protective gloves.
“OH GOD PLEASE PUT THE BIRD DOWN,” chipmunk yelled. “OH GOD, THEY’RE SO DISEASE-RIDDLED, PLEASE PUT IT DOWN!!!”
“JUDAS!!!” i would have shouted as i sprinted away, if i had known what a judas was. instead, i pulled the bird to my chest, blood getting everywhere as it understandably began to panic and flap its wings to get away from me. i don’t know if you’ve ever been punched in the face by a bird, but it hurts more than you’d expect.
“CALM DOWN I’M TRYING TO SAVE YOU,” i shouted at the bird, which did not calm down because it did not speak english.
“COME BACK” cried chipmunk, chasing after me.
picture it:
a furious, panicked pigeon, trying to get away, flapping its wings and repeatedly face-slapping –>
a tiny child, in a billabong t-shirt with an orange butterfly that is now covered in blood, screaming at the top of her lungs, pursued by –>
a frantic twenty-something, cheeks still slightly swollen, waving a pellet gun in the air like that pigeon-child duo swindled her out of a vast fortune and she wants revenge
i broke for the door, but the poor pigeon, at this point very slippery and very desperate, wriggled free and dove for safety under the building’s bathroom unit. the unit was on a platform a couple feet above the ground for reasons i have never known or cared to look into.
if you know, don’t tell me.
do not.
i do not want to know.
in what i felt at the time was a very heroic move, i followed suit, scrambling under the toilets with my hands outstretched, explaining to the pigeon in high-pitched screams that i was saving its life!!!
“molly,” chipmunk begged, “please come out from under the toilets. you are going to get a disease and you are going to die.”
“i don’t take orders from murderers,” i hissed, making a point not to think about any of the things i was crawling in. “come on, pigeon. we can run away together.”
“coooooooooooo,” said the pigeon, which i assume is bird for, “get the fuck away from me.”
chipmunk gave up on reasoning with me and reached under the toilets to drag me out by my ankles as i screamed like the scene in a horror flick where the best friend of the final girl gets dragged into a pit. the pigeon watched me go unblinkingly.
“oh, god,” chipmunk said, looking at the swamp creature that had emerged from beneath the toilet: pants ripped, hands and shirt covered in pigeon blood and a mysterious dark substance neither one of us wanted to investigate too closely. i looked like how a cartoonist would anthropomorphize the black plague in a new yorker cartoon.
poor chipmunk dragged me to the house, freaking out the entire way about what she was going to tell my mom, her employer, the one who was paying her to get rid of the pigeons. “well, i was doing what you asked, and then your daughter came in and high key ruined everything by bathing in pigeon blood and probably some human waste”?
by the time we got there, she’d worked herself into such a state that she simply shoved me through the front door, shouted, “IT’S NOT HER BLOOD,” and ran back to the barn.
my mom looked at me from where she was standing at the sink.
“o……kay,” she said, after a second. “you know what, let’s just. let’s hose you off outside.”
honestly the tags on this post are works of art all their own
When I was a wee thing, my parents moved out the the Highly dubious condo in East Palo Alto and into a relatively nice suburban neighborhood, into a house immediately across the street from my new elementary school. Immediate, as in, less than 40 feet from the traffic circle. Mom would wave at me from the driveway sometimes while I was in class. This should have made getting me to and from school easy, but there was an issue:
I still had to cross the street, and because I was living in the over-caffeinated heart of silicon valley at the time, that meant dodging the local commuters barreling through the school zone at upwards of 40 miles per hour with no regard for the stop signs.
The flashing “School Zone” signs were ignored. The city refused to put in speed bumps or devote extra patrol cars. One of my classmates grandmother’s volunteered as crossing guard, and some jackass in a BMW ran over her foot on the first day.
Now, mom declared as we drove Mrs. Manchez to the hospital her foot in a beer cooler full of ice, Would be a good time to take the law into my own hands.
So after dropping Mrs. Manchez off at the hospital, we drove to the thrift store, where my mom found a navy blazer, aviator sunglasses, a pilot’s cap and an old, clunky-looking hair dryer.
The next morning, mom went out to the sidewalk in her new “uniform”, with the hair dryer and a legal pad so she could write down the grocery list. Every time a car would come roaring down the road, Mom would look up, point the hairdryer at them, and, and write something down.
I remember listening to brakes squeal all day the first time she tried it, Mercedes and BMWs screeching to a crawl as they passed the school, glaring at her. By that afternoon, cars were creeping along at an over-cautious 10mph, and I was able to get home without taking my life into my hands.
After that, Mom went out “in uniform” every couple of days, because intermittent re-enforcement is what REALLY gets a change in behavior going, and point the hair dryer at anyone speeding through the school zone, usually while writing down grocery lists or short stories, or drawing unflattering caricatures of the other PTA moms.
Eventually, however, one of the cars that came through was a patrol car, and he slowly pulled to a halt in front of mom, glaring at her though his own reflective glasses.
She smiled an waved the hair dryer. “Good afternoon!”
“…What’re you doing?” he groaned, 3 in the afternoon entirely too early for this shit.
“Writin’ a grocery list.” She beamed, and when that failed to satisfy him, she explained about the speeding problem and that if they couldn’t send a partol car out here to ticket people regularly, she figured that a hair dryer would be the next best thing. Working like a charm so far. They didn’t even notice the little airplanes on the Pilot’s hat.
The officer stared at her for a moment longer before his face broke out into a slow grin. “Y’know, when we’re out of a car, we usually wear visibility vests. So more people see you and your… Phaser.”
And that’s the story of how Mom and Officer Brown met and started the neighborhood watch program.
My bros I have been doing a lot of
reading about Wacky WWII Hijinks lately and I want to tell you a
story because I love it okay
once upon a time there was a dude in
Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol
hated him some goddamn fascists.
See Spain had recently ended its civil
war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in
Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy
buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty
bullshit
so soon after war breaks out Pujol
travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on
the Nazis for you”
“who the fuck are you?” say the
British, and kick him out
but Pujol is not deterred! He still
wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he
says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”
“yeah
okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”
and
just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German
intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and
such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his
way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later
writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England
Pujol
had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon
public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books
and set about just wholesale making shit up
this
is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely
did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were
basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen,
because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of
wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so
that’s probably the same right?
Here
is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves
this. “wow this dude is a
great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been
the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new
awesome spy that the British start to get worried
you
see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly
unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by
reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio
transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and
reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England.
The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by
parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept
the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed
in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies
so
there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a
prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as
double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking
up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great
spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail
“oh
shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they
have to and from this mysterious super spy.
“hey
wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending.
“someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”
At
this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the
British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally
an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t
interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started
asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we
know that guy”
so in
1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially
becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case
officer so he can start making up even better bullshit
and he
does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d
recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to
disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+
sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK
none of these people actually exist
Pujol
just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of
their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of
MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but
ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive
in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy
network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents
Pujol,
now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a
huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge
intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of
attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation
Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII
Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended
crazily
enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent.
After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which
require personal authorization from Hitler), and a
Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)
unable
to resist being totally fucking ridiculous,
Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this
time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own
death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”
and
that’s exactly what he did. Juan Garcia Pujol died in 1988, at the
age of 76
Okay I’m just editing my reblog to add this picture of Juan Pujol Garcia because I feel that it adds so much to the story to picture him doing ALL THE ABOVE with this expression:
What a legend.
Thank you Jess for this extremely important addendum.
D&D players will always come up with the most bizarre, workable solutions to problems when you least expect it.
In one game I ran, the party needed to find a magical artifact and didn’t have any idea where it was at all. So they decided to use Commune to figure it out – but Commune as a spell only lets you ask yes or no questions, and get an answer out of it. So they took a map of the continent, drew a line down half of it, and asked “Is the artifact on this half of the map?”. They then continued, narrowing the artifact’s location down further and further, until they were able to pinpoint the exact building in question.
This reminds me of the last campaign I was in, when my husband played a Telepathic Psion. When we were coming up with our inventories at the beginning of the game, everyone else is putting down normal shit like horses, packs, travel provisions, money.
My husband asked for a bear trap.
The DM (who happened to be coolkidmitch) asked him what the hell he could possibly need a bear trap for, to which my husband only said, “You’ll see.” After about twenty minutes of figuring out what this bear trap would weigh, the skill my husband would have to roll in order to use it, and a bunch of other minutiae, my husband had a bear trap in his inventory.
Now, all of us kind of forgot about the bear trap while we were adventuring along on our escort quest (during which my husband’s Psion regularly tried to convince one of our employers that there was a golden acorn/tree of life/fountain of youth/whatever the fuck in the forest so she would wander off and get herself eaten by bears – she was really rude) until we run into a situation where we’ve been surprised by the locals and nobody can draw a weapon without causing a real problem.
My husband pulls the bear trap out of his saddlebag, holds it out to the nearest goon, and says the goon needs to roll a will check. When asked why the goon needs to roll a will check, my husband calmly replies, “He’s being offered the fanciest hat he’s ever seen in his life, and he really wants to put it on.”
Moment of silence around the gaming table as all of us realize that my husband is trying to end the encounter by convincing a goon to put a bear trap on his head like a hat.
The goon failed the will check.
I gotta share The Grand Show story now.
So my D&D campaign is comprised of four newbies, one guy with a lot of tabletop experience, and me, the newbie DM. The crew is trying to break into a walled manor, in part to find out if the Lord inside had anything to do with some culty plot shenanigans (P.S: he was dead the whole time, so no one would have detected them from inside the wall regardless).
I am very explicit to them about the fact that they are trying to break into the Lord’s manor, in the middle of the day, across from the main thoroughfare of the town, with no cover or disguise of any kind, and they are all level 2 – so no teleportation, invisibility, illusions – nothing. They do not heed my warnings, and our gnome paladin and halfling rogue toss a grappling hook over the wall and start to climb it. Meanwhile the other three in the party – a totally inconspicuous group consisting of a dragonborn with a cat, a tiefling in a chainmail bikini, a half-vampire warlock with a mask and a swordcane, and an NPC satyr who was along for the ride – are just hanging out below the wall watching.
After a minute I say, “behind you, you notice that a crowd of about ten or twelve peasants have gathered and are whispering in worried voices. You notice two guards approaching from down the road.”
Halfling rogue – one of the more-or-less newbies of the crew – whips around and immediately shouts “WELCOME TO THE GRAND SHOW!”, and scores an excellent deception roll. Dragonborn starts making his cat do tricks and rolls a sick animal handling check. Tiefling cleric begins pole-dancing on her spear and also rolls high. The warlock starts doing special effects with Minor Illusion and rolls ok. They nudge the satyr into playing music for them, who crits his performance check and charms half the audience as a result. The paladin, from the top of the wall, starts juggling his hammers and midway through throws one at the window of the Lord’s manor, breaking it so they can get in.
I was already going to give them that, and then nearly every last fucking NPC rolled an insight check of less than 10. So the group also made 10 gold for their “busking” and got into the manor completely unhindered. o/ goddamnit.
Omg so I’m at the cafe by campus and this guy came in and went to hug this chick but she went in for a fist bump
OK OMG SHE SAT HIM DOWN AND SAID “I think we should break up”
I’m legit 3 feet away from them pretending to be invested in my science book
She said “it’s not you it’s me” and before he could respond the barista called his name. It’s Bob. Poor Bob
The move was effective. The lady looks defensive
Bob has come back.
It was a few minutes of awkward silence as he took a sip of his drink. It’s the same kind as mine. Meaning he ordered Hot Chocolate
He started out with “You know, I think.” And I could hear this lady’s eyes roll. No one cares what you think Robert
FINGERS ARE FLYING. SHE POINTING AT HIM. SHIT IS GETTING REAL.
she calmed down and he legit did that thing where you steppe you fingers together in front of your mouth and take a huge breath. Bro. Leave it. It’s done. She’s too pretty for you.
He freaking snapped his fingers like he’s got this grand plan to make up for things.
She Said she still wants to be friends. She starts this by asking about his day
Apparently something bob said made her laugh.
She has not been able to say a word since she got him talking. It’s too loud in the cafe for me to make out anything even tho I’m legit behind this chick
He talking about his struggles now and how much he needs her. Run lady. Run. Run far away.
She tried to get up and his hAND SHOT OUT TO GRAB HERS
She’s literally folded in herself. Hands not going out further than the table. Limited hand movements.
Now she’s talking about her self. He doesn’t look that invested.
“well some people are bitchy” -bob
Lady does not have a drink. I don’t think she planned on being here this long.
Bob is again talking about himself 🙄🙄🙄🙄🙄 no one cares bob.
Well he said something that made her laugh again. It sounded fake tho.
He’s talking about school. APPARENTLY HE IS A PROFESSOR
“Promiscuousness leads to disease” -Bob again.
I’m done with my hot chocolate and I don’t know if the bitter taste in my mouth is from the chocolate residue I drank or my disdain for Professor Bob.
She adjusted her chair so she’s further away
SHE GOT UP! She went to take her purse but bob said to leave and he would watch it. I think she’s headed to the bathroom.
I can’t leave! But he’s doing that voice to text thing for his phone. Talking to someone about this? Idk?
I’m trying to figure out what he’s saying by looking at his lips but I suck as this. Also where are his lips?? Bob is lipless. Further proof that lizard people exist.
I just noticed the lady left her phone in her purse.
Ok she’s coming back. She is pretty. Too pretty for Bob. But probs old enough to be my mom.
He’s talking about his students again.
She was talking and he interrupted her and she was like “I was talking” and he like flinched and he apologized. Yes queen.
“but this is why this democracy is at its purest.” Wtf Bob that doesn’t make sense
They’re talking so quietly now I can’t hear them.
“I should have said this a long time ago. But I can’t get anyone to love me” -Bob what the fuck.
“I feel like I’m projecting my self onto you” -bob once again
She’s leaving! She said something about picking up her son, Kevin, from school. Good job lady!
HOLY SHIT HES REACHING INTO HIS PANTS WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF
*pocket. But still.
HE PULLED OUT A RING BUT THE CHICK IS ALREADY OUT THE DOOR. OMG
OMG OMG OMG ITS A MENS RING!! HE PUT IT ON HIS HAND HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT. HES PICKING UP HIS PHONE
“Hey babe, nah sorry about not answering your call. I was in a meeting with a student. I’m leaving my office now. Yeah I can pick up dinner. Is Tanner home from school yet?”
what i do is not up to you 