October 15, 2013
My lines won’t remain apart
Even if extended to infinity
They keep curving back to the start
And sowing insanity
I’ve got the non-Euclidean blues
Playing them up the R’lyeh streets
Gonna have to pay my dues
As the gibbering horrors bleat
Oh, I’ve got the non-Euclidean blues
And my mind is starting to crack
It can’t process the maddening views
Of Cthulhu’s scaly back
October 14, 2013
“Go on, Ms. Curry. Please load and fire the weapon at the target downrange.” Mr. Klint held out a pair of shooter’s earplugs, which the “applicant” took with a trembling hand.
Curry desperately hoped that her hosts couldn’t see the sweat beginning to bead along her upper lip, the hairs on her forearms prickling alarmedly. She was in over her head, and those kindly and dapper assassins had told her not minutes ago that failing the test would lead to her immediate death.
“Why, whatever is the matter, Ms. Curry?” said Mr. Wyd with exceptional politeness. “Would you prefer a different weapon, or a different load? The Imanishi 9 is our standard pistol…”
“…but you could use a Moses Model 19…” added Mr. Klint.
“…or a Grünwald KPK if that is your preference,” finished Mr. Wyd.
“I…would prefer the Grünwald,” said Curry. She hoped that the Germans’ reputation for engineering would mean that such a gun would be easier to use for someone who’d never fired one in her life, but any hope of successfully bluffing her way into the organization and getting an idea of where they’d taken Chris seemed to be swiftly fading.
“Very well!” Mr. Wyd swapped out the gun with blistering speed; Curry tried to see how he unloaded the Imanishi and popped a bullet from the top part of the gun by pulling it back, but the master assassin’s hands were a blur.”
“Would you prefer a full metal jacket load, or hollow-point?” asked Mr. Klint, holding up two magazines.
“We’ve depleted uranium, sabot, and ratshot as well,” chimed Mr. Wyd, “but I’m sure you’ll agree that they are nor suitable for such a demonstration.”
“Of…of course…” stammered Curry. “I’ll take the hollow-point.”
The assassin chose one of the magazines–not the one Curry thought she’d chosen, but he didn’t seem to notice–and, to her great relief, loaded it for her and made it ready to fire. With trembling hands, she took aim.
October 13, 2013
Javaman was created by Reggie O’Donald (art) and Nate Grimaldi (writing) as part of IC Comics Group’s “New Consumers” lineup. The New Consumers were originally intended as a group of foodstuff-related heroes that could provide IC with another revenue source through distribution to local restaurants and eateries. Most of the heroes from that lineup, like Pastaman or the Burger Avengers, were unpopular and quickly canned. Javaman alone survived the cut.
As with many of the IC heroes, Javaman has several origin stories. In the Golden and Silver Age continuity IC used through 1987, he was born Jan Van Aman, an American-Dutch wealthy playboy and heir to the Van Aman coffee fortune. While overseeing a plantation in Malaya that was run like a slave-labor camp, Jan was kidnapped by native laborers and held prisoner. Moved by their plight, he agreed to be infused with the Sacred Coffee Beans of Fuol Gerre, which granted him the power to control coffee-based substances, super-speed, and super strength at the cost of having to constantly drink potent coffee to maintain his powers.
In the rebooted continuity promulgated by IC starting in 1988, Javaman was John Avaman, the owner of an independent Seattle coffee. Upset with his popularity and scruples, agents of the local Stubb’s Coffee empire (changed to the fictional Queequeg’s Coffee after a lawsuit) attempted to assassinate him by puncturing vats full of an experimental super-potent coffee and drowning him. Instead, John Avaman’s cells were hyper-saturated with caffeine, granting him more or less the same powers. Some later limited series and one-shots (like Javaman #391) tried to establish a link between the Golden Age Javaman and the Modern Age one, positing that Jan Van Aman was variously John Avaman’s uncle, surrogate father, wealthy benefactor, or inspiration.
For all the changes in his continuity, Javaman’s rogues’ gallery has been relatively consistent. His most persistent foe has been Unfair Trade, since Javaman #1 an unscrupulous plutocrat with designs on the worldwide coffee market and armies of hired goons and technology at his disposal. The ambiguous Decaffinatrix, a burglar waging a one-woman war on caffeine after a traumatic accident left her unable to enjoy coffee, has been both friend and foe ever since her first appearance in Javaman #55. And the Expressonator, introduced in Javaman #271, has been a perennial favorite as well.
October 12, 2013
The shadow’s voice dripped with irony-laced joy, its words battered with equal parts honey and poison. “Do you really think that such a thing is possible? The ritual of key and coin is a farce, a trap! You came willingly to the down below, as have many before you, seeking the impossible, only to find yourself in the same trap as those you would rescue.”
“That’s not true!” Ellis growled between teeth clenched against the chill of the down below. It was no only a cold that knew no warmth, it was a cold that suggested warmth was a lie, that it had never been, that it was a pleasant dream scattered upon the winds of wakefulness.
“It howls at you, doesn’t it? Tears at your very soul, ribbons it into threadbare rags, this idea of yours that there’s something that can be done for your lover, your brat,” continued the shadow, ever in the periphery of Ellis’s vision and never in the center. “But every lead, every whisper, every ley line you followed was just a way to bring you into the down below. To rip at you with ice and rock unending, to cut at you with wind that will bear no warmth and light that is neither day nor darkness.”
“You would have me lay down in the snow and subject myself to this forever?” spat Ellis, the moisture condensing to ice upon his very lips.
“I would have you face reality. It was all just a way to bring you to the despair that never would have been yours had you allowed things to proceed as they were, to take your rest as it came. In trying to reach beyond it and break the order of things, you have condemned yourself as surely as those you seek to save.”
“I still have hope.”
The shadow laughed gleefully amidst the flurries and driving snow. “And that, that false and misguided hope, is as the sweetest of rare wines to me, to mine. Do you not see? Whether you suffer, whether you hope, or whether you do both, it matters not. You are but a battery, a soul in chains, and every move you might make will only bring us pleasures untold.”
October 10, 2013
MARVIN: I…I just can’t…
MRS. POINDEXTER: See, he’s like this all the time.
MARVIN: It’s just…ugh…agh…
MRS. POINDEXTER: He acts out, but I can’t get him to vocalize what’s the matter, what he’s thinking.
NICK: Let me try.
[NICK walks across the studio and kneels by MARVIN]
NICK (into MARVIN’S ear):
MARVIN (leaning toward NICK):
NICK:
MARVIN:
MRS. POINDEXTER: What is it, what is it?
NICK: Mrs. Poindexter, Marvin is suffering from the fumes of your patented spicy curry gumbo, which are filtering down into the basement where he can smell them. He can’t bring himself to tell you because the dish is your pride and joy.
MRS. POINDEXTER: I’m sorry, I didn’t know! Marvin, my baby!
MARVIN: Momma!
ANNOUNCER: The Nerd Whisperer. Fridays at 8 on NBS.
October 9, 2013
Usually Frank had a giggle at signs in suburban neighborhoods that warned “Slow Children At Play.” Naturally the signs were meant to mean “slow down because children are playing and might dash out in front of your car,” but the semantic ambiguity was always mild amusement for an Usway distributor who spent a lot of time in cookie-cutter suburbs. It was the only use his moldy old English Literature degree got, at any rate.
Upon entering one neighborhood in East Hopewell, Frank saw a sign that seemed like a model of linguistic efficiency and purity: “20 MPH Children.” Clear an succinct, it warned of children and set a 20 MPH speed limit rather than using the relative term “slow.”
Partway to his destination, though, Frank was accosted by…something…darting in front of his car. He couldn’t for the life of him make it out, as it was moving fast enough to be but a blur in his slightly rheumy vision. Craning his neck and stutter-stopping his car through the area, Frank’s knuckles were white on the dashboard and his eyes were wide as saucers in fear of hitting one of the…whatever-they-weres…before he had a chance to unload his Usway merch and get the money he needed to make rent (and cover any repairs or insurance rate hikes).
Eventually he eased his way past the obstructions. Arriving at his destination, Frank asked about the mysterious blurs. “Oh, that’s just Bryan’s kids,” said his local distributor, as if that explained everything.
A few blocks back, the McClintock kids had just wrapped up their game of tag. “Dad! Hey Dad! Did you see that guy come through here? He looked pretty scared!”
Bryan McClintock, once known as Lightning Runner before he’d retired the cape and leotard, shrugged. “I put up the sign warning people that the children here run at 20 miles per hour; I guess that gentleman just didn’t know how to read.”
October 8, 2013
“Are you not aware that we are never seen one without the others, and that we are called, at court and in the city, Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, or the Three Rhetoricians?”
The three men spread out across the barren fields of the Preaux-Clercs, which were generally employed as a place for duels of men who had no time to lose.
“My faith! I was ignorant of this little fact,” replied d’Aristotle.
“Sound off!” cried Logos.
“Ethos!” cried the first rhetorician, his noble and handsome, but frightfully pale, head held high. “Surrender! Do as I say, because I know what I’m talking about! I am an authority!”
“Pathos!” sounded the second, a rhetorician of great height and haughty countenance, dressed in a magnificent baldric, worked in gold, which shone like water ripples in the sun. “I’m passionate in my beliefs! Yield before me, to spare yourself heartache and fear!”
“Logos!” added the last. A stout man, he had an open and ingenuous countenance, his cheeks rosy and downy as an autumn peach. “Lay down your arms! Logically, you cannot prevail with three against one!”
“You are well named, gentlemen,” said d’Aristotle. “But your rhetoric does not persuade me! I find that your appeals lack supporting evidence!”
This entry incorporates some text from the public domain Dumas books at Project Gutenberg.
October 7, 2013
“Did you hear that? The way the buffet seemed to creak and settle?”
“Yeah, almost like a sigh.”
The buffet had started life as a stand of trees in what later became Tecumseh County, Michigan. After the brushfires of war with the natives and the British died down, lumber men had come up from the south with their axes and saws. The area was well-served by rivers which were deep and wide enough to float logs on, and when the lumber boom came in the 1880s, the trees found themselves in the center of a large logging camp known as Reid’s Slashing.
Cut down in the first expansion of the camp, the logs were floated downriver to Muskegon, where they went through a riverside sawmill and emerged as rough lumber. Then it was up the Grand River to Grand Rapids, the great Furniture City and boomtown of the hour. Berkley and Sons, a fast-growing furniture maker destined to become the state’s greatest carpentry concern until its collapse in the Great Depression, bought the lumber. Finished into a buffet in the then-fashionable style, it was loaded onto the Grand Rapids & Indian Railroad, ultimately destined for Chicago.
Gilded Age Chicago was booming in its own way, a center of railroads, meat-packing, and other heavy industry. The buffet quickly found a buyer in an up-and-coming district, changing hands several times before winding up on the South Side just before the second World War thanks to a pair of newlyweds and a garage sale. It held everything from knickknacks to wedding feasts over the next 40 years, before the crippling urban decay of the late 1970s and early 1980s forced the buffet’s owners to the suburbs.
30 years later, one of their grandchildren and his wife found the furniture in a storage unit where it had lay for almost a decade following the deaths of its owners. They loaded it up on a truck for their vacation home to the north–up in Michigan, in the blighted buckle of the Rust Belt, the boom days long since past. Setting it up in their second home, an old lumber baron’s mansion in the Tecumseh County seat of Deerton, they had both been startled by the strange, earthy noise it had made upon being set down.
Thing is, Deerton had grown up from the nucleus of the Reid’s Slashing lumber camp. The old house had been built in the heart of the Slashing, where the first trees had been logged long ago. For those old boards, sitting where they had once grown, they weren’t just decorating another living room.
They had come home.
October 6, 2013
October 5, 2013
The political crisis continues this week in the Republic of Slon, where deadlock between the Democratic-Republican Party and the Whig Party has led to the suspension of all essential and non-essential government functions. The Slon News Network reports on the fallout.
Surprisingly, the shutdown does not seem to have affected the average person on the street in Slon, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric unleashed by the two parties in the weeks prior to the shutdown. According to experts, this is because most functions that were once provided by the Slon central government, and which are provided by many of its fellow governments, were so inefficient and backward that most citizens long ago made the transition to using unethical corporate alternatives. “Sure, it sucks that Slon Post isn’t delivering,” said one citizen, “but my packages always arrived late, singed, and smelling of bacon, so I send all my stuff through GesteCo Express these days. GestEx might pollute the environment and use my money to influence corrupt legislators, but at least they get the job done.” Another citizen, on being informed that the Slon Library and Archives of the Republic were closed for the duration, expressed surprise that they were still in operation: “Oh they were maintaining our priceless heritage for free and making it available on the network? I just assumed that GesteCo Heritage Services was the only source for that stuff, so I’ve been buying access at 99 sloncs a month.”
In a statement for the Democratic-Republican Party, Archon Laden O’Bourne said that the shutdown was entirely the fault of the Whig Party, saying that the Democratic-Republicans were “innocent as little baby goats” while adding that the four-day-old shutdown was “the worst such political crisis in the history of Slon.” When reminded of the gridlock that led to a shutdown 18 years ago, which lasted two weeks, Archon O’Bourne backpedaled, claiming that “no one remembered” the earlier incident and that his statement was still correct inasmuch as he meant “the worst crisis in current history.”
The leader of the Whigs in the Assembly, Ephor Jimmy MacRibb, countered with a statement of his own indicating that O’Bourne’s words cast him as the “most ignorant, ineffective, and reviled Archon of modern times.” When reminded of Archon Crater, whose four years in office 35 years ago were so disastrous for the Republic of Slon that they are still known today as “The Great Malaise,” MacRibb said that his comments were taken out of context, despite being the only words he had said in a featureless and otherwise unoccupied room.
An uninterested third party, speaking on condition of anonymity, had the following remarks: “The end result of the gridlock will primarily be twofold. On the one hand, when the Whigs are in power, the Democratic-Republicans will use the same tactics they now decry with a smile on their faces. Much as the Whigs’ current tactics were practiced by the Democratic-Republicans during Archon Germanicus Briar’s administration six years ago, tactics that the Whigs at the time called ‘a holocaust-genocide-abortion.’ On the other hand, other countries jealous of the Republic of Slon or wishing to minimize their own horrible internal problems will trumpet the problems. Expect the Tyranny of Kyiiv to use jokes about the shutdown to distract from their current practice of grinding up political opponents and homosexuals into a nutrient paste for general consumption, and the Confederation of Maghrebos to feel better about themselves despite their corrupt governments squandering every cent of aid earmarked for their starving and restive citizenry.”
