Archive for February, 2010
Government-Ordered Ad Disclaimers After the Anti-Consumerism Coup of 2028
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Sliggers! by Gamesaplenty may or may not be fun for the whole family. Your family may contain members who are brain damaged, infantile, incapable of following the very easy instructions, or who simply do not like fun. Alternatively, your family may have tastes in fun that are far too sophisticated to allow enjoying our game, which is after all just a holographic knock-off of Parcheesi tarted up with slightly eroticized dancing foxes. Gamesaplenty takes no responsibility for the inability to play or transcendence of our game by members of your family or by anyone else.
Neither the new 2029 Ford Curfew nor any other vehicle currently on the market will change everything.
Liteline products will only help you lose weight if you reduce calorie intake and exercise more–and if you do that, you’ll lose weight anyway. Liteline products will not in and of themselves give you new confidence. If you actually do lose the weight, you will still not look like the models in the Liteline commercials.
Tastiness and expeditiousness have been reliably identified as characteristics of Powermilk Biscuits in double blind research (2021, 2027).
FDA studies have concluded that there is no Coke side of life. Coke does not make anything real and is not itself real. Due to occasional instances of improper bottling and/or counterfeiting, it is not even always Coca-Cola. While it is true that you can’t beat the real thing, as established above, that thing is not Coke. The feeling is sometimes mildly pleasureable but can be beaten fairly easy, e.g., by playing Sliggers! (by some members of the family only). America does have a real choice, but Coke is not it. Coke cannot be had with a smile without spilling. Measures of life before and after drinking Coke indicate that Coke does not add any.
Papa November
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
The shortwave radio still sat on the desk at the back of the cabin and it felt like more than luck when Shelly found a numbers station on her first run down the dial. A woman’s voice read the numbers, calm, never pausing for breath, reciting five-digit combinations.
When she was young, Shelly’s grandfather only gave those stations a few seconds if they found one during the day. They’d move on to more interesting transmissions, accented voices from places she’d find in the old atlas with musty-sweet pages. At night, he’d let the numbers ramble.
“Soothing,” he’d say, and make her cocoa in a metal cup. “Codes sent around the world for spies, supposedly.” He’d open another beer, grandma would read fat historical paperbacks, and Shelly would doze off.
The monotone numbers soothed her now, while her mind spun questions for morning. Take or avoid the interstate? Go north to the city? How near was a town where she could top off the tank? The further she got tomorrow, the better.
“I know how you think,” Glen always said. “You’ll never leave me ’cause I’ll guess where you’re going before you even get there.”
But he hadn’t known she would leave. She hadn’t known until she drove past work and onto the onramp. Then she couldn’t go back — even if she got home by five like everything was normal, he would know.
The radio voice repeated the call sign “Papa November Pa-pa Nov-em-ber,” and maybe Shelly did doze, because a man unfolded himself from the air up near the ceiling, his gray skin nearly silver in the light of the bare bulb. He climbed down the dresser and looked at her.
She tried to speak, but all the muscles in her throat and neck froze rigid. The man’s shoulders were twisted, one leg was too short, one foot too big. He stared as if seeing into her, and evened out. He had Glen’s eyes and forehead, then he didn’t; there was a hint of grandpa’s many-times broken nose, then his face went mannequin blank.
Shelly felt her lips moving with the numbers, as if she knew them.
The gray man replied with codes of his own: “35-A14, 24-C9, 63-J2…”
She woke just before dawn with a hunch. In the atlas, she saw she was right: those were pages and map-grid coordinates. Places she could go.
Glen might know her, but he didn’t know Papa November.