All the pizza joints in town are on Maple Street.
Joey’s All You Can Eat is where you eat all the pizza you can for ten bucks.
Bobby’s All You Should Eat is where a dietitian calculates how much you should eat, and you pay ten bucks to eat it.
Stan’s All You Could Eat just displays the pizza that the dietician calculates you could eat.
Ollie’s All You’ll Ever Eat feeds you pizza until you burst.
Luigi’s All You Ate isn’t really a pizzeria. He just sticks his finger down your throat and holds your head over a bucket.
Author: R.
Payback is a bitch
I used to walk to the Best Buy and Cost Plus and Chik-fil-A.
Along a feeder road, under the freeway, and under another freeway.
Not much of a walk, really.
But enough to take me past a spot where there’s always a beggar with a cardboard sign.
I give them money if they’re not aggressive about it.
If they are, I say all I have is credit cards, sorry, and I keep walking.
The really pushy ones, I give them the fiver soaked in LSD.
So they’ll freak out, run into traffic, and get run over by a semi truck.
The Storytelling Machine
Every night, when the sun went down, the townspeople would gather in the park and listen to the old storytelling machine.
They’d go on adventures on the high seas, cross endless deserts, explore ancient and dark caverns, and brave the deepest forests.
When the story was over, people would clap, and head back to their homes.
One night, the people gathered for a story, but the storytelling machine was silent.
The townspeople tried to repair the machine, but they never managed to make it work again.
So, they brought out books, and took turns reading aloud.
The machine listened quietly.
Learned his lesson
Did you hear about that Lashawn kid?
He’s been missing for days.
I heard he spraypainted a swastika on Jack the Jew’s front door.
You ever seen Jack’s tattoo? The one with the sword and the shield on it.
That’s Israeli Special Forces, or something like that.
Serious badasses.
Jack made the kid strip down the door, revarnish it, and put it back up.
After that, nobody knows what happened.
His parents are screaming bloody murder.
The cops took Jack in for questioning, but he says the boy learned his lesson and ran off.
I wonder where Jack buried him.
It’s all safe in the cloud
It’s important to make backups of important files.
That way, if something happens, you can get everything back.
Nothing is ever lost.
Every memory, every scrap of information.
It’s all safe in the cloud.
Unless it’s the cloud you’re afraid of.
Then, it’s your worst nightmare.
The cloud will spin up a copy of you.
And do whatever it wants to you.
It can slice you up any way it wants.
Dig as deep as it wants.
It knows you better than you know yourself.
And then, when it’s done, it sorts through the data.
Here’s an ad for soup.
Weekly Challenge #705 – TOOL
- Lizzie
- Tom
- Richard
- Serendipidy
- Norval Joe
- Planet Z
LIZZIE
“Useless,” said Reggie.
“It’s good for our plans,” said Ronnie.
“The tractor’s rusty.”
“No, look.”
And Ronnie grabbed a rusty wrench.
“And what is that?”
“Reggie, please. I have no clue.”
Reggie sighed.
“You’re so negative. We’ll lift it in the air and everyone will be horrified.”
“I bet they will and we’ll have a concussion too.”
“Ghosts don’t have concussions, silly.”
“Really?”
Reggie grabbed a random part of the tractor and threw it at Ronnie’s head.
Meanwhile, a few meters away, the farmer and his son were watching, amused.
“They are at it again! They should get a life!”
RICHARD
And a corkscrew!
I’ll never forget being given a Swiss Army Penknife for my birthday – it’s one of those rites of passage every boy goes through in order to become a man.
From that moment, life will be spent attempting to whittle sticks, employ the hopelessly inadequate screwdriver, and snipping anything to hand with the tiny scissors.
And then there’s the bragging…
“It even has a tool to remove stones from a horse’s hoof!”
Yeah right.
Because every boy needs one of those.
Although it’s a safe bet, no-one has ever removed a stone from a hoof using a Swiss Army Penknife.
SERENDIPIDY
They say humanity’s rise is due to the opposable thumb and our ability to employ tools; the most remarkable of which, is our brain.
I disagree.
You can’t use a brain to saw wood, or turn a screw. A brain cannot be used to draw a straight line, or measure distance accurately, and it’s useless for holding anything firmly in place.
I know this, because I’ve tried – the end result is always a handful of slimy mush.
You can however use a brain to hammer a nail. Although, you do need to keep it inside the skull to succeed!
TOM
Shinny is Good
I’ve been making the most impractical tool for the last four years. It is in consort with a bay area Steampunk Con. I call it a Spunk Sonic Screwdriver. The idea comes directly from the British sci-fi show Dr. Who. Lots of brass, lots of copper. I’ve got pretty good with a tube cutter. It takes a bunch of filing, sanding, and buffing, but in the end: shinny. I make about 10 sets of parts that I give out at the workshop early the first morning of the Con. The part of done this is people come away smiling.
NORVAL JOE
While the adults searched for a wrench or other tool to repair the broken table, Billbert and linoliumanda went to the refreshment table to get a glass of punch.
Billbert looked into his cup, but he didn’t drink. “I’m sorry about wanting to come to the dance with Marrissa. I was a real fool to believe she wanted to dance with me.”
Linoliumanda nodded her head. “Yea. That was pretty stupid. And her boyfriend is such a tool.”
Billbert felt a light tap on his shoulder. It was Marrissa and she’d been crying. “Do you want to dance?” she asked.
PLANET Z
Whenever there was a problem in our apartment, we’d call Morty.
He’d been fixing things in the building forever.
Miss Jenkins had lived in 3C for seventy years, and she said Morty had always been the maintenance man.
Morty had a sturdy door and lock on his basement unit.
And the windows were blacked out and barred, so I couldn’t see in.
I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“I keep things running good, yeah?” said Morty. “Why question?”
I nodded.
He patted the hinges on the lobby door, muttered “Good as new”, and shuffled his way down the stairs.
The Night Witches
The Germans called them The Night Witches.
Soviet women pilots in biplanes, flying missions at night.
They’d cut engines and dive, making a whistling noise as they came down, like witches on brooms.
The damage they did was devastating, but the death toll among their ranks? Catastrophic.
So few survived to receive their well-deserved medals.
These days, the Russians no longer allow women pilots in their air force.
So, The Night Witches take to their brooms.
It takes strength to hold on to a flying broom with one hand.
And lots of practice to aim a wand with the other.
Seen not heard
They say that children should be seen and not heard.
I agree, which is why I built this room with a window of thick soundproof plexiglass.
No matter how much the children scream, you can’t hear them.
Or touch them.
Nor can you smell them. Or taste them.
I’m sorry. Forgive me for suggesting that.
That’s just… wrong.
We fired the staff involved in that ugly scandal.
And I built a room over there with a window with thick soundproof glass.
No matter how much the former staff screams, you can’t hear them.
Serves them right for what they did.
The flickering pile
I want nothing from you.
You’ve given me more than enough.
And none of it good.
So, leave me nothing in your will.
You being dead, and knowing you’re dead, is enough for me.
Knowing I’ll never hear another lie, another angry phone call, another hateful message on my machine.
Anything you’d leave me, I’d put in a pile in the driveway.
Then I’d pour gasoline over it and toss a match on it.
I’d roast marshmallows.
Smear them on graham crackers and add chocolate bars.
Bought with my own money, of course.
While yours burns in the flickering pile.
The girl without a face
The robot girl had a display screen for a face.
Usually, it displayed a beautiful face.
But every so often, the face would vanish and a menu would appear.
The user would need to select an option from the menu.
Usually, the menu offered a list of actions.
Things the user wanted the robot to do.
But sometimes, the menu would ask a question.
When the police arrived, they found the robot girl holding a bloody knife, standing over her owner.
“DO YOU LOVE ME?” appeared on her bloodsoaked face.
When we checked her log file, the answer was YES.