Why were The Roaring Twenties called The Roaring Twenties?
No, it wasn’t because of the booming economy and everybody celebrating their wealth madly.
It was because the streets were filled with packs of lions.
At first, people hardly noticed them. They were too busy noticing all the automobiles in the streets.
Plus, the lions ate stray dogs and the few not-wealthy people.
It was when the stock market crashed that people noticed the lions.
They threw stockbrokers out of the windows, trying to appease them.
Finally, they put big lion statues outside of public libraries, and that scared them off.
Category: My stories
Mario
Sure, the game was called Super Mario Brothers, but Mario wasn’t Luigi and Mario’s last name.
What was their last name?
I have no idea. And it’s not on WikiPedia, either.
Maybe Mario’s like Madonna and Cher and has only one last name?
I wonder if he can sing like Madonna and Cher.
According to WikiPedia, he’s held parties, and there’s usually singing at those, right?
Or are those political parties? Are the Mario Brothers like the Kennedy Brothers?
Which one’s the drunk? Which one’s the womanizer?
And which one drove his go kart off the bridge?
Vote for Mario!
Three Little Virtual Pigs
Once upon a time there was a big bad wolf and three little pigs.
The wolf wanted to eat them.
The first little pig built his house out of Mesh, so the Big Bad Wolf logged in with Viewer 1.23 and it didn’t render. He ate the pig.
The second little pig built his house out of sculpties. The Big Bad Wolf checked… it was Phantom. He ate the pig.
The third little pig made his house out of prims. The Big Bad Wolf couldn’t enter it. So, he hit Auto-Return. And ate the pig.
Then he crashed.
The end.
Stumble
Ted dropped his coffee as he stumbled and fell to the sidewalk.
He tried to get up, but his legs wouldn’t move.
They had been fully charged… he always checked before going out the door…
Ted crawled out of the way and leaned against a building, then pulled the status panel out of his pocket.
FIRMWARE 34% LOADED it said.
35%… 36%… 37%…
Updates? Now?
Weren’t those supposed to run overnight?
He called the office, told them he’d be late.
“Traffic,” he said, hanging up.
He closed the status app, tapped on Angry Birds 6, and waited for the reboot.
Torrid
Fred opened up his CAD program, drew a circle, and then revolved it on a plane around a point.
He colored the resulting donut shape pink.
Then, he revolved a blue rectangle… it looked like a disk with a hole in it.
Triangle… a pentagon… a hexagon… other shapes…
The screen filled quickly.
He looked around for the original pink donut he’d made… gone?
So was the blue disk.
Searching… searching… searching…
He found them in a server in Hawaii, happily interlocked in each others’ axes.
Let them enjoy their toroid love affair, he thought, and shut down his workstation.
Giant Robots
There’s nothing I like more than watching gigantic robots beating the crap out of each other.
One lunges at the other with a massive arm, which barely dodges out of the way, and then responds with a wicked jab.
All the while, people shouting and pointing… it’s a thrill-a-minute!
Oh, sure, it would be more interesting with blades and hammers, but all we’ve got here on the assembly line is grabber and welder bots.
Well, until they move operations to Mexico.
Yeah, I saw the memo. Corporate fuckers.
So, screw the Mexicans… let’s have some fun right now!
Fight! Fight!
Not just another pretty face
Sure, she’s a famous model now, but when she was a teenager, she was crowned Miss Connect The Dots of the Schenectady Summer Fair.
Worst case of acne you could possibly imagine.
She tried every cream, treatment, and torture imaginable.
None of them worked.
Do you ever wash your face?
Don’t eat so much chocolate.
Go easy on that greasy food.
Humiliated, she ran away from home.
Today, she’s in hundreds of magazines and catalogs.
Oh, her face is still a mess. More hideous than Medusa herself.
But then, who needs a pretty face when you’re a famous hand model?
The portal
I finished the time portal last night.
It’s nothing fancy, really. Just a room-temperature superconducting toroid.
The fancy stuff is in the control mechanism.
Well, that and the math I needed to establish the displacement field.
Have I gone back in time yet?
No. Haven’t had the chance.
Every time I try to go through the field, something comes through.
And, every now and then, someone.
Me.
Another me.
I stood there, and I laughed at myself.
Then I apologized, waved, and was gone.
Or was that me?
Want to see it?
Not yet. It’s not done yet.
When?
Soon.
The Speed Of Think
I’m often complimented for the volume of my creative work and the speed with which I write it, but when it comes to writing, I’m actually rather thoughtless.
You see, if I write slowly, I give myself time to think.
Being a pessimist and my own worst critic, I’ll think I can’t write, so I stop writing.
But, when I write faster than I can think, I never have time to think I can’t write, so I write even more.
And the creativity comes from not having time to think of things I’ve thought of before, so it’s all new.
Bottled Up
Bob’s analyst told him not to keep his feelings bottled up.
So, Bob stopped bottling them up, and he put them in cans.
He forgot to heat them to kill the bacteria, and he ended up sick.
Then he tried dehydrating his feelings, but people accused him of being jerky to them.
Freeze-drying his feelings left him feeling cold.
“Why not just leave them fresh?” I said.
“They’re just too raw,” said Bob.
So, he went back to bottling his feelings up.
He had to get new bottles, though. I’d turned the old ones in to collect the deposit.