I’ve lived in this city for thirty-four years, and in this neighborhood for twenty-one of them.
And there’s some restaurants that have been around longer, but I’ve never been to them.
When I drive past or walk past, I wonder what it’s like there.
Are they any good?
So, for this week off, I made a list, and I went to every one of them.
And sure enough, I now know if they’re any good.
Most were quite awful.
So when I drive past or walk past, instead of “What is it like?” it’s now “Oh God not that place.”
Registered parking
The apartment complex has gates around the parking lot.
But the gates are open and the controls are broken.
They posted signs that nobody reads,.
NO TRESPASSING. NO UNATHORIZED PARKING.
As if. Not happening.
They hired an app to handle parking registration.
Enter in a bunch of information on your phone.
No stickers. No passes to hang from your rear view mirror.
How the hell will they know who’s supposed to be there or not?
I see moving trucks loading up every day, loading up the fed-up former residents.
I wonder if they’ve registered those moving trucks for guest parking?
Weekly Challenge #852: Archimedes
LISA
A wet towel on the bathroom floor.
Honestly? I’m right at the end of my tether. I don’t know why but he’s been drawing circles in the sand. When I went out to hang his wet towel up he’s screaming at me ‘Don’t disturb my circles!’ It’s going to be the last thing he says.
And if one more person tells me I have to make allowances because he’s a highly intelligent man. No. Can a highly intelligent man pull his own bathplug out? Yes. Our Archimedes can’t. What the fuck’s he doing up there? He’s certainly not washing himself.
I mean it. Last thing he says.
JOHN
Creating Evidence
He found the photo cleaning out the house after his last surviving sister died. Five sour-faced kids, two glowering parents, and the family dog stared back at him from crinkled black and white. He took the photo to the senior center’s computer room and asked the young woman working there to scan it. Following his directions, she first erased the parents and then, one by one, his siblings. She was able to press a few buttons and slide her finger to create a smile on the boy’s face and move the dog to lean against his leg. Perfect, he thought.
RICHARD
Perpetual Motion
Grandpa was a little mad, but he did have interesting ideas.
Take his perpetual motion machine, for example – a sealed system, of a number of tanks, and a complex arrangement of Archimedes’ screw pumps, electro-magnetic impellers, dynamos and capacitors.
It worked by way of a gravity fed stream of water from a header tank, driving a dynamo, which generated a charge, stored in the capacitors, to power the impellers, driving the screws to pump the water back to the top.
It was crazy, but it worked.
Well, for three years.
Outlasting grandpa.
So, I guess, for him, it was perpetual.
LIZZIE
“Archimedes!”
Archimedes received an envelope in the mail for years. He opened that envelope to find it empty. But he kept all those envelopes, neatly organized by dates, in a shoe-box under the bed.
One day, a man arrived in town asking for him.
“Your instructions.”
He rushed to his room. He unfolded all the envelopes open and there it was. A map.
He followed the map and at the location, he found a box.
“Oh, my God! I’m filthy rich.”
Ah, his uncle, his only surviving relative, the trickster.
Good thing he hadn’t thrown any of the envelopes away!
TURA
Archimedes
———
It was me that gave Archie the idea. He’d discovered how to calculate the volume of a sphere, or a cone, or pretty much anything. Hiero heard about him, and challenged him to find the volume of his crown. He gave Archie a month… or else.
Archie forgets about ordinary stuff like bathing when he’s thinking. At last I tell him “You reek, Archie!”, and I drag him along to the public baths. I see him staring at the water and thinking, then suddenly he leaps out and runs off yelling “You reek! You reek!” and the rest is history.
SERENDIPIDY
I’m always on a mission to find new and interesting methods of shuffling people off their mortal coil, but it can be hard to innovate, when you’ve tried it all before.
There’s not really much choice outside the usual strangling, stabbing and shooting, and all those unusual and fun ways you see in the movies, can be a pain to set up, and are rarely successful.
I always fancied the toaster in the bath method, but the fuses always blow before you can do any damage.
Then I had my Archimedes moment – why not simply bypass the fuse-board?
Eureka!
NORVAL JOE
Billbert blinked his eyes and shook his head. “There’s no difference between magic and a superpower?”
“That’s right.”
Billbert scoffed. “I think there’s a big difference. With magic you cast spells, and wave your hands, and other mumbo jumbo. With a superpower, you just have it.”
Sabrina rolled her eyes. “That’s not what Archimedes said.”
Billbert frowned. “Archimedes? The ancient Greek mathematician?”
She sniffed. “Of course not. My uncle Archimedes. My uncle Archie was a real deep thinker, a philosopher mage. He said that true magic doesn’t need to be learned or performed. It should be natural to the witch.”
PLANET X
The Archimedes was a Class Seven Star Freighter.
Just a big hollow box with a jump engine attached to it.
The Shipping Consortium ran a circuit around The Gamma Rim.
Raw ore from one world, robots from another.
Grain, water, gold, diamonds, fusion bombs.
As long as they got paid and nobody pointed a gun at them.
So when a stray shipment of Rigel fusion bombs went off in Sirius-4’s orbit, the Consortium stopped coming.
Express smugglers happily took up the slack, bringing food.
And planning out where to plant the next round of fusion bombs to annoy the Consortium.
My favorite months of the year
April and May are my favorite months to sit outside.
My jasmine is usually in bloom by then.
One flower, then a few, then all of them.
I have a chaise lounger for sitting out.
And a table to put iced tea on.
There’s no electrical outlet out there, so I run a cord through the window so I can plug in a fan.
That’s useful towards the end of May, when the heat shows up and stays.
And the jasmine flowers fall off, one by one, then faster and faster, until there’s none left.
I wait for April again.
For a good time call
Rick got up from his barstool and went to the bathroom.
He saw a phone number scrawled on the stall… for a good time call…
So, he did. He got out his phone and called the number.
There was a knock on the stall door. Rick opened it.
A man in a chauffeur’s suit was standing there.
“Come with me, sir,” said the man.
Rick washed his hands, dried them off, and left the bar with the chauffeur.
And he got in a white limo, and was never seen again.
One can only hope that he had a good time.
The third sled
I went to a movie museum and saw the sled from Citizen Kane.
But didn’t that sled get tossed on the fire in the end?
How can it be here?
The truth is, Orson Wells had three sleds built for Citizen Kane.
One was thrown on the fire, but it didn’t burn right.
So, they tossed the second on the fire.
If that one didn’t burn properly, they’d have burned the third.
But it didn’t. It burned perfectly on camera.
So they still had the third to put in a museum.
Which is on fire.
Head for the exits now!
Super swindle me
Remember when you could super-size your McDonalds meal?
Know what you got with it?
You got a slightly bigger sleeve in which the same amount of fries were stuffed, along with extra ketchup and salt packets.
You got a slightly bigger cup with the same amount of soda, but more ice.
The cup was more expensive than the soda or ice.
You got more napkins. Those are cheap, too.
But the sandwich was the same size.
Well, as the other sandwiches they sold at the time.
Over the years, they’ve gotten smaller.
It all fits in the same sized bag.
Fame is the price you paid
Sometimes, famous people meet on the set and fall in love.
You watch their performances before and after, you can tell.
The look on their faces, how they stand, how they move.
But it doesn’t last.
Usually, they hit the rocks.
Drinking, drugs, and affairs.
And you can tell that in their performances, too.
The look on their faces, how they stand, how they move.
It’s the ones who last that are the rarity.
Those people, they put up with the drinking, the drugs, and the affairs.
The best actors can fake it better than anyone else.
Such award-winning performances.
Bring a gun to
They say never bring a knife to a gunfight.
But a gun can run out of bullets. Or jam.
A knife never runs out of bullets. Or jams.
Or makes any noise.
Tikki would dress up in the enemy’s uniform and sneak behind enemy lines.
Then he’d slit the throats of sentries, scouts, and guards.
If he was caught at the scene, he’d scream “He’s getting away, follow me!”
And eventually, when they’d split up to keep searching, he’d be left alone with a soldier.
He’d kill them, too, and run as fast as he could back to his base.
Weekly Challenge #851: Deal
LISA
Gambling lives.
Mum always said to have a packet with you. Scout camp she forgot my underwear but I’d got a pack of cards in my rucksack. She was right. Snap to Cribbage there was no age limits with a game of cards. I’d killed many hours with a clock of Patience cards.
Lately it’s not been playing to pass the time or a bit of fun. The stakes have got higher than the matchsticks at Nans. A bag of halfpennies turned to banknotes, a car, a house… to this.
I want this to be my last hand even if I win.
RICHARD
The deal
“Fifty thousand in used, unmarked bills up front, then another hundred thousand on completion. Do we have a deal?”
I looked around nervously. I was way out of my comfort zone, but I wasn’t calling the shots.
I nodded, fumbling with my inside pocket for the envelope, which I slid carefully across the table top.
The man in the sharp suit took the envelope and quickly sifted through the wad of cash.
Satisfied with its contents, he pocketed the envelope and produced the contract.
“Sign here, and my client will sign when it’s done.”
Weirdest house purchase I’ve ever made!
LIZZIE
Millions. To sell him for millions. He wanted the millions. He wanted the fancy cars, the huge house, the yacht. He wanted the girls, the jewelry, the paparazzi. He wanted the interviews, the autographs.
Then the millions came and everything else along with it.
It was fun, at first.
When that creep jumped over his fence and held him and his family hostage for half a day, demanding the release of another creep from jail, it wasn’t fun anymore.
He stopped playing football. He moved to the mountains to be free.
But he still kept the millions… just in case.
SERENDIPIDY
I have a deal with the River Styx ferryman – he lets me have first refusal on the bodies that come his way. Those with a decent amount of meat on them, I can have.
He gets to keep the coins, I get the body, and it saves him the effort of rowing across the river and back.
Everybody’s happy.
Well, almost everybody – I can’t say that the souls of the dead are particularly impressed, having to roam the shadows and never achieving peace.
Doesn’t bother me though. I’m tell them I’m a Buddhist, and it’s simply karma doing its thing!
TURA
Deal
———
I owe everything to my father’s advice. He’d asked me how much I was losing on poker. I hadn’t known he knew I played. Not serious money, and I put it down to learning. “It’s not the luck of the draw, it’s how you play the hands, right?” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said. “Control the deal, and nothing else matters.”
So I learned card sharping. Then I took up bigger games. Car dealerships. Construction. Politics. And now, President of the United States. And yes, people did buy used cars from me.
Make everyone play your game, and you’ll always win.
NORVAL JOE
Billbert and Sabrina got to their second period classroom. Before they went in, Billbert held up his hand. “Wait. Help me deal with this. You gave me the koala toy so these knights can’t see me. We make contact every day to keep our magic strong. To be absolutely honest with you, I don’t have magic. I have a super power. So, all your talk about magic is just a delusion.”
Sabrina closed her eyes and shook her head. “Do you know what the difference between a superpower and magic is?”
“No, what?” Billbert asked.
Sabrina smiled, “There isn’t one.”
PLANET Z
I made a deal with the Devil.
I mean, who wouldn’t?
If you could, you would, right?
The things you can ask for, the things you’ll get.
There’s always some kind of twist involved, I know.
But, damn, this was the best milkshake I’ve ever had.
And I said as such.
The Devil was… smiling.
Not that evil grin smiling, but genuinely pleased.
And happy.
“Everybody’s always asking for eternal life, power, women, that kind of stuff,” he said. “But nobody asks for my special handcrafted milkshakes.”
We tapped glassed together and at and watched the sunset over the water.