The Truth

What do you do with a prisoner who has information?
Torture them? You won’t get the information you want out of them. And it’s against the law.
So, the government asked Dr. Odd to come up with a truth serum.
After weeks of research and experimentation, he had one.
But instead of making people speak the truth, everything they spoke became the truth.
Which was not a good thing in the hands of terrorists who wanted to overthrow the government and kill the infidels.
Doctor Odd took the serum himself.
Everything’s changing.
For the better.
And you know that’s true.

Mustache Crime

Before World War 2, bottlebrush mustaches were a popular form of facial hair.
After World War 2, they weren’t popular at all for the obvious reasons.
Just as Japanese-Americans were rounded up and sent to internment camps after Pearl Harbor, bottlebrush mustaches were rounded up and sent to barber shops.
Using the sharpest razors, the bottlebrush mustaches were quickly and systematically dispatched and eliminated, washed down the drains in a foamy and messy river of stubble.
Some tried to escape as disguised as eyebrows. Others fled as landing strips.
To this day, Simon Wiesenthal’s barber continues to hunt them down.

The Sparrow

He called himself usfur duri, the sparrow.
He tried to set off a bomb on a school bus.
It took six men to bring him down. He was still trying to trigger it.
To murder. To kill.
He sat in his cell and didn’t say a word.
FREE THE SPARROW, the Amnesty International posters said.
No mention of the bomb. The children.
He called us evil during the trial.
Guilty. Thirty life sentences.
Years later, he was on the prisoner exchange list. A “goodwill gesture.”
He laughed at us.
We wrapped him in a poster and beat him to death.

If the shoes fit…

Bob lost his right leg in a motorcycle accident. Bill had his left leg blown off after he stepped on a land mine in Iraq.
“Hey, you could buy a pair of shoes together,” said a girl at the bar. “Bob gets the left shoe and Bill gets the right.”
They heard that kind of patronizing crap one too many times, and they both snapped.
When they were both convicted for murder, they shared a prison cell. Sure enough, the warden did the “shoe joke.”
As they beat the fuck out of him, they shouted “We’re not the same size!”

Flight Insurance

I need to fly somewhere.
What? Do I want insurance?
Well, let me take a look.
One insurance plan offers insurance that pays benefits if you die on an airplane.
Another insurance plan offers insurance that pays benefits if you die in a terrorist attack on an airplane.
The second plan costs more, despite the fact that the first plan overlaps the terms of second plan.
Why do people buy the second?
Because they’re afraid? And stupid?
But I’m going to buy it anyway.
Because I could do this through GoToMeeting.
Instead of flying there.
But I’m afraid. And stupid.

Stalin

We walk along the path, looking for the house.
They colored the building green so it would blend in with the trees around it.
Curtains were cut short so nobody could hide behind them.
He watched movies alone so nobody could see him laugh. Or cry.
Emotions were something he didn’t feel appropriate to share.
Carpets were removed from the hardwood floors so he could hear people walking up to him.
We walk the halls where Stalin used to walk, in the house where he got away from it all.
From the nightmare that he created for so many others.

The horse and the men

For centuries, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse owned just one horse.
This arrangement worked out great for when there was just War or Death doing on, but sometimes there were two or three of them on that horse.
Or, when things were particularly bad, all four.
Not only was the load unbearable, but as civilization spread and got more complicated, they had a lot more ground to cover.
The lone horse didn’t particularly like that arrangement, so the gang got three more horses.
Nowadays, they each have several horses. And they’ve hired a full-time vet, trainer, and stable manager.

Aging Badly

Time travel machines are expensive.
So, to pay for the cost of building and maintaining a time machine, I’ve bought an abandoned mine.
In the mine, I found a cache of brandy and wine that had been left to age for a hundred years.
After I auctioned them off, I was able to build the time machine.
Then I bought the brandy and wine to send back in time.
“What about going forward in time?” said an assistant.
“Sure,” I said. And I went ahead a hundred years.
The world was a burnt-out radioactive husk.
(And the wine was spoiled.)

Kill Hitler

Let’s go back in time and kill Hitler.
I have a gun.
You have a time machine.
There’s nothing on TV.
And it’s raining. We can’t go out and play.
Unless.
Is the time machine fully charged?
Good. I’ve got bullets for the gun.
Dad left them in the drawer with the gun.
So, we can go back to Germany and kill Hitler.
What?
It’s just a time machine?
It doesn’t travel?
Then we can’t get to Germany to kill Hitler.
Besides, the rain’s stopping. And the worms are coming out of the grass.
We’ll kill them instead.
Stomp! Stomp!

Don

As he neared the age of fifty, Don Quixote grew weary of endless adventure and battles.
“Go home to your island,” he told his companion Sancho.
Quixote rode his horse Rocinante one last time down the main road, and settled into the old Quijano Estate.
“Please, come back,” wrote his beloved Dulcinea.
But he never did.
Quixtoe hung up his lance, hammered the helmet of The Knight Of The White Moon into a shaving basin, and quietly read books.
“Fight us!” hissed the giants on the hills.
But they were long since dead, and their skeletons turned in the breeze.