Friday, January 26, 2007

Nuggets and Cootfarts

I’ve wanted to get another post up for days – that last one was only supposed to be #1 for a day or so.  Now it’s Friday and I’m scrambling to get a weekend-friendly nugget in place for your discriminating delectation.  And what I’ve got, really, is just a few weirdo bits of thought shrapnel that I am having trouble getting control over.  I actually wrote them down yesterday but I can’t figure out where now.  It was, like, four things worth wasting your time making you read.  Damned if I know what they were anymore. 

So instead I’m going to try a little exercise.  There’s this incident that was so funny when it happened that I sort of blacked out a little with laughter, and so did Kel, who’s usually more phlegmatic about such matters.  Since then we’ve both mentioned it to each other several times with unbounded hilarity.  But it’s not the kind of story you can easily tell someone.  Kel tried a few weeks ago, she says, but it sort of flopped.  So here’s my challenge: can I make this story even partly as funny in words as it was in life?

We were out by a nice lake in the park, one with long lazy lawns leading down to sculpted concrete banks.  Zach was chasing geese up the hill, and I had wandered down a few feet closer to the water.  Before me by the lakeside dawdled a few random ducks, a widgeon or two, and a desultory coot, one of those little mini-ducks all in black with a scrawny white beak.  They have feet that are not so much webbed as just kind of flattened out, and they tend to waddle right up behind their larger waterfowl brethren to scam the odd morsel of pondscum or whatever it is they eat. 

So that’s the set-up: me on a bucolic sloping lawn, with Kel and Zach playing a few yards up the hill from me, and more lawn and the lake in front of me.  I gazed over the rippled water, my mind blissfully empty.  A coot strolled up onto the grass near the lake, settling in on a spot directly in line with Kelly and me.  I serenely let the bird’s presence enter my consciousness.  It lethargically opened its beak, and then it sounded off with a very wet, rattly, rasping buzz of a quack.  It sounded, as Big Rodney once famously described, like somebody stepped on a duck.  More than that, it sounded wretchedly biological, a bilgebog honking that blasted loudly and rudely through the idyllic calm of the afternoon.

Horrified, I looked up the hill to Kelly – who immediately turned to face me, shocked.  I stood, gaping silently, on the grass.  I was between Kelly and the coot; she couldn’t even see it.  It didn’t sound like the kind of noise that would come out of a coot anyway.  It sounded a lot more like human posterior demethanization.  I stood accused, and, per ancient rime, I could not deny.  I could only helplessly turn and point desperately with both hands to the inoffensive little coot that sat on the lawn behind me, insensible to my discomfiture, silent as deadliness. 

Kel wasn’t buying it and smirked skeptically at me.  I turned back to the coot and mentally implored it to do something – anything - to vindicate my deflection of responsibility for that fabulously flatulent sound.  The coot looked at me with the cool detachment of a native watching a tourist get lost, and then, mercifully, it pulled back its head and quacked again – another low floppy noise, digestive and echoless.  I turned again to Kel – she surveyed the coot with surprise and amusement.  She looked back to me; I visibly hove a sigh of relief.  Then we both cracked up.  The coot didn’t seem to get the joke. 

And that’s the cootfart story.  I hope it conveys some little bit of how goddamn funny it was when it happened.  Or maybe you just had to be there.  Regardless, it was fun to try to write it up.  And in the meantime I found my notes from yesterday, so here are the points I wanted to raise:

1) I wrote a post a few weeks ago about all the spam I got in one weekend at work.  I’m now getting spam comments on that post.  I am inclined to leave them there for ironic purposes, though I usually clear such garbage out as quick as I find it.  My question to you, MultiNet InterWob: Do I run any risk leaving it there?

2) Strange career paths: Watching 24, it seems incredible to me that Hamri Al Assad, the erstwhile-evil terrorist mastermind now brokering peace at the cusp of nuclear catastrophe, started his career as the medical officer on the Deep Space 9 station?  Doesn’t that blow your mind?  Similarly, did everyone else already know that when Moses appears on South Park, it’s TRON ? 

3) (cootfart)

4) Finally, after centuries of the Wankel Rotary Engine and pornographic colorforms and caffeinated donuts, science has finally produced something useful: an actual ray gun!  I am thrilled to death, or to the point that I feel I am about to burst into flames spontaneously.  This initial model is a tad bigger than the ones I remember from the comix.  However, if you’re going to try to disperse a street full of angry protesters, you might want to have a nice big truck to stand on when you irradiate them.  There’s no reason to sink to their level while you turn them into screaming, weapon-dropping weaklings.  Democracy can and will prevail – especially now that it’s being promulgated by truck-mounted ray guns!

Okay, so that’s enough goodies for you.  I don’t want to spoil your weekend.  Coming up later, here on the Chucklehut: made-up names, presidio ghosts, and the rude boy on the bus.  Don’t miss a single installment!