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TV Dinner

Nightmare SausageWhat ever happened to the trope of the “bad food” nighttime hallucination? It seemed like there was an era when any television-based father figure who ate a sausage and took a nap, while suffering some sort of moral quandary, would have their rest interrupted by a roaming hallucinatory spirit, or alternate-universe versions of their own children.

Cliff Huxtable eats a hoagie and bam, he’s suffering the delusion that Theo is dropping out of school and Rudy is climbing up his leg with a knife clenched between her teeth.
Huxtable and a Hoagie
For the youngsters in the crowd who might be doubting that this sort of thing happened, allow me to quote a snippet from TV.com, regarding The Cosby Show, season 6, episode 8.

Cliff dreams that the eruption of a volcano in Peru has sent spores into the drinking water and caused men to become pregnant. Cliff, Elvin, Martin and Theo are all pregnant. Theo deals with stares and unkind comments because he is an “unwed father.”

Was ergot poisoning just a lot more common back then?

The Cos wasn’t the only one to suffer through this situation (repeatedly) though, I’m fairly sure that this gag was used in quite a few shows to help grease the wheels for a seasonal ripping off of “A Christmas Carol” – heck, if I recall correctly, the entire run of Newhart was blamed on some bad “Japanese food” in the final episode.
Newhart finaleI’m reminded of this Mitch Hedburg quotation:

I hate dreaming. Because when you sleep, you wanna sleep. Dreaming is work, you know – there I am in a comfortable bed, the next thing you know I have to build a go-kart with my ex-landlord. I want a dream of me watching myself sleep.

Picky (Apple Axiom)

My first taste of Christmas this year involved Alton Brown’s Good Eats – and I learned something during the show which answered a long standing question I’ve had.

Snow White meets the guy in charge of the local produce section

How and why does a single rotten apple ruin the barrel?

First, a little background from botany.org

In addition, ethylene promotes fruit ripening. Like many hormones, it does so at very low concentrations. Apple growers take advantage of this by picking fruit when it is not ripe, holding it in enclosed conditions without ethylene, and exposing it to ethylene right before taking it to market. This process is why we have newly ripened apples grown in temperate North America even in the spring and summer (apples ripen in the fall).

Ethylene acts as the signal for apples to ripen, but if that signal never reaches them, they can apparently be kept – unrefrigerated – for three or four months. The suggested method is to wrap each apple individually in newspaper, then simply store.

The trick is, you’ve got to be careful not to store a bruised fruit alongside your good ones – the bruise will throw off gouts of ethylene, causing your one bad apple to ripen the rest too early, and spoil the bunch.
Snow White Witch with Apple

Flash Pulp 103 – Mulligan Smith and The Strange Woman, Part 1 of 1

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and three.

Flash Pulp

Tonight we present Mulligan Smith and The Strange Woman, Part 1 of 1
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(RSS / iTunes)

 

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Flash Pulp on iTunes.

It’s like Stevie Wonder driving a monster truck.

Find a link it here.

 

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight, Mulligan Smith, PI, encounters a stranger while crawling into an unlikely location.

 

Flash Pulp 103
Mulligan Smith and The Strange Woman, Part 1 of 1

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

 

Mulligan hadn’t meant to encounter the woman, he’d been busy chasing down a job when he happened upon her – still, once he’d found her, he couldn’t leave her.

It was noon, and he’d come sidling down the long strip of paved pathway while babysitting a client’s son. He hadn’t realized the teenager and his friends had come equipped with wheels in the heel’s of their shoes, and the whole group had zipped away with practiced ease before the PI had been able to nonchalantly exit the park bench he’d been patiently occupying.

With the elbows and fists that Mulligan recognized as the hallmarks of high school students who would never master algebra, or basic grammar, the trio had quickly devolved into a rolling hazard of combat racing. Smith had made his best effort to keep up, but running would have made him memorable should Farrel, the wayward son, decide to turn around.

Instead he’d been forced to follow at the best pace he could manage, and when the boys broke from the trail and into the parking lot abutting a long row of townhouses, he had lost his chance to identify the door which they’d entered via the shared hallway that made up the spine of the building.

The lot that adjoined the housing was a barren expanse of pavement, which in turn opened onto a march of high tension power lines. The towers ran east-west, and the path upon which Smith had been traveling snaked at their feet.

The only other feature he might use to remain unseen was a cluster of entwined shrubberies which had been cut into the shape of a massive, erect marshmallow. As he’d approached, Mulligan had guessed the flat top of the topiary was likely owing to a fear of excess growth entangling in the cabling above.

He lamented the lack of his warm Tercel as the wind plucked at his sweater, then he dropped to his belly and began to wiggle beneath the foliage.

It had been a tight fit, but he suspected the position would allow him a superior vantage point for watching the boys’ exit, and it was close enough that, as they passed, he might hear some snippet of dialogue that would help prove if it was actually the place they’d been doing their shopping at.

He’d been careful to keep his face to the ground to avoid the grasping tree limbs, so when his hand brushed against the cloud of golden hair that surrounded the woman’s face, he’d brought up his eyes to find himself within kissing distance of the stranger.

He’d started and scrabbled backwards six inches.

Collecting himself, he looked her over.

Black welts and dried blood marred the length of her body, obvious in her nudity. Her hair had snared in the low hanging leaves, and hung about her face like strands of a ratty curtain.

Her killer had taken care in ensuring her body was as near the center of the cluster of bushes as was possible, and Mulligan knew it was only the strange coincidences inherent in private investigation that had brought him to discover her hiding place – otherwise it would have likely only been breached once the smell had become too much for some passing pedestrian.

Wiggling a hand into the pocket of his hoodie, he pulled free his cellphone and called it in. After he was sure his situation was understood, he hung up. He knew he’d just have to re-answer the same questions later – and yet, he found he could not leave her, not until there was someone to hand her over to.

Had she been pretty? It was hard to tell. Had she been a good person? It was impossible to know.

“What happened to you?” he asked the dead woman.

“Who and why?” There was a ring mark on her temple that he thought might provide a likely lead, but it wasn’t his job to run it down.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve… I’ve got things I’ve got to do.”

Babysitting.

Maybe a convention had already been in the neighbourhood, maybe his truncated call had caused them to pick up their feet, but from beneath the drape of the bush, Smith saw three cruisers pull to hard stops in the parking lot, their lights blinking.

Alongside the building a sliding patio door burst open, and a dozen delinquents pilled out, scattering as they ran.

A trio of familiar faces came pounding in his direction. He spotted Farrel’s horse face opening into a gaping maw as he ran, and watched as the boy’s right hand came up to swallow several mouthfuls worth of unidentified baggies.

“Someone will be here in a minute, I promise,” Mulligan told the woman.

The adrenaline made it easy to extract himself from the bush, and his escape came just in time to intercept his client’s son.

“You, your Mom, and I, have a date with a bottle of laxatives. Then I suspect it’s back to rehab for you, boy-o.”

He worked hard to keep some humor in his voice, but there was none in the rough hand that closed around Farrel’s shoulder.

 

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.

Spotlight on Mr Blog

This month we’ll be exploring the archives of friend of the site, Mr. Blog’s Tepid Ride a bit.

We open with the first of a trilogy of pieces, in which BMJ2K ventures out in search of a knob.

Mr Blog's Tepid Ride

Knobs for Noobs

Some of you may know that for the past two weeks I have been on a quest to replace an air-conditioner knob.

I woke up one morning and, bleary-eyed and wobbly, I wandered over to the a/c to turn it off. My a/c has two knobs- one to turn it on or off and control the fan strength, and another to control the temperature. To turn off the a/c I needed to turn the leftmost knob to the right. I grabbed the rightmost knob, which was already as far right as it would go. “Uh,” I thought. Somehow the thought went through my mind that it must be stuck. So I used all of my sleepy, weary strength to turn it to the right. The shaft of the knob crumbled and the rest of the knob came off in my hand. “Uh,” I thought, and went back to bed with the knob laying on the floor.

I reawakened a few hours later, very cold. I was sure I turned of the a/c, didn’t I? So when I found the broken knob a few things came to mind: “Uh?” and “Was that what I did this morning?”

This wasn’t the important knob- the a/c was already at full temp. I didn’t need it to turn the a/c on or off. But I broke it and it needed to be fixed.

My first thought was to fix the knob. I know how to do this. I had the knob and the two broken pieces (one had to be fished out of the a/c’s frame.) I took some modeling putty and filled the stem. I put a toothpick in the middle to use as a handle. After the putty hardened a bit I smoothed it on the outside and placed the broken pieces on top. The putty would act as a base to properly place the broken pieces in the correct position. I then used Testors modeling glue to adhere the pieces back into place. After a few hours drying time I brushed a thin layer of epoxy on the outside of the stem. The next day after it was dry I gently pulled the putty out of the knob, using the toothpick, being careful not to put any stress on the newly-solid knob. The knob looked good. I took an x-acto knife to scrape out any loose putty and trim an edge of rough glue and it was done.

I waited another day to let it totally dry and solidify and then I slowly placed it back on the metal piece sticking out of the a/c. It fit snugly. Deep breath. Now the test. I turned it, gingerly, to the left. Didn’t move. I used a little more strength, a little more, there it goes- snap! It crumbled in my hand. “Uh.”

So my next step was to buy a replacement knob. My first stop was Home Depot. I know that store well. We had tangled in the past. Despite owning the reputation of having everything anyone could possibly need to put in a tub, sod a lawn, or furnish a castle, I had trouble there a few years back finding some hex screws. On another occasion I could not buy their advertised drill because, as explained by an associate, “it doesn’t exist.” My father’s battles with their Mill Basin store are legendary, with them actually encouraging, no, forcing him to shoplift. I went there with low expectations.

My first stop was their furniture knob and handle section. They didn’t have what I wanted, but I wasn’t expecting to find it there, it was just a short detour on the way to the appliances section. They had a lot models of a/c, and filters galore, but no replacement knobs. I went to the electrical area with, frankly, little hope. I was right, no knob. My next move was going to be very logical. I was going to snag a knob from one of their floor models.

That isn’t shoplifting- I had the broken knob in my pocket and I was just going to make a switch. Floor models get treated rough anyway. Knobs break all the time. I was really just correcting a mistake- this floor model should have a broken knob. And since I should have a new knob, this was a win-win move. Karma.

Or not, since all the floor models were either A- missing knobs or B- digital and didn’t have knobs to begin with. So I left Home Depot.

Home Depot is for poseurs anyway. Real guys go to their local hardware stores. A good hardware store will have anything- Japanese ball joints, metric window screens, socket wrenches with unusual flanges, and those little things that let you stick a polarized plug into a non-polarized outlet and risk a deadly fire. I knew a good hardware store on Cropsey Avenue. They’d have it.

No they didn’t. The store had new owners. It still looked like a good hardware store, but I don’t think much of hardware stores that also sell needlepoint kits and yarn.

Boro Park. Home to dozens of little independent electronic stores. Many of them are the ones always being investigated by channel 2 or channel 5 news for selling rebuilt products as new. I’d shopped there before. They’d sell their shoes if you made the right offer. Those stores are actually pretty good if you know how they operate and what you are looking for. I’d find the knob there.

Out of three stores, I found one guy who was willing to sell me the knob from the air conditioner sitting on a shelf, under a gray-market CD player and a layer of dust. Clearly, this a/c had been there since the parting of the Red Sea. It was old, it was not going to sell, but the knob matched.

Twenty dollars. He wanted twenty dollars for the knob. I offered five and I knew I was overpaying by $4.65. He didn’t want to haggle, he didn’t want to compromise, he wanted twenty dollars. His reason? Without a knob he would have to sell the a/c for less and maybe not sell it at all- who would want an a/c missing a knob? I pointed out that it looked filthy and wasn’t going to sell at all. He pointed out that it was in good condition. I asked him to plug it in and let’s see. He said that he had his hot plate plugged in and he pointed to it. It was as dusty as the air conditioner.

“You cook on that?”
“Soon,” he replied.

It was time to reassess my strategy. I was on my way to Elizabeth New Jersey the next day, to shop at Jersey Gardens. I knew that I wouldn’t find the knob there but it was just down the road from IKEA, the Swedish Superstore. Maybe, just maybe…..

IKEA had a ton of build-it yourself bookcases and some tasty Swedish meatballs in their ultra-clean food court but I left without anything but a “fleurgin,” or a “stzl,” or whatever they called the small set of mugs I bought. I always loved the Swedish Chef on The Muppet Show and I bet he never needed an air conditioner knob.

I was running out of options. Reluctantly, I went online to buy one. This is not how men do things. We men build things, we hunt out replacement parts, we do it ourselves. We don’t buy stuff online unless it is 35% off and free shipping from Amazon. But I didn’t have anything else to do.

The GE website had it. It was $3. This wasn’t so bad. After all, I already offered a guy five. What got me was the shipping- $3.95. It was more than the knob! I would rather go and pick it up myself from wherever they are than spend that. It isn’t the money, it is the principle. That is just a rip-off. Well, I had to order it, and to be smart I ordered two. This knob weighs a couple of ounces. Shipping for one was $3.95. To stick another in the box and ship two cost $5.95. Two dollars more! The knobs were $6 and the shipping was another $6, so two knobs cost me $12. What a racket GE has going.

They came about four days later in a giant envelope that could have easily contained thirty or forty of these things. I am sure that the envelope weighed more than the knobs. OK, it was a padded envelope, but $6 for that? And to add insult to injury the website said they would ship FedEx but the regular mailman brought them. So the actual shipping cost about $1.80 for postage and 98 cents for the envelope.

So know I had the knob, but something wasn’t quite right. It was about 1/16th of an inch too big. Not a lot, just enough to be noticeable. It also had a small dot molded into the face. The original knob did too, but this dot was painted black and the original was unpainted. Not a big deal, but just enough to bug me.

But when I put it on it fit snugly and turned like a dream.

The extra knob is safely in my toolbox.

There is a lesson here. Something about perseverance, or maybe something about technology and obsolescence. Perhaps there is a moral here about big business.

I just think that when you read this you’ll realize that I had a lot of time on my hands and nothing better to do.

But bottom line- I got the knob.

The Goods

http://twitter.com/#!/JRDSkinner/status/10807876738097153

This is basically going to be a post collecting my week together – nothing extravagant, more just a brief tour through the recent highlights of my twitter feed.

Mr Seven is now Mr Eight. In celebration we went to visit Mr. Chuck E. Cheese.

DucksBased on an older design that used real boxers and real ducks.

gargoylesThere was also a “Deal Or No Deal” machine that was frequented exclusively by people over 40.

I still don’t get why a restaurant would present a super-sized rodent as their mascot. “Come to Taco Heaven and meet our mascot, Sammy Salmonella.”

I did get to play some Space Invaders on a stand-up arcade unit, however, so I’ll give the disease-carrier a pass.

Flash Pulp 102 – The Murder Plague: Harm's Return, Part 3 of 3

Welcome to Flash Pulp, episode one hundred and two.

Flash Pulp

Tonight we present The Murder Plague: Harm’s Return Part 3 of 3
[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/skinner/FlashPulp102.mp3]Download MP3
(RSS / iTunes)
(Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3)

 

This week’s episodes are brought to you by Tom Vowler’s new collection “The Method and Other Stories”.

Sure, sacrificing one of your kidneys to keep a loved one alive would be a touching Christmas gift, but wouldn’t this award-winning selection of short tales just be easier?

Find it on Amazon, or find links to special editions and more at http://oldenoughnovel.blogspot.com/

 

Flash Pulp is an experiment in broadcasting fresh pulp stories in the modern age – three to ten minutes of fiction brought to you Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings.

Tonight, Harm has a discussion regarding the madness that seems to have descended upon his hometown of Mass Acres; a discussion which leads to further unpleasant realizations.

 

Flash Pulp 102 – The Murder Plague: Harm’s Return Part 3 of 3

Written by J.R.D. Skinner
Art and Narration by Opopanax
and Audio produced by Jessica May

 

It’s a rough go to take in the death of three people you knew, much less in the space of fifteen minutes. The sight of a familiar face, especially one that could still intake breath and feasibly even provide some explanation as to what had brought on such murderous intention in Catarina and the Hernandez family, left me considerably more eager for the company of the ivory-haired Doctor Henley than I’d ever been previously.

I did my best to pull myself together, then trotted across the road to his doorstep.

He let me in, then promptly returned to his viewing post.

The doctor’s house was orderly, his white faux-leather couch, and matching living room, spotless. Across the glass top of the coffee table lay a spread of outdated National Geographic magazines, and his beige walls were decorated with carefully generic landscape paintings.

It is hard to describe the feeling of suddenly finding myself in that apparently unchanged center of calm. It was something like stumbling from a war zone into a Zen Buddhist’s garden.

As I’ve mentioned, I knew few of my neighbours, but, in truth, Henley was likely the person in town I’d known the longest, as he was my own physician. Still, despite his intimacy with my intimates – or, likely, due to – I’d rarely spoken to him outside of the context of his office, which was also garnished with white faux-leather.

He began to fix me a drink as I entered, which I was too polite to refuse, having never told him about my need to refrain, and I shuffled aside a full-cover spread of the pyramids to make room to set it down.

It seemed little use dancing around the subject, so I began with the news I thought he’d find easiest to take.

“The Hernandezes are dead.”

He nodded, raising his own glass as if to salute them. After a moment he cocked an eyebrow at my abstention, then drank deeply. Finally, he spoke.

“It doesn’t surprise me much. I noticed your car’s been gone these last few days – you’ve been away?”

“Yes, I’ve been camping at the cabin.”

Since I’d been forced to depart my home, my mind had been grinding over the reason behind Catarina’s sudden betrayal. Part of my subconscious had become convinced that nuclear annihilation was imminent, and that she’d simply been conducting the ultimate work-related revenge fantasy. Certainly, if she had some concern about her pay, I’d have preferred she issue a complaint than attempt to lodge a chef’s knife in my ribcage. After finding the Hernandezes in their decomposing state, however, I was beginning to understand that some larger tragedy was in motion.

The doctor confirmed my fears.

“They named it Hitchcock’s disease,” said Henley, “although it’s really a virus. It lays dormant for a few weeks after infection, then begins to work at the survival instincts of the brain. The infected suffers paranoid delusions, and soon after believes the people around them are plotting their demise. They become convinced that the only way to prevent their own death is to murder the other fellow first.”

The doctor finished his glass, and, I must admit, I was mightily tempted to take up my own. He seemed to be watching me closely – I couldn’t blame him, considering.

“Is there no cure? No way to stop it?”

“Oh, yes,” he continued to speak as he left the room. “There is a vaccine. It’s a slow thing, and so civilized in a way. Usually the survivor tries to conceal their crime – the police of course being just another party attempting to do them in.”

He returned, setting a briefcase down on the the gathered faces of a group of aboriginals.

“It takes contact though – contact and opportunity. You can likely still safely order a pizza, if you don’t stop to chat with the delivery guy long enough to give him ideas. Even then, so long as you don’t provide him an opening, and don’t order from that location again, you can probably say your goodbyes and not be concerned.”

As he continued his narration, he pulled back his sleeves and extracted a pair of latex gloves from the interior of his case.

“Yet, if you’re brave enough to leave your window ajar in the evenings, you will hear the sound of shovel-work emanating from many darkened backyards.”

I asked him about the police.

“Well, there’s no television or Internet to deliver the news, but you don’t hear sirens too often either, so I suspect they’re all too busy murdering their families to deal with the public,” was his reply.

He held up a syringe and vial, then jabbed one into the other. Pulling out the painful end, he motioned for me to roll up my sleeve.

I did so.

He leaned over his working area, a thumb pressing at my forearm in search of a vein. He held the needle aloft.

I do not remember fully forming my reasoning, but my hand moved faster than my brain; I plucked the instrument from his fingers with the speed of a child snatching back its favourite toy from a sibling.

In a single motion, I righted the device and thrust it into his leg, fully depressing the plunger.

“I apologize,” I said immediately. “Consider it a game of trust, as I’ve never heard of a vaccine upon which you can overdose.”

He may have attempted to stand and reply, or he may have been attempting to retrieve some tool with which to beat me, whatever the case, he never made it upright. Instead he toppled sideways onto the milky expanse, and, after a moment, a line of bloody drool began to trickle from his gaping mouth.

I had learned the prime lesson of the murder plague: think, at all times, like a person who wishes to murder you.

 

Flash Pulp is presented by http://skinner.fm. The audio and text formats of Flash Pulp are released under the Canadian Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 License.