How to Flip a Coin

Before we all of us begin, make sure you are in a well-ventilated area with no sharp corners or small children; both are likely to poke you in the groin and make you angry. Turn on all the lights and put on some soft jazz. No, we take that back. Turn that crap off.

Supplies Needed:

• One (1) coin minted from the US treasury. It should ideally be legal tender for all debts public and private. If it comes from an amusement park, results cannot be guaranteed as those coins have not been fully tested in a wind-tunnel environment. If the coin you are planning on using has a picture of a Disney character on it, go fill your bathtub up with ice cubes and pointy engine parts and sit in it until you're less of a weenie.
• One (1) fully functional human hand. This hand should be one you personally own and are familiar with. This procedure really only utilizes the thumb and index finger, so a hand with only these two digits will work in a pinch. (Ha! See what we did there?)
• A motor cortex in good working order. Yours isn't. If you can't type out your disagreement with that statement, I'm right.

We're ready to begin! Take the coin out of your pocket, and--what do you mean it's not in your pocket? Where'd you put it? We're not responsible for misplaced coins. It's not our job to keep track of... Okay, we'll wait here until you go get another coin.

What a moron.

Hmm? Nothing. We were just humming a little.

Okay! We see you have inexplicably fetched a pair of Allen wrenches. Very intriguing, but those won't work. Hold on! You stay right there. Here. Use one of our coins. It's a penny.

You may...um...take the Allen wrenches out of your mouth. Just give them here.

Take the penny out of your mouth too. That's okay. You can keep it. It's our gift to you.

Hold out your hand like this, with your thumb vertical and your index finger horizontal, like a pretend gun. The two of them will form an L shape--where are you going? Pretend gun. It's not a real gun. It's just our hand! Come back.

Okay, now curl your index finger, so that it's pointing back at your palm. It will form a sort of horseshoe shape. Tuck your thumb into that--

No, this entire procedure will take place within the confines of a single hand. Stop...stop pointing at your palm. Just put your left hand in your pocket. Good.

Tuck your thumb into and slightly underneath your curled index finger. When you are finished, it will look like your index finger has your thumb in a headlock. But do not panic! Your thumb will be fine. Your thumb can take care of itself.

Place the coin on top of your index finger just below your second knuckle so that it covers the edge of your thumbnail.

Yes, we can wait. You what? Lost it? But you just had it a second ago! Furthermore, it's impossible to lose your thumb like that. No! Not without a lot of screaming and bleeding!

You know what? Never mind.

The Hardass Goes Skiing (Part 1)

"Well, where do you think they go? You don't seriously buy into that 'flying south' nonsense, do you?" The Hardass growled.

He growled this to his girlfriend, delivering the requisite eye contact in sharp, grudging little daggers hurled from the corners of his flint-gray eyes. His forward attention was focused on keeping the M1 Abrams tank off the road. In pandering to the dismayingly large and vocal pansy community, the city had plowed its roadways free of the day's impressive snowfall. This allowed them to become clogged with morons, so The Hardass avoided them altogether.

The Hardass never much cared for paved surfaces anyway. Or ducks.

"Of course they fly south! They don't all die when winter comes! That's terrible!" Chastity said, her face distorted by womanly anguish.

The Abrams flattened some road signs. "Nature is terrible," The Hardass said. "And I didn't say they ALL died, dammit. Next spring, when the smart ones are coming out of hibernation, look real close at one and then tell me that a duck would be able to walk all the way to Florida. There's no way they'd make it. They're too soft."

"They don't walk, silly. They fly," Chastity said, her face distorted by womanly respect for ducks.

"Have you ever seen one flying?" The Hardass grunted, bracing himself as the Abrams ramped up over a snowbank, taking a brief flight of its own. Trailing a festive ribbon of uprooted chain-link fence, it landed in a parking lot with a pavement-shattering boom.

Chastity picked herself up off the floor and crawled back into her seat. "Yes, I have," she said, her face distorted by womanly smugness.

"No, you haven't," The Hardass said, forestalling any further backsass and flawed optimistic nonsense. "We're here. Let's go conquer this bastard." He punched open the hatch.

Imagine, if you will, that our narrative camera zooms out, widening our field of vision by perhaps a factor of ten. Moving, say, to the point of view of a startled family who had been happily piling out of their minivan twenty yards away. Startled out of their mittens by a ground-shaking crash, they snapped 'round to find a tank--an honest-to-God military tank!--in the middle of the parking lot. It was tilted at a jaunty angle, half in and half out of its impact crater, a steady plume of black smoke issuing from one end.

Suddenly, on the tank's turret where there had an instant before been a circular steel hatch, there was only a fist. Glancing quickly up, one might just be able to see the hatch lid spinning skyward, like a flipped coin. The fist lowered itself back into the tank's interior, and in its place rose a woman. She stepped gingerly from the hand that was raising her, and then down to the ground.

Then, silence, while the woman waited, tapping her foot impatiently, hands on hips.

There was a bout of muffled profanity, a sound like a very big cork popping out of a very big bottle, and a giant man with craggy features and a disregard for all things soft and sweet (unless those things had breasts) launched himself from the mangled hole in the turret. He somersaulted in midair and came to rest face-first on the asphalt beside the woman.

Taking the permanent marker the woman offered him, the giant man signed his name next to the imprint his face had made in the asphalt, ate the marker, and the two of them walked into the ski lodge.

"Hello!" Chastity greeted the teenager behind the ski rental counter. He looked up in time to see The Hardass eat the little sliver bell on the counter. He frowned, reached into a bag full of bells and put a new one on the counter. The Hardass ate that one too.

"Tanner," said the teenager.

"Dave," said The Hardass.

Chastity looked surprised. "Have you been here before?" she asked The Hardass. He and Dave both said "yes" at the same time. "When?"

"Few months ago, we got a call about some possible illegal drug use goin' on at this joint. A pack of hippies was holed up in here, free-lovin' and smokin' the wuss weed, and I had to break 'em up."

"You put three of my friends in the hospital," snapped Dave.

The Hardass ate another bell.

"That's what I said. So now I come down here every once in a while to make sure the place ain't infested with hippies again, and I get the stink-eye from this little shit."

"Well!" said Chastity hurriedly. "Um, Dave, we'd like to rent two sets of skis and get a lift ticket, if you'd be so kind!"

Preaching

The room was big. The ceiling was way up there. It was pocked with reflector floods that filled the room with amorphous light. The walls were barren white with one incongruous strip of dark-stained walnut that circled it at waist height.

Waist height to most of the people the room was filled with.

At its front, on the beach of the sea of seated reporters, was a stage. On that stage was a podium, and behind that was a man. He spoke.

"What would a world with no energy shortages be like?" he asked, leaning forward, his intense eyes flashing, his brows raised.

"Impossible!" shouted someone in the crowd.

"Stupid!" shouted another.

Clearly taken aback, the man behind the podium straightened up and the fire in his eyes guttered. "Wait. What?"

A woman with her dark-stained walnut hair in a bun stood, a pen to her lips. "Well, it would be impossible," she said, wagging the pen in a little admonitory arc. "If that were possible, why hasn't anybody figured it out until now? It seems something that useful would have been discovered a long time ago."

The lights in the room got brighter.

"Plus, to have something like that is just dumb!" said a man in a black turtleneck. He stood and spread his arms. "If energy was all free and plentiful and clean, millions of people would lose their jobs! Clearly it is in everyone's best interest to keep things the way they are."

The hum of the air-handling system increased in pitch.

The man behind the podium smiled wryly. "But what happens when we can no longer keep things the way they are? Eventually we are going to run out of stuff to burn. What then?"

"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it," said the woman.

The overhead lights brightened to a white-hot glare. The leaves of the potted plants on the corners of the stage rustled in the breeze from vents in the ceiling.

The man behind the podium lifted his chin, allowing the breeze to ripple his hair. The intense light glinted on his glasses. "I'll just come right out with it then. My team and I have built a system that converts human stupidity into pure energy. It's this system that is powering everything in this room right now. As you can tell, it works. All that remains is large-scale production and deployment."

"It's cost-prohibitive!" said the man in the turtleneck.

All at once, the flood lights popped like flashbulbs and the room went dark. From overhead came a metallic shriek followed by a muffled sound like a handful of marbles in a blender, and the air fell still.

"See, I told you it wouldn't work," said the woman.

Suburban Wasteland

I like that title. I'm not sure why. And I'll bet it's been used before by trenchcoated teenagers with their nails painted black with permanent marker and all sorts of piercings they regret to describe the exquisite hatefulness that is being a doughy white kid living in comfort so comfortable it's painful.

Did any of that last sentence make sense to you? Yeah. Those kids are stupid, aren't they?

I'm outside, on the porch, with a Pepsi and a netbook. I am sitting in a pre-Enlightenment-era cast-iron bench that looks like it was designed to either impress old ladies or grill meat. Or both. It's the stupidest thing ever, and I wish I had some poots to defile it with.

The sun is out, and there are happy children scooting around on skateboards and bicycles and basically just being carefree and oblivious to their impending doom.

Well, I assume that their doom is impending. They may end up avoiding it altogether, and what a shame that would be.

But it's very pleasant, this porch-sitting. I just mowed the lawn and attacked some weeds, and that's where this little utopia kind of falls down for me.

See, I hate yard work. I don't mind pushing a mower--rather like it, in fact--but I can't stand the rest. There are old men on my block who devote entire DAYS to going out with a soft baby's hairbrush to individually polish blades of grass and who apparently make their own bark mulch from scratch out of cellulose they grew in culture in their basement laboratories.

I hate them. It makes me look lazy, and I've been trying to hide that.

Speaking of lazy, I have underground sprinkling, but I haven't turned it on all year. Just as well, since I don't know how to winterize the pipe, and it burst sometime last winter. There are seven valves I have to turn in the proper sequence to squeeze all the water out of the thing. I did it wrong, and now water shoots out of it in two different spots in a festive display of terrible design.

I picture the sprinkler man standing in the yard, staring at the side of the house, with one finger up his nose and the other darting off on its own to point at squirrels.

"Hurp!" he'd be saying. "I say we gits a pipe made outta copper foil and make it run out of the side of the house, durr, and up about three feet. Next, and for no reason whatsoever, we glue on a little horizontal bit just a-bristlin' with doodads! Hurr, after that, make it go back down four feet and disappear into the ground!"

"Why," his boss probably asked, "wouldn't you make it come out of the house and then go directly into the ground? Having all that exposed pipe with the thin walls is just begging for it to trap water and burst when the water freezes."

The sprinkler man got his way, of course. He probably made a very persuasive argument by pulling a catfish out of the front pocket of his bib overalls and waaaaaving it around. You just don't argue with a man like that.

The lawn was seeded years ago with rare and expensive Texan Wuss Grass, which turns brown, shrivels up and blows away under the following conditions: all of them. Sprinkling it doesn't help. My grandfather, (an old man whose lawn is museum-quality) says it's the pine trees sourin' up the dirt. I knew it. I knew those smug bastards were up to something.

The weeds, of course, have absolutely no trouble at all. If it were up to me, I would take out all the grass and put down some rocks. Maybe paint the rocks green to fool the near-sighted.

The house is situated on the corner where one street T-intersects mine. The driveway is split at the end, and empties out onto each street. Between the ends, in the angle formed there, there is a little miniature forest complete with oak trees that poop seedlings all year and, of course, big wads of weeds.

I went outside to glare at them. "Stupid weeds. I hate you. I hate you. You know what I'm going to do? No, not go back inside and not think about you. I'm done with that. I'm going to get some poison, and I'm going to put it in a spray bottle!"

At this point, the bigger weeds started laughing.

Speaking louder, I continued, "and then I'm going to come out and douse you with doom! And I don't care what Wikipedia says; I choose to believe that weeds can feel pain. Oh, just you wait!"

I stalked back inside and mixed up a bottle of weed murder. I put it in a bright orange bottle that once contained dollar-store spray cleaner. Then I went on the attack.

I wish I could call it a rampage. But it wasn't. It was the saddest thing you've ever seen.

A man in jeans and a T-shirt with what appeared to be a bottle of spray cleaner, stood in his driveway, stoically squirting weeds. The bottle made a soft "ffft" sound and some clear liquid pattered onto the laughing weeds. Then, nothing happened. A gentle breeze stirred the weeds, causing them to wave obscenely at the man.

An old lady happened by. "Cleanin' yer weeds?" she asked.

"Murdering...them!" the man said through gritted teeth.

"Aw, ain't that something!" she said. "Looks like ya got quite a crop growin' there."

"I need a flame thrower," muttered the man.

"Ffft," said the spray bottle.

I'll be keeping an eye on the weeds over the next few days to see if they die. If it works, I'll refill the bottle and attack the other side of my forest. What will probably happen, though, is the wind will blow some of the poison off the weeds and onto the lawn, killing it instantly. The weeds will become immune to the poison, mutate, and start feeding on birds.

And then, when all the songbirds disappear and the night is filled with the belching of my weeds, the neighbors really will start to complain.

Hell's Fender

Have you ever read Dante's Inferno? You have? It doesn't matter; I'm going to explain it anyway. It's called "padding" and all the good writers do it.

Basically, this fellow named Dante is walking around in the woods, when some big carnivores start chasing him. Dante is not prepared for this sort of assault because evidently he is a big dopey white guy wearing flip-flops and a beer hat. So he starts barging sweatily through the underbrush in random directions and eventually trips and falls into a hole that leads to Hell.

Fortunately for Dante, the Roman poet Virgil is just sort of hanging out down there, smoking a cigarette and fooling around with a yo-yo, and Virgil knows his way around Hell.

Unfortunately for Dante, Virgil decides that as long as Dante's dropped by, he might as well show him around the place. So it's off on a guided tour of the Nine Circles of Hell!

We get to come along with Dante as he sees what Satan has in store for all the assholes on Earth. We learn that Hell is a surprisingly organized place, with multiple levels, each one dedicated to a particular class of asshole. Imagine it sort of like an inverted Devo hat, where all the really horrible people are way down at the bottom, and the foul-mouthed used car salesmen are nearer the top.

Only the worst of assholes live in the bottom of this hat.

The hierarchy observed by Dante seems a little arbitrary to me. For example, Betrayal is the Ninth Circle, the very bottom of our Devo hat. But Violence only makes it down to Circle Seven. So if you've ever promised a cold beer to a friend, and then said "ha! I drank it before you got here, sucker!" you're worse than a serial killer.

On second thought, maybe Hell's got it right after all. Carry on, Hell.

The First Circle, Limbo, is full of nice atheists who get a relatively pleasant place to live (it has a castle!) but occasionally get depressed because Limbo is basically just a shitty knock-off of the real heaven. They're not actively punished, but are forever reminded that they could have had a much nicer castle if only they hadn't been so stubborn. Presumably, there is bacon in Limbo, but it's not very good.

Beyond that, each Circle has its own eternal punishment regimen, tailored to its residents. The Second Circle, Lust, gives its tenants what-for by blowing their souls around in some wind. Take that, you indiscriminate fuckers! That'll teach you to leer at people's dirty, sinful bodies! To make matters worse, they're probably tormented by the fact that the eternal wind never blows anyone's skirt up.

What about the Betrayers? Oh, they get the worst of it. They're frozen, half-submerged in a lake of ice. And imprisoned in the middle of that lake is Satan himself, biting forever on the heads of the worst bastards the human race had yet produced. Shouldn't have lied about that beer, Mr. Iscariot. You brought this on yourself.

So it seems like Hell's got things pretty well taken care of, but I say there's always room for improvement. First of all; nine circles? It's such a...not-ten number! I suggest adding a new First Circle of Hell and promoting all the others. For that, we will need a new analogy. Toss out that Devo hat; we're using a lousy picture of my car's front wheel instead.

The Wheel of Hell

The layout is pretty similar to Dante's Nine, where the real assholes are wrapped around the lugnuts, getting shit on by two-ton hellpigeons, and the heretic scientists are hanging out in Limbo up on the tire. The O in "Dunlop" is like a hot tub, but the water's just a little too chlorine-y, and there's always one bubble jet that's broken.

I propose the new First Circle be located somewhere on the fender. Limbo will remain the nicest place on the Wheel of Hell, even though it is no longer the First Circle, because its occupants at least made an effort to be pleasant human beings. Their punishment is sort of self administered, because of their knowledge of their "mistake" and of a possible better outcome. Plus, they get to spin around with the rest of the Wheel, which is sort of like a sub-par carnival ride. Enjoyable, but kind of blah.

Off the Wheel entirely, we have folks who don't know anything, and never bothered to find out. These are the people who are annoying, but have no idea why. They are the ones who put the Confederate flag on their Silverados because they think it labels them individualists or free spirits or something. Here, next to the sparrow poo and the splattered moths you will find the people who ask "why're you so quiet?" when you don't talk to them at work. They stand in the middle of the aisle at the store and talk on their phone, waving their arms in dramatic gestures that their listener cannot see and which occasionally slap passers by and knock the bottles of shampoo out of their hands.

The Permanently Oblivious, the Overly Perfumed.

We join Virgil and Dante at the dark entrance to the Underworld, in this lost (and badly translated) chapter of Dante's Inferno. We are about to take a tour of Hell's Fender.

The (new) First Circle of Hell

Virgil led me into a big gray stone building with tall wooden doors. There were potted plants in the lobby, and those rubber floor mats with the little cone-shaped pointy bits that make your feet feel all squirrelly when you walk on them.

Here, I noticed that the people were poorly dressed, but that not all of them were wearing Dale Earnhardt T-shirts. Some had suits and ties, but the ties were knotted with a variety of haphazard tangles, and many walked with a hunched gait, as their ties were zipped into their pants. They looked perturbed about this, but had evidently resigned themselves to the inconvenience, the resolution to the problem presenting an even greater struggle in their eyes.

Most of them seemed incapable of closing their mouths. Their slack jaws, furrowed brows and firm handshakes marked these people as good-hearted but oblivious.

We walked past a brightly-lit room full of people sitting around a elliptical conference table and stopped in its doorway. Two women were talking loudly to each other in a corner, and I saw at least five men picking their noses. One man repeatedly leaned forward in his chair, knocked over his glass of water and stammered an apology while righting the glass and wiping ineffectually at the spill with his tie. Somehow, the glass was always full when he leaned forward to knock it over again.

"These people are trapped in an eternal meeting where none of them knows what is supposed to be under discussion," explained Virgil. I was about to ask that we move on, when a man stood up to speak. His stature was hunched forward uncomfortably because his tie was zipped into his fly.

"Now, uh, ladies and gentlemen, I, um, suppose we should, uh, probably--MMPH!"

As soon as the man had gotten to his feet, an enormous fat man had leaped out from behind the water cooler. This struck me as rather odd, as he was easily eight feet tall and six feet wide. He had dark red skin, like that of a bell pepper, horns, and was wearing a dirty tank top. He had crossed the room while the standing man was beginning his speech, and nobody noticed him. He'd sneaked up on the man from behind and stuffed the man's head into his armpit.

"Gwuh huh huh!" the fat red man said, making a rude noise with his armpit. He released the man and minced happily past me out the door, streaming an arrow-tipped tail in his wake.

"Goddammit! Who keeps doing that?" spluttered the standing man. The people around the conference table shrugged. The nose pickers picked on, and the water glass guy knocked it over again. As Virgil led me on, I saw another man stand and clear his throat. When we passed into the hallway, I heard him begin to speak.

"I just think we ought to--MMMPH!"

"Hee hee harpgh!"

"Goddammit!"

As the fat man tiptoed at high speed down the hall behind us, I asked Virgil who he was.

"That is the form Satan takes at this level," he explained. "He's not so much an agent of one's eternal, insufferable damnation down here, but more like a really annoying Little League coach. He is always sweaty and his name is Hank. Come, I have more to show you."

The next room we came to was dimly lit with people sitting around numerous small, round tables. At the front of the room was a stage, picked out by a bright spotlight. On the stage stood a man in a Dale Earnhardt T-shirt. He was holding a microphone in one hand, and some 3x5 cards in the other.

"You know what they say about men with, um, big feet, am I right?" he said with forced enthusiasm.

"They need special socks?" called out a voice from the crowd.

"Big shoes!" said another.

"They like pasta! That's it, right? Pasta? It's pasta!" hooted a third.

"No!" the struggling comedian said, throwing his cards down in exasperation. "They say they have big dicks! Big dicks!"

"Did someone say Big Dick?" shouted someone from the back of the room. Suddenly, and with stunning speed, a big fat red guy thundered up to the stage and stuffed the comedian's head into his armpit.

"Bweh heh heh!" he chuckled sweatily, and sprinted from the room.

"Goddammit!"

"In this room," whispered Virgil, leading me back out into the hallway, "everyone must take turns being a terrible comedian working a very stupid crowd. Naturally, Hank puts in his appearance as well."

"I thought he said his name was Dick."

"Satan says a lot of things," sighed Virgil.

"He sure gets around well for such an, um, rotund fellow," I said.

"Well, down here he is able to move at superhuman speeds, and none of the residents of this Circle are able to hear him coming. His clammy embrace is always a surprise because they are not allowed to identify their tormentor. In a permanent state of bewilderment, being visited by Hank in such a manner can be quite jarring."

"I bet. So what did they do to deserve such treatment?"

"In life, these people were told time and time again that their habits were annoying, but they never bothered to take heed. Many of them responded by scratching themselves and saying things like "come on! Lighten up!" They were all the stupid people who ever went through a 12-items-or-less checkout lane pushing two carts full of items with all the barcodes scratched off."

"I see. So they're doomed to a life of being eternally fed their own medicine?"

"Exactly. An eye for an eye, my friend. May the punishment fit the crime. Now, look upon this next room."

In the room we'd stopped in front of, I saw a single man at his kitchen table. He was shirtless and wearing a pair of boxer shorts. Spread out in front of him on the table was a newspaper crossword. The man frowned at the paper, picked up his glasses, and dropped them on the floor.

"Durg," he muttered. He picked up his glass of orange juice and drained the last half in a gulp. He got up, glass in hand, and walked to the refrigerator. As soon as he opened it, a big fat red guy jumped out and stuffed the newspaper man's head into his armpit.

"Doo hoo hoo!" Satan chuckled, prancing out of the room and down the hall.

"Goddammit!" said the newspaper man, darting a confused look around the room. "What the--?"

I had seen enough. Knowing that there were still another nine Circles to visit, I asked Virgil if we could move on. He obliged.

"Indeed. I think you'll probably like Limbo," he said, showing me out through another pair of tall wooden doors. "The people there are pretty interesting, but not for more than a few minutes."

Red Dead Redemp---HEY! Get back here!

Howdy, fellow video gamers!

What's that? You...oh. I see. Okay. I'm still gonna talk about it, though.

It all started with the purchase of a recently released video game that perhaps even you have heard of: Red Dead Redemption. The game, made by famous and infamous developer Rockstar Games, puts you into the digital boots of a digital man named John Marston.

I could go into the story, but I'm not. I'm also not going to talk about the gloriously free, open-ended gameplay and "sandbox" style level design that allows you to see a mountain in the distance, start running, and eventually (holy crap, it wasn't just a picture of a mountain!) climb it, but I'm not. I could even talk about all hookers and shooting and violence in the game. But I'm not. Because I'm sure all the paranoid parents with stupid kids have told you all about it.

I guess you can see which side of the fence I'm on when it comes to "mature" content in video games. I figure if you didn't bother teaching your kid the difference between real life and sweaty button-punching, then you deserve to have him turn out weird. If you forbid him to play a game and he gets a hold of it anyway and manages to play through it without you finding out, then he's outsmarted you. And you should be proud of him for that.

The videogame nerd sites had multiple orgasms about the game's depth and how "fully realized" the world is. Just chock fulla minor characters, this world, all dynamically generated on-the-fly, along with an entire ecosystem of animals! And all of this goes through a day-night cycle with dynamic weather!

Poppycock. I'll admit that the weather effects and lighting are pretty darn impressive. But except for the cutscenes, all the human characters in the game are animated like retarded marionettes. Occasionally you'll catch one moving in a somewhat realistic manner, but I guarantee that if you watch them long enough, you'll see all the corners Rockstar cut to keep the game under budget. When the physics system twitches, it's like the puppeteer sneezed, sending the marionette flailing around like a startled hamster.

Oh, and all the fantastic realism you see along the side of the road during your travels on horseback? Why, you'll actually believe you're in the Old West, on accounta all the Old Westy things you see happening out there! A fully-realized world with endless opportunity for interaction!

Spoiler alert! Here, "endless" means "four".

You'll see four things happening out on the plains: a lone man standing in the middle of nowhere shooting at birds, a lone man being shot at by two or three others, a lone man being chased by coyotes, or a lone sheriff who needs help recapturing escaped prisoners.

Soo...

Why is that man just standing in the middle of the moonlit desert shooting at owls? Why the hell would he or anyone else be willing to pay you ten dollars if you can shoot four owls in 30 seconds? What did they ever do to him? That man just really hates birds, I guess. Maybe one of them touched his wife.

And the guy being attacked by coyotes? If you shoot them, he will be so grateful, he'll pay you five bucks for saving his ass. A little bit poorer but a whole lot wiser, the man will then happily wander off into the desert, where he will almost immediately be set upon by more coyotes. An attentive gunslinger could probably make a good living shadowing this particularly stupid and tasty individual.

I dunno. Maybe that is realistic? I wasn't around back then.

The gunfights also end with the survivor(s) wandering off into the desert to be attacked by coyotes. Probably because they didn't have any bullets left to shoot at the owls.

So it's not realistic.

But here's the thing: that's the best part. This is why I love this game! The main narrative be damned. The best part of this game is the unintentionally funny things that happen all the time when you see it bonking its head against the wall of finite technology resources.

Picture a dusty little town in the sun-drenched plains of New Mexico. Picture all the wooden buildings with their hanging gas lamps and horses hitched to the rails out front. There's the saloon with its bat-wing doors, the general store, the town doctor, the train station. It's late afternoon, and the shadows are stretched long over the hoof-pounded dust of the main street. Men lean against the walls of the saloon, under canopies, their faces shaded by their hats. The horses swat flies with their tails, their pointed ears swiveling. It's a peaceful evening in one of the hundreds of little towns in the Old West.

But wait! Here comes a crazy man! He leaps from the roof of the saloon and lands with a grunt in the middle of the road. He jumps to his feet and breaks into a run, moving from standstill to full-out sprint faster than humanly possible. He runs at breakneck pace into the side of a horse! Undeterred, the stranger continues to run, his arms flailing wildly, his legs pistoning up and down in a blur. But he is not making progress; just running as if the ground beneath him were made of ice with his face planted in the horse's flank.

"Good evening for it, mister," says the horse's rider. This inappropriate response seems to snap the furiously running man out of his reverie, for he immediately stops trying to force his body through the horse and stands there briefly. Then, as if remembering an important appointment, he punches the horse and runs off at full tilt, the rider's parting words hanging in the dust behind him: "Billy James once sawr a wolf th' size of a barn door, no foolin'!"

Blam! The strange man parts the bat-wing doors of the saloon with his face and makes a flying leap onto the bar top, scattering shot glasses and beer steins. The bar's patrons greet him with polite howdies. He responds by going into a crouch and punching air for a bit. Tiring of this, he jumps down and sprints around the room in mad circles, plowing into everyone. The unlucky townsfolk in his path seem to offer no resistance; as soon as the stranger's body comes into contact with them, their muscles all relax at once and they crumple to the wooden floor with indignant cries of "hey!" and "you'd better watch it, mister!" and "my outhouse gots sticks in it!".

Evidently not satisfied keeping his barging spree confined to one floor, the strange man heads upstairs. He is greeted there by the establishment's sultry escorts. "You lookin' for a good time, mister?" they inquire sweetly. The man responds by shoving them over the rail and onto the floor below! What a bastard. Obviously, this sociopath is dangerous. The ladies take defensive action by...calmly walking over to a post and leaning seductively against it. "You look like you could use a good rubdown, mister," one can be heard saying to a nearby man.

Infuriated by the womenfolk's total fearlessness, the stranger runs face-first into a locked door for ten seconds.

Cut to a shot of the saloon's outdoor balcony. Two women (probably twins) dressed in identical outfits rest languidly against the railing. One of them is smoking a cigarette. Suddenly, the doors in front of them burst open, and the strange man comes charging out at full speed. He hits the railing opposite the doors with his pelvis, taking the full brunt of the hit without flinching or toppling over.

"Howdy, mister, you look like--" one of the women starts to say before the crazy man shoves her down the stairs. The other woman continues smoking her cigarette until the man pushes her over the railing. She lands on her face, gets to her feet and stands there a full two seconds while her PowerPC-based brain decides what to do next. She settles on screaming and running off into the desert to be eaten by coyotes.

An entire streetful of people watch this little exchange without breaking stride. The stranger then jumps from the balcony, landing with an "ooomph!" that turns the screen red momentarily, and whistles for his horse. The horse, standing ten feet away from the West's laziest sociopath, trots over. The man mounts, and without saying a word, gallops off into the open desert. On his way, he purposely knocks down three people.

If we were to follow our strange new acquaintance, we would find him dismounting occasionally to kick armadillos, chase skunks and pick flowers. Happening upon farms also affords him the opportunity to kick goats and lasso pigs.

This is where we must leave him, because it gets pretty monotonous from here on out. The man is driven, evidently, by a powerful and insane urge to punt chickens and shove donkeys, and will not rest until he has kicked one of each species of animal in the game. He tackles this mission with steadfast resolve.

Oh, and I've been told that there are bears somewhere in the game. I can't wait to kick a bear.

The FooDaddy's Adventures in Pipe Land - Conclusion

I'm going come right out and spoil the surprise right now: I did manage to get my drain unclogged without calling a professional.

I figure I had better get that out of the way so my hordes of adoring fans can finally rest easy. No more lying awake at night wondering whether or not I had defeated the Mashed Menace. "Did he prevail?" you were no doubt asking your haggard reflection in the toaster at 3AM. "Did the pipe burst and coat his basement with goo? Wouldn't it be easier to butter the bread, then toast it?"

Since I'm pretty certain that answers from your toaster were not forthcoming, I will answer them for you. No. If you butter the bread first, it makes a huge mess. If you did get answers from your toaster, reading this blog is probably the last thing you should be doing if you value your mental health.

If you don't, why, read on then! When you're done, you and I should get some cardboard, make some signs and go yell stuff in public. I'll wear my tuxedo.

And what of the pipes? I'm pleased to report that after a trip to Wal-Mart and $11 later, water and assorted solids and semi-solids are once again trekking happily through them. I had to make the trip to the store, because I did not have the clogbusting equipment I needed here at the house. This isn't to say that I did not have any equipment at all. I did.

It's just that it sucked.

You may recall that I had decided to resort to chemical warfare after the miserable defeat of my twin plungers and Sink-Perched-Drain-TurboHumping (patent pending). Sadly, the half-bottle of dollar-store drain slime I half-heartedly tipped into the sink had no effect whatsoever on the diabolical potato flakes. All it did was add a bleachy smell and an "in case of skin contact, flush thoroughly with water for 5 minutes" to the festering bog of spudwater.

Instead of fixing the problem, I'd gone and made it stinky and poisonous. I also couldn't try plunging it again, because I had to open the window to let the bleach fumes out, and the neighbors might see me. I settled for swearing and stomping around the kitchen in an angry little circle.

Ah, but hope was not lost! There was always the basement. The basement of this house is full of ancient tools left behind by three generations of people I'm named after. Also, spiders.

Oh, I spoke too soon. Hope was indeed lost. The only thing I found was this misbegotten piece of equipment designed in the dark by vengeful elves with access to only 19th century metallurgy and bottomless buckets of mischief.

Have you ever opened the back of an old spring-driven pocketwatch? Have you ever then proceeded to drop it? The part that goes "twaaannng!" and sends a cloud of microscopic bits of brass raining down all around you is the mainspring. It is a ribbon of steel twisted into a reluctant coil that spends the rest of its miserable existence fighting to untwist itself. Harnessing this struggle is what powered your watch during its non-dropped phase of life. Freed, its years and years of pent-up hatred for you comes out in a catastrophic explosion of tiny gears and bits of glass.

Now imagine a coil fifty times the size of the one in your watch. Imagine that it has been rusting away in a basement for untold decades, getting shit on by spiders. Also imagine that it is inexplicably tipped with a little spring-loaded brass dildo.

Now imagine that I want to heap insult upon insult and stuff this thing into a pipe full of bleach-flavored potato gunk.

Needless to say, it did not end well. Thirty minutes of wrangling the wretched thing around the cramped space under my sink, fending off its attempts to lacerate my face and arms served only to splatter everything with unspeakableness and to fill me with a deep hatred of pocketwatches.

"Screw this noise," I said, casting the springsteel demon into a corner. I pointed at it. "Fuck that thing and everything that looks like it," I announced to the cats. "I'm going to have to break down and do what I'd been trying to avoid all day: put on pants."

I cleaned myself up and, fully pantsed, drove to Wal-Mart. I believe I have mentioned before my reasons for hating shopping. This had to be done, though, so I sucked it up and strode purposefully into the store.

"I need a pipe auger," I said to the teenagers loitering behind the counter in the store's built-in Subway sandwich shop. I quickly moved on before they could respond.

Let's see now...I need plumby stuff. Bathroom stuff? That's gotta be close enough. Bathrooms are, like, 90 percent plumbing. Right?

I found myself staring at a veritable cliff-face of toilet seats. Thousands of them, stretching to the ceiling and yards to the left and right, in every color you can imagine. More colors than the screen on my laptop is capable of reproducing. Some of them were cushioned. Some of them had the logos of professional sports teams on them.

"Why would anyone want to crap on the Detroit Lions?" I asked the wall of seats. "Oh, yeah," I answered myself, rolling my eyes.

I moved on to a section labeled "Do It Yourself," which yielded results. I found a device called a "pipe auger" that looked like some sort of surgical tool designed by perverts for use on other perverts. It was a big funnel with a bunch of (electrical conduit?) coiled up inside and a corkscrewy bit of wire coming out the end. It had a handle mounted perpendicular to the funnel's pointy end, and a wingnut, and a sort of crank knob thing, and...


Yeah. Like that.

I picked the thing up by its knob and carried it at arms length to the checkout aisle. I threw it down on the belt and watched it glide up to the cashier.

"Did you find everything okay?" she asked, eyeing the device.

"God, I hope so," I said, wishing that she would hurry up and put that thing in a bag. It sort of scared me.

"What's so funny?" she asked, this time eyeing me.

"Those potatoes don't know what they're in for," I said. I pointed to the auger. "I'm going after them with that." I winked. "Fuck them," I added.

As I left, I saw the cashier carefully place the bills I'd paid her with into a plastic bag and then place the bag into a small cardboard box and then set that box on fire.

Once home, I placed my auger on the floor in front of the sink. I gathered a few towels and a pitcher of water and a crucifix and made sure my cellphone was charged up. Confident that I was fully prepared, I grabbed a bottle of beer out of the fridge. if I was going to do this right, I was going to need fortification.

Basically what I'm saying here is that my bottle of Michelob had a better idea of how to go about this project than I did, and that I would have to drink it if I wanted to absorb its precious, precious knowledge.

Holding the auger by its handle, I gave the crank on top an experimental twist. The bit of wire on the end turned lazily. Ah HA! So this was the part of my ultimate weapon that was going to claw its way though the clog! This fearsome, chrome-steel...tiny...bit...of...corkscrewy wire on the end of a cable that rotated in a slow-motion ballet of flaccid unremarkability no matter how fast I hauled away at the crank.

Awesome.

I dunked the corkscrew into the pipeful of goo. Then I loosened the setscrew on the end of the auger and fed in some more of the auger's cable. I tightened it back up again, and tried the crank.

A noise like a chipmunk trying to claw its way out of a bowl of pancake batter drifted out of the pipe. This was followed by the situation displaying a stunning reluctance to improve.

The next twenty-five minutes or so was pretty much a repetition of this. I shoved more of the cable down the pipe until I encountered resistance and cranked away until my arms hurt. Shove. Crank. Repeat. Shove, swear, crank. Swear. Pull some cable out. Marvel at how much gunk was stuck to it. Swear at gunk. Take off pants. Swear at pipe.

Toward the end, the situation had degenerated into this scene: a pantsless man, covered in splattery bits of mashed potatoes furiously stabbing a pipe with a cable and yelling insane threats into the end of it. "Don't make me come down there! God help me, I'll use the gasoline if I have to!"

Finally, miraculously, the potatoes gave way under the sheer brute force of my assault, and with a parting "blorrrrk," they shoved off downstream to trouble me no more.

I cheered. I poured pitcher after pitcher of water into the pipe, cheering each time the contents went down without impediment. I pulled out the nearly fifteen feet of the auger's cable I'd stuffed down the pipe and watched helplessly as wad after wad of gunk pattered onto the floor before I could catch it with a towel.

There was a lot of cleanup and the plumbing still had to be reassembled. Before I tackled that, though, I had to get something to eat.

A dish involving mashed potatoes.

I would eat them with the pointiest fork I could find.

I would eat them angrily and out of spite.

And I don't care what the restaurant people said, I wasn't going to wear pants while I did so.