Five Anecdotes With Which To Arm Yourselves

1. Not content with a merely ‘firm’ foundation, Samuel chose instead to build his dream house on a base of pure diamond. Unfortunately, he was a poor man, and could only afford a very small diamond. The house, while exquisite, was nearly microscopic, and in order to enter Samuel was forced to take a penknife and whittle away at himself until nothing remained but a single red corpuscle, which lay dejectedly on the parquetry floor of the miniscule living room, wishing that it had someone to talk to.

2. It is widely discounted but nevertheless true that the legal age of consent among certain groups of Australian aboriginals is sixty-four. It will be apparent to the attentive reader that survival under such circumstances demands a fairly high occurrence of felonious sexual contact. The shame that this carries may contribute to the dreary content of these people’s rock art, which consists mainly of images of frowning young men playing contact sports and taking long, cold showers together. Bummer.

3. Clayton had always wished to try his hand at ceramics, but was unable to locate a potter’s wheel in the hick town in which he was imprisoned by the Ice Giants. One morning, however, he found a rotisserie lying on the curb, and was able to contrive a sort of very slow, sideways pottery. For the most part the pots were crap. They were unglazed, poorly balanced and smelled of chicken loaf, but they fed young Clayton’s soul. Go Clayton, you luckless patsy of Ragnarok!

4. When Susan first had her plastic surgeon mount the enormous tin parachute on the back of her skull, all her friends complimented her on how pretty it made her look, gleaming in the sun and reflecting the scenery as she puttered about town on her miniature choo-choo. In time, however, the drag caused by the cranial tin canopy became another kind of drag altogether. Under certain wind conditions, Susan and her choo-choo made virtually no forward progress at all, and the strain to her neck was also something of a concern. All of her erstwhile friends began to make snide comments and snicker to one another as she chugged laboriously by, weeping softly. The moral of the story is, be happy with who you are. Also, another moral is that cosmetic surgery which hinders your natural streamlining may, for various reasons, be socially isolating.

5. Little Ninja Ned had a full set of Ninja clothes, but usually performed his terrible errands in a chador he had stolen from a Persian actress’s night table. It was a deep, marvelous black, and did a superb job of concealing his face, but it was also loose and, well, a bit billowing really. Often, as Little Ned was making his getaway after silencing some ne’er-do-well fat cat with a Ninja strike to the pancreas, the chador would catch on something or other. This caused all sorts of embarrassing problems. More and more it seemed that Little Ned spent most of his down time, which the other Little Ninjas used to pursue a variety of rewarding pastimes, simply mending the torn hem of his chador. Curse you, you dazzling, maddening, modestly attired Persian temptress!