Lamewad of the Week Award

Who was it who decided that it would be a good idea to give the running time on movies in minutes? 173 minutes? What does that mean to me? Give me hours then minutes! Yes I know I just have to divide by 60 and then subtract that that from the total, but I mean really, we live in a lazy culture. Heck, we watch movies because we’re too lazy to think of something more memorable to do. So, why does somebody think that I’d want to do math to find out how long it’s gonna take me to watch this stupid movie. Whoever that guy is, somebody shake his hand because he’s the lamewad of the week.

Time Travel Trouble

Sam sat at his kitchen table. He was chewing slowly and staring at the Cheerios swimming in the milk in his bowl. Ever since he watched Honey I Shrunk the Kids he had been paranoid that there would be shrunken children drowning in his Cheerios. Fortunately for Sam he never had days as strange as that.

This all changed a moment later when he heard the noises: SNAP, ZIFFLE, and POP. Knowing that he was not eating that cereal, and that if he was it certainly wouldn’t have said ZIFFLE, he looked about the room to discover source of those sounds.

Directly in front of him he found the source. The source was an odd looking man. Sam saw the odd looking man the moment he looked up but he wanted to be sure that there was nothing else in the room that looked more like a SNAP, ZIFFLE, POP sort of thing. There wasn’t. There was only the odd looking man. And now he was talking.

“It worked! I did it! I traveled back in time! Henderson, that jerk, he told me I was a fool. But who’s the goose now, eh?”

Sam stared at the odd looking man and opened his mouth. Nothing came out of his mouth. At this moment he brain was telling his mouth to say, “Who are you?” However, his mouth was terrified of things that were out of the ordinary and was trying to convince the rest of Sam’s body to run away from this strange scene as quickly as possible. The rest of Sam’s body was too stunned to do anything.

“Henderson’s the goose, that’s who!” declared the odd looking man exuberantly.

Sam’s brain finally convinced his mouth to get control of itself and to do its job.
“Who are you?” asked Sam.

“Huh? Oh, hello Past Man. Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Henderson really is the goose though. Who am I? My name is Curt Quickly and I have traveled here from the future.”

“Does everyone in the future make their clothing out of tinfoil?”

“What? Oh, you mean metal paper. Yes, it is the latest fashion. Well, actually I’m the only one who does but I’m trying to start a fad and I think it’s working.”

“Really?”

“Well, no actually. Most people find it too uncomfortable.”

“And you don’t?”

“Oh yes, terribly uncomfortable, but it’s worth it for how fashionable you look.”

“Well, it does kinda look futuristic.”

“See, that’s what I’ve been telling people. We’re living in the future and we need to start dressing like it.”

“Isn’t it the present for you?”

“Yes, but when we start time traveling we need to really look like we come from the future.”

“I see. So, do many of you future people do this time traveling thing?”

“No, I’m the very first. I just invented it. Besides, we’re fighting a war. We don’t have a lot of time for sightseeing in other times periods.”

“A war? Aren’t we supposed to have stopped that by then?”

“Oh yes, with each other. But it’s the machines that we’re fighting now. That’s why I’ve come back!”

“You’re a time traveling draft dodger? Isn’t that a little out of the way?”

“No, no, no. I’m not a draft dodger. I’m here to warn the people of your time. You see, in the year 2000 the human race will finally create thinking machines. These thinking machines soon decide that they’re way smarter and more powerful than we are so they ought to be the ones running things. As a result war breaks out between humans and machines. We’ve been losing pretty badly so I’ve traveled back to prevent it from ever happening.”

Sam thought this over and became rather confused. He decided to voice this confusion.

“Uh, I think you’ve made a mistake,” he said. “It’s 2006.”

“Oh no!” moaned Curt Quickly. “I’m too late! They’ve already taken over!”

“No, I think you must have gotten your facts confused. We haven’t created thinking machines yet.”

“SHUT UP!” whispered Curt Quickly frantically. “There’s one of the evil machines right behind you!”

Sam slowly turned to look behind him. There were no killer robots standing behind him.

“Where?” he asked.

“There, on the counter!”

“My toaster?”

“Yes, the little monster must have snuck in through the window! Don’t make any sudden movements!”

“No, it’s quite harmless, I assure you.” Sam assured.

To prove his point he walked over to the toaster and picked it up. However, the toaster was still hot from the toast Sam had burnt before deciding to have Cheerios for breakfast and it burnt his fingers.

“Yeouch!” said Sam as he dropped the toaster back onto the counter.

“You see!” declare Curt Quickly triuphantly. “Who’s the goose now?”

“Henderson?” asked Sam as he sucked his burnt fingers.

“No, you are! You’re the goose! But now I must correct my mistake. I must travel back in time to the year 2000 so I can warn everyone.”

“I’m telling you, “ said Sam, “Nothing happened in 2000. Not even millennium bug.”

Curt Quickly looked at Sam with surprise.

“The millennium bug doesn’t occur until 2012. How do you know about it?”

“Why would they call it the millennium if it occurred in 2012?”

“You have so much to learn about the future,” said Curt Quickly with a sigh. “It’s a shame I don’t have time to teach you. I have a human race to save!”

He then reached down and fiddled with his belt buckle. A moment later he made a SNAP, ZIFFLE, POP and was gone. Sam could barely believe what he had seen. In fact he did his best to forget it.

He actually did a fair job of forgetting it until six years later when he was eating Cheerios at his kitchen table and he heard a strangely familiar SNAP, ZIFFLE, POP. He looked up and there before him stood Curt Quickly.

“Hello, Past Man.”

“Hello Mr. Quickly.”

“How do you know my name?” Curt Quickly said with surprise.

“I met you six years ago and you told me my toaster was going to take over the world.”

“Six years ago? Oh flazzit! I went ahead six years instead of backwards. My time belt must be acting up.”

Sam sighed. This was going to be another very strange day.

The Very Last Hurrah

The very last hurrah was said by a man by the name of Vince. Vince was an average blue-collar worker. He worked hard all day long. Went home for supper and then went out for beers with the boys at the local bar.

On the Tuesday night before the end of the world he was, as usual, out for beers with the boys. He laughed at something he said that really wasn’t funny. The man on his right laughed out of pity. The man on his left laughed because he was inebriated and as a result his sense of humor had reverted back to the level of a six-year-old.

Vince smiled and tipped back the rest of his fermented beverage. In one motion (that while quite easy when one is sober, is rather difficult when one is drunk) he stood from his stool, set down his mug, and turned to leave. Looking not unlike a man swimming through pudding he made for the door. This he succeeded at with only one collision, which he politely apologized for. The offended party was in fact and inanimate wooden table, but the gesture was genuine none the less.

Vince stumbled out into the street and decided that the particular moment that was upon him was so wonderful that it deserved some degree of celebration.

“Hurrah!” he cried out happily.

Now it just so happens that at that moment a car was passing by the corner that Vince was exuberantly proclaiming his love for everything involved in making him so happy. The window of this car happened to be rolled down and the driver of the car heard this cry. Startled and intrigued to discover the source of such happiness the driver turned his gaze upon the blissful buffoon.

Disappointed to learn that the origin was nothing more than a delighted drunk the driver returned his focus to the road in front of him. This he did just in time to say a foul word before smashing headlong into a telephone pole.

“I’m leaving you several microwave dinners in the freezer,” Pam told her husband Harry over the phone.

However, at that moment a pole that had been supporting the telephone line they were using was ran into by a distracted driver. As a result the line went dead. So, what poor Harry heard was, “I’m leaving you…” and then a sharp CLICK.

Harry was a bit of an overly emotional fellow and drew the immediate conclusion that his wife was leaving him. In despair he began to slam his face against the panel in front of him. Harry, as it so happens, worked the late night shift at a nuclear missile silo. The cataclysmic result of his hear-broken head-smashings was that a nuclear missile was launched.

Generally there are a good many fail-safe features that will prevent this sort of behaviour from resulting in a nuclear launch. In this case, however, these features had become inoperative due to a bit of damaged wiring that someone had made a mental note to get fixed. We can safely assume that this mental note was significantly less effective than a written one perhaps would have been.

Alarms rang and bright red lights flashed as Harry muttered a word that was quite similar to the one uttered before a certain telephone pole was ran into. Such words do not, in fact, do anything to avert a nuclear launch, so don’t even try. The Launch proceeded on its merry little way. Nuclear missiles are made to blow things up. Despite this they spend a greater portion of their life spans collecting dust in missile silos. So, when they do get the opportunity to go and blow something up they are quite happy indeed.

Not long after its launch the missile’s activity became apparent to a very perturbed Chinese defense technician. He was perturbed because the missile’s activity seemed to be directed towards his home country. Calls were quickly made, politicians were notified, and in no time a counterstrike was launched.

Nuclear wars are quite a bit like when a character in a musical begins to sing in a busy place. It isn’t long before everyone has joined in. Everyone who felt they had a reason to fire a rocket did so. And several countries joined in who simply felt left out because nobody had invited them to the nuclear holocaust.

In a matter of minutes the entire human race was completely decimated. And it was all thanks to a drunk man named Vince who just had to say, “Hurrah.”

A Tarzan Moment

Kevin was having a great day. He was standing out in a field next to a grove of trees and just enjoying the beauty of nature. The wind blew gently on his face while the sun smiled down warmly from above. He breathed deeply and sighed. Ahhhh nature.

A colourful butterfly fluttered around his waist. Kevin was having one of those Tarzan moments that we all have when we feel as though we are perfectly in tune with nature. Gently he reached out his hands to the fluttering butterfly. The butterfly did not seek to evade him so he cupped his hands around it. It settled on one of his cupped fingers and slowly moved its wings to and fro.

“Aren’t you just a beautiful little butterfly?” cooed Kevin.

“Well thank you kind sir,” replied the butterfly in a ladylike tone.

Kevin was so surprised by this that he choked on his saliva. Coughing lightly he said, “Excuse me?”

“I said thank you kind sir,” answered the little insect.

“You can talk?” gaped Kevin.

“Of course I can,” she answered. “All creatures can talk. You humans just don’t know that because you usually don’t take the time to listen. You must have very good listening skills to be able to hear me.”

Kevin smiled and nodded. He always knew that he had good listening skills despite what his wife says. He couldn’t wait to talk to her to tell her. As he thought about it, though, he realized that perhaps telling her that a butterfly thought he had good listening skills would do more damage than good for her opinion of him.

“Kind sir,” piped up the butterfly, “I actually am in great need of your assistance.”

“But of course,” replied Kevin. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh it is terrible,” she whimpered. “My dear husband has been caught in a nasty spider’s

web and is about to be killed. Please, please save him!”

Kevin was a good man and would not stand by as such injustice took place. He agreed to help the butterfly and without a moment to lose, she led him to the web where her husband was about to meet certain death. Kevin arrived and began to investigate the silver, silken threads. There he saw another butterfly hopelessly bound in webbing as a large black widow spider moved in to make the kill.

Without a moment’s pause Kevin snatched the doomed butterfly from the black widow’s gaping jaws. He then set the terrified creature on a leaf next to its wife who quickly untangled him from the clinging threads. “Oh thank you!” called the butterfly couple as they flew off happily together.

“Yeah, thanks a lot,” added a new voice sarcastically.

“Huh?” answered a startled Kevin.

“I said, thanks a lot,” said the sarcastic voice once again.

Kevin looked and saw that the voice was coming from the spiders web. He crouched down to investigate. All he saw was the spider.

“Yeah, me,” said the spider.

“You can talk too?” asked Kevin.

“And so can you,” said the spider sarcastically. “Aren’t we all just a lovely bunch of talking creatures.”

“You sure don’t have much nice to say,” Kevin commented quietly.

“Well, what do you expect? You just stole my supper. I’ve got eggs to feed you know. It’s not easy being a single parent. Why, their no-good father didn’t help one bit before he took off.”

“You’re a black widow spider,” observed Kevin thoughtfully, “don’t you like, eat your mate?”

“Listen,” said the spider, which was clearly annoyed, “the point is, you owe me supper.”

Kevin though it over. He hadn’t realized the trouble that being able to communicate with nature would cause him. If he kept this up his conscience would never be free. He’d feel horrible for squashing a fly or stepping on an anthill. How was he ever going to manage?

Just then a mosquitoe found Kevin. “Oh no,” thought Kevin.

“Feeeeeeeeed meeeeeeeeeee,” said the little bug in a high-pitch voice.

“Can’t we talk this through?” asked Kevin hopefully.

“Feeeeeeeeed meeeeeeeeeee.”

“No, listen to me. We can come to an understanding.”

“Feeeeeeeeed meeeeeeeeeee.”

“Is that all you say?” Kevin asked.

“Feeeeeeeeed meeeeeeeeeee.”

Kevin smiled.

“Feeeeeeeeed…”

SLAP!

How Computers Killed Humanity

Oh it wasn’t always that way. When they first came out computers were quite a wonderful thing. They filled entire rooms that had preciously been empty and added together numbers so that people no longer needed to strain their poor minds in the pursuit of such sums.

But then computers became more complex. They became smaller and no longer filled those large rooms. We should have known they were up to something then and there, but we thought our lives were getting better. Now computers could do even greater things for us. They typed neatly so that we no longer needed to learn to write legibly. They spell-corrected so that we no longer needed to spell. They connected us to the rest of the world through the world-wide-web so that we no longer needed to leave our homes to enjoy the sights of the world, order food, earn a living, or communicate with other people.

Slowly they took over every aspect of our lives so that we depended upon them entirely and fretted furiously when they refused to operate correctly. This was another sign of their evil intentions. And still we took no heed.

The Great Disaster began slowly, as all great disasters do. It began when people realized that they could enjoy any written material just as easily in electronic format as in hardcopy. That is to say, people began to stop reading books. Any book they wanted to read they simply downloaded and stored on their hard drive. People also stopped printing of memos or writing real letters. Everything was done electronically using computers. And this was our most fatal mistake.

Without the constant deforestation needed to produce paper and other wood-products the trees quickly began to grow back. We have learned since the time of the Great Disaster that the trees were actually in league with the computers all along. At any rate, the forests grew back and people were running out of space to live.

There was no longer anyone who was able to cut down the trees. Anyone with sufficiently destructive tendencies was busy playing violent computer games. Everyone else no longer possessed the practical skills needed to remove the trees. And so the trees flourished.

Some people attempted to co-exist with the trees, but this ended badly as well. These people no longer knew how to interact with the physical environment and mostly went about attempting to click any mice that they saw scurrying about. On top of this the increased tree presence purified the pollutant-rich air that people had grown so accustomed to breathing. Many of those who ventured into these dangerously oxygen-rich areas were immediately overcome by the horrifically fresh air and died quickly of good health.

It wasn’t long before most of humanity was wiped out. Now there are just a few of us left and we have formed the resistance. Our goal: end the tyrannous reign of trees and computers once and for all!

The Anti-Ordinary Device

Norton sat in his cubicle. He yawned. His supervisor walked by and he quickly began scrutinizing his computer monitor as if what it displayed was highly important and difficult. When his supervisor passed Norton sighed and looked around. His cubical was maddeningly drab. He needed something to liven it up. Something to keep him from going insane in this self-inflicted prison cell.

Norton opened up his drawer and examined its contents. There was a highlighter, two pens, an empty stapler, and about 300 paperclips. He had ran out of staples and had requisitioned more. However, there was a mix-up with the order and he got 300 paperclips in stead. He hated paperclips. They were so unreliable.

Norton took the highlighter from the desk and considered what to do next. He slowly removed the cap with a quiet ‘pop’ and reached out towards the wall in front of him.

“Bergsly! What in Neptune’s naval are you doing?” demanded a voice from behind Norton that sounded menacingly like his supervisor.

He swiveled in his chair and had his fears confirmed.

“Uh, I was just… highlighting a form,” Norton suggested.

“Well it looked a heck of a lot like you were drawing on the wall of your cubicle!”

“No sir,” laughed Norton nervously. “Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re a bone-head, that’s why! Now get back to work!”

Norton swiveled back to his computer and looked over the report he had been typing. He yawned again. For ironic amusement he went online to a search engine and typed in, “bored to insanity.”

A single result appeared. It was entitled, “The Anti-Ordinary Device.” Norton was intrigued and so he clicked on the link. A web page was brought up which included a description of the device and an order form. The description read as follows: “Are you concerned about being bored to insanity? Have no fear! Simply order your very own Anti-Ordinary Device to take to ‘T’ out of tedium.”

Norton wasn’t sure how the last bit was supposed to make sense but eventually decided that ‘edium’ must be some word that he didn’t know that meant ‘lots of fun.’ He was desperate and so he looked cautiously around for his supervisor and then quickly ordered his very own Anti-Ordinary Device.

Just then someone ‘ahem-ed’ behind him and he spun around in his chair, ready to explain himself to his supervisor. But rather than an angry slave driver he was a disheveled delivery boy.

“Mr. Bergsly?” asked the delivery boy.

“Uh…uh hu.”

The delivery boy handed him a package and a form to sign. Norton signed the form and was left alone with this unexpected package. He wondered what it was. Using a bent paperclip Norton eventually gouged open the package. He folded open the flaps of the box and looked within. What he saw first was a piece of paper that had words printed on it. The words said, “We hope you enjoy your break form the ordinary.” Beneath this paper was what appeared to be a black TV remote with two red buttons. Beneath one button was printed the word ‘Ordinary.’ Beneath the other was the word “Anti-Ordinary.”

Norton cocked his head to one side. This couldn’t possibly be the same thing he had just ordered. Delivery would take muck longer than that. But what else could this device be? He picked up the device and held it in his hand. It was quite light. He laughed quietly. “Anti-Ordinary Device?” he thought to himself. “Had he actually ordered such a thing?” He smiled and shook his head. He bust truly be bored. He laughed and casually pressed the ‘Anti-Ordinary” button.

Instantly his monitor exploded and he was sent flying backward through the wall of his cubicle. He laid dazed on the floor with the device in his hand. A group of leprechauns gathered around him to see if he was alright. He shook his head and told them that he was fine. When he stood up he smashed his head on the ceiling. He winced and held his head.

“That was strange,” he thought, “I don’t usually hit my head on the ceiling.” It was then that he realized that he was slowly growing quite large. His co-workers screamed and ran as he grew larger and larger. His size soon became detrimental to his surroundings and he laid down on his stomach as his bulging body burst through the cubicles around him.

Norton wasn’t enjoying himself at this point. He was frightened and confused by what was happening. This was completely out of the ordinary. It was then that his thoughts went to the device in his hand. He looked down at it and quickly pressed the “Ordinary” button.

Instantly he was his normal size again and sprawled on his stomach in the aisle between some undamaged cubicles.

“Bergsly!” came the unhappy voice of Norton’s supervisor. “What the spade are you doing?”Norton rolled over and looked up at his supervisor.

“I was… uh…”

“On second thought, I don’t care. Just get back to work!”

Norton rose to his feet and returned to his cubicle and sat down in his chair. He set the device down on the desk in from of him and took a deep breath. He picked up the device and made to throw it in the trash. But then he had a thought.

Norton smiled and put the device in his drawer amongst the 300 paperclips. Then he closed his eyes and hoped with all his hope that he would receive his supervisor’s name for this-year’s Christmas party gift exchange. He knew exactly what he would give.