One Crafty Nerd

Clark looks up from his computer at the new intern. “Oh, no,” he says. “You caught me.”

“Clark, you pull this shit every time, man,” his desk neighbor Steve says. “Shut the fuck up.”

“No, the kid’s right, I’m Superman,” Clark says. He gets out of his seat and cracks his back out. “I guess we’re gonna have a superhero fight.”

“Clark, sit back down.”

“Nope. Superhero fight.”

“Clark if you don’t sit the hell back down and finish your article by lunch I am going to tell Perry on you.”

Clark points at the intern. “You get off easy this time, buddy,” he says, and sits back down. 

“So…” the intern says, very lost. “Uh…”

Intern: “Ahahahah Superman in Kansas tilling the fields at superspeed, that’s a good one. What, if the tractor breaks down, do you just pick it up and take it back to the barn?”

Clark: “Nah, between my ex-ray vision and my heat vision I can generally find whatever the problem is and do a spotweld if necessary so long as I know where to get the parts - once had to nip over to South Korea because I didn’t want to wait 6 weeks for the ship to get there.”

Intern: “Bahahaha classic, Clark you are so funny! Superman fixing tractors with his heat vision, oh that’s a good one.”

Like the red footed boobie who has a surprisingly colorful beak:

The masked booby and his close cousin the nasca booby who look like they came from home alone 3 with that mask of theirs:

The Peruvian booby who didn't want to wear the same clothes as everyone else in the family photo:

And the emo cousin the brown booby who was very excited to hear about mcr:

And of course everyone's favorite, the blue footed booby:

DYK that's was the point of the game? It was invented by Eleanor Abbott for children hospitalized with polio. The disease would effect mobility among other things so Candyland focused instead on bright colors and engaging illustrations rather than complicated gameplay to encourage the imagination of bedbound children. This post, and this comment, is a testament to Abbots genius in when she made this game.

a poem by Jay Hulme, titled Jesus at the Gay Bar

He's here in the midst of it - right at the centre of the dance floor, robes hitched up to His knees to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening a boy will touch the hem of His robe and beg to be healed, beg to be anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out, sweat-damp, and weary from dance. He'll cup this boy's face in His hand and say,

my beautiful child there is nothing in this heart of yours that ever needs to be healed.

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.