We're normal

When I turned 17, we ordered a cake at the grocery store for my party, as we’d done many times before. If you wanted something written on the cake you’d write it into a section of the order form. We requested, very simply, “Happy Birthday Courtney”. When we went to pick it up the day of the party, this is what we got.

The bakery employees had absolutely no explanation for this. The order form, attached to the box, very clearly did not contain any of those extra names. Whomever had done the writing was no longer in, so there was no one to ask how this had happened. The fact that the name ‘Juan’ is misspelled bewilders me to this day. (I’ve never seen ‘Miley’ without the E, either, but it’s believable that someone might spell it that way.) Did this cake slip in from an alternate universe where I’m one quarter of a set of Hispanic quadruplets? Dyslexic Hispanic quadruplets, maybe?

This cake became the focal point of my party. At least two of my friends regularly called me ‘Courtney Mily Jaun Pablo’ for years to come. My siblings and I still reference it sometimes, eleven years later. It is probably the funniest thing ever to occur at any birthday celebration of my life, and may well remain so for the rest of my days.

No One Like You

now, it took us a while to realise it meant "(there is) no one like you". at first, we all parsed it as a botched "no one like(s) you"

it should be an explosive device, so they widen that part of the cave at the same time and no other spelunkers will get stuck there

Fan Translators: hmm taking into account the intention of the original and the rules of both languages, plus the tone of the story, the best title would probably be something like Adherent of the Blade of Duality, but probably an official translation would want to shorten it to Blade of Duality, or perhaps Double-Edged Sword to borrow a popular turn of phrase that also fits thematically--

a flower, a jack of spades, a laptop and a CRT TV lay at a bar...

(tiny doodle comic)