Secretly Macduff.

book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

Mongolian armour - Huyag.

1. Satine Kryze

2. Anakin

Please join, I'm desperate to gossip about this horse show!!

“The following is a list of people who can suck it. Number One: The Joker. I don’t think I need to explain that one. Number Two: Cluemaster. Fuck you, you stole my bit, and I will be like a plague unto your house. Number Three: King Tut. You also stole my bit, but did it while killing people and got me arrested for murder. Also, I’m, like, 93% sure you’re a white guy and your costume is racist.

“Number Four: The Scarecrow. I know you ate my leftover Chinese, Jon, even though I wrote my name on it. I was saving that for lunch. I had to eat a goddamn peanut butter and jelly sandwich like a five-year-old. It was all you had in the hideout. For fuck’s sake, go shopping, not all of us can live like a bridge troll.

“Number Five: The Penguin. You- No, no, wait, wait… That one should be crossed out. He replaced that and apologized. Never mind, Oswald, you’re fine. Drinks at 7:00 tomorrow, right?

“Anyway, where was…? Ah, yes. Number Six: The Mad Hatter. You carded me and left me like that for six hours because I, and I quote, ‘would not stop talking about Mythbusters.’ Well, excuse me for trying to make intellectually stimulating conversation on a level you could understand. I suppose every time you prattle on about mome raths and borogoves it’s goddamn Shakespeare? Well… Well, it’s Carroll, but… Oh, you know what I mean!

“Number Seven: Catwoman. You left me hanging by one hand from a ledge five stories up and holding a twenty-pound bag of jewels and very pointy  objets d'art while you ‘distracted’ the Dark Knight. I know you were making out with him, Selina. You were gone for fifteen minutes. My shoulder almost dislocated. Very unprofessional.

“Number Eight: Kite Man.”

Here the Riddler pauses, lifting his narrowed gaze to glare at the camera, voice dropping to an ominous tone.

“You know what you did…”

His demeanor shifts quickly, and he’s back to reading from his list almost cheerfully.

“Number Nine! Th-”

He’s interrupted by a crashing noise in the background and looks over his shoulder just an instant before a deep voice angrily growls, “Riddler!”

“Oh, for the love of-” He turns to glare at the camera, speaking quickly. “Number Nine: Batman! Interrupting me while I’m on television making very important- Hm-mmph!”

Batman: Riddler, you’ve hijacked the TV airwaves and you know that’s wrong but I think this is actually theraputic. So I’m giving you five minutes, and then I’m taking you to Arkham

This starts a dialogue with a number of other youtube users who both attempt to answer his riddles and pose their own riddles in return.

“Riddle me this… who’s the biggest asshole in games development this side of Ubisoft? It’s Daniel Mockridge who screwed the dev team, myself included, out of our royalties for Riddle of the Minotaur-”

Two days later Jim Sterling is calling Mockridge out, there’s a gofundme for the other people on the dev team, and Nigma’s halfway to funding the spiritual sequel on Kickstarter.

Read this craigslist ad for a 1999 toyota corolla.

I did not find my husband in this way.

In rural France it is apparently Known that one brings one’s own shopping bags to the grocery store. I was a visitor and had not been briefed and had no shopping bag. I saw that other people were able to conduct negotiations to purchase shopping bags, but I could not remember the word for “bag.”

“Can I have a box that is not a box,” I said.

The checkout lady looked extremely tired and said, “Un sac?” (A sack?)

When I phoned my mom during week two I tried to tell her that it was a bit cold in the sleeping bag at night. I stumbled around the word in German because for the love of god, I could remember the Germwn word for sleeping bag.

“Yeah so, it’s like a bag you sleep in at night?”

“And my mother must probably have thought I lost my mind. She just sighed and was like ‘So, a Schlafsack, yes?”

That afternoon I met up with some friends and was talking about the new job, and the new office, and for the life of me I couldn’t remember the English word for pheasants. So I basically ended up bragging to my friends about “the very fancy chickens” we had outside the office.

She gets to Israel and is riding a bus for the very first time.

American: כמה ממון זה? (”How much money?” but in rather archaic language)

So in Biblical Hebrew the word for penis and weapon are the same. There is a verb meaning to arm, which modern Hebrew semanticly drifted into “fuck”: i.e. give someone your dick.

Except he doesn’t speak a lick of modern Greek, and the receptionist couldn’t speak English.  Or French.  Or German.  Or Italian.  (He tried all of them.)

Finally, in a fit of inspiration, he went upstairs and got his copy of Medea in the original Greek (you know, the stuff separated from modern Greek by two and a half thousand years).  He found the passage where Medea begs Jason to let her stay for one more day, went downstairs, and read it to the receptionist.

Please tell me there’s a sequel where that happens.

My stomach hurts and I can barely breathe, because I haven’t laughed this hard in a very, very long time. I only learned about this prank less than fifteen minutes ago, but I’m already dead from how ridiculous it is.

Context: Paul Rudd has a history of going on Conan O’Brien’s shows (first Late Night, then Conan) and, when asked to show a clip from his newest movie, shows this snippet of a 1988 movie called Mac and Me (an ET ripoff) that people refer to as “the runaway wheelchair scene.” And Conan falls for it… every time. The exasperation through the years just kills me. Every time Conan thinks that he’s maybe caught a break, it happens again.

He thought that Paul Rudd might have laid off the joke for Ant-Man, in hopes of not pissing off Marvel.

Look at that face. Look at that expression. Look at how resigned and dead he is. This was his chance to get Paul Rudd to actually show a proper clip. Who would piss off Marvel? Who would waste a chance to promo their new movie for a prank they’d already been doing for fifteen years?

When I was in high school, I was the part-time henchperson of a Mad Scientist.

I’m not exaggerating about “Mad Scientist”.  “Riley” (Name changed for his family’s privacy) was a former Medical Doctor, as well as an artist, microbiologist, pilot (as in, designed and flew his own experimental aircraft), magician, computer programmer and musical composer, and had an outbuilding attached to his house where he kept things like his hand-made 3D printer, electron microscope and drone-dirigible assembly devices.

Riley had ALS and was eventually wheelchair-bound, so by 2006 I was being called in on the odd school night or weekend to go out around FoCo and the surrounding mountains. “I need a younger set of legs and someone with no fear of heights” He’d say.  Being that I was a very boring child that had no interest in sex or drugs and always called when I was going to be late, and that Riley was a trusted family friend, My parents trusted me to go out at like 9PM  and come home at 2AM on a Tuesday.  

…To do things like scale locked fire escapes and climb around on rooftops that we DEFINITELY did not have permission to be on to do things like install speakers and bluetooth broadcasting devices at strategic points around Old Town so that if you download the right app onto your phone (I’ve got it backed up somewhere, I’ll post it when I find it) , you can walk around town and be exposed to the ghostly, extremely shady side of FoCo history for his 2007 Halloween project.

We did get caught by the cops but I was 17, short and white as goddamn mayonnaise so when the cops asked me what I was doing “It’s for a community art project!” actually worked.

My favorite Mad Science Project was in 2009, Gallus rostromegalus.

I was home from college for summer, and Riley had been messing around with Rotational Physics and had managed to make Giant (24’ x 18’) extremely realistic Chicken eggs, weighted and everything so that if you picked one up, it would feel like there was a heavy yolk wobbling around inside.  They’re amusing all on their own, but after leaving them in the slash pile from spring cleaning, Riley realized they had POTENTIAL.

So we went around getting permission from a few businesses and the art museum, and I spent a few nights making plausible enormous chicken feathers in Riley’s lab out of grass, acrylic glaze and some other odds and ends laying around, and filling up the back of my mom’s van with as much of the backyard slash pile as fit in there, then drove out in the middle of the night to set up giant nests for the eggs, strewn with feathers and surrounded by Traffic cones and orange construction mesh and signs from the entirely fictitious “Department Of Fish And Wildfowl, Specious Relocation Division”

(an incomplete nest on the steps of Fort Collins Museum of Art)

(signage, responsibly warning people to stay away in case of giant chickens)

Riley even made QR codes that linked back to an obviously false Wiki- if you scrolled to the bottom, the page was covered in feathers and after five minutes it would start to make chicken noises.

People. Went. INSANE.

Crowds turned up to take selfies with the nests and Riley tracked down literally dozens of tagged photos captioned “IS THIS REAL????”.  

Someone wrote a very worried and not terribly facetious-sounding letter to the editor concerned that Giant Chickens were roaming around FoCo, something that big could hurt someone!  There was an entirely-serious-sounding counter-letter that we Humans have clearly invaded this majestic creature’s natural habitat, where are they SUPPOSED to make their nests, huh?   

Multiple people called the police to report having seen the elusive Gallus rostromegalus up in the hills or skulking around downtown. Reports claimed it was anywhere form five to twelve feet tall, with dramatic plumage and an eerie, yodeling sort of call.

A few nights after installing each nest, we went back, collected the eggs, and left broken ‘eggshells’ and extra down feather around each of the nests. One of the nests was put up at the local Garden Center and I remember one of the assistant managers coming outside just after we finished the ‘hatching’ and shrieking “OH GOD I THOUGHT THOSE WERE FAKE THEY’LL GET TO THE TOMATOES SOMEONE CALL THE POLICE!”  That woman would later become my manager when I worked there for a summer, though she never made the connection between me and The Chickens.

Riley passed away in 2015 after a good and well-lived life, and was kind enough to leave me The Eggs in his will.

It was a truly splendid bit of ruckus, and I miss him terribly, and I very much treasure the memories.  And the Eggs, which I am absolutely going to inflict on some unsuspecting neighbors at some point, in his honor.

Dr. Z. was, easily, the best and most competent doctor or dentist I’ve ever encountered – and after that accident, I encountered quite a number. He came stunningly highly recommended, had an excellent record, and the most calming bedside manner I’ve ever seen.

That last wasn’t the sweet gentle caretaking sort of manner, which some nurses have but you wouldn’t expect to see in a surgeon. No; when Dr. Z. told me that one of my broken molars was too badly damaged to save, and I (being seventeen and still moderately in shock) broke down crying, he stared at me incredulously and said, in a tone of utter bemusement, “But – I am very good.”

I stopped crying on the spot. In the last twenty-four hours or so of one doctor after another, no one had said anything that reassuring to me. He clearly just knew his own competence so well that the idea of someone being scared anyway was literally incomprehensible to him. What more could I possibly ask for?

(He was right. The procedure was very extended, because the tooth that needed to be removed was in bits, but there was zero pain at any point. And, as he promised, my teeth were so close together that they shifted to fill the gap to where there genuinely is none anymore, it’s just a little easier to floss on that side.)

But Dr. Z.’s insane competence wasn’t just limited to oral surgery.

When I met Dr. Z., he, like most doctors I’ve had, asked me if I was in college, and where, and what I was studying. When I say “math,” most doctors respond with “oh, wow, good for you” or possibly “what do you want to do with that after college?”

Dr. Z. wanted to know what kind of math.

I gave him the thirty-second layman’s summary that I give people who are foolish enough to ask that. He responded with “oh, you mean–” and the correct technical terms. I confirmed that was indeed what I meant (and keep in mind, this was upper-division college math, you don’t take this unless you’re a math major). He asked cogent follow-up questions, and there ensued ten or so minutes of what I’d call “small talk” except for how it was an intensely technical mathematical discussion.

He didn’t, as far as I can tell, have any kind of formal math background. He just … knew stuff.

I was a competitive fencer at this point in time, so when he asked if I had any questions about the surgery that would be necessary, I asked him if I’d be okay to fence while I had my jaw wired shut, or if it would interfere with breathing.

“Fencing?” he said.

“Yes,” I said, “like swordfighting,” because this is another conversation I got to have a lot. (People assume they’ve misheard you, or occasionally they think you mean building fences.)

“Which weapon?”

“Uh. Foil.”

“No, it won’t be safe,” and he went off into an explanation of why.

Turns out, he was also a serious fencer – and, when I mentioned my fencing coach, an old friend of his. (I asked my fencing coach later, and, oh yes, Dr. Z., a good friend of mine, excellent fencer.) (My coach was French. Dr. Z. was Israeli. I never saw Dr. Z. around the club or anything. I have no idea how they knew each other.)

So this was weird enough that later, when I was home, I looked Dr. Z. up on Yelp. His reviews were stellar, of course, but that wasn’t the weird thing.

The weird thing was that the reviews were full of people – professionals in lots of different fields – saying the same thing: I went to Dr. Z. for oral surgery, and he asked me about what I did, and it turned out he knew all about my field and had a competent and educated discussion with me about the obscure technical details of such-and-such.

All sorts of different fields, saying this. Lawyers. Businessmen. Musicians.

As far as I can tell, it’s not that I just happened to be pursuing the two fields he had a serious amateur interest in – he just seemed to be extremely good at literally everything.

I have no explanation for this. Possibly he sold his soul to the devil.

Whenever zoo’s tried to put lions and tigers in the same enclosures, the tiger would eventually try to groom the lioness and play constantly. The lioness would lose patience and snaps at them

So basically what I’m saying is that you have a regal and refined gf who stands at the edge of a balcony during parties, sipping champagne