A hilarious pair of ducks
Redpilled on March 13, 2022.
Tomorrow will be a dozen years from March 14, 2010, the infamous Pi Day upon which I stole a pair of ducks from a local duck broker and set in motion a terrible chain of events that will inexorably lead to the Great Noöclasm of 2186. That stuffleupagus sure made short work of that duck broker, though!
I chortled as the memory played across my ganglia, in as piggishly a goat-like manner I could muster. Leaning back in my Hopeless Slack-Ass® recliner, slug of pepperoni in one hand and a ruddy grease cocktail in the other, I continued my mosely reminiscing.
Tuesday next, the infamous Ides of March, will be a dozen years plus one day from the same March 14 when I stole that pair of ducks from that stuffleuppity duckmonger. With the death of Julius Cæsar on the Ides of March mmlxv years ago, the countdown to the Noöclasm inexorably continues, one day at a time. Who’d have thunk it!?
And as for Cæsar… they sure stabbed a lot of holes in him!
That purloined pair of ducks may have loosed horror upon the world 164 years from now, but paradoxically, those two ducks were also hilarious—almost as hilarious as Pope Hilarius, the funniest pope alive.
I rose Wednesday morning to the sound of meowing coming from my bed cushions. Since I don’t have a cat, nor any other cat-like animals, nor even a catamite, nor do any of my neighbors have any cats (at least not since Bouba and Kiki ate them all in a startling reversal of cat–squirrel relations), I was quite concerned. I recalled a lullaby my dear old Mamårp would sing to me when I was but a Pnårpling:
Cat pills,
Cat pills,
If I don’t take my cat pills,
I’ll turn into a cat!
Indeed, I had not taken my cat pills in three days. Wide-eyed and caterwauling, I leapt from my bed and darted to the bathroom. Being my usual cartoonish self, I slid face-first into the over-sink mirror, bounced back against the wall, hit my head, bounced forward, hit my forehead on the rather pointy edge of the sink, then flopped onto my buttocks like a gaffed carp. I floundered around on the floor for a few minutes, both as a comically futile attempt to right myself and because the pointy end of the sink had knocked my brain into a seizure. It was also fun.
After much frothing and a bit of tongue-swallowing, after pulling the sink from the wall and the toilet from the floor, I was able to raise myself onto my knees, and after much more hissing and meowing, onto my feet—both of them, startlingly enough. I gazed into the mirror.
The visage that greeted me in the mirror was my usual goat-like countenance. I blinked. The meowing continued—but it wasn’t me. I was clearly not a cat. Not a cat, nor anything cat-like, nor even the eldritch cat-bat-octopus monster Cat-thulhu. In fact, what stared piggishly back at me was an image that was utterly graceless, vaguely doofus-shaped, and completely caprine in every way (except for the piggish and doofussy part). I bleated and oinked in relieved satisfaction. I was not a cat. I was not a cat. I was not a cat.
But why were my bed cushions meowing?
My pepperoni clock hooted it was time for more pepperoni. I ignored the endless meowing and grundled downstairs for some oily breakfast. Passing through my downstairs computering room on the way to my kitchen, I saw the ol’ girl was powered on. The so-called “web browser” was up on the screen. I held back a startled yerk—who had turned on my computer overnight? Cats!?
I approached the computer hesitantly, visages of certain death criss-crossing my synapses as fast as their hardworking sodium-ion channels could transport them. If a six-foot-tall man–cat had snuck into my home during the night to power up my computer, it was also likely the evil feline had planted a bomb inside the computer and attached a detonator to the keyboard. One false move, one wrong key press, and yours truly was history!
On the screen was a page from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia even a cat booby-trapping a computer can edit. The page was about John Deydras, a pretender to the English throne in the fourteenth century. Someone (or somecat) had highlighted the following passage:
Deydras confessed during the trial to having made up his story, blaming his pet cat which he said was the devil in disguise, who had led him astray one day while he was walking across Christchurch Meadows. Found guilty, both he and his cat were hanged and Deydras’ body burnt.
This seemed sensible to me, and assuaged both my fears of my computer being bomb-ridden and my bedroom being cat-ridden. The meowing upstairs continued, sometimes insistent, sometimes dying down to a dull mewl, but it never fully ceased. I returned my piggy-goaty eyes to the screen. The Wikipedia article went on, “Today Deydras is believed to have been mentally ill; his story is not believed to have been true.” I scoffed dismissively. Wikipedia and their clutch of gnomely editors clearly had little experience dealing with cats. I cocked an ear toward my bedroom and could still hear my bed cushions meowing forlornly. No, no experience dealing with cats at all.
Then I pressed control-W and my computer exploded.
It put me in mind of that time I’d used Wikipedia in place of a proper how-to manual and ended up with the videocassette tape unwound rather than rewound—and shattered into 476 individual pieces. The video rental store wasn’t too pleased, even after I kindly rewound the remains of the tape around the cash register as the clerk (I think his name was Borb) watched helplessly.
After that, I only rented videos on old-fashioned vinyl.
My exploration of the theology of trigonometry continues. On Thůrgsday, after a slimy, unnatural lunch at the Cthulomat, I learned that:
sin(x) − tan(x) = a whole lot of sin. Less than sin(x) + cos(x) however!
Returning home and ensconcing myself in my wizard’s tower, I went about performing some deep trigonometric incantations, but no eldritch revelations were forthcoming. A spider darted across the floor, black and foreboding. In my fervent efforts to call up the spirit of long-departed George Boole, did I accidentally summon something far worse? I cast another spell, this one involving the secant crossed with the cosine. I frowned. Now the deadly countdown to the Great Noöclasm had sped up to two days at a time. 2186 was suddenly a lot closer. And the Langoliers would be getting fat off of all those extra days to eat. But then rebootling my computer seemed to fix the problem. Time resumed its normal one-day-at-a-time pace.
« Иди нахуй! » had seemed like an appropriate response to that giant floating brain hellbent on fossilizing us all, but now I thought better of it. Frankly, I thought better of a lot of things—and I thought much, much worse of my new neighbor Gnaddeus after I learned he ate tater-tots for dinner. Every night. I thought about firebombing his house but I was all out of firebombs. Instead I put the whole matter out of my mind and decided to buy myself a new pair of ducks.
No itinerant duck brokers had passed through my town since the Great Duck-Tailing Disaster of 2013. So I had to drag my corpse down to the Spend-O-Mart to buy a new pair o’ ducks. With grocery prices (including duck meat) rising faster than a turgid wizzle-nipf in the presence of an estral glorpf-snake, the price of live ducks had crashed. No one knew why. Swarms of experts squeezed out graph after graph showing us that prices weren’t even going up, prices were going sideways, and prices were actually going down, all at the same time. But the truth was I could now purchase a pair of ducks for less than a pound of pepperoni. And if I tied a bunch of helium balloons to the little quackers before putting them on the deli scale, they were even cheaper!
All of it sure was a hilarious paradox.
Ducks (and some shiny new firebombs) purchased, I high-tailed it out of there before an angry deli clerk could come running and shouting at me over my anatine balloonery. « Иди нахуй, иди нахуй, иди нахуй!! »
I made it home in record time with my new, hilarious pair of ducks. I stored them for safe-keeping in a barrel of bacon grease in my basement, then decided to go swimming in another barrel because it seemed like a good idea at the time.
It was then that my doorbell hooted and I galumphed back upstairs to answer it. At the door was a deli clerk from the Spend-O-Mart. An angry, angry deli clerk. I yerked. He was carrying a kookely-wanger. The koala perched on the tip looked at me, and lunged—