Kidnapped by Pirates

I post this from the floor of the Chicago Airport Southwest Airlines ticketing... what do you call this? Ticketing area?

I've never been to Chicago nor did I plan on visiting it tonight. That may strike you as a bit unusual. How often do you not mean to be sitting on a cold floor on the other side of the country only to find yourself twelve hours later doing just that?

-Unless you've been kidnapped, you might not expect it. But I guess I've been kidnapped today by Southwest. How jovial.

On with the post.

Here's what I wrote joyfully today on the plane to Denver, before all the trouble happened. It is now 3:04AM and I am still in Chicago. Rock on.

HOW I BECAME NOT A SCIENTIST

Why are Children expected to be scientists? Honestly, the ratio of scientists to not scientists in the real world is staggeringly disproportionate to the ratio in public schools. I'm not sure they're aware of this. As important as scientists are in our world, why was I expected to be one? More specifically why did I have to come back to the school on a Thursday night after already being there all day? And of course, What was I supposed to do my project on?

I don't know why Science fairs are such an established tradition. I suppose many a top scientist found his (or her. We do need to be politically correct afterall. This is my public school experience we're talking about.)

Anyway I'm sure many got their first taste of the fame and glory to be had in scientific inquiry from gatherings like these. The road to Nobel prizedom begins in elementary school.

Mine however did not.

I don't remember how this became my project, but I ended up with one of those stupid tri-fold poster boards, a rubber band, a chicken bone, and a penny.

The only marker in our whole house at the time was an old dried out whiteboard marker. It was brown. Scratched in what looked like disappearing ink at the top of my board was the word "acid".

We were supposed to come up with an experiment to test our hypothesis, which happened to be a big word for "what you think will happen." I think we spent three days learning what it meant. There was a test. I wouldn't be surprised if the entire science fair was really just a ploy to make sure we didn't go through life not knowing what a hypothesis was. How glad I am to know its definition now.

I decided a good experiment would be to soak each of the items minus the tri-fold in a cup of vinegar for a week. My hypothesis, scribbled in pencil because the marker didn't work anymore so I put it back in the junk drawer, was something like, the bone will be rubbery because that's what someone said would happen. The penny was supposed to corrode and the stupid rubber band was supposed to get brittle. That's pretty much what happened but a lot less of it than I'd expected.

I had each item sitting out on my table in front of the dumb tri-fold board . By the time things got going, the bone had dried out and wasn't really that bendy anymore.

I stood there feeling like an idiot while trembling grandparents and civic minded citizens came around to pretend interest in my presentation and tell me I should try the same thing with coke.

I was actually quite surprised and somewhat disturbed to discover how many adult members of my community had taken to this unusual activity apparently effected by some mania in decades past. All I could imagine were pre-TV age children running around splashing coke on things and then waiting in stunned silence to see what happened. I thanked them each for the advise, but began to wonder if I looked like the kind of kid that did this sort of thing for fun.

"You do realize I'm at school right now." I wanted to say. "You don't seem to understand. It's 7:30! I was here all day. And in exactly twelve hours I'll have to be here again. I have to because someone decided to make it against the law for me not to..."

At the end of the night they handed out ribbons.

I didn't get one.

My teacher did come around and snap a Polaroid of me. She handed me the photo and walked away. As I watched it develop I realized how stupid I looked standing in front of a presentation on how to break rubber bands over the course of a week.

Isn't science a glorious thing.

The Turtle that Ate up Everybody

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 at 2:45am

Ted, a 36 year old bachelor and bank teller was enjoying his first day off in over five weeks by taking his pet turtle Chippy out for a walk. The sight of a thin man in jogging shorts toddling through the park behind a small turtle on a string is an uncommon sight on any day of the week, but on this particular Tuesday afternoon it was exactly what Dr. Silas P. Scrimshanks had been hoping for. He’d been sitting in the park for three days now waiting; waiting for some poor fool to happen by. Ted was too well qualified to miss.
“Excuse me.” Muttered the doctor as he stumbled past Ted dropping the contents of a large cardboard box he was carrying. Books, papers and scientific discourses spilled out onto the sidewalk nearly smashing Chippy. A look of horror graced Ted’s pasty cheeks.
“I’m terribly sorry. How clumsy of me.” Dr. Scrimshanks lifted a few papers uncovering the slightly dazed Chippy. “Hello, and who’s this might I ask.”
“Chippy!” Ted smiled relieved that his only friend in the world was still alive. “He’s a turtle.”
“Yes.” Smiled the doctor with a hint of sinister glee only a passing blue bird happened to notice.
“He’ll be about six to seven months old now I should think.”
“Yes uh…he is- Hey how’d you-“
“I’m a scientist friend. It’s my business to know.” He smiled again and shook Ted’s limp hand. He looked around at the ground apologetically.
“Look at this, I’ve interrupted your afternoon and made a mess of a public thoroughfare! Please, would you be so kind as to help an old man collect his notes and papers?”
Ted quickly obliged and within a few moments the doctor was up off his knees and off again down the sidewalk and across the street. Ted sighed and turned to see what Chippy was up to. It was unlike him to stay still for so long. He nearly fainted as he realized why Chippy hadn’t been pulling at his string. There where Chippy had been only few moments before was an empty loop of string.
“Chippy!” Ted whirled around checking the sidewalk behind him.
“Chippy?!” He franticly checked the grass on either side of the path. No trace. Not even a foot print; although he wasn’t sure turtles could leave footprints in grass.
“CHIPPY!” he looked to the trees.


It had been a wonderfully informative day thought Julie as she walked home from school with her best friend Amber. It had been “Don’t Talk To Strangers Day”, and both girls carried booklets and stickers to remind them of what they’d learned. The back of the booklet featured illustrations of the most popular ways strangers try to engage children in conversation. Offering candy and breakfast cereals from minivans was mentioned but the most frightening by far was the one of a stranger in a park disguising himself as a man searching for his lost puppy. Both girls chattered nervously to each other with this one illustration burned freshly into their young impressionable preservationist minds. It was at this unfortunate moment that a man came crawling out of the bushes on his hands and knees combing the grass franticly with his fingers and babbling to himself. Both girls froze, equally alert at the danger they now faced. Aside from the lunatic Stranger’s startling behavior, his bare thighs reminded both girls of page three in their booklets which featured a man dressed similarly trying to coax a seven year old into conversation aboard a cruise liner. They realized they were already in phase two of an encounter with a stranger. The stranger upon seeing the girls quickly rose to his feet and approached.
“Have either of you seen a little turtle around here? I was taking him for a walk and he’s disappeared. I can’t find him anywhere!” Alarm bells sounded deafeningly in both girls heads.
“He’s about this big.” He raised his hands to show how big the fictional lost pet was. Julie recognized phase three and opened her mouth to scream, but fear had gripped her throat so tightly nothing came out. Like in a nightmare she struggled to scream. She had to scream. The booklet said to. Her head was swimming. She couldn’t breathe!
“Are you alright?” Asked the stranger as he stepped forward pretending concern. Amber’s scream rang out true and clear like an air raid siren.


Ted jumped. His body became a jumble of adrenaline and nerves. He knew that whatever was behind him was either very big or very dangerous or both. What else could make a little girl scream like that? He didn’t wait to find out. He tried to run from whatever must have been pursuing him but something got in the way and hit him hard in the stomach. It was the screaming girl’s head. He fell down hard knocking his face against the pavement. Now the other one was screaming too.


Hanging from a nearby telephone poll Angel Fuentes, a City Power employee, heard the frantic screams and turned just in time to see the pedophile attacker rush the two little girls. He was a thin pale man in ridiculously short shorts obviously driven to his perversion by the lack of female attention in his life, but this wasn’t a time to analyze. Angel was particularly fond of analyzing the little people that passed back and forth beneath him as he worked, but as was mentioned before this was not one of those times. This was a time for action.
Angel knew just what to do. He’d rehearsed it for several months now hoping an opportunity like this one would happen. He smiled a satisfied grin as he pulled a long heavy wrench from a loop on his belt. The metal felt cold and solid in his fist. As if in slow motion, the action played out just as it had a thousand times in his mind. He pulled his arm back and with a steely eyed stare, targeted the perpetrator like a hawk fixed on his prey. Everything went still for Angel. Time had come to a screeching halt. All that existed was the cold balanced steel in his fist, and the head of a man down there on the ground; a perverted sick man trying to hurt children, and then Angel was ready, A satisfied whisper escaped his lips. “You’re already dead.”




“This is Martha Shapiro reporting live from Franklin Memorial Park where earlier today a man tried to molest two six year old girls returning from school when he was stopped by a literal guardian angel.”
Ted’s bruised and confused mug shot was replaced on the flickering screen by a live video feed of an interview with Angel Fuentes. The reporter’s microphone was stuck into his face in time to hear him say, “When I saw that guy tackling those little girls, I knew somebody needed to stop him… so I did.”
“and it was quite the throw!” remarked the smiling reporter as the image changed to the shaky home video footage of a grandmother out videotaping pigeons that day. The abrupt swish pan came just in time to capture Angel swinging his arm and the gleaming wrench flying gracefully through the air. Then there was the lovely jolt the camera made when the wrench made contact with the would-be child molester’s face. They replayed it several times as the reporter praised the accuracy and distance of Angel’s heroic throw. “I used to play baseball in School.” beamed the City Power employee.
“Fotsworth! Turn that off and come help me with the next batch of serum!”
Fotsworth, like most laboratory assistants was short, ugly, and remarkably dimwitted. How he came to work with Dr. Scrimshanks was a long complicated story that boiled down to the fact that if Dr. Scrimshanks was going to finally do what he’d dreamed of his whole life, then he needed an assistant with enough intelligence to follow instructions, but not ask moral questions or consider personal danger.
“It’s too big for this bowl.”
“That’s why we have larger bowls for subsequent batches.”
“Oh.” Replied Fotsworth as he wondered to himself what subsequent meant. He figured it probably had something to do with the subway.
“Now, place our friend in the bowl please.” Dr. Scrimshanks ventilator mask reminded Fotsworth of the alien invasion comic book he hadn’t gotten around to reading yet because he wasn’t used to staying overnight in the laboratory yet and was too scared to look at it. As he put the foot long turtle into the larger bowl he wondered why he didn’t have a mask too.
“I still think we should have done the jellyfish.”
Silas Scrimshanks sat silently concentrating on his display of gauges and graphs.
“It could sting people.”
“Including us you diptherious imbecile. A jellyfish aside from being extremely messy lacks two very important qualifications. Fotsworth waited but the doctor wasn’t forthcoming with any explanation. He lowered the hose into the bowl. Fotwsorth still waited.
“Switch on the pump and release valves three and six please.” Fotsworth flipped a switch and turned to twist the corresponding knobs. The doctor lowered a dark set of goggles over his eyes as glowing green radioactive plasma flowed down into a special chamber in his machine. The room glowed green for a moment. Then the doctor closed the chamber. Tightened a valve and flipped another switch. As a low hum reverberated through the laboratory he removed the goggles and ventilator and continued.
“First, a jellyfish cannot survive out of water. Therefore we would find ourselves with a lot of useless rash generating jelly and a horrible stink.”
It took a moment for Fotsworth to realize the doctor was back to giving his qualifications.
“And second, even if a jellyfish could survive out of water it lacks any form of locomotion.”
Fotsworth tried to nod in agreement, but he was having trouble processing that last bit.
“Legs Fotsworth. It hasn’t got any legs.”
“It’s got tentacles.”
The doctor stood and leaned over the experiment.
“Yes it has.” His voice was soft and far away. His eyes flickered with a wicked gleam.
“Fotsworth… I think its time for something bigger.”