Santa, Godzilla and Jesus Walk Into A Bar: Chapter 1: No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

This might be my favorite Xmas story I ever wrote; if you've read it before, maybe read it again. If you haven't, then here's the first installment of the story, from back in 2011:

"Santa,
Godzilla,
and Jesus
Walk Into A Bar"
a/k/a The Greatest Xmas Story Ever Told.

(By me.)

No orphans were harmed in the making of this story.

And only one orphan was harmed in the telling of it.

On the street in front of Nick, who makes UFOs for a living – it’s a long story, and there’s no time to explain it right now because we’re only moments away from something really important happening --  was a tiny brass trumpet.

It was dirty.

It was covered in soot and laying in a puddle of slush next to a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and looked as though it had a lipstick smear on it, on the wrong end, and maybe some teeth marks, too.

So naturally, Nick picked it up and was just seconds away from blowing into it when the door to the bar he’d just been told to leave opened up behind him and he heard the voice of the man who’d told him to leave, saying:

“Okay, okay. So here’s this one: Santa, Godzilla, and Jesus walk into a bar…”

and Nick paused with the dirty lipstick-smeared horn up to his mouth and listened because with a set up like that who wouldn’t, and then that important thing you were told was going to happen but you already forgot about it happened:

A body slammed to the ground in front of Nick, falling into, as it happens, the exact same puddle that Nick had just pulled the trumpet out of. How’s that for irony? We’re only just getting started, too.

Sirens immediately started up all around Nick, and from both ends of the street – he was in the middle of the block – came cop cars racing towards him, almost as if they’d been waiting for just this.

(They had been.)

Nick squatted down and looked at the body in front of him. It was a large man, laying on his stomach.  His face was turned to the side, his eyes closed. Somehow, the fedora the man wore, which Nick hadn’t noticed until that moment, had stayed on when the man had fallen to the puddle from wherever it was he’d fallen from.

All the buildings on the street being three stories or shorter, Nick didn’t bother looking up above him.  The man had fallen straight down from the sky, Nick knew, because it had happened right in front of his eyes.

“We’ll take care of this, sir,” said the surprisingly sexy cop who was suddenly standing in front of him. Nick blinked up at her, and saw her eyes narrow in a fetchingly cute way.

“Where’d you get that horn?” she said.

Nick looked down at his hand, still poised near his mouth.

“It’s a trumpet,” he said.

The cop reached for her waist, and Nick made his second regrettable decision that day, the first being “admitting to the bartender that he had no money before he ordered.”

He ran.

The third regrettable decision he made a second later when he looked back and saw the sexy lady cop lifting up the dead bum’s jacket, and noticed the dead bum had wings.


PART TWO COMING SOON. Or if you want you can buy the entire story all at once here. 

These footnotes got a little out of hand but the point is this is cool music.

Last night I bought "Act 1- New Game" by Phillip Leon (son of writer extraordinaire* Andrew Leon). Andrew says it's good music to write to, and it is that -- it's got soundtrack written all over it -- but it's also just plain good music to do anything to.  You could listen to this music and go for a walk, or listen to this music and rail against rich people, or listen to this music and kneel for the National Anthem, or listen to this music and dream of the day when society finally stops letting rich f***s destroy the world and we can all be a little happier.



You can listen to the music and be a little happier, and for just $5** you can get the music for yourself and make Phillip Leon both a little happier, and a lot more likely to keep on making cool music like this.  Go buy your own copy here. 

*WHEN IS BROTHERS KEEPER COMING OUT ANDREW FOR CRYING OUT LOUD!!!

**Come on it's FIVE BUCKS. Even I spent that much and I am the cheapest living human being.***

*** that's true. I won't buy a brown belt to wear with my brown pants because what am I the queen of England here?

The girl who exists

"Escape From The T. Rex!"

Mr Bunches invented a game! It's called "Escape From The T. Rex." He designed it, and I drew it to his specifications.  Here are the game pieces:

Each player is a jungle explorer, and has to make their way along the treacherous path from Start to Finish:

You roll a die to move, but Mr Bunches decides how many steps to take in between the marked spaces.  This is intentional: Mr Bunches hates to lose (he is always the red explorer) so by not marking spaces on all the boards, he can decide (as he did tonight, for example) that if you roll a six and are pretty close behind him you move 6 tiny little spaces so you stay behind him.

There is, of course, a T. Rex:

Scientifically accurate

But the T. Rex only comes into play if you land on that space, in the middle of the board, labeled "Eaten By The T. Rex!"

If THAT happens, your piece is replaced with one of the pieces indicating that his head has been bitten off:

and you are either out of the game, or returned to start, or -- in one strange quirk tonight -- turned into an angel and then by magic your head is back.  (That happened to my piece, I think because I looked sad at being out of the game.)

If a person makes it all the way to Finish, then you have escaped the T. Rex and also beaten it so that it turns into a fossil:

Pretty sure that's EXACTLY how fossils are made. 

It is a VERY exciting game that combines the best of science, board games, and the thrill of Escaping From A T. Rex!

I think a cool thing to do would be to spend an entire day using ONLY Star Wars quotes.

Boom goes the dynamite

"... Only you can see then, Martin. You want to know why?"

"This is bullshit," Martin said.

"You've got the sight," Harrison said. "The third eye. The sixth sense."

"I don't see dead people," Martin said.

"No, you see worse. I've met people like you before. You have a talent. You don't need a gadget to make it work."

"Is there where you tell me to put away the targeting computer?"

-- We Are All Completely Fine, Daryl Gregory.

But with new Loquinex (TM) you can be free of all that (i had this moment)

Bear Comics

The Boys etc etc August!

Miniature golfing:

Swimming at the "Dolphin Pool" (So named for its dolphin-water fountain)

At Zipline Park. 

On our way to the Dolphins' Cove waterpark for Mr Bunches' early birthday present. No pictures from the waterpark, for non-waterproof-camera-related reasons. 

Babysitting Mr F's and Mr Bunches' nephew (my grandson) and taking him to the nature trail...

Mr F & Grandson at the splash park:

Swinging on the last weekend of summer...

Bonus Summer Day: Actually September 1, but I took the day off and we went bowling: 

Mr F has a "Green Machine," a Big Wheel for older kids, but it had already been delivered to the school by the weekend of September 2 (he uses it for phy-ed), so he was relegated to old school Big Wheels when playing outside: 

The boys are tenty-one, part two: pics from July

Sweetie and I agreed summer seemed less full of activities this year -- me busier with a new job and having fewer days off helped that. But we packed a lot in.

Stewart Lake, 

This is our nature walk to the natural springs and then the big hill we call "the mountain." We got to the springs, but this impending thunderstorm called off the hike up the mountain:

Free day at the Milwaukee Public Museum: Mr Bunches in the butterfly room

Us in the European village. 

Mr F in front of the Native Americans hunting buffalo display. Clearly excited by it!

We only stayed about 1 hour at the museum. It was supercrowded and Mr Bunches was made nervous by the dinosaur display where the dinosaurs seem VERY real and there are thunder noises in the background.

Swimming, then swinging at the beach down the street from us.

This was when we went to go wading up the river, right at the start. Mr F slipped and cut his ankle, and while it wasn't bad I didn't want it to get infected so we cut the trip short. Then weather kept us from ever finishing the trip, one of three traditional summer activities we had to skip that we'd done every year up to this one. 

The Vilas Zoo in Madison. Free, so we go all the time. 

Sad story alert! This is a splash park where Oldest Daughter brought her son (my grandson) and I took the boys. While Mr F and the grandson had a great time, Mr Bunches kept coming over and telling us that there were "troublemakers" squirting him (as shown below). We both thought he was just having fun and saying they were troublemakers because of the squirting, which, you know, splash park. We learned after we left that it had really bothered him, that he wanted to play with the horse squirters but was trying to get the kids to stop squirting him, and that in fact he wanted our help. I felt guilty for days.

I took him back to the splash park a month later, and he was worried about the troublemakers being there again. So I stuck by him and when a kid tried to squirt him, I explained to the kid that he did not want to be squirted, and Mr Bunches finally had a good time there.

This is what happens when you swim several days in a row...

Mr F finished off July lounging in our lower level, where my home office used to be but now it's becoming a playroom again.

The Boys are Tenty-One

The boys turned 11 yesterday, but I ran out of time to post photos of them. In lieu of the yearly roundup of past pictures of them, I'm going to post a bunch of stuff we did this summer. Today is from June:



Graduation from fourth grade. As 5th graders, they now go to a new building with fifth through eighth graders.

Clearly impressed by his achievements.

Trip to the beach with their nephew. It was the windiest day I've ever seen, but Bucket Helmet (Patent Pending) was an unrelated fashion choice.

Early in the summer, Mr F didn't want to go in the water when we went swimming. So we compromised...

Dad teaches hygiene, Mr Bunches fights back using The Power Of Notes (Patent Pending)

"Cops & Bobbers": free fishing poles for the kids at the park where Sweetie and I had our wedding reception years ago. Mr Bunches caught TWO fish.

Of course without DNA testing we can't say whether
that's a different fish or just the same, really really
gullible, fish.

Most Sundays I go into work for a few hours in the morning. The boys come with me, and then we go do something fun. Here's Mr Bunches playing with the Dollar Store Robots by my fish tank. Oh, yeah, we got goldfish for the office. Mr Bunches named them: the boy is "Sam Alex," and the girl is "Rose Alice."

I am the only lawyer in my office with a working catapult and an easy chair. BOTH ARE NECESSARY.

"Krafty Kids" at the library. Mr F was making an ocean necklace.

On weekend nights, Mr F's nightly ride is the "Capital Route," which takes us down by the Capitol, through the UW campus, and home along the lakeshore. One night, we got this scene:

"Tall Park." Guess why we call it that?

Swinging at the park around the corner from our house.

"Little Park On The Mountain." I don't know why he was posing this way...

But it reminded me of something...