he pushed it open, sending it creaking open on its ponderous corpulent hinges. Even the malfeasance of his memory, though, could not protect him from surprise at the sight he encountered within. A pallid arachnid, dressed in some kind of papal bustier, turned to face him. This mutant horror, closer to the size of a blimp than an ant, turned with a horrible temporal scream and faced him. It whipped back a corner of its bizarre liturgical negligee and pulled a deadly rune-covered sword from its scabbard. "Hm! No happy shindig today," he thought to himself, the single thought filling the usual vacuum of his mind. The sword swooped down and caught him a glancing blow. The horrific spider laughed with glee, but the cheer caught in its thorax as he rose, unhurt, to his feet. Thank God he was wearing his kevlar
There are five houses. The first house is on the left. The longshoreman lives in the red house. The economist owns the basset hound. Tea is drunk in the green house. The fireman drinks bourbon. The green house is immediately to the right of the ivory house. The octopus owner reads history books. Science fiction is read in the yellow house. Milk is drunk in the middle house. The detective lives in the first house. The man who reads biographies lives in the house next to the man with the anteater. Science fiction is read in the house next to the house where the squirrel is kept. The magazine reader drinks antifreeze. (Bad habit, really.) The general reads Shakespeare. The detective lives next to the blue house. Now, here's your quiz: Who drinks water? And who owns the weasel?
were there any references in the book to Aragorn looting Boromir's body? Do the descendants of Elendil have a history of plundering the fallen that I was heretofore unaware of? When Isildur took the Ring from the body of Sauron, did he stop to claim the gold fillings from Sauron's teeth as weregild as well?
progress has achieved wonderful things, too. Paving. Asphalt. Smog. Car alarms that wake you up in the middle of the fucking night. Carcinogenic food. The Exxon Valdez. That stereo in the apartment upstairs. Hydrogen bombs. Hormone-injected meat. Artificial coloring. Alarm clocks (and a society so dependent on measured time that we need alarm clocks). Television, and a society that has replaced "How can we improve the human condition?" with "Hey, did'ja see the Simpsons last night? Huh huh". An Internet where people like us can waste away their free time instead of going out and having a life. Yeah! Progress! I love it! Get me the genetic splicing kit! I want to make a new kind of trout!