23 October 2012
Volcabbage, a controversial figure of the Sham Grimeasty in today’s Republic of Porfbe, had often said, in life “I want to dig a hole and live in it,” but until now details about being dead in one have been scant.
Initially, our excavation crew had been granted permission to investigate the tomb of Roneldo, the famous and influential warlord, but the Porfbeian government withdrew support the day before it was to happen, deciding in the end that Roneldo was too respectable to be violated in this way. They suggested Volcabbage instead. Volcabbage did not enjoy Roneldo’s level of popular support nor leave a lasting impact on anyone’s customs or ideology but nonetheless had a large and eccentric grave site. Our team of archaeologists was not terribly interested, but as they had come all that way they figured they might as well. We were unprepared for what we found. Primarily because we were prepared to find something else.
Volcabbage was a court eunuch who usurped power from the beloved monarch Gorko by changing the palace locks when Gorko went out to buy a pumpkin. Gorko, despondent with shame, went into exile and never returned, even though Volcabbage ended up getting tossed out of the palace and also exiled later that evening, having neglected to win the favor of the staff in charge of the windows. As it happens, Gorko did not maintain a stock of concubines so it is unclear why eunuchs specifically were employed on the premises.
Volcabbage was only emperor for several hours but somehow had time to order this massive tomb be built. It is speculated the tomb had been designed far in advance; possibly up to a week and a half, and Volcabbage stole power primarily to demand its construction. As the workers were busy on the construction they were not notified that Volcabbage had been ousted until they finished the job. Some of the non-structural artifacts are believed to have been contributed from Volcabbage’s personal extratombal property.
What an ugly diagram! We had best look at it more closely.
1: Entrance to tomb. (1a) top floor may have been rented out to other deceased to cover some of the costs
2: Inner passage to lower level. (2a) Escalator: Volcabbage was indecisive. If the afterlife proved unsatisfactory, the deceased may have wished to return, in which event a comfortable exit from the tomb was desirable. Similarly, if being reminded of this world once more helped to put things into their proper perspective, the spiral slide (2b) would provide a quick and simple re-entry.
3: Vehicle storage zone. classical decadent tombs often contained stables, so this was seen as an appropriate analogy. (3a) Helicopter chair: keeping in mind the idea of “if you can create a physical, visual approximation it will work in the afterlife,” this was designed to simplify transportation, as Volcabbage was not a licensed driver. (3b) Chariot: in Porfbeian society a license was not required to operate one of these. (3c) Hovercraft, because there was space for one.
4: Houses for servants. most of volcabbage’s employees were little imps. Some of them are more affluent than the other imps and it is speculated the wealthiest had their own little tombs containing even tinier servants
5: Banquet chamber. (5a) banquet table: Volcabbage rarely enjoyed company. It is uncertain if this meant to represent a pathetic hope for more human contact or to give unwanted guests a space to deal with their own business in while Volcabbage worked elsewhere, possibly at (6b). (5b) Terra cotta figure of Pog, the Inedible, on a large serving dish. Pog reminds us of an ancient Chinese story of a tree which grew old through being so useless that nobody saw any reason to chop it down. Pog, in contrast, was useless and lacking in flavor merely by chance, and no predators dared attempt to consume it. Volcabbage developed odd culinary tastes, it is said, as a means of encouraging visitors to purchase their own food, particularly guests of roommates. (5c) tiny table for tiny servants to hold banquets at.
6: Bed enclosure. Reduced scale, compared to banquet chamber. Much clutter that seems to be of little consequence. (6a) Bed said to be remote-operable, but as its optimum operation requires it lie dormant this is of dubious significance. (6b) miserable, tiny desk. Not ergonomically suited to any task we can think of.
7: “pig room.” Potentially the most peculiar section. It requires special attention and so it is illustrated and discussed in greater detail later in this document.
Though this is Volcabbage’s tomb, is not known whose body was actually buried within; considering Volcabbage’s known wish to not be buried. The most common theory is that it is actually the body of Rygar, a trusted court official. A more fringe suggestion is that the original body of volcabbage was dismembered and fed to partisans of Roneldo in anticipation of a bowtie-clad imp statue being placed inside the tomb. Overcome by food poisoning or a simple curse, their lives were thenceforth inconvenient and they were buried here afterward, for they contained the tomb’s owner, who they resented and decided to spite with their posthumous placement. In another oddity, however, no bodies were found. All that turned up were skeletons, the infamous restless undead warriors. The excavators thankfully found it unnecessary to battle the skeletons to gain their respect before entering. They are not currently a threat to visitors. However, a pine cone was discovered on the premises so it is advisable to be cautious.
7a Toilet paper: Volcabbage endured allergies regularly (possibly from overconsumption of foods like 7h pizza) and found “roll” the most effective method for the dispensation of allergy relieving paper material. This roll is very large and its user would never fear tearing off an amount inadequate to contain nasal excretion flow out of a desire to conserve the material. However, it is also far too large to be portable. We wonder why Volcabbage did not propose a representation for an allergy cure to go in the chamber.
7b Nemitz: Large ceramic figure of semi-divine entity of Mupelzorian religion. Porfbe is said to be named from one of Nemitz’s quotations. Unlikely to be an effective guard. Perhaps volcabbage just found it funny to look at. Its attire suggests butler-like duties, but again it may simply be to appear ridiculous. A similar statue called an “Elpse” (7c) was looted shortly after the excavation began. Nemitz was evidently less desirable.
7d dopes: Large-eared smiling creature with similar demeanor to nemitz. Volcabbage repeatedly claimed in life to despise these “dopes,” and yet the tomb is filled with them; one for each of the six columns and a rotating gold dope (7e) in the center. The other dopes are plastic. Hopefully the servant imps were not as foolish as dopes.
7f Bowtie imp: unlike the dopes, there is no imperial record alluding to the existence of a jade bowtie imp and it is not in the plan. It has been speculated that this was placed into the tomb by a rival, possibly Roneldo, to be a source of annoyance in the afterlife
7g Ducks. No ducks found.
7h Pizza. Volcabbage was an avowed believer in the importance of a balanced diet, low in saturated fat and cholesterol. The pizza represents people not having pizza anymore because it’s in this tomb and thus people will have no choice but to eat more healthy foods. Or perhaps Volcabbage just really liked pizza.
7i A bottle. Surely this represents a drink of some sort to go with the pizza. That seemed bland so elaborate handles were added to the sides. However, much like the large toilet paper roll, this must have made the bottle impractical for placing into a coat pocket.
7j The large pig, at last, represents a fondness for pigs. The pointless monarch once said of pigs “they look funny if they are sculpted and displayed.” Volcabbage must have thought a very large pig would be very funny. A strange person, Volcabbage.
Subsequent grimeasties looked upon Volcabbage with disgust. With a mind for cultural preservation the tomb was left where it was, but highways and utility poles were built nearby. Several chambers remain unexplored, including one that appeared to represent an elegant tiled single-occupancy bathroom, but it is doubtful that Volcabbage bathed and in any event we were getting tired and decided to go home.
I would prefer to wash my own hands!
Or perhaps it is this kraft orange green goop
Warning: do not be fooled by imitation brand generic “craft” goop. How do we even know that it is orange (or green)?
Another warning: you dang kids better stop bringing your beds to the beach!
i just spent 3 hours going from a French-audio news story I barely understood about Catalonia to looking up pictures of Kim Jong-il on escalators. Good night, internet. Clearly it’s too late for me to have one.
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Crucial correction: a recent study has revealed that I have indeed eaten peanut butter before. I hated it. Most commonly before I could read, inside brown, chocolate-looking deceptions.
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“Taste the flavors, as nature intended.”
I do not think, if nature had intentions, that one would be for us to chop animals into pieces and then stuff the pieces into little rectangular packages. I think nature’s promises would look more like…
Stix. There was a time when people put food on sticks. That was too complicated. What if you accidentally ate the stick? What if you accidentally jammed the stick into your ear? Now food IS sticks. Excuse me, stix. This is very important, evidently. Much easier and safer. But wait, Fribbage, you say. Wouldn’t removing the stick result in less non-food matter being wasted and discarded? Ah ha! Research has shown that stixifying edible objects allows them to be encased in non-biodegradable material where previously nobody would have bothered.
You might have thought: apples, those are easy! one of the most overproduced and underwhelming fruits on earth. There is no place that sells food where they cannot be obtained. Packaging them is totally unnecessary. WRONG. You neglected to consider the stix factor. Could I cut the apple into stix on my own? No, I could not. By expending the slightest bit of effort, could I remove any trace of a perceived need for another plastic-wasting piece of supermarketfluousness?
I suppose you think these are just regular dumb old raisins that somebody tossed in a structurally unremarkable box behind a picture of Highschool and Musical.
Maybe you think, if it’s REAL FRUIT, with a flashy little graphic saying so, why don’t I just BUY FRUIT? Do not agree, I am mocking you! Consider that “fruit” never has print testifying to it being real fruit. If it doesn’t come in a bag, how are we going to write what’s in it? More importantly, how are we going to put pictures of cartoon characters on it?
This picture is from 2008! Disney appealing this rule was to everyone’s benefit. Goofs are good for business.
True enough, there were those apples whose stickers had a picture of Garfield-the-cat’s head with a barcode frightfully superimposed over his teeth, but stickers are only there to annoy people, and to make consuming the fruit a frightful, obsessive compulsion triggering-ordeal, either when removing and disposing of the things or discovering them permanently adhered to a common household surface when a fellow resident fails at the task. They have no practical function. Fruit stix are much safer, and better to give your kids than Dunkaroos, much as having a pumpkin thrown at you is better than having a used diaper thrown at you.
I hsve often remarked at the ingenuity of Captain Crunch, who could not create real doughnuts or chocolate and so synthesized both, but Little Debbie raised the bar so high that it fell off the supports by failing to even achieve the shape. Worse, she could not spell stix properly. Since there is no Food and Drug Administration definition of what cannot be stix, I don’t know why Debbie would let such an obvious quality error past her diabetic shock fixed gaze.
Glix Stix! Just like glow stix but with less nutritive value.
Is there nothing we cannot make into stix? Is there nothing we cannot make into Pringles? Unlike a majority of similarly-shaped items, Pringles already weren’t potato chips, and now they are less than that. They weren’t about to let somebody else get the jump on their not-quite-being a regulated commodity celebration. Also, though they dare call themselves neither chip nor stick, “PIZZA” is still a-o-k.
Pringles are also mutltigrain. Not quite whole grain, and not quite food, but wow they sure feel healthy when they have the word grain printed on their tubes!
Kid Cuisine Snack Stix. These are undoubtedly created from the remains of that really loopy-looking mascot seen on the packages through much of 2011.
Though stix-like food was still a factor. Oddly enough less stick-like than a real hotdog. Better poke it with a fork just to make sure it’s dead.
My picture from the store was blurry, perhaps a self-defense mechanism by my camera, so I looked for other people’s pictures of queasine stix. This one is still of minimal quality, but that hasn’t been a factor yet today, and I was fascinated by the picture of the little penguin, also a Martin Short fan, evidenced by the Ed Grimley hair style, stepping on a fute ball while reciting a hubris-filled monologue at the poor hopeless stixling. Sportly imagery is always a good hint that the brand has been criticized for being rubbish, like when Ronald McDonald inexplicably took up basketball in the mid 1990s. Subtly imply that eaters should engage in heavy aerobics prior to eating (or in this case just step on a ball and imagine you might), because changing the product would amount to admitting that it was rubbish, and make you liable in the lawsuits filed against you for selling rubbish and pretending it was food for years and years. Also, if the product itself were changed to be less rubbishy, then people would notice it was different, and this awareness might make them realize they were eating frozen, reheated tubes of goops that they could buy fresh, in jars, at much higher quantities for less money.
There, again! I have never eaten peanut butter or jelly in my life, nor have I in anyone else’s life, but it certainly LOOKS delicious here. And by grebij, it has NO high fructose corn syrup in it! That’s a bonus! A health benefit! Instead of using less sugar, you can use the same amount and boast that you didn’t use a different kind of sugar! It wants you to be impressed not because it did something good, but merely that it resisted doing something bad, even though it actually did, just under a different name. The anti corn syrup hype subdued the too much sugar hype and then they both wondered “why are we fighting each other?” The Westboro Baptist church website should have a glossy seal on it that says “contains no racism!”
and we are completely helpless.
Meanwhile, the artist is hopeless.
page 16 of what?
i realize it is unsatisfying to get an old page when it has been so long since a new page, but I have not had access to my paper and for some reason I have not yet totally given up on its inclusion in the process. This update approaches fixing a longstanding issue I have had: that I had no idea where the amphibian was driving off to if it had not completed its task. In the old, old 2001 script the creature had suspected that the correct recipients had indeed stolen the package, and so it returned to its home. In the 2005 edition, as now, the creature was visiting yet another destination in the same vicinity, so it should not have been on a journey of length. The answer: detour signs, just to be annoying.
I say this approaches fixing because, due to the detour injection it could only conclude midway between the next regular old page, if I wanted it to be legible, which means I need to show the full old page, which negates this. It is better this than to try and force in everything as I would have three years ago two rows had five frames. That is a bad habit. So I am not any faster than I once was but I am less concerned with economy.
I have learned to disguise my abuse, fortunately.
I would like to say another new or old new page is forthcoming, but evidently I need to get everything out of the apartment I have lived in for 2.5 years and then go to another country briefly, and both of these require more planning than I can do gracefully, so to do it awkwardly may require extra effort.