My rage burns like it always has. It’s been a while since it last erupted, like a volcano of rage that simmers and bubbles at the surface and gradually builds up until it boils over and destroys Los Angeles or Tokyo or Des Moines, or maybe just makes a new island of solid gold in the Pacific on the international date line and Scrooge McDuck and Flintheart Glomgold compete to get there first and stake their claim on it, but Glomgold gets there first and stakes his claim, but Scrooge notices he staked his claim on the WEST side of the island, so he just walks over to the EAST side of the island and stakes his claim, and since it’s on the EAST side of the international date line the claim was made nearly an entire day before Glomgold’s?
It’s that kind of volcanic rage. And kudos to anyone who read that Scrooge McDuck comic book.
To the Kingdom of Aragon:
Hi, I’m your neighbor, Castile. We get along pretty well, don’t we? Yeah, could say as much. Yeah, I know you invited me into a military alliance with Bremen and a coupla other nobodies, but I didn’t want to commit to something, especially considering how Fez, Algiers, and Grenada were allied against you. I was gonna hook up with you guys soon enough, but then you went to war against Grenada. I figured this was my chance to help expel the Moors, and I helpfully invaded Gibraltar, besieged the city, and conquered it. Now, as we both know I was just an occupying force, and Grenada itself still technically owned the territory. I just figured that I’d send you a little missive, we’d hook up in an alliance, and then you could keep Grenada and I’d keep Gibraltar as soon as we signed a peace with Grenada. Instead, you rejected my alliance, and signed a punitive peace agreement with Grenada in which he ceded ownership of Gibraltar to you, and then you passed it on to Bremen. Fucking BREMEN. They’re way the fuck back there in northern Europe! They’re up by Holstein and Denmark! So my bloodstained and battered troops, having caught their breath after a destructive siege, are now politely notified “This territory belongs to Bremen. Please evacuate your occupying force.” This means war, you understand. I’m going to annex your puny Aragonese territories. I was just going to complete the reconquista and then work my way eastward across North Africa. Instead, I’m unifying all of the Iberian penisula under my boot. You just signed your own death warrant, Aragon, and your body is writing checks that your ass can’t cash, and I’m your worst nightmare, and stuff. As a result of your inept diplomacy (what did Bremen ever do to help your attack, anyway?) I’ve spent all day fuming and I can’t wait to get back home and teach you that you don’t mess with Castile.
And I AIN’T leaving Gibraltar.
To phenylalanine:
No, I’m not phenylketonuric. My phenylalanine hydroxylase enzymes are chugging away happily, turning phenylalanine into tyrosine, and I can keep drinking all the Pepsi One I want. However, I’m positive that the six cans of Pepsi One that flush through my system daily will give me said metabolic disorder. Sort of like too much sugar turns you into a diabetic, or too much masturbation makes you blind? Stuff like that. However, I’m also positive that phenylalanine should be a substance controlled by the FDA, since there can be no other reason why I drink this stuff at such a prodigious rate. As a result, I’ve got about 4000% of the recommended daily allowance of caramel color, and I’m sure there’s a sandy brown goo building up in my veins. When I die and the coroner performs an autopsy, he’ll say “Hey … what the hell is all this goo?” and immediately masked Pepsi operatives will flash a red light in his face and tell him that he saw nothing. My word will not be silenced, phenylalanine. I’m on to you.
To the pig:
Yeah, I know, I know. I know this is like Jesus calling out God, or Moses calling out Buddha, or Spanky the Wonder Monkey calling out lno, but you’re on the list. Because of you, I have no room left in my freezer. It’s packed with carefully labeled homemade sausages. I’m sure you’re saying, “But what did I do? Your parents were the one who gave you the meat grinder! Your butcher was the one who sold you the casings! He even sold you me! All I did was exist!” And you’re exactly right. Your mere existence is reason for your excoriation. What are you, some kind of magical animal, that gives us pork chops, and ham, and bacon, and more? The chicken gives us chicken. The cow gives us beef. What do you give us? A countless cornicopia of pleasurable porcine products. And for what? Is this out of the goodness of your heart? Maybe you’re trying to give us all trichinosis? Or maybe you’re even more subtle, and you’ll gradually exact your revenge through years of slightly elevated cholesterol and, fifty years from now, an artery that YOU clogged will kill me? No, no, oh no. You’re in cahoots with phenylalanine and caramel color and you intend to fill my veins with icky nasties. There is only one solution to this, and that is to exterminate the pig through a programme of increased eating. You, the pig, will die to feed me.
To Scrooge McDuck:
And by extension, all of Disney’s line of Duck comics. We had a subscription to about a dozen of your comics when I was growing up. Monthly I read Donald Duck, Donald Duck Adventures, Scrooge McDuck Adventures, Walt Disney’s Comics & Stories, DuckTales, and on, and on. I was your target market. You knew you could just repackage old Carl Barks stories and Al Taliaferro strips into a comic and ship it out to me each month and I wouldn’t gripe. I’d even read the shit that William Van Horn scribbled. WILLIAM VAN FUCKING HORN. Yeah, you did occasionally have a new Don Rosa 10-pager, and I lived for those. His Majesty, McDuck? Classic. Even Don Rosa’s worst was far above the rest. Why am I calling you out, you ask? Simple. I derived an unhealthy amount of knowledge from your so-called comic “books”. On the KnowledgeMaster quiz team in high school, I depended on bits of trivia gleaned from passing references. Like when the question came up on the screen asking which of the five volcanoes listed was in the southern hemisphere, and I saw Krakatoa and shouted “dog definitely!” to let the teammate at the keyboard know that the answer was D and that I’d wager my life on it, and we got full credit and full bonus credit for answering within seconds. How did I know that Krakatoa was in the southern hemisphere? Well, there was the eight-pager where Gyro Gearloose decides that the world needs fast transit to the opposite side of the globe, and creates a laser that drills a core through the planet, and then a passenger can ride in a metal ‘bullet’ that gravity pulls through the planet and ejects out the other side. Remember that one? 'course you do. Anyway, when Gyro fired the laser through, he nearly hit a comically-dressed native duck on the far side of the globe, who jumped to the side and shouted “KRAKATOA!” Which, in the brief second of seeing that word on the screen in the quiz contest, led me to deduce that Krakatoa was a volcano, and since Duckburg is in North America, the polar opposite of that would be in the southern hemisphere, and THUS KRAKATOA IS IN THE SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE AND THE ANSWER IS D! That’s all fine and good, right? RIGHT. However, I then tried to apply duck knowledge to the rest of the world. Like, how Scrooge has three cubic acres of cash? Well, as we all know, an acre is a measure of area, not volume, and cubing an acre would turn us into a wonky six dimensions. Or would it go to eight, since 2^3 is eight? Or maybe we could disregard that path of logic, and instead look at the fact that his money bin is apparently a cube. One side of an acre is 208.71 ft, but that just introduces more problems since we’re repeatedly shown that the money fills the cubic bin to a height of less than 100 feet! So not only do we have a problem of how to cube an acre, but we have another problem of a cube that measures slightly more than 100 feet on a side! Well, yeah, we can postulate that there’s a foundation and there’s open space above, and MAYBE the height of the bin is several hundred feet, but that’s beyond the scope of this rant. Suffice it to say that you started me on a path of rational thinking, and then you fucked with my head with your cubing of squares. You’re on the list, and your little grandnephews, too. Their Woodchuck training won’t stop me.
To Eight Legged Freaks:
I read about you a year or two ago. You were going to be a campy monster movie, like It Came From Beneath The Sea or Tarantula but with modern CGI rendering? You said that you wouldn’t be a traditional horror movie, but would retain the element of silliness that we all came to know and love from the 50s and 60s monster movies. At first you were entitled Arach Attack, but after the recent rumblings of another war against Iraq, you wisely altered the title. But then, shouldn’t it be Eight-Legged Freaks? I mean, as the title reads now, it sounds like there are eight freaks who have legs. Still, though, that’s a minor issue beside the major point, once I find it. And THAT is, as we all know, I have an unhealthy fear of spiders as described in previous rages against Fred, the spider in the garage. I watched the trailer, and despite a queasy and uneasy feeling in my stomach, I was sold with the last scene - David Arquette clinging to a ladder, firing a shotgun into a pack of spiders below and shouting at them. The only thing that could be better is if he were equipped with a flamethrower. Beggars can’t be choosers, though, and I’ll take the shotgun, and I’ll go see this movie against my better judgement. Despite the therapeutic effects of seeing spiders the size of horses being blown up, I’ll still see people pounced upon, eaten, and chased by said spiders. I’m going to have nightmares for WEEKS, and who’s to blame? You are. I’m fine with classic spider movies, like Tarantula mentioned above. (Who can’t love John Agar in his roles from the 50s? Jesus, man, a SAG card doesn’t mean you’re an actor.) However, now that the spiders actually look realistic, I’m a whiny bitch. I could handle Arachnophobia despite clinging to the arms of the theater chair so tightly I broke one of them off. Those spiders were small, and it was impressive how the ‘spider wranglers’ managed to get them to ‘act’. But giant monster CGI spiders? I’m scared shitless already. And it’s ALL YOUR FAULT.
To Duchess:
Aw, you’re such a cute pupsy, yes, you are. You ARE. You’re my little schnoogums, aren’t you. My cousin is looking for a new home for you, and I’m about two days away from saying, “hi! yo! me!” I’ve watched you grow up, you know me, you like me, I like you, and everyone involved would love for you to end up in a home with someone familiar. What’s the problem, you ask? Let me tell you. Because of you, Duchess, sweet, sweet Duchess, I’m going to have babes flocking to me. “Oh, what a cute dog!” they’ll say. I’ll take you to a park, and I’ll have to beat the chyx off with a STICK. And will you care? No. You’ll look at me with your tongue lolling out and your tail thumping on the ground, wondering when I’ll fend off all that attention and start playing with you again. And know what? One of those chyx will probably convince me to marry her someday, and then someday we’ll have kids, and then the toddler will pull on your tail. That’ll be my revenge, Duchess. Revenge is mine, saith lno, I shall repay.
…ahhh. It’s so exhilirating to release all of that pent-up rage.