Mr. Potato Head Bible Beating – spoilerized with a block of those red and cyan blotches that require a special 2 cent gel made in China to read the text hidden inside.
She Came In Through The Bathroom Window
Fireworks and Hurricanes
*Mr. Potato Head Bible Beating
*Fireworks and Hurricanes
*Spinning in the Sunlight
Jesus. They’re all so good. I love any story that features one of your sister’s evil comebacks at your mother.
I guess: Potato
Bathroom Window
Wraith Waifs
Seriously, may I suggest that you consider renaming the Potato Head story to “Bring Me the Head of Mr. Potato” and (possibly) renaming the Bathroom Window story “Oh! You mean That traincase” or “In lieu of flowers…”
Really tough to choose, but I’ll go with:
*Mr. Potato Head Bible Beating
*Hacksaw the Musical
*She came in through the Bathroom Window
And just let me say how much this Canuck who’s never set foot in the South has enjoyed reading all your stories.
{which oddly enough, doesn’t mention Jonestown}
This is one I would never include in anything published because it’s way too politically incorrect and I don’t want to portray Kathy as an Ann Coulter-ish hatemonger (she’s not), but it is memorable (and the parts about Janet Reno’s mom are true, if you’re wondering).
I was working at a college in Americus, Georgia on September 11 (and actually learned about the first plane crash from an e-mail sent by a friend who heard it on the news) and had the typical reactions. Kathy learned about it when her husband, who was flying his small Cessna from Pensacola back to Gulf Shores, was ordered down by an ATC (he thought it one of his airport friends playing a joke and he joked back, but he quickly learned they were quite serious) and he grounded and called home. A few days later I was in my office and got a call.
“Hello?”
“What’s the Korah say about people who kill themselves?”
“I beg your pardon? Kathy?”
“Yes it’s Kathy, you’re good. Only took you thirty something years to learn my voice. I can’t believe you actually picked up a phone for a change. Now what’s the Korah say about killing yourself?”
“What’s the Korah?”
“That Moslem Bible thing, the KORAH!”
“Ah, the Qur’an.” (It was hard to sound the apostrophe, but I did it.)
“The ku what?”
“Qur’an.”
“Koo-ran, Kool-Aid, Korah Korah Korah, whatever it’s called, what’s it say about killing yourself?”
My sister for whatever reason considers me a one-touch expert on everything and I’m afraid I have to perpetually disappoint her.
“Well… to be honest I’ve never read it all the way through. I would assume it considers it a sin, just like Christianity and Judaism.”
“That’s what I figured. So those @#$$ers on those planes, they just miss that day in Ay-rab Sunday school or something? Cause they were supposed to be to Izz-lamb what Holy Rollers are to us, you’d think they’d have seen in there sometime that ‘You really shouldn’t kill yourself cause it pisses old Allah off”. Why would they do something like that when it means they’re goin’ to hell?”
“Well, they thought they had just earned automatic entry into heaven.”
“Come again? The Kool-Aid Bible says ‘you shouldn’t kill yourself, but here’s a loophole- crash a plane into a tower and you go to heaven.’ What since does that make?”
“Well, Islam as I understand it teaches that to die in battle in the defense of Mecca or the defense of Islam itself is a noble death and rewarded with Paradise.”
[silence for a moment]
“And those people over in Mecca… they reckoned that World Trade Center was comin’ right at ‘em, did they?”
“Uh… well… it’s… complicated. They saw it as a strike against the United States, who had troops in Saudi Arabia and who fought the Soviet Union in Afghanistan which added to the destruction of that country…”
“And if we’d just let the Soviets have Afghanistan then they’d have been bitching about that.”
“I’m not defending them or saying I agree with them, you asked and I’m trying to explain as I understand it, which is limited.”
“So they think that if you go into battle for Mo-hammid, and you die, then you’ll go to heaven?”
“Basically.”
“Alright… I can almost understand that. I really can. They’re wrong of course, but I can see if I grew up Ay-rab that it might make sense. But tell me this… if you go into battle, there’s always a chance you’re gonna come out alive. There are stories about battles where men were outnumbered twenty to one, but somehow they made it through. There were even survivors at Masada…”
It’s always amazing what my sister (who please don’t ever let me convey the image of a stupid woman- she’s not at all, she just doesn’t read) does and doesn’t know. I would have bet good money that she had no idea what Masada was.
“…so even if it should be a bloodbath, there’s a chance you can somehow live. But these dumbasses, they somehow thought that if they flew a plane into a building and it blew up, which is what they were counting on, then there was a chance they’d live?”
“I don’t think that’s the case… I think they all knew they were going to die.”
“Then that’s not battle. That’s suicide.”
“Well, and please understand I’m not defending them because I honestly think they’re as fucked up as you do, but… if a man throws himself on a grenade to save his platoon mates, that is technically suicide, but not really. It’s a sacrifice.”
“M-hmm. Well if that skyscraper had been exploding and one of them had thrown themselves on it to save lives, I’d respect them, but the only reason a skyscraper was exploding was because a bunch of damned Ay-rabs were too &#@*(# shit-eating dumb to know that just because the Koolaid Korah doesn’t specifically say ‘Now when I say don’t kill yourself, I’m talking about crashing airplanes into buildings too!’ that it didn’t count.”
I talk about Muslim history (as I understand it) for a while, specifically Muslim military history, and I mentioned the Assassins and the Old Man of the Mountains
“Well that explains a lot… they go get high on pot and listen to some old Holy Roller fart and then think airplane crashing isn’t suicide…”
“No, the Assassins no longer exist… supposedly… I have my suspicions about Osama bin Laden and… well anyway… there’s a story, that may be apocry… fictional, that during the Crusades one of the Christian generals met with the Old Man on his mountain top and tried to impress him with his soldier’s skill at archery. The Old Man wasn’t impressed and said ‘choose on of my men’, the Christian general did, and the Old Man said ‘jump’ and the Assassin immediately and without question leapt to his death. The Christian general immediately conceded that the Old Man’s men were more fearsome.”
[silence]
“Why didn’t he just say ‘I bet you can’t make ‘em all do that! Double-dare!’”
“Maybe the Old Man had had somebody pull that trick before and wasn’t going to fall for it again.”
“Is it true that those people think heaven is some sorta own personal Ay-rab Disney World slash Titty Bar?”
“Ah… actually that ties in closely with the Assassins, and how normal Muslims see heaven is different than these fanatics, but there’s something about seventy-two virgins each…”
“Well hell, they’re not gonna be a virgin but once. And who the hell wants a virgin anyway? Can they get pregnant up there?”
“I… I honestly don’t know…”
“Well I hope they all get ‘em. I hope every one of them wakes up and has seventy two virgins. And I hope every one of those damned seventy-two virgins looks just like Moms Mabley and acts just like Loreena Bobbitt and gets knocked up right out of the box and he spends his afterlife getting his pecker cut off 72 times a day and having to work all night shoveling shit to pay child support. *@#8$&(@#%ers. They say not all Muslims are like that.”
“That’s correct. These are fanatics. They’re to mainstream Islam what the Branch Davidians were to Christianity.”
“Unfortunately not. The Branch Davidians just set their own people on fire. But that’s what we need- call Janet Reno out of retirement and send her over there. She can do them just like she did the Davidians, tell ‘em “y’all take a good look at my face— nobody wanted to fuck with me on my prom night and nobody wants to fuck with me now, and I’m about to set a personal best for destruction. Is it true her mama used to wrestle alligators?”
“Yes, she was the Georgia and Florida lady gator wrestling champion in fact.”
“I think that one of those gators got her pregnant and that’s where Janet came from. You know whether gator eggs hatch male or female depends on the temperature. Looks like Ol’ Janet’s egg was right on the middle point temperature.”
[silence]
“So the Kool-Aid Ay-rab Bible says don’t kill yourself?”
“Yes.”
“That’s all I wanted to know. Luv ya.”
[click]
snerk
That’s an image that won’t be leaving my mind for a bit.
Tough choice, but I have to go with:
Mr. Potato Head
Bathroom Window
Bo (the tummy-rubbing-leg-shaking image had me howling)
I don’t post very often but I just wanted to tell you how much I love your stories! I’m sending links to your stories to all my friends, I don’t want them to miss this!
Oh, Hacksaw, for sure!
That story had me laughing so hard I couldn’t read it out to my husband. 
Definitely Mr. Potato Head Bible Beating. Utter brilliance, that!
Then, it depends. If you want to focus soley on humor, I say Hacksaw the Musical and She Came in through the Bathroom Window (was the letter really written like that? I was laughing so hard, I kept having to get up from my desk and walk around to collect myself before I continued). Spinning in the Sunlight is so great, though, I just got chills again thinking about it. Maybe it would fit better in a larger collection that included some (melo)dramatic and other non-humor-based stories.
Why, oh why, do we have the choose??
That being said, my votes are:
#1 Mr. Potato Head Bible Beating
#2 Le Morte d’Bo
#3 She came in through the Bathroom Window
Though Fireworks and Hurricanes really deserves something special, because it was the first, from which all else has flowed.
Potato Head
Bo
Hacksaw Opera
Keep 'em coming!
If forced to choose I must say Potato Head, Bo and Bathroom Window.
But we must have more samples to get a truly informed choice.
Yes. More samples.
Say, how many views did that “LOTR by a different author” have?
Dozens, at least. But it also had well over a thousand posts. This is far more impressive (even if the poll thing does have a tendency to pad things out some).
Great Googly-Mooglies! I just saw the views count. Did somebody slash-dot this thread or something?
And what does slash-dot mean, anyway?
Getting slashdotted is what happens when a relatively low-traffic site suddenly gets exceedingly popular for some reason, especially getting linked by Slashdot (which has umpteen thousand readers that obsessively click on anything linked by the front page). The big spike in traffic can bring down servers that aren’t ready for it.
And as for why slashdot is named “slashdot”, the way I heard it was that it was an attempt to sound like a computer geeky way to say “where I currently am” but they got it backwards. If that was the intent, it should have been named “dotslash”.
On the other hand, it would legitimately represent the concept of “the origin of everything” or, more literally, “the root of everything”. If that is the case, it would be more accurate to have named it “slash” but since the term “slash” is very well defined term in the sci-fi community, “slashdot” would be a reasonable synonym.
Thus concludes your recommended daily allotment of geekdom lore.
I’d always heard that they just liked all those slashes and dots together. Hold on… from here:
That’s what I get for not checking a primary source. Consider my ignorance fought.
Gotta agree with Swampbear on this!