The Sudden Halt of the Linear Progression (a Love Story)

 

 

It happened long ago, I did not a witness this event, but it must have been a magnificent occasion when M. Carbon first met a bunch of bouncy, giggly, light mademoiselles Hash. It took just a fraction of a second and he selected the first four closest to him and they bound calling themselves Methane.

  

 

 

 

 

                  

The picture above shows Carbon atoms in traditional black bound to Hydrogen atoms in white. After a short while, a pair of Carbons grabbed a bunch of H and took the name of Ethane. Then everybody went wild ... the threes (Propane) and the fours (Butane) and the fives (Pentane). You see them here in order of seniority, then, when they already dreamed of Hexane, Heptane, Octane, Nonane all the way to heaven, some unknown and not understood force intervened. Nobody could explain it except, maybe, some German physicists with strange eating habits and proclivity for bizarre sexual practices. The thing turned on itself and became round (actually hexagonal) but who gives a hoot when the linear progression stopped being linear and progressive.

 

The sun still came down like honey on "Our Lady of the Harbor" but people were disillusioned to learn that when they had something which they thought they got it, the Universe told them that they "ain't got it!"

A Simple Knick (Twist) of (Time) Fate

This is Camelia Clara Wanda Chelu, she was born on March 25th 1921 at 8:25 AM in Berlin. The second time she was born eleven minutes  earlier in Tegucigalpa.

This bizarre event was caused by an extremely rare inconsistency in the fabric of time a "Knick" which scientists cannot fully understand yet. Clara lives now in Toronto and is twenty eight or thirty two years of age (she ages normally for a couple of years and then the Knick reverse-ages her to balance it out). She is a talented composer (classical and pop, she wrote "Norwegian Woods" among other hits) but cannot publish anything for fear of taking away a piece that may be written later. She has a brilliant technical mind (she invented the trans-lateral Pistio mechanism for fruit and veg and many other things) couldn't patent them for the same reason. She told me that the time brigade (ultra-secret authority watching that things that shouldn't happen don't happen) drops in on her inopinantly. Suddenly she said "Are you crazy? It's just wrong, the Knick will knack" (which was an answer to a question I asked her later). This is the thing with her: she remembers things that happened in the future: five minutes, two hours, a year and a half, she has no control over it and she cannot predict what she will predict. The rule is, she told me, that she cannot change the future. That's when I asked her "Why not?"  

The Surprisingly Simple Return to Form

This is Martha Karolina Imogen, Baroness von Schlauch, known as Ayleen B. She is highly intelligent, talented and has a piercing curiosity. Until the age of twenty-two she lived a life of opulence and  privilege in the ancestral castle of the Barons von Schlauch in Pichelswerder. It is not known why (some say she couldn't stand the brass orchestra for which the town is renowned) one day she flew to La Paz, Bolivia. Apparently she wanted to prove that she can thrive in a life of penury in an environment of economic and political instability (rather than opulence and privilege). In La Paz she met, fell in love and married Francisco Gonzales Bernardo (Bernie) Rubin, poet and playwright. Bernie was in equal parts talented, left wing and alcoholic. They had two children Heloise and Abelard. In La Paz two equally fatal forces competed for Bernie's life: Cirrhosis and the secret police. Cirrhosis won.

Ayleen B, now a widow, started a theater to promote contemporary Bolivian Dramaturgy. She named it Teatro Babylonia, after her favorite aunt, but the registration clerk, a recent Greek immigrant, wrote down Teatro Bubulina. The name stuck and the theater became famous. At a recent Sunday brunch, her two kids, now 19 and 20 told her that they will return to Germany as they preferred a life of opulence and privilege. She cursed horribly and threw her coffee at them.

What Significant Thing is Missing?

I made this puzzle for my grandsons in April 2015. They had to guess what is missing. You, please try to figure it out and email me your answer (miki.uhlyarik@gmail.com). First correct guess wins a valuable gift-certificate. 

Month of April, if I may,

Friday is a “Play all Day”

Saturday turns “Piano Day”

Sunday boys will think and say

"Ought to go or ought to stay?”

Thursdays: knocking at a door,
Just about at half past four,
Six bucks fighting a big bad war,
Cannot say what it was for,
Was it six bucks or just four? 

Shadows growing tall on wall
Mama just back from a mall,
With six muffins for y'all
Boys all know what is that call:
Stop a scandal or a brawl!

How was school? Was it just good
Wash your hands and now think food,
Pizza or pasta that I would
Buy you if I only could
Grab four bucks or six from wood.

The Uncommonly Violent and Unexpected Transfiguration

Some may say say this is disturbing, some say it's life.

He rang the doorbell and waited for a couple of minutes, when nothing happened he rang again. The door opened. A young woman with her hair wet, dripping, in a flowery bathrobe stood there: "Yes?" "Is this 304?" "No, this is 403". They stared at each other for a moment. He noticed that the flowery bathrobe slipped and opened a little but she didn't fix it. She noticed a big bulge at his crotch. Her voice, a little hoarse: "Wanna come in for coffee?" Words caught in his throat: "Sure, yeah". She pulled him inside and pushed him towards the bedroom pulling his t-shirt off. He was struggling out off his jeans. The flowery bathrobe fell onto the floor as they fell onto the bed. Their passion was almost violent, their pleasure was almost painful. Then they fell exhausted on the crumpled sheets. They lay there. Silent, sweating, panting.

After a few minutes he said: "I gotta go". "What?". "I gotta go". She was angry: "You ain't going nowhere!". He sat up: "I gotta go, you crazy?". "You ain't going nowhere and don't call me crazy". She jumped up and ran out. There was the noise of her bare feet on the floor getting fainter as she ran away and getting louder as she ran back. He was standing looking for his things when she flew at him with a large kitchen knife and slashed him across the throat. The blood gushed out in a pulsing stream, she must have hit a carotid artery. She kept shouting and slashing and stabbing furiously. He was stumbling and bumping into furniture and holding his throat, blood everywhere. A big vase crashed down loudly and broke. He fell to the floor thrashing around and making gurgling noises. After a while he stopped moving. She stood there. Silent, sweating, panting.

There was pounding at the door: "Police, open up!". She went and opened the door naked and covered in blood. The policemen saw the knife and shouted: "Drop the knife", "Drop the knife now". The knife clattered to the floor and one of them kicked it away. The other policeman followed the bloody foot prints to the bedroom. He shouted "Body". The policeman asked her: "Who is it?". She answered: "I don't know"

Incomplete Progression (Armenian) Review

Crispina DeSanto was fifteen, overdeveloped, and loved the pilots from the nearby Aviano US Airforce base. When the unplanned but fully predictable consequences "started to show", Crispina's father beat her up and threw her out: "Non sei mia figlia, sei una putana!" She hitchhiked to Treviso and found shelter at the nuns of "Nostra Signora Degli Armeni". A few months later she gave birth to a beautiful healthy boy. Crispina left four days later never to be seen again. The boy was baptized in the faith of the Armenian Apostolic Church as Khajag Gukasian. From early on Khajag (who preferred to be called Charlie) proved to be extremely bright: at the age of nine, he was fluent, besides Italian and Armenian, in German, English, and French, and at fourteen he graduated high school. On the principal's recommendation he was accepted at the local university where two years later he won a full scholarship at NYU. Charlie continued to be his brilliant self in New York scoring in the high nineties. To make a few bucks he delivered pizza for Bitondo's. The detailed records of his deliveries over those four and a half years became the basis for his Ph.D. thesis "On Human Relationship of Late Night Food Delivery in New York City". He was beaten up six times (twice requiring stitches), robbed three times, and had twice sex with clients. His work, once published, became an instant success (it helped that it opened with a detailed description of the fateful night when he delivered two large Medonos with extra Frim-Fram Sauce, and minutes later found himself naked on the kitchen floor straddled by a middle-aged woman with large breasts and tremendous upper body strength who rode him all-the-way).  Less than a year later he married Pierrette DeWilson, a fellow graduate, and they moved to Paris where they opened a consulting anthropology studio on Rue Buffon. 

Their success was helped by the "Case Book of Charlie Gukasian" Pierrette's blog (lavillaugoulet.blogspot.com). Celebrities and folks from the neighborhood all wanting to fix their issues stood in line. A politician (degenerate gambler) was cured of his vice being advised to add nutmeg and cinnamon to all his dishes and never wear green. The upstairs couple's sex life was revived when they were told to wear each-others underwear for a week. A retired, and now obese, rugby player lost 102 pounds by meditating and reciting a secret chant twice a day at five-oh-five. Every year, in August they close shop and go to Treviso to stay with the nuns. The monastery now has a magnificent website, free WiFi and all nuns have the latest I-Phone ... it still takes in strays.

No Time Like the Gift

I stayed a few weeks in Auteuil, a place where it is very easy to buy shoes. One evening I saw a small crowd in front of the  Les Cyclades bookstore, a sign announced the launch of "Fables" by Gabriel Nemes-Plisk. I joined and sat on a chair in the back: Gabriel, tall slim with long black hair walked in and started to read.

The first poem was about a large male bovine managing a convenience store in downtown Beijing. It was called "The Bull in the Chinese Shop" and it was quite amusing. The next piece called "The Escape Goat", dealt with family in suburban Tegucigalpa frantically searching for their la cabra was equally cute. A piece about a slim, fast and strong feline predator always getting off at the same bus-station was called, predictably, "The Leopard Cannot Change its Stops" and was less funny but more philosophical. The applause made him "reluctantly" read another, a botanical story about an inept arborist who compares Maples and Orange trees. Then, people lined up to have their book signed, Gabriel chatting pleasantly. I stood aside and snagged a glass of very decent Gamay off the tray of a passing waiter. Later, when the crowd thinned out I congratulated the poet on the successful launch and praised his craft, the clever use of jeu de mot, giving new unexpected meanings by changing just one or two letters. Gabriel looked puzzled: "I'm sure I don't know what you mean". I asked how he got into writing. It turned out he never knew his father and was raised by his mother and her friend, a professor of literature name of Appfelbaum who instilled in him the passion for writing, he was his literary father. I said "So you didn't fall far from that tree, did you?", he gave me the same puzzled look and asked if I cared for another glass of wine. I excused myself mumbling that I had to sort some shoes and hurried out the door.