according to the article i read in between much, MUCH more specific image searches, a kid spent 6 years working on this baking pan, which is designed to ensure that every piece of every dish you bake is, essentially, a corner piece. for the record, i'm a huge proponent of corner pieces. truly, a huge fan.

so: bang up job on the invention my friend, but holy shit: 6 years? that's the innovational equivalent of spending 10 months developing "pull my finger."

as my former roommates dougie and ingrid will attest to, i too fancy myself as something of an inventor. as my former roommates dougie and ingrid will also attest to, i never invented a way to keep my socks from smelling like they are channeling the body funk of deceased shellfish.

i did, however, try to invent an LCD bumper sticker, so that you could tailor its message to the driver behind you. hottie? let me just punch up my digits. tailgater? his/her mother is about to feel the wrath of an unmitigated F bomb.

my latest invention, while more likely falling under the classification of Social Construct/Contract, would allow every man, woman, and child to carry a laminated card that lists his or her foremost Pet Peeve, and would accordingly allow him or her to present this card to any violator of said peeve, and promptly collect $1. a government agency would have to be established in order to prevent freeloaders from pretending their pet peeve is "a prominent adam's apple" or "women wearing pants" but, really, such an agency would be no stupider than the Federal Interagency Committee for the Management of Noxious and Exotic Weeds (seriously, look it up: http://ficmnew.fws.gov/)

my card, should you be curious, would allow me to be a dollar richer whenever i explain to somebody that i hate cats, to which they respond, "Well, you haven't met my cat."

that's a buck. i've met your cat. and i hate it. if you tell me that you gag at the smell of seafood, i don't insist upon taking you to my favorite Red Lobster location.

i try to write original material on this page, but perhaps our friends at the Onion summed up my feelings regarding felines best with their headline, "Like Boxes of Shit Around The House? Get a Cat."

i'd own a tiger or something of that ilk. and name it zeus. or, knowing that i'd only buy one after drinking heavily, i'd name it Mr. Stickypaws.

but not a regular cat. my capacity for being a cat guy ended forever when i was a little(r) boy in cincinnati and my bestest pal krumboltz (i'd use a fake name, but krumboltz sounds made up anyway) received a little black kitty named Noel for christmas. yes, it was cute, but so are baby vampire bats, so that argument's not going to hold up.

within a week, this thing had disappeared, thereby refocusing our collective attention from yuletide joy to Operation Find That Fucking Kitten. as an aside, regular readers (both of them) know that i don't swear very often on this page, so this was clearly a serious matter.

we were 8, though, so we were playing dart guns in his basement less than 24 hours later, while letting the grown ups put up flyers.

a quick tangent: playing dart guns in the basement was yet another game that children of the 80's played that would no longer be tolerated in today's lawyer-laden america. we should have called the game See If We Can Reach Puberty With One Or More Functioning Eyeballs; these guns, while painted orange and clearly fake, packed some serious cheese. krumbo and i would take turns hiding in the basement with the lights off while the other waited upstairs, thereby guaranteeing that he would have no night vision whatsoever when he came back down. invariably, the "hider" would wait until the "sitting duck" would get to within 3 to 4 feet of him, trying desperately not to laugh at how stupid the prospective assassin looked tripping over toys while trying to adjust to the low light.

then, in a wild departure from the Silence-of-the-Lambs-style happy ending, the blind person would get shot in the face at close range.

getting back to the kitty story, however, one of the prime hiding places in krumbo's basement was in a little boiler closet, in between the "wooden" wall paneling and the house's actual foundation. some time after christmas, while one of us was hiding back there (i believe it was krumboltz's discovery), he noticed a pair of glowing eyes staring at him from deep inside the basement wall. if i made the discovery, i've since blocked it out, as i can not imagine how freaked out i would have been had i seen them first.

of course, the eyes were not those of an axe-wielding werewolf like we first assumed, but rather those of Noel, the world's most anti-social kitty. the cat hadn't run away, it had been hiding in the basement walls, venturing upstairs to feed on god-only-knows, then returning to its preferred environs, far away from a cat's natural enemy: a loving family.

for what must have been weeks, krumboltz and i (and eventually his father) devised increasingly sophisticated plans that were intended to reintroduce the kitty to society at large. naturally, none of us could fit in between the walls and the foundation, so our brains would have to come up with something.

translation: this kitty was in trouble.

at first, the schemes were simple. we would watch a bowl of meow mix for hours on end while occasionally making smooching noises, or form long lines of dry cat food leading upstairs to various bedrooms, etc.

through a cat's preternatural disdain for other living things, it somehow knew we were watching/waiting, and decided that it rather starve to death than know the loving embrace of an 8 year old boy.

eventually, we manufactured outright traps. cat travel caddies were lined with tender vittles and rigged to close whenever the beast would enter. cardboard boxes hovered over a plate of Friskies, ready to fall on any feline within a 3 foot parameter.

without fail, the cat would eat the food from the shoddily-made traps (those designed by krumbo and/or myself) and altogether avoid those traps conceived by krumbo's dad. the dad was getting frustrated, but i suspect part of his anger was due to our insistance upon going to the supermarket every other hour in order to purchase trap-building supplies and increasingly exotic cat food.

if Fancy Feast couldn't get this goddam cat out of a cold basement wall, we knew we'd have to bring in an exorcist.

the days stretched into weeks, and creepy glowing eyes were all i ever knew of this cat. i can't even quite recall how they got the thing out, but i'm guessing the krumboltz family either tore apart the entire basement wall or were forced to tunnel in from the back yard. i'm fairly certain they got it out though; i suppose he may still be there, smoking winstons and wondering where the two MacGyver wanna-be's with all the primo cat food went.

12.02.2004

i am confident that the following exchange, written with my hottie sister lara and inspired by a Charlotte department store known only as Belk's , represents a snippet of perfect dialogue that, when inserted into any and every film, television show, or play, would instantly make the world a better place.



nathan filibustered at 2:01:00 PM

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