Badgers
Reply
Monthly Archives: April 2006
Interactive Entertainments for the Bored Masses
Bursting the Bubble of Complacency in Your Own Home-Town
Despite your own mental acumen, there will be times throughout your life when you lay prone under the icy, paralyzing grip of that creature we call Boredom. Therefore, as a public service we offer the following alleviations for your condition. Use them well and wisely and remember that Axes & Alleys, its creators, its parent and affiliate companies are not responsible for the consequences.
Retailer’s Nightmare
Requirements: Backpack or shopping bag, various cans of food, boxes of pre-packaged meals, boxes of crackers, or other non-perishable foodstuffs. Two or more people.
Take the food goods into a non-grocery store, someplace like Petsmart, Home Depot, Borders or Bestbuy. Put out the food as though it’s a sales display. If you enjoy merchandising, you might try to create an end-cap display of canned corn at the Virgin Megastore. Feel free to bring along fake price tags for the items as well.
Ti-Fi
Requirements: Tin cans, length of string, perhaps some hand-crafted Ti-Fi brochures. Two or three people to be sales-reps.
Make tin-can telephones (you know, two tin cans connected by a piece of string). Take it to an area frequented by laptop users, you know, somewhere with wireless internet. Offer to show them the latest in wireless connectivity, “Ti-Fi.” Then pull out the tin can phone and attempt to get them to use it. For bonus fun, try creating a USB attachment.
Continue reading
On the Subject of Conspiracy Theories
By Steven Singe
Steven Singe is author of the book “Why Good Girls Like Bad Boys: Understanding
the Global Currency Exchange Market in the 21st Century.” He enjoys gravy.
I empathize with the conspiracy theorist. These great things happen that affect our lives, the lives of our fellows, the lives of our children and there is very little we can do about it. For some, it seems, that powerlessness manifests in recounting and believing fully such detailed folklore. I feel for their disconnect and their need to assert some control.
It’s hard when you subscribe to some belief, subscribe to it so much that you forget where it came from and where it’s taking you. It seems so important, so consuming. And here people don’t believe you and you have to look at all of these others, others who “should know the truth,” and all you can see is the wool pulled over their eyes by whatever bogeyman entity you hold dear.
Not only do you forget where your belief came from, but anywhere you can find it refers back to another person like you and another and another. That circular chain of whatever you consider evidence coming back around to itself again and again. You see people thinking like you and can’t help but think you’ve found a brother or sister, a right-thinker and an expert of sorts (more on that later). You reïnforce and encourage one another. It all highlights your powerlessness, but gives you some feeling of control.
Continue reading
Mayfax College
Breaking the Gordian Knot in the Park
By H.G. Peterson
Dedicated to Azura Skye
The other day I came across a fresh thing in the ground
When I stepped upon it, it made a squishy sound
It was sort of like a gurgle, like to a flushing john
Curious I looked down, to see what I stepped on
The color was transparent, though not completely so
If it were alive then its moving didn’t go
For when I went and took a stick and poked it several times
It didn’t react much at all except for a few whines
Wondering was it ectoplasm, I got down to examine
For at a closer look it might be vomit of a salmon
But why would fish, I thought, be walking down the road?
It’s quite less temperate than a watery abode
It was not coins or radishes, for certain not pureé
Nor bioluminescent pork, nor the scab of an ofay
I couldn’t see a kiester, or joints like dear Phssthpok
Could it be old muenster, or crushed caiman in a sock?
I tried to ask a man I saw about its genesis
But he just smiled and mumbled about whale ambergris
This I thought unusual and quite outside of true
For they cannot perambulate, not even with four shoes
This, of course, is why I can’t ever leave my home
Without a vacuum sample tube and shock-absorbent foam
In my satchel are always kept some beakers in a rag
‘cause samples sometimes spill out inside that battered bag
I sometimes take a ratchet and a candle with a wick
And lest we not forget, there’s that handy poking stick
Always prepared to test out a putrid mass I find
I keep these things with me. They give me peace of mind.