"This Stupid Pineapple Is..." Part THREE!

I'm running a blogfest! About stupid pineapples! Details here, or down below at the end of this post. And today's author/blogger who should enter this contest is...

... Michael Offutt, who blogs at SLC Kismet and whose sci-fi novel Slipstream comes out soon, so stop by
his blog and ask him about the pineapples!

The continuing saga of "This Stupid Pineapple Is..."

Today: Part Three: There's bigger problems to have than simply "too many pancakes."

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"This stupid pineapple is..." Other Sexy Cop began, but stopped, and without finishing her sentence, she stamped her foot in frustration and started at Templeton. She closed up her notebook and put her green marker away, ignoring the way this strange little man stared at it longingly. He hadn't even, she'd noticed, spent any time looking at her cleavage, despite the fact that her chest was more amply displayed than ever, given the heat and sunshine that was everywhere today, which was both to be expected and to be unexpected.

That heat and sunshine were everywhere was to be expected because, well, what else do you expect when you are on a tropical beach surrounded by seas filled with the kind of blue water that usually only appears on television commercials, where it almost looks as though they've specially treated the water to make it appear both crystal-clear and also a deep azure so alluring that the eyes can taste it, which eyes are not supposed to be doing, ever since the Great Senses Truce Of Houston, when all the senses got together and decided that what the eyes had started -- trying to do the job of other sensory organs, like hearing and smelling and sometimes singing, which had led noses, in turn, to decide that they wanted to hear, because why should ears have it so easy, with all the pleasant sounds in the world while noses had to smell things like feet or that particularly nasty bog down around I-80? The ears, meanwhile, had stopped doing any work, whatsoever, making negotiations that much harder until the Secretary of the Interior had convinced the kidneys to step in just temporarily for the ears -- so eyes should not be tasting anything, is the point, but that water and heat and sunshine and beach-ery were to be expected because they were, after all, all taking place on a tropical beach, albeit a tropical beach with camels on it for some reason,

And by the same token, all that sun and heat were unexpected because this was Trenton, New Jersey, which had previously not been part of the tropical-beach scene, let alone one with camels on it.

Other Sexy Cop had not been dispatched to Trenton, New Jersey, to talk to Templeton Freeney because Trenton, New Jersey had been transformed into a tropical paradise, though. That was not in Other Sexy Cop's jurisdiction, and, anyway, even if it had been, Other Sexy Cop wouldn't have necessarily gone to Trenton, she would have had to go everywhere, as currently the entire world had been transformed into a tropical paradise: Everywhere one went, there was nothing but beaches, surf, kids playing, palm trees, and the ubiquitous camels.

Even Antarctica was a tropical beach, which had confused the scientists who were down there to continue bothering penguins no end. They'd wandered outside for a day of nagging the wildlife and found the wildlife replaced by camels and kids surfing, something that was certainly worth studying but as these particular scientists' specialities was not science, as such, they had no real insight into the situation and so ended up playing a game of sand volleyball, which was won by Dr. Norbert's team, 3.14 to -i.

Other Sexy Cop could not have possibly responded to all the calls reporting that cornfields, rivers, mountains, Paris, etc., suddenly were beachfront property infested with camels, but she was sent to investigate Templeton Freeney's call, for two reasons:

First, Templeton had not even mentioned that he was on a beach, making him unusual for one of the callers, and

Second, Templeton had mentioned a stupid pineapple, which was the case that Other Sexy Cop was working on and so she'd caught the first flight to Trenton, New Jersey, having previously changed into clothing more appropriate for a beachfront investigation/negotiation.

The source of Other Sexy Cop's frustration -- which shouldn't have existed, given that she was standing on a beach holding a tropical drink in one hand and interviewing Templeton Freeney as the sun began to droop into a long wonderful tropical afternoon of the sort that had never before been seen in Trenton -- was that Templeton had just revealed to her that he had thrown away the stupid pineapple.

She stared off into the distance now, not because there was anything to see there but because she wanted Templeton to know that she was both frustrated, and thinking.

Templeton stood in front of her, holding his own tropical drink, and wondering about her reaction to his throwing away the stupid pineapple. He felt it important to clear up that he had not, at the time, known that the stupid pineapple could actually grant wishes, but as he thought about that he realized that he'd also thrown away a talking pineapple which, stupid or not, he felt in retrospect was the wrong move to make with a sentient fruit.

Before he could speak, Other Sexy Cop said "Look over there."

Templeton looked where she was looking, off over the ocean that now surrounded Trenton, which had been transformed from a rather dumpy city into a small tropical village on a peninsula surrounded by lagoons of clear water.

"What?" he asked.

"Shhhhhh..." Other Sexy Cop shushed him. "I'm trying to see something."

She stared off at the horizon, which was starting to reflect the sun above it and which was, farther out, glassy and smooth and blue and alluring and also, Templeton realized, sort of weird-looking.

"It's sort of weird-looking, isn't it?" Other Sexy Cop asked him.

"It is," Templeton agreed.

"In fact, it almost looks as if..." Other Sexy Cop stopped, and looked around to see whether anyone else could hear her. She paused in her thought and opened her notebook again, took a sip of her tropical drink, sighed a heaving breath that made Templeton's eyes goggle out, and said "... Before I finish that, tell me where the stupid pineapple is now."

Templeton finished up his story quickly, with the phone call and waking up here and then shut up. Other Sexy Cop wrote her notes and then closed her notebook again, and took another sip of her drink. She scratched her leg idly while thinking, and Templeton tried very hard to not look at her perfect legs as she did so, because Templeton was not entirely sure if he was again a married man.

Other Sexy Cop seemed to be thinking the same thing.

"And you say your wife is back?"

Templeton nodded.

"Her name is Ana?" Other Sexy Cop asked.

Templeton nodded again.

"Where is she?"

Templeton pointed towards the hut. "She's in there. Baking pancakes." As Other Sexy Cop looked at the hut, Templeton said "That's all she's been doing, all day. She just keeps baking pancakes. Over and over. When I suggested that perhaps the roomful of pancakes we already had was enough, she just said oh, go ahead and start eating, I know you love them."

Other Sexy Cop looked from the hut to the ocean and back again.

She took another sip of her drink, and put a hand to her head. Her concentration made her even sexier than she'd already been, as she chewed on her full, round, pouty lip and narrowed her slim eyebrows to focus her shiny, emerald green eyes on the hut.

"Something's not right here," Other Sexy Cop muttered.

She looked again at the ocean. Then at the hut. Then she walked barefoot across the sand to the window of the hut Templeton had indicated. She looked inside.

A woman, about 50 years old, was standing in the kitchen, spatula in hand. All around her were stacks and stacks of pancakes, on the table, the floor, the counter, even the windowsill. The woman was flipping a pancake on the frying pan on the stove. She looked up and saw Other Sexy Cop.

"Oh, hello!" she said, in a merry voice. "Who are you?"

"My name is Other Sexy Cop," Other Sexy Cop said. "Are you Ana?"

"I guess I am!" Ana answered.

Other Sexy Cop thought about that and looked at the horizon, then back at Ana. "What are you doing, Ana?"

"I'm cooking pancakes," Ana said. Privately, Ana thought that was kind of a silly question. What did it look like she was doing? But as she looked around, she realized that there were, after all, a lot of pancakes. She thought perhaps that was enough, even if this woman with her beautiful hair pulled into an amazingly sexy ponytail and her high cheekbones were to join them.

Ana decided that was quite enough pancakes, and so she set the spatula down and turned the stove off and went to get out some plates to set the table... only she actually did none of those things and instead flipped the cooked pancake onto a stack and then poured another one from the bowl.

Other Sexy Cop watched that and said "Why don't you take a break, Ana, and talk to me?"

"I..." Ana paused as she flipped the latest pancake. "I... can't."

Other Sexy Cop looked around the room one more time, and then turned to look back out to sea. Templeton had joined her now and looked from his wife to where Other Sexy Cop was looking.

"What are you thinking?" Templeton said, hoping perhaps that what she was thinking was that Ana couldn't simply move back in, make a thousand pancakes and make them be married again, and also that perhaps Other Sexy Cop wore that wedding ring for reasons other than being married, and would maybe want to go have a second drink with him while they sorted this out and/or enjoyed a tropical vacation.

Other Sexy Cop said: "I'm thinking that the world is disintegrating out there."

Templeton looked from her full chest barely contained by the uniform to the edge of the horizon where she was looking.

It was true: clearly visible at the very edge of the view were cracks and breaks in the sky and ocean, where the cool, smooth water and endless blue of the sky met, and in places where they met the water stopped being cool and blue and the sky stopped being endless, and instead they appeared to be simply cheap plaster of the kind you might find in a terrible apartment, and they were flaking off and cracking and pitch black could be seen behind them.

"Can you rescue us?" Templeton asked Other Sexy Cop, quietly.

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There's still time to enter "The Stupid PineappleBlogfest", a blogfest honoring author Patrick Dilloway, the Grumpy Bulldog of blogging, who got a book contract

The rules are here: to sum up, this Friday post your entry, which must include the phrase "This Stupid Pineapple Is..." I'll pick the winner Saturday morning by random chance.

Again: Details here.

A tiny stegosaurus still sometimes calls it 'Freedom Toast', but only to himself.

"This Stupid Pineapple Is..." Part TWO!

Hey! I'm running "The Stupid PineappleBlogfest" to celebrate the fact that author Patrick Dilloway, the Grumpy Bulldog of blogging, got a book contract and therefore must take part in blogfests. The details are here, and you have until this Friday to write your entry and/or accumulate numbers by tweeting about it and getting comments. In essence, though, you must simply write "The Stupid Pineapple Is..." and you're in, but be sure to leave a comment on this blog letting me know to check.

But you know who else would benefit from this? OTHER AUTHORS. Guys like Rusty Webb, who I'm SURE will want to enter as I essentially stole the idea from him, and because he'll want to publicize his awesome book A Dead God's Wrath. So you should definitely go to his blog and ask him breathlessly: "Are you really gonna enter that blogfest, Mr. Webb?"

Again: Details here.

To hype the contest, and because I wanted to keep a tiny stegosaurus from taking over this blog, I'm writing my own entry, cleverly titled:

"This Stupid Pineapple Is...",

a serialized Nick & Other Sexy Cop story! In part one, Templeton Freeney threw away a stupid pineapple that then sent him to a beach house with his wife. Also, there was a tiny wormhole. Read it here.

Today is Part Two: The important thing is, the cheeseburger ends up okay. So try to keep that in mind.

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"This stupid pineapple is driving me crazy!" complained Tiny, as he lugged a cheeseburger that was as large as he was across the refrigerator shelf to the edge, where he caught his breath and then pushed the cheeseburger, which was still in its original yellow wrapper, off the shelf and onto the floor below.

He watched it fall the equivalent of about six stories. Shaking his head, he then shimmied himself down the refrigerator that, to him, was the size of a giant building. Letting himself down from shelf to shelf, he reached the level of the produce bin and stared, in momentary horror, at a piece of broccoli as large as he was.

On the floor, he tugged at the cheeseburger wrapper and dragged it over to the table, where the stupid pineapple sat, several stories above him.

"How am I supposed to get it up there?" he asked, and grunted in disgust as he realized he'd have to push it onto a giant chair and then lift it onto the table.

"Don't know why I couldn't get some other job today," he muttered, laboriously going through the motions of getting the cheeseburger up to the table.

Once up there, the vast expanse of the kitchen table lay before him like several football fields if football fields were made of formica-made-to-look-like-wood and if on those several football fields, instead of large men trying to knock each other down to impress the large men watching them on TV who wished they could knock other men down, the football fields instead contained nothing but a regular-sized stupid pineapple sitting in the middle of it. Tiny pushed the cheeseburger over to where the stupid pineapple, no larger than his own head sat.

"Here," he sighed. "Here is your lunch."

The stupid pineapple didn't even look at him. "I can't eat that," it said. "I'm a vegetarian."

"A what?!" Tiny exploded. "You never said nothin' about... you can't be a vegetarian! That's cannibalism!"

"I'm not a vegetable. At least, I don't think I am. Am I a vegetable? No. I think I'm some sort of dog," the stupid pineapple said, and began muttering to itself a poem it made up on the spot about pineapples and dogs and how they were probably the same thing but who could tell because nobody had ever seen a dog.

Tiny sat down on the edge of the cheeseburger. "I'm not gonna go all that way just to get you some giant vegetable," he said. "It's the cheeseburger or nothin'. Take it or leave it."

"Why are you so crabby?" The stupid pineapple asked him, interrupting its poem. "What have YOU got to be upset about? I'm the one who was kidnapped. Wasn't I?" The stupid pineapple paused. "I'm pretty sure I was." It then paused again and said "I didn't kidnap you, did I?"

Tiny put his face in his hands and ignored it.

The stupid pineapple was talking to itself again. Tiny heard things like "Probably need to turn myself in. But I won't go easily..." and "I wonder what a dog looks like. Maybe I'm not a dog after all. Maybe I'm a skywriter."

Tiny decided that he would have some of the cheeseburger, and opened up the wrapper, reaching in and grabbing a fistful of meat and stuffing it into his mouth. From behind him, he heard:

"Hey, can I have some?"

He turned to berate the stupid pineapple for now wanting some of the cheeseburger but when he turned around he saw instead a man standing there, holding a green marker.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Nick," said the man with the marker, whose name was Nick. (That was why he said what he did.) "Who are you? And more importantly, can I have some of that? I'm starved."

Tiny pulled his laser gun on Nick and pointed it at him. "Don't move. Hands up," he said.

Nick, in response, pointed the green marker he was holding at Tiny as though it were a gun. "Don't you move," he said.

Tiny surveyed the situation. "That's a green felt-tip marker," he said.

Nick looked down. "It seems to be, yeah. I just found it on the way in here."

"I have a gun," Tiny said.

"Yes, you do," Nick agreed. "I mean, I'm no expert in guns. I'm more of an amateur punctuationist and professional UFO maker. I'd give you my card, but if I did that, I'd have to let go of this marker, and since the odds already seem against me, that strikes me as a bad idea. Still, that is a very impressive looking gun you've got there. Assuming it's a gun, and not, say, a green marker."

"You are holding a green marker," Tiny said.

"We were talking about you, not me," Nick said.

"Is everyone here crazy?" Tiny asked.

"Not me! I'm just stupid. But what do you expect from a pineapple? Dogs aren't very smart."

Nick looked down at the pineapple, then back at Tiny.

"So it can talk," he said. "I thought I was imagining that, the way I thought I was imagining getting sucked into a tiny wormhole and spun around and twisted over and over until like some kind of water slide only less fun and less watery and more interdimensionally, and at one point I got this green marker jabbed into my eye, which made it even less fun, let me tell you, and then suddenly I was here. So it looks like I didn't imagine either of those things. Any of those things," he corrected himself, after a moment. "There were more than two things I thought I was imagining," he said to Tiny.

The three of them sat there for a moment, regarding each other silently. Then Tiny thought he should reassert his authority.

"Hands in the air," he said again, a little more loudly.

"I haven't got any hands," the stupid pineapple said. "Would you like me to have hands?"

"No!" Tiny ordered it. "You've already made things bad enough, shrinking us."

"It shrunk you?" Nick asked, incredulously. Tiny was about his size. "How big were you before it did that?" After a moment, he said: "And how did it do that?"

"I can grant wishes," the stupid pineapple said. "As many as you want, although I'm supposed to limit it to three, which isn't as many as people always want but that's the rules."

"Quiet," Tiny said.

"Also, I didn't..." the stupid pineapple began, but it was cut off by Tiny picking it up and ordering it again to be quiet. In the moment that he did that, Nick took the green marker and used it to bat the laser gun out of Tiny's hands, sending it skittering across the giant tabletop.

"It seems that now I have the upper hand," Nick told Tiny.

"How? You still just have a green marker."

"But you have nothing," Nick pointed out.

"I have this stupid pineapple," Tiny told him.

"Touche," Nick agreed. "How about we make a truce. You send me back to where I came from, I give you back your green marker, and we're all free to go on with what we were doing. You can feed a cheeseburger to a pineapple, which seems kind of dumb as pineapples are vegetarian, and I can get to my meeting on time because if I don't, my business is definitely going to go under this time. I mean, this is it for me. The Bank is not going to let me 'accidentally' mail it a piece of toast again and claim that I got mixed up and mailed it my breakfast and ate the check. So I need this job and I'm pretty sure that having gotten sucked into a wormhole is going to mess that up."

"Send you back? How am I supposed to do that? Haven't you noticed that this stupid pineapple shrunk me, and all my men, and we're stuck here in this kitchen" he waved his hand to indicate the vast expanses of the kitchen they were stuck in, just in case Nick had missed the fact that they were standing in a cavernous, but rather nicely-done (if a bit dated) kitchen. "And I'm stuck guarding this thing while the men try to find a way to report back, which is going to take them a long time because even if they can get onto the roof, how are they supposed to operate a hovercraft that's now giant?"

"I didn't..." the stupid pineapple began, but Tiny shook it and glared at it.

"You shut up, you! You're why we're in this mess!"

The stupid pineapple silently wondered how it being kidnapped by the men was its fault, but that line of thinking confused it and it began to wonder again whether it had, in fact, kidnapped the men. It was terribly worried that it had, and that made it worry that someone somewhere was going to be mad at it, which reminded that this man, Tiny, was mad at it right now, and then he wondered why Tiny was so mad at him.

"Why are you so mad at me?" the stupid pineapple asked Tiny, who simply scowled at it.

"Do you see what I go through?" he said to Nick.

Nick, meanwhile, had idly started sauntering over to where he'd batted the laser gun. When Tiny spoke to him, he saw what Nick was doing and immediately flung the stupid pineapple up into the air and began to run after Nick, who began to run towards the laser gun.

Tiny almost instantly realized what he'd done and forgot all about the laser gun, instead, spinning to look in horror at the stupid pineapple, which was flying through the air backwards, towards the edge of the vast expanse of the giant kitchen table. The pineapple appeared unaware of the peril it was in, as it was humming the first several stanzas to Bizet's Symphony In C. You may think that is a rather odd thing for a stupid pineapple to be humming, given that many people are not aware of Bizet's early work, let alone conversant enough with it to be able to casually and calmly hum it while they are being flung, or have been flung, or are in the process of being flunging, towards the edge of a giant kitchen table which marks a precipitous fall that is the equivalent of many stories' of height.

But rest assured: the stupid pineapple did not know what it was humming. It was just dumb luck that the stupid pineapple hummed that particular set of bars which happened to perfectly match up with the opening of Bizet's little-known symphony. Dumb luck, of course, increases with the level of stupidity of the person experiencing it. Scientists have known for years about the attractant qualities of luck, with good luck being attracted to people who are good-looking or good at something, and therefore enhancing their skill and bad luck being attracted to the opposite sorts of people, and dumb luck being attracted to dumb people.

The stupid pineapple being particularly stupid, it had amassed a phenomenal amount of what scientist call "elucktrons," because scientists are not, when it comes right down to it, particularly creative, but forget about that: The pineapple was like a walking storehouse of dumb luck, except that it was neither a storehouse nor could it walk. In any event, it had a lot of dumb luck saved up, and most of that dumb luck accounted for its inexplicable ability to hum the first stanzas of Bizet's Symphony In C quite by accident as it flew end over end to certain doom.

"Noooooooo!!!!!!!" Tiny yelled.

The stupid pineapple hummed.

"Nooooooooooo!!!!!" Nick yelled, too, to cover for the fact that he was picking up the laser gun. Nick deliberately used fewer exclamation points and more o's than Tiny to set himself apart. He doubted Tiny noticed, but Nick was particular about things like that, and he noticed.

End over end over end over end over a side because the stupid pineapple had tried to twist itself to see what all the yelling was about, the stupid pineapple floated towards the edge of the table in what seemed to Tiny and Nick to be slow motion, so slowly in fact that they could see it rotating.

"Is it going in slow motion?" Nick asked Tiny.

Tiny put his hand, raised dramatically, down.

"Yeah," he said. "I think it is."

The stupid pineapple was almost to the edge of the table.

"Shouldn't you go try to catch it?" Nick asked. "I mean, I'm assuming all this nooooo-ing was because you realized that you shouldn't have thrown it."

"I shouldn't have," Tiny said. "It's a magic pineapple. It grants wishes."

"It does?" Nick asked.

"Yeah." Tiny said. He had started walking towards the edge of the giant kitchen table to retrieve the pineapple, which by now had forgotten entirely that it was supposed to be falling. It had so enjoyed the drama of being flunged -- it wasn't sure that was the word but would put it in its diary anyway, if it ever got a diary-- that it had slowed itself down to stretch out the moment, but now it was captivated by a thought it had just thunk up, one involving whether the number 3 was actually a kind of rocket ship, and so it had stopped falling altogether.

Nick walked casually behind Tiny, holding the laser gun casually behind his back, and tried to be even more casual as he said:

"So that's one of those talking, wish-granting stupid pineapples."

"Uh-huh," Tiny said, and then he stopped, and looked at Nick. "What do you mean, one of them? And why are you being so casual?"

Nick, for his part, had tried to find something to casually lean against, but the giant kitchen table was remarkably sparse on things to lean casually against. The giant cheeseburger was at least 40 feet away from him, and he wasn't sure how casual it would look if he were to try to lean on it and then slip on a giant pickle or something.

"No reason," he said.

Tiny stared at Nick for a second longer, and then turned and broke into a run towards the stupid pineapple.

Nick broke into a run, too, but lagged behind at first because he tried to run casually before realizing that nobody was being fooled by that and also that it's more or less impossible to run in a casual way.

Trailing by a few feet as they closed in on the stupid pineapple, Nick remembered the laser gun and yelled "Stop or I'll shoot!" which he'd heard Other Sexy Cop say all the time on her job and it always worked. He congratulated himself on being such a good husband that he'd paid attention to his wife and also that he'd learned something from her.

Tiny didn't stop.

Nick felt that was unfair, and wished Tiny would have listened to him and stopped.

Tiny abruptly locked into position, on one leg, other leg raised up, arms pumping, and promptly fell over onto the table, still in that position.

Nick caught up to him, and surveyed the man, who looked up at him and said "What...did...you...do?" through gritted teeth because he could not move his mouth.

"I have never seen that work so well," Nick said. "Man, Other Sexy Cop is going to be jealous of me."

He nudged the man. "It's okay to move a little. Just no sudden moves or I'll shoot."

"I... can't...move."

"Really?" Nick squatted down and poked the man in his face. "Not at all? How are you doing that?"

"I'm doing that," the stupid pineapple behind him said. "I told you, I can grant wishes."

Nick stood and looked from it to Tiny and back to the pineapple.

"So you granted my wish?" Nick asked it. "But I didn't even say it out loud."

He thought about that for a second, and said "So you can read minds?"

The stupid pineapple answered: "I guess I can. Hey, maybe I'm not so stupid after all!" And it was so overcome by that idea that it promptly forgot not to fall and dropped out of sight below the edge of the table.

Nick gasped.

Tiny gasped, as well as he was able to, since he still couldn't move.

There was a long silence, and then the stupid pineapple's voice, from far away, came floating up. "I'm okay," it said.

Nick breathed a sigh of relief. Things would be okay after all. He'd use the stupid pineapple to get himself unshrunk, wish them all back home, give the stupid pineapple to Other Sexy Cop who would finally be able to close that case, and then he'd finish up that meeting with the company and he would be sure to mention that it was very unsafe of them to have a tiny wormhole unguarded in their third floor bathroom.

"I'll be right down there," he said, and went to the edge of the table, where, looking over, he saw nothing but the tile floor -- it was a nice tile, if a little dated -- far below.

No stupid pineapple.

Nick stared all around, wondering where it could have gone, but his concentration was broken by the sound of a giant door opening. He stood up and held the laser gun warily ahead of him, looking in the direction of the sound, only to see Other Sexy Cop come walking in, which would ordinarily have been an extremely welcome sight, as Other Sexy Cop had never given up her habit of wearing extremely short, tight skirts, and extremely tight, unbutton-y shirts, and she also had never given up her habit of being drop-dead sexy, so just seeing her would alone be welcome but Nick felt he was in a bit over his head at this point and could use her very-competent, pretty-cleavage-y help, but in this particular instance, Nick was not, in fact, pleased to see Other Sexy Cop at all, probably because while she was wearing a tiny skirt, and had her shirt opened to the point where one could see her bra and a generous helping of boob, Other Sexy Cop was also at least fifty times taller than Nick, and she was not just fifty times taller than him but also she was blue.

And she was bleeding. She stared at the scene in front of her, and locked her giant (but very sexy) eyes on Nick's tiny (and bewildered) eyes, and said:

"Can you rescue me?"

And then she fell over with a thundering crash.

Click here to go on to Part Three: There's Bigger Problems To Have Than Simply "Too Many Pancakes."

A tiny stegosaurus is thinking that you're probably all wondering why he asked you here today.

This Stupid Pineapple Is... (A Nick and Other Sexy Cop Story!)(Part One)

Attention: To help Big Shot Author Patrick Dilloway, the Grumpy Bulldog, meet his Big Shot Contractual Obligations, I am running The Stupid Pineapple Blogfest. Details here. This story is my entry, because I really want one of my books. (Note: I am ineligible.)

This Stupid Pineapple Is...

Part One: Wishes can come true, if only you believe hard enough. (And also own a pineapple.)


"This stupid pineapple is never going to shut up!" yelled Templeton Freeney in frustration, and although he fully expected it, he still got a little madder than he was already when the stupid pineapple said:

"Why don't you shut me up?"

Templeton Freeney sat down hard on the stool that he kept in the kitchen for just that purpose. It was not the first time the stupid pineapple had driven him to distraction, and he'd learned about a week before that it was best to have something to sit down on when that happened, or else he would simply fall on the floor when he was so driven to distraction that he had to sit down.

Tonight, the stupid pineapple had been telling knock-knock jokes in its loudest voice at 3:00 a.m., and he had gone down to the kitchen to tell the stupid pineapple to keep it down because people had to get up to go to work in the morning and the stupid pineapple had looked at him as he'd come in and said:

"You don't have any pants on," which had caused Templeton to look down at himself and then the pineapple said "Made you look," in that smarmy way it had which drove Templeton nuts and he'd decided that he was going to for once and for all throw away the stupid pineapple at that point but as he'd picked it up the stupid pineapple had said:

"Don't,"

and Templeton had paused, and said:

"Why shouldn't I?"

He'd held the stupid pineapple by its green leaves over the recyclables bin in the kitchen.

"Because if you let me live, I will give you three wishes," the stupid pineapple had said.

"Liar," Templeton had said, and had tossed the stupid pineapple into the bin and started to walk away. "No stupid pineapple has the power to grant wishes." He'd started back upstairs, checking only momentarily to ensure that he in fact did have his pants on.

"I do," the stupid pineapple had said from inside the bin.

Templeton had stopped on the stairs and put his fingers to his temples, the way he always did when he was thinking very hard about something he did not want to be thinking about at all. Templeton did that a lot, in fact, as his job was Ponderer Of Things Nobody Wants To Ponder, a position he'd been appointed to by the CEO of the company the year before after a tiny wormhole in space and time had opened up in the men's washroom on the third floor.

The wormhole was too small to do much with. Nobody could even really get a finger inside it, except Rhonda from Accounting, and Rhonda from Accounting had thus far resisted everyone's entreaties to stick her finger into the tiny wormhole, steadfastly refusing to do so for a whole year. The wormhole had, it must be pointed out, had many other things put into it, things like paperclips and push pins and tiny pull-off tabs from soda pop cans and the like, something that people had started doing when they realized they could, since often it is simply the realization that something can be done which prompts that thing to then be done.

Templeton had himself succumbed to the allure of the tiny wormhole, one day, working a little late. He'd gone into the third floor washroom and the tiny wormhole was there, between the stalls and the sinks, just as it always was. Templeton had a couple of pens with him, including his green marker that he used to mark things in green, and on an impulse he looked at the wormhole and put the green marker into it.

There was only the slightest hesitation, and then a zhhoooopo!

Templeton was very sure that it wasn't simply a zhoooop, that there was an o at the end of it, and he'd emphasized that on the Official Report he'd filed with Customer Relations. Customer Relations wasn't sure what to do about his green marker or the zhoooopo! or the tiny wormhole in general. Customer Relations, which had only three employees (Tim, Timothy, and Dan, who resented the bond that Tim and Timothy had), had only gotten jurisdiction over the tiny wormhole because nobody else wanted it. Building Services had been the natural department to handle it, but they'd pointed out that most wormholes lead to other dimensions and so the tiny wormhole wasn't a part of this building, per se, and the per se had convinced the few holdouts, and so then Human Resources had been assigned the job of dealing with the tiny wormhole, on the grounds that while the wormhole was not human so far as anyone knew, humans were doing things to it, but Human Resources all called in sick the next day and management, worried about losing an entire department, had instead assigned the tiny wormhole problem to Tim in Customer Relations. Tim had then requested authority to hire two other people to help deal with it, and he'd hired Timothy and Dan, and the three of them had set out to have an ongoing feud about whether Tim favored Timothy due to their sharing a name, while getting no work done, which was fine because the company had no customers, anyway, and as nobody knew what to do about the tiny wormhole, Customer Relations could hardly be blamed for doing nothing about it.

Just after the Zhoooopo!, there had been a slight tug on the green marker and Templeton had felt the green marker tugged from his hand. He'd had to fill out three different forms requesting a new one and although that was time-consuming, he'd felt that he should not have to pay for a new green marker on his own, as he'd lost it on company property.

While waiting for Requisitions to deliver the new green marker (Expect it in 6-42 weeks, barring wars, hurricanes, gravitational inversions and mist, the email had said) he'd gone back into the third-floor washroom and seen, of course, the tiny wormhole again.

He'd eyed it warily, the same way that he'd eyed warily the stupid pineapple which had already taken up residence in his house the first time he'd seen that.

Then he'd stepped up by the tiny wormhole and looked into it and put his mouth right next to it and said, in a voice he hoped was both friendly and authoritative:

"Send back my green marker, please, as I need it."

There had been a pause, and then from the tiny wormhole had come a voice, and that voice said:

"Blert!.;"

Templeton had paused in shock, and before he could assess what that might mean, a voice behind him had said:

"What do you suppose that meant?"

And he'd turned to see the CEO of the company, a man everyone simply called "Gene," since "Gene" was the exact opposite of the CEO's actual name -- no, nobody got that joke, but Gene always chuckled at it and so everybody else did, and then wondered what Gene's actual name might be, and then wondered what the exact opposite of their own name might be* -- and Gene strode over to stand next to Templeton, and peered into the wormhole, and said:

"It talked."

Templeton, who by that time already had reason to be tired of things talking when they shouldn't ought to talk, sighed, and said "It did."

"That's amazing," Gene said.

"Is it?" Templeton asked.

Gene scratched his chin. "Now that I think of it, I'm not so sure it is. I mean, what do we really know about the tiny wormhole? Maybe all tiny wormholes talk."

Like stupid pineapples, Templeton thought, but he didn't say that because he wasn't entirely sure that all stupid pineapples talked.

Gene leaned down and put his mouth by the tiny wormhole.

"Do all tiny wormholes talk?" he asked it.

There was a lengthy silence, during which Templeton wondered if he could leave, as he was supposed to be home by now, and then the tiny wormhole said:

"Iort:?"

Gene and Templeton regarded each other, and then Gene said:

"Did it say Iort:?"

Templeton nodded. "Yes. Iort," he agreed.

"No, it didn't say Iort," Gene said. "It said Iort:? I heard it."

They stared at the tiny wormhole a moment longer.

"What does it mean?" Gene asked.

"I don't know," Templeton said.

"But you could figure it out," Gene said.

"I suppose," Templeton had said, and that had led Gene to on the spot promote him to Ponderer. ("It's not an official title, until now," Gene had explained. "You'll have to fill out the paperwork.")

Later, Templeton would put his fingers to his temples and rubbed them in the way that had earned him his name in the first place as he pondered the stupid pineapple's offer to grant him three wishes.

"You think I can't grant wishes because I'm just a stupid pineapple, but I bet three months ago you'd have thought that a stupid pineapple couldn't talk, and I proved you wrong about that, didn't I?" the stupid pineapple said from inside the bin.

Templeton sat down on the stairs and looked at the bin.

"Didn't I?" asked the stupid pineapple.

"I'm going to bed," Templeton said, and started up the stairs, wishing that the stupid pineapple had never woken him up in the first place and wishing that it was not Sunday evening because he didn't want to have the spend the entire night fighting with the stupid pineapple only to get up and begin a whole week of Pondering the tiny wormhole and other things nobody wanted to ponder.

He woke abruptly with the sunlight beaming in through his bedroom window and a phone ringing. He heard steel drums playing somewhere just over the sound of the ocean surf, and a camel stuck its head into the bedroom window.

"Breakfast is ready!" he heard his wife yell, and he sat up more fully and looked around, bewildered.

To understand why Templeton was so bewildered, you must first know some things about Templeton beyond what you already have learned about him.

First, Templeton Freeney lives in Trenton, New Jersey, which is not overly stocked with steel drums, oceans, tiki huts of the sort that Templeton found himself standing in, or camels.

Second, Templeton's wife Ana had left him several years before when she had fallen madly in love with a man who'd become a huge Hollywood screenwriter after a movie he'd written about a madman trying to take over the world only to be foiled by his brother-in-law had become a worldwide smash, leaving Templeton to raise the children himself.

Third, and you've probably already gathered this, it was no longer Sunday-night-leading-into-Monday-morning. A large calendar on the wall had days marked off in X's that looked to have been made by his green marker, and the last day marked off was Friday, making this Saturday.

As he stared around him, Templeton realized the phone was still ringing. He picked it up.

"Hello?" he said.

"I told you so," he heard the stupid pineapple's voice. "I told you I could grant wishes. Now do you believe me?"

Templeton looked out the window, where some teenagers were getting ready to go surfing.

"I wished for this?" he said.

"Yep!" the stupid pineapple agreed heartily.

"All of this?" Templeton asked.

"Yessiree Bob," the stupid pineapple concurred.

"I guess you were right," Templeton said. "I guess you were right."

"Now that that's settled," the pineapple said, "Can you come rescue me?"

The phone line abruptly went dead.

*Mathematicians over four years ago proved that for 56% of the population, the opposite of their name is "Tyler." The remaining 44% break down into three categories: those whose opposite-names are "Jerome (12%), those whose are "Maria" (12.2%) and those whose opposite name can only be spoken in a long-forgotten Hindi dialect. (45.7%). After mathematicians released that report, they all went and enjoyed a large chicken dinner.

Go on to Part TWO: The important thing is, the cheeseburger ends up okay. So try to keep that in mind.

(UPDATED!) Announcing The Stupid Pineapple Blogfest!

UPDATED: Heather Arundel (blogs at My Demon Spirits, is a great writer) has a great idea. +1 point for her already.

Her idea: in addition to extra numbers for all the other stuff, you get extra numbers for tweeting & Retweeting about the Stupid Pineapple Blogfest.
But you MUST mention @whyihatepeople in the tweet or retweet, so that I can track them.

You may or may not have heard that author Patrick Dilloway, a/k/a Grumpy Bulldog, got a book deal.

Over on his blog today, Grumpy complains about how as a Big Shot Author with a Million Dollar Book Contract, he has to actually relate to people and interact with them in hopes that they will buy his book and justify his publisher providing him with one of the castles that Nicolas Cage lost to foreclosure. This, in turn, legally obligates Grumpy to be nice to you and me, and to take part in as many blogfests as the Internet can throw at him.

Which is how I came up with the idea for The Stupid Pineapple Blogfest!



Now, I've never run a blogfest before, so I don't know what really to do. Whatever I do, I expect that Michael Offutt, Pagel Hater, will immediately point out to me what I did wrong and then expect me to pay him for that, so you can rest assured that one way or the other, this will end up being a colossal mess.

But... a colossal mess that will get you a free book and $10 to Amazon.

The BOOK is one of MY books -- whichever one you choose, from this list, and $10 on a gift card to Amazon, all just for participating... and winning.

Here's what you have to do:

1. Leave a comment saying you're going to enter.

2. On Friday, February 3, 2012, post, on your Blog, a post on the following topic:

"This Stupid Pineapple is..."

That's it. It can be a post, an essay, a poem, a picture, even, if you are daring and so inclined, a karate-ballet demonstration featuring several black belts.

(That last one would almost certainly win.)

Then, on Saturday, the 4th, I'll go read all the posts of people who left a comment here saying they were going to enter, and I'll post links to them, and I will assign a panel of distinguished judges made up of:

A. Me.
B. Mr Bunches
C. Mr F

To determine who wins, based on the following exacting criteria:

1. You have to enter by commenting and posting something.
2. I will assign a number to each entry, in the order in which you posted your comment.
3. I will have Random.org pick a number.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE EXACTING CRITERIA!

4. If I really like your post, I will give it not one, but two numbers. Or more.
5. And if you link back to my blog in your post, I will give it a third number.
6. And I will give your post an extra number for each person who comments on YOUR post at YOUR blog.

So, to recap:

The total number of numbers will begin at "the number of people who enter." Let's say four people enter. Each person gets assigned a number:

1, 2, 3, 4

But if I like your post, and you were #1, you'll be #1, and 5, with the total numbers being 1-5.

If you link to "Thinking The Lions" in your entry, you get another number, so you'll be, say, 1, 5, and 6, with entries 1-6, so you'll have, what, a 99% chance of winning or something?

Then, if you get a bunch of people to comment on your post, each comment is another number. So someone who gets 83,000,000 comments on his blog, like Michael Offutt, you'll get even more opportunities.

I know it's a complex system, but what did you expect? It was thought up by a Stupid Pineapple.

A tiny stegosaurus recognizes the aerobic benefits of taking the stairs but still is not entirely sanguine about the whole thing.

I Don't Want Another Gosh Darn Question, I Want Answers...! (Middle)

Is it right to follow the rules? Should there even be rules in the first place? If one makes their own rules should they be hard to follow? If it’s too hard to follow then should they be changed? Or should people just live life without worrying about any rules?

These are some questions that I have been asking myself lately. I don’t have any answers for any of them and with each new day I have a new question. And let me tell you it is really not easy going through each day attempting to live life with numerous questions running through your head.

I wake up in the morning and I think to myself ‘maybe today will be the day that I meet someone’ or maybe today will be the day that I get that big break and get a job that actually pays enough so I can have health insurance as well as be able to pay for all of my bills and not have to get a second job.’ Or ‘maybe today will be different.’ But none of these so called days are any different than the previous day.

I set rules for myself to make sure that I don’t lose anything or to make sure that I get what I want without hurting the ones that I care about. But I am thinking that maybe without these “rules” my life will flow into something better.

I am not saying that I have a bad life by any means but to me all that I do is work and when payday comes around twice a month both of my paychecks go to bills or student loan payments and I am left with nothing to bring me joy. It also leaves me with a sense of ‘I do not want to work every day and not be able to go to a movie that I want to see because if I do I will not be able to pay my phone bill’ and ‘now I have to get a second job because now that my health insurance will be deducting money from my paychecks I need to work another job in order to pay my bills which now leads me to zero personal time to spend how I want to.’

I don’t want to have these thoughts anymore. I want to live a life where one job is enough. Where if I want to go to a movie I won’t have to budget three months out in order to see if I can spend that $10 dollars to go and have a little fun.

When does life get too much for one person to handle? Why are there so many questions and no answers? But then that would make life normal, right?

I'm not gonna be able to sleep until I find out what THIS is all about. (My Daily Walk)

Today, I cut through the Overture Center because I wanted to walk through the Museum of Modern Art, and I saw this:



Up closer, the sign says:




Why?

What will happen?

How far can it be moved? What constitutes removal of the table? What happens if it's removed on the 29th?

The whole thing makes me curious. And, to be honest, I was sorely tempted to remove the table. You can't see a sign like that and not want to test it out.

A tiny stegosaurus decides that maybe, tomorrow, he will start that beard, but not today.

What Mr Bunches is watching 2 (Life With Unicorns)

He is watching the intro to 20th Century Fox movies.

Just the intro.

This:



Over and over, he's watching that. For about thirty minutes. He calls it "20."

A tiny stegosaurus wonders if he, personally, is any safer, and also, whether there will be cookies inside.

I bet some people are earbidextrous (I Get Paid For Doing This)

Off to the right there is a picture of roughly 57% of my face, showing off my new headset for my telephone.

I got my new headset last week as part of a technological upgrade that also included "replacing the printer that broke back in November", and it was necessary because for about the past six months or so I'd been using speaker phone for almost every conversation, for several good valid reasons that I have even though every single person in the world objects to someone using a speaker phone.

Except me. I do not object to you using a speaker phone. I don't object to you using a headset, a speaker phone, a can attached to a string, your hands cupped together, or any other method you want to use if I can hear you.

That's me. I'm easygoing. But nobody else is. Everyone else in my life treats every single departure from "talking into a phone in the classic style" as though it were a personal affront to their dignity and/or possibly enmeshing them into a complex of sin that will get them banished.

So when I put on my headphone to talk on the cellphone in the car, I get this:

Me: "So as I was saying..."

Everyone I Ever Talked To Using The Headset: "What?"

Me: [Shouting] "So as I was saying..."

Everyone I Ever Talked To Using The Headset: "What? And why are you shouting? Are you on a headset? Why?"

To verify that it was simply the headset they were somehow objecting to, I once did a test. I was talking to a friend on the phone, and I was using the phone as a phone qua phone. But I spoke as quietly as I could and held the phone away from my mouth and had the radio on in the background.

My friend paid no attention. I then plugged in the headset and answered a question of his and he said "Did you put on a headphone? What'd you say?"

Speaker phones are worse: Put someone on a speakerphone and the conversation consists entirely of:

($) the person saying repeatedly "Am I on a speakerphone?" and

(7) the person asking why you're shouting at them.

So I upgraded to an office headset, not out of any deference to all the people in the world who wish that we could still have those kind of phones that hang on the wall and you hold one piece up to your ear and shout into the other "Give me Brentwood 355!" and wait for the other person to say "Ahoy!" but because if I talk on a speakerphone all day long I go hoarse, which interferes with my ability to tell Sweetie stories about my day when I get home. (Me: "So then the guy said, 'Am I on a speakerphone?' ")

The thing was, when I got the headset, I did not know that I was left-eared.

Seriously, I am.

And you probably are, too.

Well, not maybe left-eared, but you probably are one-or-the-other eared, and you may not even know it.

The headset -- which took me an astounding 48 minutes to set up, which at my hourly rate means that it cost my firm $212 in gross income to have me work on this and therefore we'd have been better off hiring someone to put the headset in and teach me how to use it -- was set up initially to be right-eared, and hang on my right side.

So when I finally was able to make my first phone call (a test call to myself in which I called myself on my cell phone and then picked up my cell phone to see if I could hear myself in the headset [I asked me: 'Do you have me on a headset?']) I had the headset on my right ear and

It.

Drove.

Me.

Nuts.

I couldn't get used to it. I kept picking at it and moving it and taking it off and putting it on and in general behaving as though I needed one of those cone-shaped things around my neck to keep me from pawing at it.

Finally, another lawyer in my office noticed, and showed me how I could switch it to be left-eared, just like I apparently am. I didn't know you could be ear-ed, but then, there you go. Live and learn.

A tiny stegosaurus wonders what goes into "non-dairy" creamer and decides to make a joke about that at the meeting.