How to Wing the Superbowl

A few days ago I experienced a crisis of massive proportions. We are talking crisis on the level of the sun going nova, or an asteroid killing all the dinosaurs. Imagine every volcano on Earth exploding simultaneously or the tectonic plates suddenly deciding to go swimming in molten lava: that kind of serious. The 'a basilisk ate Obama and the Queen' kind of serious.

First you should know that I don't cook. My mother would rush to inject here that she made sure my brothers and I knew how to cook before we left the house, as well as how to do our laundry, and how to sew. This is true. For me, not cooking is a personal choice. This choice stems mostly from my hatred of doing dishes.

Yesterday I decided to boil an egg. Not a difficult task, you say, but let me remind you: I don't cook. My goal was to boil three eggs. The first egg- no problem. The second egg- fine. But the third egg, as I began to slide it into the water, slipped out of my fingers and cracked on the bottom of the pot. HORROR! Egg began to emerge from its encasement! White slimy stuff sneaking out into the water, like a Trojan horse wheeling its way sneakily into Troy. The water started to bubble and foam until it had reached the edges of the pot and threatened to leap out and consume the world.

So I did what I always do during momentous crises--I called my mom. She said it was fine. She told me to turn down the heat. She also said I could eat it, even though it looked like a deformed alien trying to pre-escape its egg, or like Earth leaking gravity through the hole in the ozone layer (I didn't eat it, actually--it creeped me out too much).

There is another reason to be concerned about eggs. I'm sure you've seen a double-yolk or a spot of blood inside an egg. But have you ever seen an egg without a yolk? I hope not. These eggs are laid by roosters. If they hatch, a terrible creature comes out: a two-legged dragon with wings and the head of a rooster--a cockatrice. There are only two ways it can die: by hearing the crow of a rooster, or by seeing itself in a mirror. If it looks at you, you turn to stone.

The trick to prevention is to throw the cockatrice egg over your house so it smashes on the other side without touching the roof. As the best chicken catcher in my family, I'm sure I could manage to take down a cockatrice--so if you see one, feel free to call me. 

But if you believe that avoidance is the best method, move to Toronto. Otherwise you're bound to be tormented by giant rooster-dragons staring you into stone and gobbling up all your children.

On the other hand, a cockatrice could be quite useful, if utilized carefully. If you're very clever, you could wrangle that rooster-dragon and use it as a weapon against the Giants (if you live in New England)  or the Patriots (if you live elsewhere), so that your team would win; and if you were really smart, you would have done it last week, so the game would have been a shutout. Or, if you were really, really smart, you would have brought the rooster-dragon onto the football field during the game, so instead of tossing around a small not-round kicking toy, the players would have been engaged in an epic battle against the Cockatrice: it would have been the football game of the century.


Here is the moral of the story: pay close attention to your eggs, and you could be the decider of the next Superbowl.

 

You Can Stomp On Monsters, But Not On Black Holes. So Don't Try.

If anyone ever tells you there's no such thing as monsters, they're lying. There are monsters all over the place. It's just that we've gotten quite good at ignoring them, banishing them to the outskirts of civilization, or remaining ignorant. Children understand this. When they are afraid of the dark, it's because they know that the biggest, meanest, most dangerous monsters are invisible; and what is the dark but a very commonplace version of invisibility?

 I suppose you want some examples of monsters. That's good, because that's what I was going to tell you next.

Category 1: Monsters We Ignore

You know that guy who cuts you off? Or the one who reads their receipt at the cash register with eight people in line behind them, finds a $1 mistake, and makes the cashier call a manager immediately? Or the lady in front of you who drives 35mph exactly in a 40mph zone, and is going exactly the direction you are? These people are not monsters. But they have little monsters inside their heads. Little monsters that whisper "who are you?" and "why?" and "RAWR" and "you're stupid". These little monsters can have devastating consequences on us. Sometimes they're even contagious. But usually we just ignore them.

The second type in this category are monsters such as The Runny Nose, The Hang Nail, and The Sneeze. These are constantly attacking, but we've developed complex defense systems that allow us to ignore the monsters most of the time.

Category 2: Monsters We Banish

These monsters usually take forms of bears, mountain lions, volcanoes, and poisonous reptiles. Typically we keep them at bay by installing electric lights everywhere, shooting at them if they come to close, or destroying their food sources and habitats. These ones are probably the least dangerous and the most feared.

On the other side of this coin is the Germ. The germ is tiny, but it invades our body and slowly takes out one of our functioning systems at a time. We have developed many defense mechanisms for this one; the main one is banishment through vaccinations.

Category 3: Monsters We Are Ignorant Of

This is a bit of a difficult category, because if we're ignorant, it means we have no knowledge. However, I at least know of one: black holes. You think your teenage brother eats a lot? My little brother would wrack up a $400 grocery bill all on his own when he was thirteen--a black hole would eat the whole planet if it could get its greedy little hands on it. And that would just be the beginning. A black hole would eat our sun as well as all of the surrounding stars. It just sucks in everything, like a giant vacuum--it eats stars, planets, moons, dust, asteroids, entire galaxies. Even you. The worst part is that they'll eat light: mixing your wildest fears into one terrible creature: a giant, ravenous monster that consumes everything, in the dark. Not only would it be consuming you, you wouldn't be able to see it.

So just watch out for little monsters and big monsters, because they're sneaking everywhere, stealing your socks and your hair, making you grumpy and scratching your car, and the only way to fight back is to stomp on them. Except black holes, you can't stomp on those.