RAQ 2013: The Rarely Asked Questions

It's my birthday! And that means it's time for the R.A.Q. – the Rarely Asked Questions. Here, I celebrate my birthday by collecting and answering questions that readers normally never ask anyone. They can be as serious or as absurd as they liked. Here we go…

1. Nicholas Sabin asked: If Jesus Christ played Dynasty Warriors, who would he play as? Follow-up: Could he defeat Lu Bu at Hu Lao Gate?

Nick Sabin, going for blasphemy out of the gate.

I suspect Christ would play as one of the Qiaos, as he was about empowerment of the least of us, and they are the youngest, the least consequential, most disenfranchised and most underpowered characters. He might co-op with his Dad as the other Qiao.

And by Dynasty Warriors 7, anyone can beat Lu Bu at Hu Lao Gate. Christ, however, wouldn't need to abuse the save feature and by the end Lu Bu would be renamed "Paul".

2. Tony Noland asked: If using normal baryonic matter accelerated to 0.2C, how hard would I have to hit Mars to initiate a self-stabilizing magnetic field?

Understand that if you've already fixed your matter and your speed for impact, then adjusting the "hardness" of the blow is quite difficult. Moreso the Moh's hardness for pentaquarks. Given that you're hoping to initiate a field, which must mean rebooting or hijacking Mars's own, I'll hazard that you'll have to hit it quite hard indeed.

3. Chaz asked: The Greek description of the sky is 'bronze' for it shone as bronze. If there were no color adjectives or understanding how would you describe the sky? Blood? The ocean after a storm?

Chaz here is clearly playing to my deep and abiding love of Homer. God bless you, atheist.

I suspect my system would be based on decoration and opacity. Here night and day are irrelevant, as during both there is some illumination that defines by degree of presence. We'll describe the sky by how many clouds and how thick they are; partially cloudy, overcast, mild and diffused haze, or the super-cast as when you can't even make out the contours of the cloud system taking up the sky. Storm lighting utterly differs, and so it stands out. This also allows for days and nights of particularly light-intensity. Cloudlessness would be "full sky," whereas a super-cast time would be "absent sky." When the sky is full of birds, "birdy sky." Full of locusts, "pestilent sky."

By not actually describing the sky itself here, but rather degrees of interference with its visibility, we will supply young artists the ability to feel clever at the expense of the vernacular for generations to come.

4. Danielle La Paglia asked: I know everyone likes to ask funny questions, but I'm not a very funny person, so...what book has had the biggest emotional impact on you? Whether it made you actually cry or laugh or love (despite your granite heart) or whether it changed you in some profound way or gave you hope or spurred you on...whatever your definition of "emotional impact" is, I'll take it.

You're right that it's difficult for fiction to have significant effects on me. I know Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Roger Zelazny's "Divine Madness" both got me to gasp and take a few minutes to collect my mind at their conclusions – maybe the only thing the two stories have in common are absolutely crystalline final paragraphs. Zelazny's Lord of Light did that to me at least four times over the course of the novel, so that would be a leader in the category. Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner is the only poem to suck me in deeply for its poetry.

But as far as writing, let me hazard that it's the junction between two authors: J.R.R. Tolkien and Akira Toriyama. The former wrote The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, so classic, so immersive, so brilliantly escapist that two generations of writers ripped him off to disgusting degrees. But very shortly after I read these books, I read Akira Toriyama's Dragon Ball (not the later Dragon Ball Z – though I happily read that later).

Tolkien gave me kings and wizards on horse back with staves and swords and magic rings out to fight armies of orcs and braving into a volcano.

Toriyama, abruptly, gave me a monkey-boy who thought a magic ball was his grandfather, cars fleeing from dinosaurs, a perverted martial arts god in a Hawaiian shirt and clouds you can only ride in you're innocent.

If I'd gone from Tolkien to Wheel of Time or Lyonesse or Sword of Truth, I might have gotten mired in the Medievalist mindset forever, but because I had these two wildly different visions of the Fantastic, it left me always thinking about how much fit in Fantasy's boundaries. It's why, today, I'm stunned by how little apparently fits into what's supposed to be "Epic Fantasy."

That's certainly why you got Puddle out of me.

5. Katherine Hajer asked: When do you sleep?

Answer: Optimally, from midnight to nine in the morning. It's been off lately since visiting Texas's timezone and WorldCon's insane anti-sleep schedule. You are now amply educated to rob me.

6. Helen Howell asked: How do you stop your worm from slipping down the plughole when you wash it in the sink? (worms are covered in dirt!)

While I have limited experience with worm-cleansing, I would always stop the plughole up with a drain cover before cleansing began. This prevents aquatic descent.

7. Larry Kollar asked: You're in your writing spot. You look out the window (if you don't have one, pretend). What do you see?

I'm fortunate enough to have a real writing spot – my desk, by my window, in my room. I have a privileged view of the top of the woods descending toward the lake, and while I cannot see any water, the other half of my view is raw sky. For more on that view, see Chaz's question.

In Winter it snows over; other seasons I get to watch the life span of leaves. I cherish working to it.

8. Valerie Valdes asked: If you could have written any story or novel by someone else, which would it be?
Ooo, there have been very few works that struck me with serious writing envy, but they definitely exist. Most commonly I find a work fascinating and am grateful for the creator, thinking about their process, rather than imagining emulation. Jo Walton's Among Others, Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars – I wish I had the time write like that too while also writing the works I already do, I wish I'd done something in that neighborhood, but really, I'm just inspired by their existence. I don't envy or desire to swipe destiny.

The second Lupin the 3^rd television series was one envy-project – so funny, such character, and when my Trio novels see the light of day, you'll see the obvious influences. Similarly, I'd write the heck out of Gail Simone's Agent X and was unduly influenced by her.

The movie Stranger Than Fiction explored and even executed several meta-fictional ideas I'd been playing with for years. That's a case of someone beating me to the public. I envied them insofar as I wanted to get my take on something so defined by ideas that I couldn't write it and stand apart after they got to it. Jerks. Smart, talented jerks.

9. Medeia Sharif asked: Think about your skills, talents, quirks...everything. If you were a computer software, what would be your function in someone's computer?

Firefox browser. Dozens of tabs open, studying several topics and participating in too many conversations for my own good until I trip over my own re-hashed coding and crash.

10. Scribbler asked: How important is the reader?

Important enough that I'm answering any questions they have!

The slightly more serious point is that they're vital to the career of any good writer. I had the pleasure of boarding a plane Monday with Mary Robinette Kowal, who played down that she'd succeeded because of talent or hard work. To her it was the readers who supported her career and gave her this status.

11. Elephant's Child asked: Is life random, or is there meaning?

Both suppositions are exceedingly true. Complexity Theory demonstrates for us that many systems in which life exists or is comprised have chaotic and random sets of particles and outcomes. However, elements of randomness can only be identified because they are meaningful. If anything were meaningless, we wouldn't be able to recognize it. Finding, creating and encouraging positive meaning has been much of my best experiences of God.

12. Peter Newman asked: How would you define yourself as a D&D character? I'm talking class (or multi-class), race, alignment, stats.

Did Peter ask this because he knows I hate the false reductionism of D&D? That's a question I don't normally ask.

The first time friends goaded me into playing D&D, I defined myself as a midget orc. Thus I had lower than average intelligence and appearance, but none of the physical benefits of being monstrous. True to myself, his religion was ALL, and he believed himself to be chaotic-something-or-other. For the sake of the experiment, let's say I'm Chaotic Good because I mean well but don't know what I'm doing as often as I ought and that takes me down many ethical alleys.

And that wraps up everyone who asked me rare things this year! I'm off to find birthday cake. Did you enjoy the Q&A?

Happy Endings and the Nonsense of Realism, Revisited

Prepare to have many endings spoiled for you.

Sometime in adolescence we learn disdain for the things we like. We still want to watch cartoons, play with action figures and hear stories at bedtime, but these are inappropriate desires for “grown ups.” Children grow to feign disgust for the things they actually desire, preparing them for adulthoods of denial. Often those adulthoods are spent desperately seeking childhood freedom, such as the necessary irrationality they can now only get through alcohol or pot. I blame that same anti-rational kickback for why so many people will watch a third awful Transformers movie.

Especially if you aim for an intellectual life, one of the things you learn to disdain is the happy ending. They’re unrealistic and trite. They don’t happen. When they do, it’s still more important to the cynical intellectual to write about when they don’t. Ours is a culture that disdains naïvety but cherishes cynicism, despite those being the same thing. They are bald-faced, oversimplisitic ideologies that prejudge people and the world, glomming onto any supporting evidence while blithely ignoring or making excuses for the exceptions. To be cynical is merely to be naïve in the negative direction. Like the sweetly naive, the cynics claim they know the real world and demand their realism.

Never mind that all fiction is inherently unrealistic – no matter how bleak, it’s just words on a page. Denis Johnson is one hundred percent as make-believe as J.K. Rowling. Not one word of it wasn’t made up at a keyboard. Many in my crowd are suckers for unhappy stories, leading them to universally rebuff me for thinking JT LeRoy was a fraud. That one had a happy ending, I guess.

True tragedy and moments of profound melancholy possess inarguable power. No distaste with darkness robs Of Mice and Men of its closure. Tor.com posted an editorial positing that 1984 is a classic because it’s depressing. I’ll freely admit that Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, one of my favorite reads in recent years, ended about as bitterly as he could make it.

Despite my fondness for Of Mice and Men and Brave New World, the worst of the unhappy endings is killing your main character. It’s typically a cop-out. Death, even in sacrifice or redemption, bails the character out from having to face future consequences. You’re at least fifty years too late to play the “but those consequences were so bad” card. It’s not deep; it’s the sick-note for Gym Class of fiction tropes.

One of the greatest offenders is the post-Burton killing of villains in superhero movies. Villains in particular should have to stick around in franchises and see what they’ve wrought or develop as characters. How nice would it be to have Doc Ock mentor Peter in Spider-Man 3? Or have Harvey Dent come to his senses after his rampage in Dark Knight? I grasp the desire to kill Osama Bin Laden, but it’s a far better story to have that man meet every widow he’s made.

Danny Boyle is making a career partially on subverting the crumby ending. In India, in a secluded canyon, and in the zombie apocalypse, he puts his characters through utter Hell so he can deliver that one moment of climactic relief. He plays the conventions of bleak fiction against its own crowd. He keeps getting nominated for awards, so thank goodness the wrong people haven’t caught onto what he’s doing yet.

Depressive folk always tell me, “That’s the way the world is.” FX’s Louie having no soundtrack, dull lighting in an airport as he laughs at someone else’s distress – this is, according to The New Yorker, “giving reality its due.” This is real life.

Bullshit. That is something that can happen in reality. A man in a Ronald McDonald costume humming show tunes can also happen. It’s less likely to, though art affords the possibility for it. To mindlessly or pedantically mimic some myopic reality any reader can experience more clearly by putting the book down and living – that’s more intellectually bankrupt than a thousand Happily Ever Afters.

This storytelling environment has left the “happy ending” malnourished. We’ll continue to see trite happy endings, where the heroes either win outright or by Deus ex Machina. RomCom Guy gets RomCom Girl. Harry Potter sends his magic kids off to magic school. In many cases these still satisfy. I’ll almost always side with a treacle positive ending over a treacle negative one, because my soul isn’t a black vortex that demands to be fed disappointment. If we’re going to be superficial, I want to smile through it.

But we should do more with happy endings, though. What else could be done with them? Examining what people want.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel The Remains of the Day is remembered as an indictment of servitude and denying common desires. I’m still at odds with the novel, because its protagonist butler is an extreme stereotype of a human being who’s given up any personal ambition in favor of blindly supporting his employers, and the novel definitely tortures him for doing so. Yet the ending has him choose an affirmation: to continue in service, but to alter his personality to do it even better, by learning to have a sense of humor. In that way he actually has a spirited moment at the ending, even though he’s chosen against the independence society believes he should prize.

Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle literally ends on the line, “we are so happy.” Their circumstances are tragic, psychotic, and yet are desired. The survivors are deranged and enthusiastic to live in something as ruined as any Greek Tragedy.

Happiness also plays a role in the better kind of ending: the complex one. Consider J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which is held up as an example of too many things, but one it never gets recognition for is its insanely ambitious conclusion. It deserves that recognition because it gets lumped in with “happily ever after” – largely by drunks and people who’ve never read it. Evil is defeated, a monarchy restored, our king marries someone we never met, the dead rest, Gimli and Legolas for an interracial friendship, the Shire is destroyed by bloody war, Sam starts a family while Frodo is so emotionally exhausted he essentially gives up on living. What happens in the payoffs in Return of the King are progressive, regressive, conservative, triumphant, joyous, defeatist and agnostic. All these themes must share a complicated world.

But writing rich endings like that is hard, which is why most authors don’t do it. The “bad ending” or “happy ending” is about as complex as most human minds are capable of fabricating, as is evidenced by the inventory of modern fiction. We mere mortals must strive for an essential goal: the ending that is authentic to the story. Of Mice and Men and Brave New World succeed in the end because their deaths are wretched and appropriate closure to great stories. A lame story can’t seed and grow a good ending. No matter what you tack onto the end, it won’t be particularly meaningful. Likewise, you can’t beat how The Princess Bride goes out. I adored Reiner’s decision in the film version to actively have a narrator tease us for wanting the right ending.

And going against what’s built up can be harmful. The end of Batman Begins suffers for Batman letting R’as Al Ghul die, tarnishing the hard-worn altruism and aversion to the death of others displayed throughout the movie. “I don’t have to save you” sounds like hokum, or a screenwriter making up for Liam Neeson’s contract expiring.

Sorry. How cynical of me.

Consumed Podcast 14: The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey

It's a particularly polarizing episode of Consumed this week as all three of us congregate over The Hobbit. There's high praise and analysis for its visual style, Howard Shore's score and many points in the acting, but also heavy questions of pacing and how the surprising number of fight scenes are handled. I seem to have stunned Max with one claim about "amateurish" elements toward the middle of the podcast. We get deep into it, so if you want a fix for Peter Jackson's latest, then this is the podcast for you.

You can download Consumed #14: The Hobbit right here.

Very Inspirational Award

So a little while ago Cindy Vaskova bestowed this Very Inspiring Blogger Award upon me. The real compliment  was Cindy finding my writing inspirational at all. It's one of the nicest things a writer can say to another. I mean, unless it turns out I inspired you to strangle your neighbors. Then I'd probably be closer to 'Neutral' than 'Flattered.'

The game requests you reveal seven things about yourself, and that you hand it over to fifteen other people. I've played a lot of games where you reveal personal details, and tried my best to come up with new stuff this time. Please tell me if I repeated something. I'll probably owe you a private revelation if you get me.

1. I root for the villains a lot. For instance, I’ve always thought the Ring Wraiths were really cool, and enjoyed the way they adapted into the movies. When the Nazgul attack in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King, I cackled so much that a friend turned to me, put her hand on my arm and said, “You’re enjoying this too much.” If only I could dive-bomb some good guys on my pet pterodactyl.

2. I’ve never had a drink of alcohol.

3. I’ve never smoked anything. For a year in my teens I needed a nebulizer for my lung medicine, which I guess counts as inhaling controlled substances.

4. I once dieted and exercised so hard that my gallbladder overreacted and I had to have it removed. I almost went bankrupt with medical bills. Healthy living, everybody.

5. One time while I was in the hospital, my brother and father gave me a bunch of rare football cards. I was so surprised that I flatlined.

6. I don’t have as much of a conscience as I have a modular sense of what some people might object to. When I love what I’m writing, even this modular sense goes on the fritz, and sometimes I’ll ask a friend to read it over to ensure it’s not horribly amoral. The most recent case was Exorcising Mother (thanks be to Max Cantor).

7. One reason that I’ve never bought Meme Theory is that human beings are not unconscious repetition machines. It’s not blind luck or survival traits that necessarily cause us to adopt an idea or behavior; we are quite often intelligent designers, altering a notion upon reception, or after a period of mulling it over. For instance, I’m changing how this award works. I’m going to pass it to three people, and I’m going to include the stipulation that you have to tell why you’re naming them.

So, I'll be passing this on to...

1. Stephen Hewitt of Café Shorts. While his blog is updated infrequently, every story he posts is lovingly crafted with provocative language, characterization and plotting. He is one of those fiction bloggers who not nearly enough people read. I deeply admire writers who experiment with different material, and Stephen does this with almost every piece. Sometimes the inspiration is simply that I should be as good at crafting the whole piece of fiction, with all its wiggling bits, as he is.

2. Elephant’s Child is obviously not her real name. However, it’s what she goes by on the internet, and I respect that. EC has one of the most positive blogs on the web. Even when she’s grappled with health problems and personal tragedies, she’s fostered compassion from her community of friends and followers. It’s something I’d like to be able to inspire as easily as she makes it look.

3. T.S. Bazelli is very transparent about her writing process. There are status updates, she's also happy to discuss what she got out of an article, a writing camp, or even her latest set of edits. She's been incredibly kind to me as both a beta reader and discussing her own process. I love transparency in how we get fiction to work.

The Books That Scared Us

Earlier this month I asked any visitors who felt brave enough to share the fiction that had scared them the worst. There were a few take-backs, but ultimately ten readers and writers were willing to share titles. The first two were William Shakespeare and Michael Crichton, which tickled me, and it got weirder from there. As promised, here are all the fit-to-print entries, including my own confession of the book that got me to try to hide under my bed as a kid.

Jai Joshi said:Macbeth scared me quite a bit actually. That bit where Lady Macbeth asks night to "pall in the dunnest smoke of hell" so heaven can't "peep through the blanket of the dark" to stop her. *shiver* When Macbeth keeps seeing the knife in front of him is creepy. And when Lady Macbeth can't get the blood off her hands it just brings up all this icky scary feeling inside me.


Danielle La Paglia said:
I didn't read a lot as a kid, but in high school and junior high I read a lot of Poe and even a little King, but neither ever gave me nightmares. A lot of movies have, but the first book that did was actually Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. There was something about being stalked through the jungle and then when they found out the T-Rex could swim, it was all down hill from there. As far as I can remember, there have only been two other books to ever give me nightmares and those two I read in the last three years.


Sarah Ann said:
Feast by Graham Masterton freaked me out and scared me the most. People chopping off their own body parts, then cooking them and eating them... That novel pops into my head frequently.


Jessica said:
I really like And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie and We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. Both are wonderfully creepy. Lots of Michael Crichton for scary parts (Sphere, Congo, Jurassic Park). The basement scene in The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The final story in Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes. The one that used to give me nightmares as a child was Tailypo. My mother had to ban the librarian from letting me check it out every few weeks. And, of course, the Scary Stories trilogy for the pictures.


Erin Cole said:
This may sound weird, but the ending of Shirley Jackson's, "The Haunting of Hill House," freaked me out, one of those punch-like endings. More obvious though, was "The Relic," by Preston and Child and Dean Koontz's "Phantoms." The build-up in some of those scenes was intense.


The Elephant's Child couldn't help harkening back to television:
Books I could cope with. The early Dr Who with the Dalects terrified me. Exterminate. Now I think that expression has real charm. I read 'We have always lived in the Castle' recently. Not a comfortable read.


Vanessa Grasso said:
"Harold" from the Scary Stories trilogy scared the ever-loving bejesus out of me, and still does, if I think about it hard enough. The illustrations in those books were scary enough, but something about the way this scarecrow came to life slowly with nothing but hatred and malice inside of him... and then what he does to the farmers... ugh, I totally won't sleep tonight. THE WORST. [Also], Sphere by Michael Crichton actually freaked my shit out pretty badly, but I can't remember why (I think it may have been the jellyfish scene, actually). And the raptors in Jurassic Park (the book)... when they're besieging the compound towards the end of the book and EVERYONE is getting eaten... their intelligence... I dunno, that scene was about a thousand times scarier to me than the kitchen scene in the movie.


Sonia Lal said:
Brave New World was creepy, yeah. Very creepy.


Your host, John Wiswell, said:
Some Horror got to me at some points, but nothing so affected me as Gandalf's apparent death in Fellowship of the Ring. I was visiting my grandmother's house, and had the book out after bed time. Part was that I read it too young for my own safety, either in my early teens or before that. Part was that I'd never envisioned fiction ever killing the powerful, wise mentor like that. Obi Wan had died, but in a brave puff of Jedi smoke. Gandalf, who was essentially Merlin and every other wizard in history to me, was dragged into the deepest shadows of the world by a whip and the foulest monster Hell ever spat out. It was fear of the dark, fear of falling, fear of losing guidance, and breaking what I saw as symbols of safety and empowerment all in the same couple pages. I tried to hide under the bed, but the guest mattress at Grandma's was too low to the ground.


Last and most pressing is Katherine Hajer'a description of a comic to which she can't recall the title:
This is terrible, because I remember the story very vividly, but don't know the title or character names (never mind the author). Okay: I was about eight, and my dad would let me pick out a comic book to get if he was in the smoke shop getting cigarettes (they had an amazing, rotating rack of comic books near the counter. I became a Stan Lee fan in that shop. But I digress.).

I never followed series properly, just got whatever had the coolest cover that month. So I wound up with some stuff that would probably be very rare and esoteric if I had been allowed to keep any of it.

And there was this one: the heroine, the title character of the comic, was on this SF world that was sort of like Earth's Dark Ages, in that she was an outlaw and it was a dangerous, backwards place to live. So her and her band of outlaws are always on the move. Apparently she always had a different outfit every issue. In the one I had, she wore a skintight camo catsuit with only one sleeve and one leg (yeah, totally practical).

They came upon this castle run by a beautiful and autocratic queen who always wore a golden mask over half her face. They are welcomed, but in the course of the stay the heroine and the queen come into conflict... in the end the heroine throws the queen over a staircase or something, and the mask comes off...

The artwork of the queen's burned, destroyed face gave me nightmares for weeks, yet I couldn't stop looking at it. The story had built her up so credibly as this regal-yet-cruel character, and the anguish the injury must have caused her was so palpable for me. It was so, so haunting, and all the more horrifying to have all this sympathy for this not-so-nice dictator.

The following issue the heroine was wearing this pure white disco outfit (remember, outlaw on Dark Ages-ish science fiction world -- totally impractical). Even though it looked cool, I stuck to the X-Men or something, because I didn't want to get that freaked out again.

Sorry, wrote you a very long answer to a short question. Hope that's okay.

Wish I could find out what the comic was!

Do you recognize Katherine's comic? Or do you have a particular piece of fiction that got under your skin? Share with us in the comments!

Bathroom Monologue: Merlin, Gandalf and Dumbledore (Redux)

As soon as the last Grail meeting ended, Merlin slipped out the door and lit a cigarette. One of the squires came over.

“Good boy. Is my horse ready?”

“Yes, sir. But are you certain you should go now? Their crusade could begin any month.”

“Listen, that hobbit isn’t going to pull this off by himself and Arthur knows what he’s doing. I’ve got two weeks vacation from Camelot and if anyone gets suspicious I’ll blame it on Morgana. You can blame anything on the old bitch. Two weeks is all I need to ride to Rivendell, from there around the cliffs and I make the necessary cameo to inspire and point him in the right direction again. I swear, if I didn’t show up regularly they’d wander into Las Vegas before they hit the Misty Mountains.”

He combed his beard with his fingers, changed his pointy blue hat for one with a rim and swapped his staff for that sword the elves dropped. Then he turned back to the squire.

“How do I look?”

“Exactly the same, sir.”

“Good, good. If Hogwartz calls again tell them I’m not playing phone tag anymore. If they want me to be head wizard, I want time and a half plus a pension that doesn’t rely on disgusting jellybeans. Playing two roles is hard enough.”

Then the wizard hustled to the stables, mumbling something about how having to make so many dramatic appearances had turned his hair white.

Bathroom Monologue: Grandpa Defends Tolkien

“He should have just sent the eagles,” I said, making the greatest mistake of my week.

“Oh, you like the giant birds?” asked Grandpa. “I’m sure they would have been inconspicuous flying over several hundred miles of terrain that’s populated solely by armies, flying reptiles and the ghost of The Devil. That couldn’t go wrong.”

“Just fly straight to Mount Doom.”

“Because they wouldn’t look there?”

“They weren’t looking for the hobbits there!”

“Because they’re not twenty feet wide and flying overhead!”

“Then send the army.”

“Which is distinctly smaller than Sauron’s and lacks the home field.”

“They went anyway!”

“And they only won because the little boys destroyed the ring.”

“They could still go and distract him while the eagles fly over.”

“Again, giant birds fleeing battle to dive into one of his most sensitive locales would draw attention. Here.” At this point Grandpa made a circle with his index finger and thumb. He held it midway between him and his grandson. His left hand balled into a fist and loomed like a cobra preparing to strike over his head. “Try dropping anything into this hole while I use this hand to punch you in the face.”

“Grandpa!” He pushed all the way to the back of his bunk. “I didn’t know you took Lord of the Rings so seriously.”

“I don’t. Fantasy is for nancies. But Tolkien and I both served in the European theatre, and I’m not going to let people badmouth his work just because they like birds.”

Bathroom Monologue: What To Do With Haunted Relics

Okay, if I had to scatter seven sacred relics to prevent some mastermind from collecting them and ruling the world, I wouldn’t stash them in seven really obvious huge dungeons. Firstly, those don’t exist. Secondly, it makes them very easy for him to find. After about the third dungeon this supervillain is bound to realize where the other four are.

1) The first one goes down the Mariana Trench. It’s the deepest hole in the known world, under so many atmospheres of water that it would kill anyone who tried to reach it. In fact, we’ve barely explored the place with robotics. A tiny crystal star would be darn near impossible to find in that abyss.

2) Drop one of them into the cement foundation of a Parliament building, preferably deep into it. You would thus have to demolish a government building and clear all the rubble just to look for it, and even then you probably wouldn’t have destroyed the foundations holding it. We also get free security, as a Parliament building should have a lot of that lying around.

3) To be a total jerk, I’ll stow one of them on the next space probe headed for the outer reaches of the universe. It’s cheap, but considering this explorer pod is headed further out into space than we’ll probably ever send humans, it will be really hard to retrieve.

4) In the middle of the arctic storm zones, where despite global warming there is a constant subzero blizzard with zero visibility. Preferably we’ll drill a hundred-foot hole in the ice and drop it down there, then cover it up. Within minutes you’ll have no idea where we drilled the hole in all the hundreds of miles of tempestuous storm.

5) In classic Lord of the Rings fashion, we’ll drop one into the mouth of an active volcano. True, the indestructible relic won’t combust like Sauron’s jewelry, but hopefully it will sink a miles under the surface of the earth, cradled in boiling lava. Most volcanoes don’t erupt like a geyser, but spit up and drool down the slopes. However this hot lava will be lighter and flow easier than the relic, so it will be more likely to sink while the lava rises. If the sucker ever erupts so badly that the relic is coughed up, it will be hidden in the cooling magma, and even we won’t know where it is.

6) Drop the sixth into the deepest stretch of the wide Yangtze in China, a river so horribly polluted that humans won’t enter it, and all the wildlife has either died out or mutated. We’ll weight this relic down in a tungsten container that will be too thick to fully corrode, and dig into the riverbed. Maybe we’ll even attached a self-propelling drill to the bottom so that it can dig a huge hole behind it. With a few days of current you won’t be able to see where it went down. That is, if you could see in the Yangtze.

7) One I’m just going to bury somewhere. It will be a chaotically chosen spot of no importance. Not a national park or a wonder of the world. I’m just going to bury out in the middle of nowhere.

In the mean time, let’s go build some huge dungeons as decoys. Perhaps one can have an exact replica of one of the relics to fool the bastard.