Green Desert - Chapter 1.4.2 - Bhanar

The beautiful blonde spun to look at the cop car, which flew at us so fast I didn’t think he saw us. She suddenly dove off the driveway, screaming, “That’s Zhíno!” The bastard who shot Mé‘ısí. And now he’d killed a cop.

The cruiser slid to a halt just short of where the woman had been, the siren blaring. Zhíno had the gun up to the window, then poking out a bit as the glass rolled down. I couldn’t let him shoot first this time. Twice was enough. His hand came out and I fired.

The handgun rotated slowly out of his grasp and tumbled to the gravel.

My body didn’t want to listen, but I forced it to stand up, commanding one frozen muscle at a time. Bits of gravel stuck to my forearms. I leveled the empty rifle at Zhíno and started cautiously forwards. He writhed in pain, eyes squeezed shut. I guess I got him good, in the hand or wrist. Served him right. Too bad I didn’t have any bullets to finish him off.

I stopped a few feet away, my rifle pointing in the door window. I shouted over the siren, “Leave the car.”

His bloody left hand was tucked in his right armpit, which already had a bloody bandage tied around the arm. The cop must’ve gotten one shot. “Leave the car!” He looked up at me, grimacing––but didn’t move. Lights flashing the corner of my eye. Another police car. A cop or another cop killer? I didn’t turn to look. “Leave the car!”

Green Desert - Chapter 1.4.1 - Zhíno

The dispatcher was asking too many damn questions, so I flicked off the walkie-talkie radio, hoping he’d think it was a malfunction. I was hurtling down the highway after Fírí, a cop lying on the pavement far behind me. My fingers paused over the siren and lights buttons. I grinned. What the hell. The click of the buttons was almost drowned out by the instant blare of the siren.

I dropped my right arm to my lap and fingered the cop’s semiautomatic handgun. Older than mine, but bigger. My shoulder still ached from the bullet wound. The aspirin hadn’t kicked in yet. If I saw that pickup driver, he was dead too. Both him and the bitch.

A house’s light. The pickup. I hit the brakes. My car! Where were they? Up the driveway Fírí stood half-naked, arms out like the end of a striptease. Pétíso! I didn’t know what she was thinking, but I knew she was about to die.

I cranked the wheel and gunned the big engine. Gravel rattled off the car’s underside. Fírí spun to face me, her skin blinding in the headlights, and she broke into a run off into the scrub brush.

I slammed the brakes, skidding to a stop, pushing the window button with my right hand as I held my gun to the top of the glass, waiting for it to get far enough down. I could just barely see Fírí running in the darkness, her back gleaming in the night. The gun fit through and my hand followed. I aimed at the bitch. My arm exploded in agony.

Happy New Year!

I almost forgot. And Rosh Hashanah ends in a few hours. . . In the immortal words of Weird Al Yankovic, "Oy gevalt, I'm so ferklempt that I could plotz."

So now we're in the year 5766, counted from . . . ? The beginning of time? I thought we were over 6000 on that count.

Nope. Apparently, Tishri 1 is the sixth day of creation, when Adam got get.

The 6000 must've been a Christian counting.

Babel babble

"Zhíno played the empty relative package of the beer of the window and is taken to air traverse in the buttock and the battery fished around for the injector."


Or at least that's what this sentence looks like after it's been run through this fun translator. Cool, huh?

Today the Estonian fishing industry, tomorrow the world!

Agu Laanemets, the owner of Hiiu Fishery, wants to consolidate all of Estonia's small fisheries into one giant conglomerate. "Let's not yet call it a plan at this stage. But yes, I do have such ambition." I wonder who he'd choose to run such a corporation? Ambition, indeed.

What would the effects of this merger be? Probably a loss of jobs. Maybe increased productivity in the short term. But definitely a stagnation of the industry in the long term. Without competition, what will motivate them to innovate new technologies? Oh I know, they'll still have competition from the big boys. And the little guys are constantly going bankrupt from not making ends meet. But still. . .

Have we progressed beyond the ma-and-pop fishery? The ma-and-pop farm? Must everything be big and industrialized? We might as well have the government running everything. . .

Green Desert - Chapter 1.3.5 - Pí‘oro

Vata was taking her sweet time getting to the door. Perhaps she had taken out her hearing aid. Maybe she’d fallen asleep. I pounded some more. “Vata!” The crazy foreign kid was making the girl strip at gunpoint. This was just too weird. Maybe if I went around to the bedroom window, I would wake my wife.

“Shoulders,” the gunman ordered like it made a lick of sense.

But the skinny girl seemed to understand. She turned around and lifted her shirt to expose a perfect, tapered back, bare from neck to waist.

The foreign kid said, “Front,” and the girl started to turn and I felt blood pulsating in places where it hadn’t in years.

Her sweatshirt hid her face but revealed a pair of pert breasts so beautiful I felt like I was ten again. I floated forwards, breathing deep.

“Sleeves,” the gunman snapped.

Behind me, Vata squawked, “What in the name of Nutíní is going on out here?”

The blonde girl pulled the sweatshirt over her head and off each arm, holding it out at arm’s length to the side.

“Pí‘oro?” Vata’s voice crackled.

Using all my composure, I yanked my eyes from the vision in my driveway and faced my wife. “Um. . .”

Vata looked past me, clutching her bathrobe tight around her.

“Call the police,” I said.

And then I heard the siren.

Serenity Now

Hitchhiker's, Star Wars, and Serenity. Have any other films been released this year?

.

.

.

Didn't think so.

At least, not that I've seen in the theaters. And that's what counts.

Oh. I almost forgot about Narnia. It'll be released on Reni's birthday. I'll probably see that one, too. [Beware that Narnia webpage though. Talk about over-designed!]

Holy Day of Tarénara

And a happy Tarénara Day to all of you, too!

Go dance naked under the new moon, sing your hunting songs, whatever it is you Tarénarans do. It's all rather silly, don't you agree? Goddess of Hunting? Sheesh. When's the last time you saw a woman with a bow and arrow?

Me, I'm sticking with Zhaké. . . um. . . I mean, Píríuso. Yeah, that's it. I worship the sun god Píríuso, and don't you forget it!

Green Desert - Chapter 1.3.4 - Fírí

The guy was insane. I should turn and run, but he’d surely shoot me in the back just for fun. So to live, I had to play out his perverted fantasies at gunpoint. Why did I ever get out of the car? Zhíno was right. I was an idiot.

“No pistol under you sweatshirt,” he yelled in his foreign accent which might have been sexy in different circumstances.

Oh. He was still worried about Zhíno’s handgun. At least he wasn’t a pervert. I lowered my hands to lift the sweatshirt.

“Slowly!”

I froze.

Behind the foreigner, the old man in pajamas banged on the front door, calling for his wife––I guessed. If Vata moved the same speed he did, it would be ages before she opened the door. The old man watched me as he kept knocking.

Carefully, I started moving again, grabbing the thick elastic with both hands and slowly lifting it. The wind bit my belly. I couldn’t believe I was about to flash two strangers. I wasn’t even wearing a bra. I stopped halfway up, just below my breasts, hoping it would be enough.

“Turn around.”

I took a sharp breath. He was going to shoot me in the back, after all. But what choice did I have? Even if I ran, he’d get me. I exhaled deeply and pivoted quickly all the way around. The foreign kid seemed satisfied. I lowered my hands.

“Shoulders.”

I blinked. Did this guy really think I had a gun taped to my shoulder? Where was he from, anyway? Nyıkãgo?

Happy Unity!

To all you Deutschlanders out there, happy Day of Unity!

It was on this day, fifteen years ago, that Germany formally reunited East and West. Way to go! Everything is all hunky-dory now, right? Right?

Anyway, now that you have the whole EU thing going on, I was thinking that maybe having a giant state amongst all those little ones isn't really that good. Especially when you can't agree on things within your own country. You don't even have a party with a majority in parliament! Egads. So wouldn't it be better if each of the sixteen Lander was independent inside the EU? Get rid of a useless level of government and all that. And it's not like you've had a long history united, after all. Come on, even these United States of America have a longer history together than your united states of Germany.

So let's have them all separate. Bavaria for the Bavarians, Hesse for the Hessians, North Rhine-Westphalia for the North Rhine-Westphalians. It's not like you'd be overwhelmed by the great size of Luxembourg or something. Come on. You'd probably have more seats in the EU government this way, if you ever got a constitution.

Look at the numbers:

[Germany..................82M]
France....................60M
Great Britain/N.Ireland...59M
Italy.....................58M
Spain.....................43M
Poland....................38M
North Rhine-Westphalia....18M
Netherlands...............16M
Bavaria...................12M
Greece....................11M
Baden-Wurttemberg.........11M
Portugal..................10M
Belgium...................10M
Czechia...................10M
Hungary...................10M
Sweden.....................9M
Austria....................8M
Lower Saxony...............8M
Hesse......................6M
[Berlin-Brandenburg........6M]
Denmark....................5M
Slovakia...................5M
Finland....................5M
Saxony.....................4M
Ireland....................4M
Rhineland-Palatinate.......4M
Berlin.....................3M
Lithuania..................3M
Schleswig-Holstein.........3M
Brandenburg................3M
Saxony-Anhalt..............3M
Thuringia..................2M
Latvia.....................2M
Slovenia...................2M
Hamburg....................2M
Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.2M
Estonia....................1M
Saarland...................1M
South Cyprus.............950k
Bremen...................670k
Luxembourg...............450k
Malta....................380k

See? You'd totally rule the continent! Don't worry about France and the UK and Italy. We'll cut them up, too. They've got plenty of separtist movements, so don't you worry. Spain and Poland, too. Well, maybe not Poland. But before you know it, North Rhine-Westphalia will be the big man on campus. Just you wait.

. . . Now if I can just decide if Canada wants to join the US as one state or many.

Green Desert - Chapter 1.3.3 - Bhanar

The old man shouted, “Vata,” which seemed like a name, but my eyes didn’t leave the blonde. She said she didn’t have a gun, but she could be lying. She probably was lying.

The woman walked towards me, hands still raised, but her oversized sweatshirt didn’t bare her midriff. “I’m sorry,” she called, coming closer. Trying to get within the handgun’s range.

“Stop!” She did. “Go away!” She didn’t. I wracked my brain for my Sarıman lessons. Goosebumps covered my arms.

“I only want to help.” She started forwards again.

My hands tensed. I almost shot her right then, but my finger was practically frozen stiff. “Stop!”

She did, chewing her lip, thirty yards away. Her arms started lowering. If she had a gun, she couldn’t be hiding it in those skin-tight pants, which meant. . .

“Remove your shirt.”

Her arms dropped slightly and she stared at me. “What?”

I enunciated. “Remove your shirt.” I remembered the word. “Your sweatshirt.”

She stood like a statue, head tilted a bit to the side.

“No gun under your sweatshirt?”

Realization dawned on her face, eyes big. Her hands dropped towards her waist.

“Slowly!” My trigger finger tingled.

Green Desert - Chapter 1.3.2 - Zhíno

That fucking bitch stole my car and left me here in some shit-hole town in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. I spun around in the road, looking for options. I had to hunt Fírí down, get my car back, and kill her.

A car. The nearest one was parked in front of a house a couple doors down. Sports car. Yellow. Rènzas RZ-7. I ran.

I shattered the window behind the driver’s and reached through to unlock the door. No alarm. The door was already unlocked.

I muttered, “Fucking idiot hicks don’t even lock their cars.”

I threw open the door and crouched to look under the steering wheel. It was dark. I guessed I had to pull off that panel there. It didn’t budge. Damn movies always made it look so easy. I pointed my handgun at the ignition.

A siren whooped. Green and red lights flashed. A voice boomed, “Step away from the vehicle.”

“Aw, fuck.” How’d I not see the cops drive up?

Keeping the gun hidden, I stood and turned, slipped the gun in the pocket of my khakis.

“Step away from the vehicle.”

Exuding calm, I held my hands out to the sides and walked slowly at the cop. He was alone, opening his door and getting out like I’d interrupted a good dream. Over the door, he said, “That’s good right there.”

I kept walking at him, lowering my hands. The bastard probably didn’t know about the smuggling, but that didn’t mean I could let him arrest me. I smiled. “What’s the problem?” And pulled out my gun.

Green Desert - Chapter 1.3.1 - Pí‘oro

“Come on, son. Hand me the rifle.” I changed direction and hobbled toward the kid. “You just can’t go around pointing guns at every passerby. It ain’t right.”

The boy didn’t move and neither did the girl, just behind the trunk’s hood. My pajamas were completely insufficient for the coldness and the present company, even if she was still seventy meters away.

“Look, son, I don’t know what you thought you were shooting at before, but I’m certain it wasn’t that girl.”

The boy looked twitchy. My jacket lay discarded between us.

“Miss?” I called. “I’d leave if I were you. Sorry about all this.”

The girl raised her hands high and shouted, “It’s not my fault! Zhíno went nuts. I hope you’re okay.”

Wait a minute. Did she actually know what was going on?

Finally, the boy spoke. “Where is the pistol?” He had a foreign accent.

“Zhíno has it. I ditched him in town.”

Two gunmen after all. I turned for the house and shouted, “Vata! Unlock the front door.” I started back up the drive. I had to call the sheriff. If that Zhíno returned, I certainly didn’t want me or Vata caught in the crossfire. “Vata!”

We had to let the authorities handle these crazies.