Mystery #115 – Supercalifragilisticexmymomidoceous

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe
Mystery #115 – Supercalifragilisticexmymomidoceous

As far as Greek Mythology is concerned, there is no greater status for a mortal than to be the offspring of a god. All the cool, trendy Greek kids would have told you that only half-human was the way to be. In fact, any myth not exclusively concerning gods was pretty much reserved for these guys. They were human, but they were still way better than you. Hercules was really strong, and eventually ended up being 50% the god of asbestos. Achilles was raised by centaurs, freakin centaurs, because no man was hardcore enough to be his teacher. I mean we’re talking a populace at near this-is-Sparta levels of testosterone, and they had to bring out the centaurs. When you were still getting action figures and legos for your birthday, Perseus’s relatives gave him a sword and some magic armor, and then sent him to go kill a gorgon. The closest I’ve ever come to that was finally beating the goron race in Majora’s Mask. Sure, that’s almost the same, only I didn’t get a dismembered head out of the deal.

But like Spider Man’s dead uncle once said, it ain’t easy being king (or something like that). Hercules, having pissed off his stepmother by existing, had to… uh… lift a bunch of stuff. There were goats in there too. Achilles inherited his mother’s superhuman powers in the “being a stuck up jerk” department, and had to not die while simultaneously pissing off every soldier in Troy. We won’t even get started on Phaëton. Basically what I’m trying to say is that having a golden chromosome may have benefits, but you get a whole load of other crap to deal with at the same time.

This has been on my mind a lot, as it was recently brought to my attention that my mother is the goddess of awesome. I probably should have gotten wise when she blew through nursing school, which I assume she accomplished by arm wrestling every test into submission while the Rocky soundtrack blared in the background. After ripping MCC a new one - literally - she proceeded to land her dream job in a local ICU, presumably by jumping through a skylight before announcing to the terrified staff, “bow before me, mortals, your souls are mine”. Then she shot lasers out of her eyes. At a bear. No, strike that, at an undead army of bears, which she then defeated and made her slave minions. Also, she’s good at yahtzee.

I’m working on living up to that legacy, which unfortunately probably means less days spent watching cartoons and eating Captain Crunch. Dang.

Mystery #113 – Yankee ingenuity

Joey Presents: Great Mysteries of the Universe
Mystery #113 – Yankee ingenuity

I didn’t sleep much last night, which meant I was up at an ungodly hour today (see Appendix C: Dawn). My dad is an early riser, the poor man, and so we found ourselves awake, together, and in need of morning foodstuffs. Being a great and devoted lover of pancakes, and knowing full well my father had purchased syrup and bisquick last week, I reckoned I’d fix me up some pan to the cakeses. My dad took off to run some errands, leaving me to my kitchen hijinks.

Background. When my dad moved from Suzhou down here to Dongguan, his things got shipped back to the US until he could re-establish residency with a new visa. However, the Olympics are like high-grade antiheroine for China’s bureaucracy, which means the drawers of kitchen supplies with which I would make my sweet morsels are currently trapped like flies in a web of Chinese red tape.

Dramatic irony: I had freakin’ pancakes for breakfast today. My first step was to fashion a griddle out of a metal tray found in a cupboard. That part was easy. We don’t have measuring cups, but I did find a water bottle with ounce markings on it. Luckily we did have a spatula, so I didn’t have to rig one out of hemp and banana peels or anything fancy like that. I mixed my ingredients in a beer mug and stirred them with a chopstick. When all was said and done I had a plate full of funky, deformed, delicious friends. Like most of my other friends, I decided to smear butter on them and drizzle them with syrup.

That’s about when I realized we didn’t have clean forks. 

I earned that pancake.