Congratulations Mountain Widow!

After your husband died yesterday, you did what any faithful wife would do: you climbed down into the abyss to recover his corpse so that you could bury it.  It irked you that he jumped, irked you the same way his apparent inability to put the toilet seat down or stop talking about how hot he thought your sister was irked you, but in death he became something less than he was and yet, at the same time, more: he became not only the man you married, but also the symbol of the man you married: he became not only the person who snored and sometimes burned potatoes while cooking dinner, but the person who you'd chosen to spend your life with, the man who was, in a sense, the sum of all your hopes and dreams.

So we get it: even though you were sort of annoyed by him towards the end, you thought it was super important to get him out of that ravine.  Important enough that you dropped gear so that you could carry his body up on a dead-line.  But now that he's with you, and you've been walking around for most of a day trying to find some way off this god damn mountain, you're pretty hungry.  And about fourteen hours ago you realized that the bag you left so you could carry your husband's frozen corpse around had all your food in it.

This is going to leave you in a difficult situation.  You could potentially just die with your husband, the way you would've been expected to in days of yore.  In fact, this is the easier option: if you just stop moving and wait for death to come, it's just a few hours away in the inhospitable clime of the mountain where you find yourself now.  But if you want to live, and let's face it, you really want to live, you're going to have to face some hard truths.

First, you never really loved your husband.  You loved the idea of him, as represented by the frozen corpse you have wrapped up and sitting next to your camp fire right now.  You've always wanted a strong partner to accompany you through life, and at times, silent times in particular, you could construct your husband as such a strong partner.  But now, reflecting on the last year of living together, you know he was not, in fact, such a strong man and that you are, in fact, probably better off without him.  You'll also know, deep down, that he isn't worth dying for and will decide, with relatively little prompting, that you could eat your husband under the current circumstances.  With that in mind, you'll remove one of his legs, place it over the fire, and eat it, charcoal black and covered in the meager hot sauce you saved from your last MRE, ravenously.

He'll taste pretty lackluster, but the knowledge that you'll be able to survive thanks largely to your dead husband will give you solace.  Because of your choice to eat part of your husband, you'll be able to successfully carry him down from this mountain, thanks, in part, to the fact that he'll be considerably lighter after you've eaten a fifth of his body mass.

Congratulations Mountain Widow!

Congratulations Crossword King!

Of all the men on the Jersey Shore you’re special. It’s not your lack of mob connections or your genuine love for your spouse which make you so exceptional, although these are rare qualities. In your case it’s your nigh mystical proficiency at crossword puzzles.

You don’t really use it for any nefarious end. In fact you’re such a good husband that you actually buy your wife a second paper just so she can do the crossword without you ruining it for her. You consider yourself blessed with a pointless skill that many people would lord over their brethren but thanks to your enormous penis and healthy upbringing you haven’t let it get to your head.

But in this economy no resource can really be left unexploited if one wants to survive, and your incredible crossword skills are going to fall under the wheel of necessity soon.

Thanks to your lack of mafia contacts you’re going to be laid off from your job in a paper mill next week. You’ll get a decent severance but work is so tight all over nowadays that prospects will be grim and by the end of the week you’ll be panicking about how you’ll be able to keep making mortgage payments over the next year.

That’s when your wife will find the ad in the classifieds. It’ll seem absurdly fortuitous, but there it will be: Wealthy widow seeks crossword tutor. Will pay six hundred weekly for guaranteed crossword success.

You’ll phone the number and reach the butler of one Maryanne Corningsworth of the Textile and Firearms Corningsworths, who will set up an interview time the next day. You’ll put on your favorite blazer, grab a copy of the New York Times and head on over.

When you arrive the butler will greet you coldly. He’ll be a traditionalist butler with a black cumberbund and a pencil thin moustache, and he’ll refuse to make physical contact during your entire exchange. He’ll simply ask that you sit down in a room with him and proceed to watch hawkishly as you complete the crossword, stop watch poised in his hand.

When you finish it in fifteen minutes and hand it off to him he’ll look shocked. You’ll be a little disappointed that his cumberbund doesn’t pop and flip up in a hilarious fashion, but when he returns with your first check that disappointment will be overwhelmed by the joy of solvency.

When you arrive home your wife will be overjoyed. She was convinced you were just being hired to sleep with a bored widow who could afford to throw money around. Over the coming weeks she’ll be proven correct as you comically avoid Widow Corningsworthy’s attempts to seduce you while teaching her about the Way of the Up and Across. There will be a montage where you teach her what love really is and she almost finds it with her poolboy before finding out that he has a girlfriend and is actually a scumbag. Soon thereafter, however, she’ll break down and sleep with her butler in a moment of desperation and things will really click between the two of them.

She’ll be so pleased not only with your crossword lessons but with your general life lessons that she’ll establish a trust in your name so you can keep banging your hot wife, avoiding the mob and doing your crosswords in peace until the day you die or the day that someone decides to hire an English major in a position of relevance again.

She’ll also pull some strings and have a resolution pushed through the state senate declaring you Crossword King of New Jersey. Wear this crown wisely. Hubris in this matter may prove costly indeed.

Congratulations Crossword King!