Congratulations Substandard Bookie!

Being a bookie is an easy enough job.  You set odds, and then you collect money, and then you watch and see how things go and then once things go a certain way you pay out money to some people and collect on bets from other people.  It's a lot of people skills, which you've got in spades, and a lot of math, which you've never been any good at.

For the most part, that means you spend your time acquiring clients, chatting them up and the like, and then rapidly either lose money to them, because of errors you've made in their favor, or lose their business, because of errors you've made in your own favor.

Today you're going to have your legs broken by your bookie supervisor.

"I'm really sorry," he'll say as he finishes one leg and begins working on the other.  "You're a nice guy, you're just awful at the more challenging part of this job."

"CAN'T WE WORK OUT SOME KIND OF WORK SHARE OR ASSISTANCE PROGRAM?" you'll gasp out between tears.  He'll shake his head remorsefully.

"I think we're gonna have to let you go," he'll say, giving you one last pat on the thigh before he brings the sledgehammer down right on the knee cap.

When you wake up in a few hours and finally work up the temerity to call 9-1-1, you'll feel pretty rotten.  But on the upside, he'll have left you with a few thousand dollars to cover your immediate medical expenses, and a tip on an upcoming boxing match.  He'll give you the odds, then let you know how the fix is working, with careful instructions on how you should bet to be sure you can stretch this cash out as long as possible.  It'll all look like gobbledygook to you.

Congratulations Substandard Bookie!

Congratulations Spent Uranium Rod!

This is a bit of an odd one, because today you're sitting in a public dump in New Jersey underneath a massive heap of industrial waste, including several pressure press devices and a few Electroluxes.  You'll be doing what you do, which is most irradiating things in the immediate area around you.  It'll be a pretty normal day for you, as you wait for the fate that all spent uranium rods are promised (to be unified with the one true atom at the center of the universe upon the final day of your radiological decay).

Meanwhile, in a hospital a few thousand miles away, in Branson, Missouri, a man, a very bright, very angry man, will be cursing his fate as he slowly dies of cancer.  This man will have handled you when you were young and he was young and the two of you worked together in a nuclear power plant somewhere in the middle of the country.  This was long before the man began dreaming of fantastic acts of violence committed on a scale heretofore inconceivable, this was long before the man began constructing a series of apparatuses that would permit him to realize this violence.  This was long before that young man became just a man and, in so becoming, was diagnosed with various kith and kin of cancer throughout his body, but your hand in events, all the same, occurred on some day, long ago, when the two of you met in passing at work

Today that angry man is going to die alone in a hospital in Branson, Missouri.  With him will die all his dreams of violence on a massive scale.  With him will die his fantasy of mass extinction carried out with a wave of his hand, of a new world order, lead by reigns clutched in his iron fist, a world order where peace would reign, a peace of death, of misery, of hatred.  This tiny rage filled world of his imagining, this burned out fantasy husk, will come to rest within his mind.  Instead, a blankness will present itself where the thought of this world used to be: that massive, effervescent hate will be gone, erased by your tender radiance.

Nice work, spent uranium rod.  You did alright.  Today, give expelling harmful radiation a rest and just have some quality "you" time with that other industrial waste!

Congratulations Spent Uranium Rod!

Congratulations on Ruining Your Skin Health!

There are a lot of great products you can use to fight acne, but remember: when a product promises to "burn acne away in a fiery inferno of pain" you might want to avoid using it if you have sensitive skin.  See, when it arrives today in the mail, you're not going to bother looking at its ingredients, which will include, among things like "whale semen" and "orange juice from concentrate," "sulfuric acid."  If you'd read through that list, you might've thought better of smearing it on your face.

But you won't read through it, and you'll just slather it on in a big old handful.  Your face will begin tingling immediately.  Your hands will take a little longer.  You'll just think "it must be working," thanks to Proactiv's "burning is working" philosophy, but after a few minutes you'll look in the mirror and, instead of ruddy red cheeks, you'll see black swatches forming on your skin.  They'll be growing steadily, second by second, so you'll do what any sensible person would do: you'll wash your face.

Unfortunately, the addition of water to the mix will initialize a reaction with one of the more obscure chemicals in the mix, something called "hydroexplosia," which, when in a very particular balance with water is entirely inert.  Unfortunately, if that balance is at all interrupted, it bursts into flames.

You'll have interrupted the balance something fierce, so that acid will be spreading with the water and the fire across your skin, and as you stand there screaming your neighbors will start knocking on the wall against yours, shouting at you to shut the fuck up.  Between the screams you'll gulp air and shout back "sorry."  That vicious pattern of agony and apology will continue for around twenty minutes until finally the acid and the fire burn to the muscle and you black out.

When you wake up, your face will be a horror show, a mass of exposed flesh and tendons.  Your breath will come out in rasps as flesh hangs in strips across your cheeks down to your jawbone.  Only your nose will have survived the ordeal.  It'll be there in the mirror with  fresh stress pimple right on the tip, the last vestige of flesh on your face.

Congratulations on Ruining Your Skin Health!

Congratulations on Solving World Hunger!

Scientists have been working around the clock to solve world hunger for decades.  They've worked on supercrops, they've worked on streamlining delivery methods, they've worked on condensing food and improving its preservation for long periods of time  Every single plan, every single joint action, will have failed.  Until today, when you attempt something truly startling.

It'll begin with a realization on your part that the problem, really, is that there are so many people.  With fewer people there'd be less of a need for food.  With that in mind, you started working on what you'll call "the final solution to hunger."  It'll be a disease tailored to work on about 90% of the population.

"As long as most of the people in India die we should be alright," you'll tell your lab assistant who, desperate for employment after getting his doctorate, will eagerly work to help you eradicate most of humanity.  With a combination of grants from the NSF, donations from private investors and your savings, you'll have poured every last ounce of your savings into developing this "superdisease" that will spread through the population effectively and leave only a small, shivering fragment of it alive.

You've been working on tailoring the disease so that it targets poor people and brown people, but eventually that became cumbersome, so you decided to just try to kill as many people as possible.  After some horrific early tests you've decided that your disease is ready for prime time.  Today, on Christmas Eve, you're going to be disseminating your special illness to members of your science company's HR department before they travel home.  The disease will take three days to reach term, so the people from HR won't start dropping dead until Boxing Day, but by the time they do everyone they've been in contact with will be infected. 

Immunize yourself, murder your assistant, and lock yourself in your disease bunker.  It's going to be a crazy holiday season!

Congratulations on Solving World Hunger!

Congratulations on Figuring Out When to Jump!

As the platform rises on its third pass, you'll still be trying to sort out when to jump.

"Those ravenous pigeons won't wait!" the stranger you fled from the pigeon park with will shout.  You'll nod at him, brace yourself as if you're about to run, and then stand stock still as the stranger rushes forward, leaps from the platform and catches himself, smack in the chest, on the platform in front of him.

"Oh no!" he'll moan.  His hands won't be able to find purchase, his fingers scrabbling against the smooth surface of the platform.  As the milling water platform continues to spin you'll simply stand there, watching as your companion's form is occluded by another platform before vanishing into the mist below.

As the squawking of the pigeons grows audible again behind you, you'll nod grimly at where you image your old-new friend's body is now and murmur.

"Thanks.  I think I'll be okay if I move a little after that."

You'll smirk a little to yourself as you brace your body to run.  Won't be long now.

Congratulations on Figuring Out When to Jump!