Snippets of Conversation*

In which our Hero had a few things to say, hear, and there

So my unnamed-here little [niece] was over again yesterday, but this time with a passel of other family which meant I had to leave my room, but also that there were others to wrangle the baby. I talked to the older kids, catching up more than I usually get to do, and keeping an eye on the brat because you do that when you care. And when there’s a baby in your non-baby-proofed house.

Either way, despite the fact that other kids had oversight duty, I think I was the only one to notice the little girl stopping for a moment to lie on the floor and talk to the imaginary person in the cold-air return vent.

“Hello?”

And then

“Oh yeah, okay!”

And then she was scrambling up like the imaginary person in the vent had reminded her she was late for a doctor’s appointment. She went charging off, the policing kids followed and I just smiled. When we were small, my cousins used the vents as an intercom system. And the vents really do carry sound well, though it doesn’t hurt that we were kids and probably not as quiet as we thought we were.

*edit* to correct transcript

After the guests had gone, my lady Nocturne and I settled down to our various works until she was ready to quit for the night. And then we cued up our respective copies of As the Vampire Turns True Blood, and settled in to watch.

Part way through the show, some character’s phone goes of with a rooster ring tone. It was loud, it was obnoxious and Nocturne was so gleefully outraged, she was almost sputtering.

“If you *EVER* had that ring tone, I would kill you. I would destroy your phone!I would take a baseball bat to your phone, and then destroy it”

“Oh, honey, I’d never put a ring tone like that on my phone,” I reassured her. “I’d never do that to you.”

“Thank you,” she responded.

“Because the right way to do it is to put the ring tone on *your* phone and then call you from the other room.”

“I’d still break your phone.”

Later in the show, [character] did [action] to [other character] using [magical] powers, and Nocturne was delighted.

“I want those powers!” she cried.

“Really? Because if we’re wishing for powers, I would wish to be like King Midas, *but* only on the back of one finger joint. So I could just cover it with a bandaid when I didn’t need it. And when I took off the bandaid, anything I touched would turn to a random flavour of donut.”

“But I hate donuts,” she told me.

“Well, then chocolate. Anything I touch turns to chocolate.”

“No! Sandwiches!”

I was thinking of the obligations of power and envisioning a life winding down in a grimy, half-donned costume, anonymity shattered as I hunch over my beer in a run-down sub-Saharan shanty-bar while fat-and-thirsty little formerly-starving children grab my hand to press goat turds into grilled reubens. And nobility failed.

“We have a responsibility to seek greatness. Sandwiches are ordinary. My power should be exotic Chocolate confections!”

When the show lulled next, I observed to my lady, “We just had that conversation.” She laughed. (I love her laugh)

It’s a brave new world, in which computer technology proliferates into the strangest parts of our lives. Today, Nocturne asked me how to pronounce a word, so I told her what I thought, and then googled it. My belief aligned with hers, but we were both wrong as the little speak-a-word doodad loudly ennunciated.

But then, she started looking up other words to say. “Gazebo,” her computer said, just as I’d persuaded mine to say “Gad-zooks” (which is a pretty funny exclamation in the slightly stoned tone that the computer has) but quickly responded with “mukluks”. Which makes sense if you’ve heard That sketch by The Vestibules

But then she figured out how to get her computer to read text, and suddenly a wooden computer voice spoke the last note I’d left her. And then I was replying, which quickly lead to a computer voice fight as we tried to come up with smart-ass or silly things to make the computer say.

She won our little battle royale. With another note I’d left her. Which was the last one in this set, within a few minutes where clearly I had time but not any of the alcohol that the notes would suggest. (I was going to record the computer speaking these, but that turns out to be more work than I expected so… ):

Remember. The first note makes you laugh.

The second note is just a little bit sweet. (hopefully)

The third note went to market. No wait, that was a piggy.

And why did the fourth little piggy have none? I mean, how does that even relate to going to market? Come to think of it, how does the beginning go? “This little piggy got a job as a salesrep at a pharmaceutical firm” “This little piggy fights roosters in vietnam.” “This little piggy went to market” “This little piggy had none” The only way this makes any sense at all is if the third little piggy was running a structured IPO and the fourth little piggy couldn’t get into it at the strike price.

True version:

This little piggy was a toe. This little piggy was also a toe. This little piggy thought it was a tree, but it too was a toe. This little piggy was a toe. And this little piggy went “wee wee wee, oh wait, I’m a toe.”