MORE SENSELESS ACTS OF BLOGGERY

1. CRAB BUFFET

I am at a seafood buffet with The Bride at a place called the Amour Garden Hotel. This buffet specializes in crab, so The Bride orders some. When I come to the table, she has a dish of crab legs, plus hairy crab. The legs are arranged like a pinwheel on a plate of ice – they are also huge, almost a meter long. The hairy crab is REALLY hairy, and the size of a golden retriever. The Bride asks me if I’m going to eat anything. I can’t eat crab, but it turns out that behind the giant crab there is a bunch of other food I can take – roast pork, vegetables, fried bananas, etc.

2. BIG-ASS ROACHES

I am in the rec room of my mom’s old house There’s a guy looking for something under her desk. We notice there are cockroaches in the lampshades. They’re the size of guinea pigs.

3. BATMAN IN A BALL POOL FIGHT

I am a bystander to a Batman fight in a ball pool. Literally: Batman and Robin (Adam West and Burt Ward) are beating up bad guys in a ball pool. The police arrive to break it up. I want to see what happens, but the group I’m with gets distracted by a flock of insanely cute birds with huge anime eyes that have landed by the roadside. Meanwhile, a team of villains led by Jeremy Irons are making plans to take advantage of a coming typhoon to steal sacks of biological samples from a laboratory. The biological samples are distilled, concentrated essence of the cute birds, whose DNA is worth a fortune on the black market.

4. HOW TO STEAL A FILM PROJECTOR

I am in India, helping Chinese nationals steal a film projector from the local corrupt boss so that they can use it for propaganda or transmit information back to China or something. The scam requires perfect timing, because the boss uses the projector to display information during meetings. We arrange to cut the power and make it seem like the projector has broken down. We come into the boardroom, remove the film reels and offer to take it in for repair. Then we take it away to use it ourselves.

The art of the steal,

This is dF

I am in France for a conference or movie festival, or maybe both.

For some reason I packed one less shirt than I needed. A PR guy/journalist offers me use of his extra shirt. “Just come find me when you need it,” he says. But later, when I need it, he can’t give it up because “news broke two hours ago” and now he’s too busy and will be staying longer than he thought.

The next morning, I leave my hotel and head back to the conference hall. I take a wrong turn through a car wash that I mistake for an alley. The attendant assumes I’m lost and tries to give me directions, but in French – he doesn’t speak English. He point to the Lumiere, a famous dept store in a shopping area that specializes in football (i.e. soccer) equipment, sports clothing, fan merchandise, etc. We can see it in the distance through the cityscape. Apart from the fact that I’m not interested in football, it’s also nowhere near where I want to go.

I make my excuses and try to leave, but he offers to give me a ride. I’m running late so I accept. However, he drives the car onto a sort of monorail track and I realize he’s taking me to the Lumiere. I get him to stop the car, and try to explain where I want to go, but I can’t remember how to say the name in French, and I can’t find the conference brochure in my bag.

He drives back to the car wash, and gives me the car so I can drive myself. But he and his friend insist on washing it first, and they put it through some elaborate Rube Goldberg washing procedure, after which it’s filled with empty plastic bags bags, and the steering wheel is wrapped in feather boas that make it almost impossible to steer. I try to get them to fix it, and they keep telling me I have to wait, and it was my idea to have the car washed in the first place, and what do I have against football, etc.

It’s around this point I realize they’re deliberately fucking with me. I get angry, and tell them this is not a cool way to act. “It’s because of guys like you that Americans think France sucks.”

They shrug and say, “Who cares what Americans think when you think you can invade whoever you want and spy on everyone?”

“I don’t support any of those things either, so why take it out on me?” I argue.

Realizing I have no stake in winning this argument, I take the car and try to remove all the feather boas so I can drive it. By the time I clear off the wheel, a drunk prostitute gets in the passenger seat and demands that I drive her to an adoption agency. Assuming the car-wash attendants put her up to this, I ignore her and start driving to the conference hall. I try to use the freeway to save time, but it is full of twists and loops, and the prostitute keeps getting me to take the wrong lane. “The adoption agency is THIS way!”

The scene soon morphs into a surreal Flight Of The Conchords music video (except the music is actually “Sacrilege” by Yeah Yeah Yeahs) where the freeway becomes a rollercoaster, and my car turns into a moon capsule. I manage to get rid of the woman by lowering her down on a ladder and then leveraging the near-zero gravity of the moon to fling her away onto the lunar surface.

Scene shift: It turns out I am watching all this in the movie hall of the conference I am attending, so apparently I made it somehow.

As the movie plays, a squad of cops in brown jumpsuits enters the theatre and start asking everyone to show their hands – they want to see if any of us are holding money in our hands. I gather there’s been a robbery nearby. I show my hands, and they move on.

A group of Japanese students a few rows down in front of me grab a guy in their row and haul him out into the aisle – evidently he’s the bank robber, and he was hiding in the theatre. The cops surround him and start beating him with sticks. As the cops whack him, the audience gets their cameras out to take pictures. I’m not interested, but I’ve noticed that they’ve paused the film so that we don’t miss the ending.

And then I woke up.

DISCLAIMER: I’ve been to France about a dozen times, and I’ve never had a bad experience with locals.

Sacre bleu,

This is dF

It is a film scene involving a spaceship ark of some kind. The protagonist is traveling with his girlfriend, but they are in separate cryogenic compartments. When the guy is awakened, he goes off to find out what’s going on and where his girlfriend is located.

There is a touch-screen directory where you can look up the status of any passenger – to include how many times they’ve awakened during the journey. He punches up her name, and is surprised to find out that she has been out of her tube 23 times. He checks again, and realizes that he’s reading it wrong – in fact she has been out of her tube for the last 23 days.

As he tries to work out why this is, he happens across a newsfeed on a big flatscreen panel, which is talking about the upcoming election to determine the leader of the new world they are settling. They go over the list of candidates – and one of them is the guy’s girlfriend.

And then I woke up.

Where are you,

This is dF

I am traveling with a woman who can be best described as Billie Piper with a short fuse. We enter a hotel, where I am supposed to get her ice cream from the ground-floor café, possibly for lascivious purposes. I buy four tubs of it, and give it to her. She takes it and tells me to meet her in Room 401 in five minutes. 

On my way to the room, I am followed by a pesky man who either works for me or for the hotel, and is clearly trying to get in on the action, or at least watch. I keep trying to shake him off.

When I get to 401, the door is already open. There is a half-dressed woman lying on the bed masturbating whilst watching a guy take a shower. There is no sign of Angry Billie, so I leave, wondering if I got the room number right.

Scene shift:

I am attempting to check out of the hotel without paying the bill for some reason. This is not easy because (1) I have a big suitcase and a stack of crates on a trolley to take with me and (2) management is already pounding on the door, calling me by name. “We know yr in there! Pay up at once!”

“Or what, you’ll throw me out?” I grumble as I struggle with the trolley. It’s difficult to keep the crates balanced on the trolley, which is wobbly. Also, the crates are not of uniform size. The other thing slowing me up is that I have far more to pack than I can carry. I have clearly been staying in this room for some time, but I have to decide what to take and what to leave behind.

The scene plays out like a Hunter Thompson scenario. I manage to get out of the room with the help of my “attorney”, who pretends to be me and demands the management send up a nurse and four bottles of Canadian Club.

“My client has a CONDITION!” he yells as I make my escape through a set of connecting doors to the adjacent room, and from there into the corridor around the corner from my room’s front door. It seems to be working – I get to the lift and make it down to the lobby.

And then I woke up.

You can check out anytime you like but you can never leave,

This is dF

The bride and I are in Tennessee investigating some local legend from my childhood involving some anti-govt nut who tried to convince everyone his house was haunted and guarded by the ghost of a Ku Klux Klansman. 

We are standing across the street from the house where the conspiracy nut used to live. The house – which looks the way all spooky houses look – has been abandoned for decades, and the anti-govt nut has been dead at least as long.

I explain to KT the background: the guy used to claim that anyone who tried to enter the house would be attacked by the KKK ghost, and people would tell stories about how they found out the hard way it was true, or that they’d seen the KKK ghost floating back and forth in front of the house like it was guarding the house.

I seem to remember seeing footage of it, but it looked like a dummy on a wire to me. So we’re here to see how the guy faked the ghost.

We walk up onto the front porch and look around. KT finds a man-sized wooden box mounted on the wall – we open it, and inside is a complicated Rube Goldberg-like rope-pulley mechanism operated by levers.

“This must be how he did it,” KT says. “He could hide here and work the ghost dummy and make it fly around.”

“I wonder if the dummy’s still around,” I wonder.

I start looking around the porch to see if I can find the hiding place for the dummy. I hear the sound of a trap door opening behind me. I turn and see the KKK ghost flying over my head – arms outstretched, dressed in flowing white KKK robes and hood. In the dim light, it’s pretty scary looking, even though I know it’s fake.

“Man, that’s pretty good,” I say to KT. “How’d you figure out how to operate the levers?”

KT looks scared. “I never touched them.”

I turn to look at the KKK ghost, which has turned around and is swooping down towards me, hands clearly moving and reaching for me, looking all too real.

I duck.

And then I woke up.

DISCLAIMER: There was no KKK ghost legend as far as I know.

The KKK took my baby away,

This is dF

Epic dream involving a dysfunctional family caught up in some kind of terrorist attack. They are driving along a highway in different cars. Suddenly a man runs up alongside one of the family cars holding a cardboard box. He throws it down next to the car, and the box explodes, flipping the car and causing a major pile-up. 

There is some question afterwards as to what really happened, as cell-phone footage of the incident shows the man riding a motorcycle, not running on foot. At first, authorities assume it’s a random attack, but further investigation reveals the family is rich and very well connected, and they hate each other’s guts. One woman in particular, a sister of the woman in the car that was blown up, is trying to get something from the family – something locked in the ballroom in the mansion – and will go to extremes to get her way.

This becomes evident after she throws a lavish party at the mansion, invites the media (including me), and then locks all the bathrooms. She refuses to open them until the ballroom door is unsealed. I am annoyed by this, and tell her I’ll go pee on her lawn. “Great!” she shoots back, “I’ll join you!”

And then I woke up.

Family feud,

This is dF

I am at a fantastically luxurious resort hotel which is hosting a convention (and offering special packages) for fans of a particularly popular book + film. I don’t remember the name, just that it was supposed to be a cross between 50 Shades Of Grey and a detective story. The film is famous for having lots of deleted sex scenes that are notoriously explicit.

There are lots of free lunch buffets located around the resort, and coupon booklets for lots of special offers, all of them related to the film. Also, the film is available on VOD in all the hotel rooms, complete with the deleted scenes, which you can actually place anywhere you want in the film and as many times as you want.

I am there with KT – neither of us are fans of the film or the book, we just got a good deal on a vacation package. KT is impressed with the hotel itself, and calls the concierge to ask if they have any birthday specials (as she thinks it would be great to come back when it’s my birthday).

The concierge promptly sends up a team of about 20+ people to meet us and explain their facilities. However, the discussion is dominated by a buffoon who keeps making jokes about how the only birthday specials they offer is following you around playing practical jokes on you and yelling “April Fools!” KT’s face goes very sour and stern, and the longer he goes on, the more obviously irritated she is becoming. Finally the guy in charge dismisses everyone and apologizes for the buffoon’s behavior.

Later, it is revealed there is a business angle to all this: I’m supposed to be researching all this, talking to fans of the book/film, then reporting my findings in a video interview. I meet the woman who works for the client that has hired me to do all this. We set up for the interview, and when the woman starts playing some “appropriate” background music, we get sidetracked after I ask her how they will handle the licensing issues for the music, since this is supposed to be going on YouTube. As an assistant tries to explain how that works, the woman tries to distract me from the issue by changing her clothes in front of me.

“I’m married, by the way,” I say.

“So am I,” she responds. “Are you sure you’ve watched the film?”

And then I woke up.

Not yr fan,

This is dF

I am in some underground city with a group of friends. There are various dangers, but all are manageable except one – a huge green ogre-like creature. No weapon can stop him, and fighting him is pointless. If you encounter him, yr as good as dead. Also, he is the one thing preventing people from getting out of the city.

My friends and I plot our escape anyway. Our best chance is a large warehouse that is the basement to an old high-rise building on the surface. If we can make it to the upper levels, we can get out.

My friends handle the details, and eventually they tell me we’re ready to go, but we’ve got to go now because the ogre knows what we’re up to and is coming now.

We enter the warehouse through a large wooden sliding door. Inside is a massive maze of obstacles made of plywood, chairs, office cubicle dividers, crates – whatever my friends could get their hands on. We don’t navigate the maze so much as climb over it. The maze won’t stop the ogre, but it should slow him down, even if he decides to smash down the walls.

We make our way to the upper floor of the warehouse (though we’re still in the basement, technically), where there is an old-fashioned mechanical lift that works via pulleys and counterweights, etc. That’s our ticket out. We go up winding concrete stairs to the door, pile into the lift, close the gate and start going up. That’s when I notice that my friend Animal hasn’t got in the lift with us – he’s still on the landing, looking over the railing to see how close the ogre is. We have to stop and go back down to get him.

When we get back to the landing, he’s not there, so I go off to look for him. During my search I find what looks like a long-abandoned radio station studio filled with old analog equipment. As I look around, the ogre shuffles by the open door. He is wearing a Flash Gordon t-shirt.

I freeze, but he hasn't seen me, so as quietly as I can, I go to the studio door, close it and hold it shut, for all the good it will do if he knows I’m in there. I’m convinced he has noticed the door closing and will smash through it any second.

But he doesn’t. He continues on down the hall. I slip out and go the long way around back to the lift, where Animal is waiting. There is also the warehouse caretaker, a kindly elderly lady who will help us escape. We ask her to come with us, but she assures us the ogre won’t hurt her. She points to a battery of rocket launchers mounted on either side of the lift shaft, then to the trip wires connected to them.

We hit the button and the lift creaks its way up the shaft as we hear the ogre roaring in anger at having lost us.

There’s only one floor to select, which turns out to be the top floor of the high-rise. We can hear the ogre climbing up the cables after us. The only way out is through a window onto a fire escape. We make our way down the fire escape to the ground, and walk away quickly, not daring to look back.

I risk a glance and see the high-rise is an old ramshackle affair like the kinds of buildings you see in the older parts of Hong Kong (though that’s not where we are).

As we walk to a nearby beach, the top of the high-rise explodes outwards – the ogre has set off the rocket launchers and has been destroyed! We made it! We start dancing and laughing along the beach in celebration. I look up at the building again, and realize that the debris from the explosion is headed right for us. We run as chunks of wood, brick and green ogre meat rain down on the beach.

And then I woke up.

Nick of time,

This is dF

I am watching/participating in a reality show not unlike Man vs Wild, only instead of Bear Grylls the host is some cop or security expert who looks like Owen Wilson. Tonight’s episode: how to chase a perp who is getting away. Playing the perp is special guest star Henry Rollins.

Rollins is tasked with escaping from an office building. He runs from room to room, down corridors, like in a maze. Wilson is chasing him, but since he is constantly losing visual sight of Rollins – who is, of course, taking advantage of this to try and shake him off – he has to use his wits to figure out which way he’s gone.

The director uses split screens, replays and multiple angles to show – in real time – how Rollins is using the office building’s layout to his advantage, and what Wilson does on the fly to figure out different possible routes Rollins could take, and how to deduce which ones he did or didn’t take.

At one point Rollins manages to double back on Wilson very cleverly using adjacent doors, and hides by lifting a huge shower drain in a washroom and diving into the water-filled basement/sewer below. Realizing what Rollins is planning, Wilson grabs a plunger and races straight to the lobby, where there is another drain. Rollins is clearly planning to take a shortcut to the lobby drain and get out the front door, at which point he wins.

Wilson rips off the drain cover, and dives into the basement/sewer, where he and Rollins struggle underwater. Finally Rollins makes a break for it, climbs out of the drain, with Wilson hot on his heels. Wilson manages to get between him and the front door. Rollins drops into a fighting stance, and after a bit of sparring, Wilson takes him down with a clothesline.

Demo concluded.

Wilson helps Rollins up, thanks him, and together they review the footage to analayze for the audience how Rollins had almost won, and how Wilson had figured out his plan.

And then I woke up.

No exit,

This is dF

1. Coins of the realm

I am in a society that has been separated into two realities (located in the same physical space). You can tell which one yr in by the coins they accept, because the coins are made of metal that exist in one reality only. So if you bring money from one to the other, it ceases to exist. Somewhere in the dream I am made aware of a cross-border currency smuggling scheme that tries to get around this.

2. Gilligan’s Island: the video game

I am playing Nintendo with my friend Rhonda. The game is based on Gilligan’s Island, only the island is much smaller than the previous one – just some rocks and a single tree. In the game, you have to do things like weave pieces of paper together to build a hut.

3. Don’t tease the angry vengeance god

Someone is repeatedly trying to unleash an angry vengeance god of some kind. The god is in the form of a statue (like a tiki god), and is harmless until you perform the invocation that awakens it, after which it starts wreaking havoc and mayhem until it finds the thing it was summoned to destroy. Then you shout “DISMISSED!” and it freezes into a statue again. Some idiot keeps activating it – like making prank phone calls – just to get it to move.

Stop doing that,

This is dF