He stood ready in bull stance but high winds lifted a plank of wood smack dab into his crotch and, as he was doubled over, carried him off down the street, never to be seen or heard from again.
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He stood ready in bull stance but high winds lifted a plank of wood smack dab into his crotch and, as he was doubled over, carried him off down the street, never to be seen or heard from again.
Emily poured herself a tall cool one and followed the man out onto the verandah, where she commented to herself, "hmm, I reckon his resonance barrier didn't take."
Hardly had the words escaped her when she was swept out to sea by a tsunami that crashed into the building but she was picked up two miles from the shore by a boat heading for Argentina.
The boat, named The Sprightly Jester, had somehow managed to avoid the storm surges and difficult tidal flows mainly despite the incompetence of the Captain Tarquin Pettifer. Emily, wrapped in a blanket and drinking a mug of hot cocoa, was soon inroduced to the dashing Tarquin Pettifer. The introduction didn't go well, and she soon found herself threatening to jump off the boat into a swirling, salty doom rather than suffer him to be in the same cabin. Captain Tarquin Pettifer, a man endowed in good measure with both ignorence and arrogance, declared that she would soon come knocking on his door just as an empty mug bounced off the back of his head.
We're beginning to stray into multi sentence mode again. However:
The captain was so annoyed that he ordered Emily to be locked in her cabin until she had calmed down because, as he later remarked to the public enquiry, "I'm a literary man and that mug was my favourite drinking vessel that was presented to me by my father when I completed my thesis on Harry Potter while up at Cambridge."
“Shiver me timbers,” said the mate, “I’ve a new respect for ye, Cap’n; I’d’nt know you was a man of letters, I’d taken ye fer a halfwit.”
"Halfwit? How can that be when I have a complete set of all the Harry Potter books in my cabin and spend every spare moment watching the Potter films and also the DVDs of Batman?"
The first mate stared at his captain blankly and then there came the scent of flatulence in the air, silent and deadly like the hungry heart, so, with neither man having sufficient evidence to accuse the other and each knowing full well the rules of implication regarding who should refer to the disturbance first, the captain hesitated before speaking cautiously,"Right, then. Dismissed."
The boat continued on its way to Buenos Aires, and Emily wondered what she would do when it got it there because she had never been to South America before and in her febrile imagination it was just a large country full of cattle and gauchos.
Then one day the captain burst into her cabin and screamed,"There's a bomb on board! If this ship goes below 10 knots she's gonna blow!!"
Emily thought, yeah right, a bomb, it'd be doing the whole world a favor to blow this ship of fools out of the water.
Emily looked at where the bomb was located and said:"That's not a bomb, it's my hurdy gurdy that I was clinging to when I was pulled from the sea and to prove it I'm going to play Turkey in the Straw."
She began to play, and the music calmed the savage hearts of the sailors, each adopting a relaxed pose, except for the captain, Tarquin Pettifer, who snorted in derison until he felt the hurdy gurdy bounce off the back of his head.
As the captain picked himself up and turned towards Emily, a huge explosion rocked the ship, the sort of explosion that occurs with the confluence of two volatile ingredients, ingredients such as arrogance and ignorance, two inherently unstable entities intermingling and mixing until they reach their flashpoint, setting off a chain reaction that consumes nearly everything and everybody in its path - people on the docks of Puerto Madero saw only the blast and then confetti-like fragments of low-brow literature floating gently to into the Rio de la Plata, and some said they saw a woman furiously swimming towards the shore.
Emily had survived the explosion and arrived at the shore covered in fragments of Harry Potter and Batman but if that wasn't enough, the hurdy gurdy was completely destroyed and would be as sorely missed as her alpenhorn.
Later, in a bar in Puerto Madero, Emily sipped a cool beer and regretted the loss of her hurdy gurdy and alpenhorn knowing that the affliction she had been plagued with since childhood, obscurus instrumentum syndrome, would flare up; she would need to find a salve to her condition.
But it didn't take Emily long to find something unusual to play in South America when she took a trip to the Andes
http://youtu.be/BZkp1KtYhSI
So in the evening shadow of Cerro Aconcagua, with her Obscurus Instrumentum Syndrome satiated, and a new resonance barrier of the pan-flute variety in place, Emily warmed herself at the camp fire and took a thoughtful look at each of her compañeros: a handsome Porteño, a weathered Goucho, dos Chilenas, a man who claimed to be the grandson of Butch Cassidy, and several members of a Uruguayan Ruby team - something didn't sit right with her about the ruggers, but she drifted off to sleep anyway.
The withered gaucho's father had been Henrique Marks, so the son was known as Gaucho Marks, much to the amusement of the rugby players who were, in reality, white slavers who were planning to capture Emily for their evil trade.
During the night, one of the Chilean women absconded with the man claiming to be the grandson of Butch Cassidy.
http://i971.photobucket.com/albums/a...linacampos.jpg
(El Sancho digs an illustrated story. The picture is from Argentine artist, Florencio Molina Campos, 1891-1959)
The same night, the Uruguayans kidnapped Emily and took her to a bordello in Montevideo where she was forced to stay by a guy who looked the image of Emilio Zapata and another just like Pancho Villa.
The next morning the two men, looking as though they’d seen better days, staggered back out onto the streets of Montevideo, muttering to themselves something like, “Pronto, vamos a Mexico, pronto – pronto, muy pronto, la dama es loco en la cabeza, ¡Ay, caramba!”
Emily could not believe the turn of dizzying turn of events could spin further out of control (it was almost like a work of fiction for an online writing forum) until she was rescued by the Grandson of Che Guevara - the formidable Chow Guevara, formed from a union with Che and and an idealistic Chinese communist translator/freedom fighter/black market profiteer/Chinese restauranteer who had fled China on charges of fixing Ping Pong matches.
The Formidable Chow Guevara, El Chow for short, said, “Em’, if we move quickly, we can catch the last hydrofoil of the day to B.A.; it’ll have us across the Rio de la Plata in no time, and I’ll have my driver take us to one of my restaurants in La Boca, a little stir-fry place I call Quick Lee’s, and, you know, the Juniors are playing tonight.”
"Sounds lovely", Emily relaxed as Chow's powerful hands held her petite, but shockingly sweaty hands. "Chow, can we just skip dinner and go to the hotel", she purred, battting her eyes - it had been days since she had male companionship and she was becoming restless.
Just then the Pancho Villa-looking chap, with a crazy gleam in his eye, poked his head around the corner and addressed El Chow directly, “Careful, Ching-Chong, that one’s a diabla!” Then he made his hand like a cat’s claw and scratched the air in front of himself several times for effect before staggering down the street (presumably in search of Mexico), laughing hysterically and sloshing cerveza from his 2-liter bottle of Quilmes.
Meanwhile, in Chipping Norton, Emily's parents, Lord and Lady Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondely were debating whether to send their eldest son Julian to Argentina, following a telegram from the British Chargé d'Affaires who said that Emily had been spotted with some very colourful characters of peculiar disposition.
Lord and Lady Featherstonehaugh-Cholmondely were white Kenyans with British passports, of course, and would only have their daughter marry someone with "good blood" and with this in mind Lord Chommondely hopped onto his Harrier and flew to Argentina.
But when he realised that he couldn't get anywhere near Argentina with the Harrier's range, Julian turned back and bought a ticket to travel by British Airways to Buenos Aries.
Meanwhile, Chow Guevara had shown Emily his rare collection of Polynesian Nose Flutes which he kept in a large and interesting, nose shaped case he had had made by one Jose Williams, Bespoke case maker to the Financially Endowed, in Guadalajara.
Sitting in the Speedbird, 38,000 feet above the Atlantic Ocean, smack in the middle of the Intertropical Convergence Zone, dining on a Steak and Kidney Pie*, Julian thought: it’s just as well I didn’t bring the Jump Jet - Argentines have been sensitive about British warplanes on their soil ever since our little soirée in The Malvinas back in the 80s - then another thought crossed his mind: hey, I wonder if they have nose flutes there.
*I nearly tossed my cookies just thinking about it.
He flicked through one of the magazines he'd brought along, Nose Flute World, and gazed lovingly at the ancient examples though he lingered most upon the Scarlet Nose Flute of Guadalajara which was said to have mystical powers.
Chow Guevara had little fear of Emily's parents and as he lay in bed he organized his ambitions:
- Organizing a takeover of Argentina with a trusty group of South African mercenaries
- Recapturing the Malvinas by all means necessary
- Marriage to Emily
And so, in a gathering with his fellow revolutionaries, El Chow said, "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
[You guys have any problems with shameless plagiarism?]
"Secondly, we take back the Rhineland, it has to be done when we got the muscle - and we got the muscle!".
"Thirdly, we ..." but his voice was interrupted by the droning of a large aircraft -passing overhead to which El Greco, one of the band, shouted, "isn't that Speedbird a leetle low?!"
Air Traffic Control Tower, Buenos Aires, Ezeiza International Airport - "Speedbird 245, Ezeiza Tower, Buenos Dias, one departure prior to your landing, cleared to land runway one-one, report the outer marker."
British Airways flight 245 - "Buenos Dias Ezeiza, Speedbird 245 cleared to land, marker inbound at this time, departing traffic in sight."
Ezeiza Tower - "Speedbird 245 check altitude."
BA Flight 245 - "Oh bloody hell..."
Ezeiza Tower - "All aircraft this is Ezeiza Tower on guard, Ezeiza Airport is closed, emergency aircraft on runway one-one, Ezeiza Tower on guard, out."
[I propose the following addendum to the one-sentence rule: radio transmissions don't count.]
Chow, Emily, Fidelista, Fidel, and Paris Peron enjoyed a cocktail on a cool light blue balcony in Buenos Aires interruped by the annoying chatter of Fidelista who peppered his dad Fidel with questions, "When will I get to be King of Cuba"? he squeaked, then "How long do we have to wear Military Green uniforms? - a simple pink t-shirt would make Such a revolutionary fashion statement!!", his statments becoming lispier as the drinks flowed.
But Emily wasn't listening, because she was wondering why it's possible to play a nose flute but you can't get a sound out of an ear trumpet.
"Oh thit," said Fidelista, "that thounded like a plane crath over at Ethaythia Internathional," then to Emily, "Em', what'th on your mind?"