Mellow Yellow Episode 18: The Hardware Store

 

ZHAN screams in frustration as he tries to pick up a wrench, but it falls through his ghostly hand. ARA watches with an amused half-smile on her face.

ARA: Just use a ghost wrench.

ZHAN: (Looks at ARA like she just said that bacon could fly.) What in the pickle bottom is a ghost wrench?!

ARA: (says slowly like she is talking to an idiotic giraffe) It is a wrench for a ghost. It won’t fall through your hands.

ZHAN: (rolls his eyes, but seems vaguely interested) And where do I acquire this so-called “ghost wrench”?

ARA: The ghost mall of course!

ARA grabs ZHAN’s hand and flies up through the ceiling. They continue north until they reach the Imoloupe Desert Sand Falls. They fly through the sand and somehow end up in a ghost mall. Everything is transparent and foggy.

ZHAN: Whoa!

Ara: (Smirking) To the hardware store!

 

At the hardware store

 

ZHAN: (picking up a wrench) Whoa. I can touch this. How I’ve missed touching things. (Turns to ARA) Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier?!

ARA: (Shrugging) You didn’t express your dislike of being a fluid surrounded by solids.

ZHAN: (scoops up an armload of tools. Turns to the rest of the tools still on the rack) I shall be back soon, my pretties.

 

At the checkout counter

 

ZHAN: I want to buy these precious tools. (Holds out a wrench for scanning porpoises.)

CASHIER PORPOISE: Is that corn? (muttering to himself) I didn’t even know we sold corn.

ZHAN opens his mouth, but ARA cuts in.

ARA: Yes, you do sell corn, and we would like to buy this armload of corn.

CASHIER PORPOISE: So much corn! What are you planning to do with it if not eat it?

ARA: Build fancy gadgets.

CASHIER PORPOISE (muttering to himself): I didn’t even know that corn could do that!

ARA: Corn has ways of surprising people, doesn’t it?

CASHIER PORPOISE: Yes, yes. Of course. (Slides forward a little rectangle.) Please lick this.

ZHAN: What, why?

ARA (impatiently): They don’t have money in the ghost world. You have to pay by giving them a piece of your DNA.

ZHAN: But ghosts don’t even have―

ARA: Just lick it.

ZHAN: But it’s so unsani―

ARA: Just lick the dumb rectangle!

ZHAN: But―

ARA: JUST LICK IT!

CASHIER PORPOISE (Cowering behind the counter): Here, take all the money! Take all the rectangles! Take the old ugly guy, for all I care! Just please, spare me. I’ll give you all our corn.

ARA: That’s not―

ZHAN: Give her all your corn!

 

~~~END

 

Football: Some Random Thoughts

I wrote a post a while back about football, and as I’ve heard that the Super Bowl is today, I am shuffling this post to the top of the card deck. (Yay analogies!) I’m not really a sporty person. I have no idea what the football is actually supposed to be about. It’s a sport. (???)

I’ve always viewed sports as sort of a mock-war to satisfy the human thirst for violence while being less-violent because we value life. A sports-person would probably disagree. Even I sort of disagree with myself. *Shrugs* It seems as though I’m having trouble forming coherent thoughts today.

I usually just watch the Super Bowl for the commercials and the half-time show. I don’t even know who’s playing. (I don’t know how I missed this. I mean everyone’s talking about the Super Bowl.)

GO SPORTZ!!!

(I like hockey the best, but I don’t really keep up with it.)

So yeah. Football!

---

I am very clearly not an athletic person. The only game I can somewhat play almost decently is tennis, but I dislike playing tennis, and the only sports game I watched was hockey. But I only watched hockey twice, and it wasn’t really of my own free will.

So being generally unathletic, I tend to look at sports differently than athletic people, which brings us to our question of the day: Why is a football called a football?

First, let us consider the first part of this compound word: foot.

Even with my limited knowledge of sports, I know that footballs are usually carried or thrown, and things that are carried or thrown by humans are usually carried or thrown by the hands, not the feet.

But we shall let this part of the word slide because footballs are occasionally hit by the foot (aka “kicked”) when a player is attempting to launch the football in a parabolic arc through the tuning fork-shaped apparatus.

So the “foot” part of “football” has been considered acceptable, although it is not the ideal choice of word. The most troublesome part of the word is “ball,” anyway.

According to Dictionary.com, a ball is “a spherical or approximately spherical body or shape; sphere.”

A football is clearly not a sphere.

It’s shaped more like a lemon.

Let’s all call it a footlemon!

P.S. That looks like foo-tulle-mon, but it is pronounced foot-le-mon.