spatch

Q. DEAR ANSWERING GUY, I live in Boston and I take the T to work from Davis Square every day. Every day for the past week or so the trains have been late due to one reason or another, and every day we stand on the platform waiting like fools for one southbound train while two or three northbound trains go merrily on by. The thing is, there's only one stop after us on the north end of the line, and that's Alewife. Today was the actual worst, though, as we waited for one single southbound train from Alewife while no less than five, count 'em, five trains went by northbound to Alewife. What the hell is going on, and where did all those northbound trains go?

Signed,
Someone Who Is Not The Author

The Answering Guy has been answering questions since before you knew what a question mark was.

A. DEAR SOMEONE WHO IS NOT THE AUTHOR, the Answering Guy is very pleased you asked him this question instead of trying the MBTA, for they will not tell you the truth even if you pumped them full of sodium pentathol, gave them a twenty, and then asked nicely. Now the Answering Guy is certain that you know there are two platforms in the Alewife station and both of them send trains back southbound to your Davis stop. You may have already come up with some theories as to how all those trains could have fit, possibly imagining extra track behind the platforms which the trains use when they're backed up, or even theorizing that the trains back up before they even reach Alewife. But none of these answers is correct.

The real explanation is that there is a freak rift in the time-space continuum in the train tunnel and it is centered directly underneath the northbound tracks. Trains travelling northbound don't actually reach Alewife, you see, for they fall through the rift and end up in the lair of an ancient Eldritch horror so arcane and powerful that the mere sight of its full name will cause any mere mortal being's head to explode. In fact, Answering Guy cannot even attempt to spell its name lest too many of its dangerous alphabetical symbols combine to cause even a small explosion, so we shall refer to this being as (') since the apostrophe represents a guttural stop and we're safe enough with that.

At any rate, the northbound trains travel through the rift and find themselves facing ('), who apparently looks like a thousand eyeballs clustered together and each eyeball has a mouth full of sharp sharp fangs and there are also tentacles and possibly demon wings, the Answering Guy is not too sure. As terrifying as it may be, (') actually really likes choo-choos. In fact, it likes the choo-choos so much that it envelops each one as it arrives, absorbing all its choo-chooness as well as all the people inside, ripping apart each soul and dooming it to float in ancient torment until the Eighth Melting of Shu'Maru. (This event, is has been said, will only happen if both Kurt Russell and Wilford Brimley ever find themselves in Antarctica at the same time and that's not going to happen any time soon because the Answering Man is pretty sure Liberty Medical won't deliver diabeetus testing supplies there and honestly, they'll have more important things to test for while in the frozen wastes.)

Do you feel slightly better about your crappy commute yet? I mean sure, you're late today, but at least your soul hasn't been devoured by an eyemouthed creature which has lain in wait since before the separation of Good and Evil.

It doesn't stop there, however, because you'd think the MBTA would notice a few missing trains and, after a while, they do. Up in the Master Control Center, which is this super-cool Quonset hut just off the Pike near the Weston tolls, a big red light starts blinking. The red light has "TRAIN MISSING" written on it and you can't miss it if you're looking in that direction. Eventually Phil, one of the three men in charge of train operations, looks in that direction, but only because he just lost a game of "Made You Look".

"Hey, there's no unicorn over there!" Phil says indignantly to Barry, the winner of Made You Look, who is now doubled over with laughter. "But there is a red blinking light. It says TRAIN MISSING. What do you think that might mean?"

"Hmm," says Pat, who was a third-party witness to the game of Made You Look. "It probably means there's a train missing somewhere. Press the button and see." Phil presses the button and a big friendly map pops up with an arrow and blinking lights and stuff.

"The arrow's pointing to northbound tracks near Alewife," Phil says. "Oh, I bet it's (') again." However, Phil only gets the first two syllables of the True Name of (') out before he vaporizes in a puff of foul-smelling incense so he doesn't get to the word "again", much less the guttural stop. But Pat and Barry know what it means.

"Get the Wee Train-Making Elves on the horn," Pat says to Barry. "We need a replacement train southbound out of Alewife ay ess ay pee. And you may also want to call in for a replacement Phil while you're at it."

So the Wee Train-Making Elves are called into action and begin to build a brand-new train right at the Alewife platform in front of commuters who'd be astonished if they hadn't been atrophied to dull complancency due to the inordinate late times. And before you know it, they have cobbled together what looks for all intents and purposes to be a Red Line train, only you pedal it down the tracks and there's no working heater in any of the cars. The Alewife commuters all smush in and away the train goes southbound towards Davis, where you'll be sardined in next. Satisfied with a job well done, the Wee Train-Making Elves decide to call it a day right then and there and instead of maybe making more trains to help, run off and spend the next three weeks getting completely crunk off of morning dew and making passes at passing pixies. And that's why you're late today. Sorry there's no official record of this on MBTA.com, by the way, but your boss wouldn't have believed you anyway.

Q. This sounds like a load of hogwarsh to me. What's the deal?
A. Well, do you hear the T giving you any better explanation?

Signed,
The Answering Guy

Last night I watched the first episode of Crowned, the mother-daughter beauty pageant "reality" competiton program on Tha See-Dubya, which has replaced Beauty and the Geek now that gee_tar's season is over.

In case you didn't see Crowned and/or don't care to, I can easily bring the experience to you in, like, words and stuff.

Imagine you're watching footage of two steam locomotives smashing into each other head-on at full speed, only you're watching it in slow-motion so you get to see every crumple of metal, every piece of debris fly off, every last bit of the carnage gruesomely displayed in full, unblinking, high-definition widescreen.

Now rewind the footage and watch it another seventy-three times.

Congratulations, you've just seen an episode of Crowned. Now you can go outside and do something productive with your life, like trying to contract rabies from neighborhood strays.



Show highlight, if you can call it that: The mother-daughter teams were challenged in the opening episode to come up with a name and loosely-based theme. Challenge was right. One team named themselves "The Blonde Bombshells" because they thought it'd make them sound intelligent and, as they explained, "the blondes invented the bombshell"; another team named themselves "Skin Deep", unaware of the full meaning of the term, because they thought it'd make themselves sound deep. I can't make this stuff up, folks.

And one team, for reasons I'm still trying to fathom, inexplicably named themselves "Silent But Deadly" and didn't understand the meaning of the term until The Guy From Queer Eye, who I don't think has a name except for "The Guy From Queer Eye", explained it to them. The only way I can sum this all up is to quote Futurama. I've seen it; I can't unsee it. Not even Lacuna, Inc. could help me now.

Frank Zappa once appeared on Steve Allen's Tonight Show as a clean-cut young lad from Southern California (hard to believe, but he once was) to show how he could play a bicycle. His proto-Blue Man Group sound stylings, involving banging on the frame, brushing things against the spokes and blowing over open tubes, did not visibly amuse Steve Allen, who thanked Mr. "Za-pah" for doing "whatever it is you do" and then invited him never to return again. (Inwardly, though, I believe Mr. Allen, a musical experimenter himself, was impressed.) Now the point of this experimental exercise was to show that music can come from anything, the bicycle just being handy with lots of pieces to noodle with as well as ranking high on the non-sequitur scale (just below 'fish'.) Mr. Za-pah did not need to prove that a bicycle itself can make music -- we all know it can. In fact, I gave quite a concert on one yesterday.

I'd stopped by L's to pick up a free bike which she promised me in a fit of housecleaning mania, holding her equivalent of a Fire Sale EVERYTHING MUST GO!! She put a bike up for grabs and I said hey sure, why not, I've needed a bike, so I went over and picked it up. I've dubbed it The White Elephant, even though there is nothing white nor excessively bulky about it. According to L. I am the third owner of the bicycle and, apparently, the first to actually take it out and ride it. It came complete with a helmet which just fit and an air pump and an ancient headlight. It first belonged to a gentleman who purchased a Volkswagen during a special promotion a few years back wherein if you bought a Jetta, you got a bike to put on top of it. The bike was passed along to L, who did not have a Jetta to put the bike on, but nonetheless she kept it as a showpiece in her living room until she got tired of vaccuuming around it. There is where I stepped in to take it off her hands and happily pedal off into the sunset.

( Now, I am not a Bike Person. )

Here it is, folks, your Moment of Denouement.
Music, Maestro? *ahem*

You and I in our little workshop
Making LED lights from the money we got
Hanging glowies before dawn
Til one by one, they're all done
Three weeks later, MBTA subway
Worker sees one, he goes "Oh hey,
Better call the bomb squad by
Cause ninety-nine Mooninites have arrived"

Ninety-nine Mooninites
Hanging from the overpass
With their middle fingers high
As if to say "Hub, kiss my ass"
Here's Ignignokt, that one's Err
But Boston does not know for sure
The Aqua Teens are advertised
By ninety-nine Mooninites in the sky

Ninety-nine cops on the scene
Can't believe what they've just seen
There's batteries and wires, too
And no one knows just what to do
They look explosive, clench your fists
They must be from terrorists!
We better blast them to the sky
Cause ninety-nine Mooninites must die

Ninety-nine white vans arrive
All with TV crews inside
Everyone's a news reporter
Everyone's a Chet or Nat
Breathlessly they cause a panic
Are these bombs or just Satanic?
Suddenly the bloggers cry
"Wait a minute, those are Mooninites!"

Ninety-nine lulz we have had
And all because of Pete and Sean
It's all over, but Menino's mumbling
Words like "hoax" to hide his bumbling
Folks are selling souvenirs
To commemorate our Day of Fear
And here is a Mooninite
I check eBay and make my bid...