Brainhorses

image borrowed from survivalworld.com

I downloaded the Icicle Hitch into my brain today. It was kind of disappointing. It works and all: I couldn't wrench the chopstick from its death grip no matter how hard I pulled. Then again, I can only pull at like 0.3 horsepower and even then I need a Continental breakfast, not this soup with dumplings that's stunting the growth of my adoptive nation. Luckily my brain was operating at like 600 horsepower--making me even smarter than a Hummer--and I saved my trapped chopstick with a simple tug in the right place and in the right direction. The only thing missing from that battle was a catchy one-liner. It's too late now as the knot lies disassembled and dead, but if I could relive that moment (**shakes fist at the heavens**) I'd probably say something like:

...

Hmm, this is more difficult than I thought. I now have infinitely more respect for the writers of Arnold's lines. Wait, I got it!

(To be read in a Bill-and-Ted enunciation)
"Knot bad!"
(notice the clever word play)

Uh oh...here they come...

"You're dead...knot!"
"Loosen up!"
"Things are unraveling fast, knot!" (Aladdin reference, in case you missed it)
"Looks like you've come undone..."
"And stay untied!"
"If I ever see you near my icicles again, I'll rip your strings out!"
"You've been extricated." (to the icicle)
"You hitched the wrong icicle..."
Something clever with "without a hitch," my brainhorses are tired.

...running low on humor juice. Time to go back to the point: the Icicle Hitch works but it's disappointingly simple to tie. And once you know how to tie it, the magic is gone. It's like finding out Santa Claus uses a time-machine to avoid all the issues with traveling at relativistic speeds. Which reminds me...I think eventually we're going to find out that every time we use our time machines to go back in time, there's some weird energetic counterbalance effect in the univers, like a black hole appears out of nowhere, somewhere in the middle of it (the nowhere).

I watched Les Miserables, the 1998 Liam Neeson version, for the first time today. Does Liam Neeson ever play someone not suffering from an overdose of nobility? The movie was ok, but I didn't understand why the bad guy did what he did at the end. Maybe the book makes a more convincing case out of it, or the twelve thousand other versions.