Akiko Gogli: The Underworld Tails, Chapter 3

Funny story. Last Thursday, Kris and Jess brought Finn over for baby wrestling (Finn is two weeks older than Gabe and we’ve already declared them BFFs). At one point in the conversation, Jessica was discussing someone and she declared, “He’s being a bitch.” One second later, Gabe was repeating “bitch” over and over again. One of the only words that he’s been able to get absolutely spot on so far, too, I might add. Usually he just gets the first syllable and hopes we pick up the rest, but not this time.

So he said it a few dozen times—while we tried to hide our smiles and laughter because, inappropriate or not, there’s nothing cuter than a high-pitched two year old chanting “bitch, bitch, bitch” over and over again—and then stopped. We even tried to coax it out of him a few times while the video camera was running, just to save it for posterity (saying things like “That lady on TV sure looks like a witch, doesn’t she Gabe? A witch? Witch? WITCH?), but he wouldn’t repeat it.

Then, about fifteen minutes later, Kris was sitting on one of our chairs and he stuck both of his legs out, resting them on some of the kids’ furniture on the floor. Gabe walked in between his legs and started beating on Kris’ knees (we were secretly hoping he was going to start pounding on Kris’ junk, but that didn’t happen) and lower legs. Finn, I should note, is extremely possessive of his parents. When he saw Gabe in between Kris’ legs, he wobbled over as fast as he could and tried to squeeze past Gabe so that he could be the closest one to Kris’ crotch—and, thus, Kris, presumably. Gabe, who’s got a good inch or two and possibly as much as five pounds on Finn now, just stood his ground. When Finn persisted, Gabe started to push him back. Then Finn started to cry.

We picked Gabe up and pulled him back over to the couch, chastising him the whole time. We said things like, “See what you did by pushing? You made Finn cry! You don’t push people! Now, you say you’re sorry to Finn.”

Then Gabe looked over at Finn very slowly and said, “Bitch.”

Oh my god we laughed.

Akiko in and out of the Yakusa

Akiko’s time in the Yakusa was relatively short. Even though her supervisors (or whatever the next person up the chain of command would be in the Japanese underworld) promised her time and again that she would have her chance for revenge on her father, Akiko didn’t have the patience to see it through. She wanted revenge and she wanted it soon. So she concocted a plan to flee the country and, with luck, leave the Yakusa behind without them feeling the need to pursue her. She was going to fake her own death.

It wasn’t an easy thing to do, and Akiko was still pretty new at all of this spy and seedy underbelly stuff, so she was pretty much just flying by the seat of her pants.

Her first mission for the Yakusa was supposed to be pretty straight forward. She was supposed to kill Godzilla. Or at least get him to retreat back into the sea. And how hard could that be? All sorts of unlikely people had been doing it for decades. Fortunately, Akiko had access to all of the carefully crafted documentaries on the subject—which the Japanese government then widely released, after poor dubbing, to cover up the fact that Godzilla and his many monster island friends actually existed. After careful study, she deduced that Godzilla wasn’t really a bad guy, he was just a misunderstood anthropomorphic representation of decades of a society’s fears of possibly undetected mutations caused by the atomic bombs that someone dropped on two of their major population centers. She planned to play on his sympathy.

The day she met Godzilla, he happened to be fighting Mothra—his on again, off again, monster mistress. They were, obviously, off again, because Godzilla had carelessly stomped one of the Shinto Ise Shrines after getting drunk by eating one too many sake hobos, and she had a bit of a severe zero tolerance rule for stompings of holy places. The fight, it should be noted, was pretty half-hearted on both of their parts, more a matter of “going through the motions” for the sake of age-old tradition.

Akiko first distracted Mothra by trapping her two pointless little fairy companions in a butterfly net—which, really, works on all fairies. While Mothra tried fruitlessly to use her giant wings to perform the precision task of emptying out a standard issue butterfly net, Akiko approached Godzilla.

Mothra (scaled down to fit in the picture) freeing her weird fairies from, er, a butterfly net?

Once she got his attention by scaling his back like a scaly rock wall and climbing around so she could stand on his nose, right in front of his eyes, she politely asked him, if it wasn’t too much trouble, if he could eat her in front of the Yakusa’s surveillance cameras and then spit her back up again fifteen or twenty minutes later a few miles away.

Godzilla shrugged, figuring it was something different than endlessly bickering with his crazy girlfriend, so they staged the fight in a part of town that Akiko was sure the Yakusa would be watching closely. Without much ceremony, Godzilla chomped down on Akiko, who was standing in the middle of the street. He even threw back his head as he pretended to swallow her whole.

Akiko preparing to be eaten by a strangely very small Godzilla. He's actually more of a Godzooky size.

Except he wasn’t pretending. Halfway to their meeting point, Godzilla realized that he didn’t need to do what the tiger girl wanted. He was the big scary monster. He could damn well eat whoever he wanted to. So he did.

But Akiko had figured on this. She knew how tasty she was and figured Godzilla wouldn’t be able to resist. So she dressed herself in a bio-hazard suit that was highly resistant to stomach acid (which she cleverly hid somewhere on her body, I guess—that falls into the category of “detail I don’t care to think about”), and she waited.

Twenty four hours later, give or take, she was lying in the middle of a big, stinking pile of Godzilla pooh—which is probably the most diversely disgusting excrement in the history of the world, considering the wide variety of things Godzilla will eat in a given day. Honestly, he’s like a sideshow geek.

Godzilla dook. At least he's civilized enough to go in an obviously gigantic chamber pot

But his digestive system got the job done. Akiko was out, and as far as the Yakusa was concerned, she was dead.

Not knowing what to do next, she contacted her aunt, Akiko’s Aunt, and tried to plan out her next step.

This was actually the third attempt. The first one he picked up the dinosaur and ran out of the room for two minutes. The second time, he put both players, the blue horn headed toy, and Aldo Cheeseburger into the armoire (behind him here in the video) then ran out of the room. This time, at least I got him to make a roaring sound and interact with one of the actors before running out of the room. I consider that a Win.

Snow Day!

So, the Blizzard of 2009 was a bit of a let-down for those of us in Newton. We got about three inches of sleet and another four inches or so of snow--a nice little winter storm but, much like the last three Star Wars movies, nowhere near living up to its hype or our expectations. Now, Pratt, on the other hand, got 28 inches of snow. That I could classify as a blizzard. Entire houses were buried. That is awesome.

That was the past two days in Kansas. Today it climbed up to around sixty degrees and already the snow was disappearing very quickly. By the middle of the week, the ground will still be muddy, but that will be all that's left of the Greatest Storm to Rock Kansas, Ever! or whatever the news was calling it in their lead-in graphics the other night.

Here are some pictures and a brief video of us playing in the snow. My brother Ben (who lives in Louisville) surprised us by showing up at the airport yesterday asking for a ride home (this during the snow--fortunately, Libby was already in town for a funeral so it worked out swimmingly). The group of us met my other brother Jon and his family out at my folks' place. They had between 12-20 inches of snow in Cunningham, so we thought it would be fun to play in some real drifts. By the time we got there, most of them had already melted down to only semi-real drifts.

Gabe dressed up in his Randy from "Christmas Story" outfit.

Gabe looking reflectively at a stick in the snowdrift

Jon getting ready to Disco Dance his kids down the "slope" they were sledding

I'm sad to admit that this movie isn't as amusing at it should have been. Obviously, I missed his trip down the slope and the first five or ten seconds of Tanner trying to help Gabe get out of the inner tube. It was golden. But it took us that long to find the camera and get it running. You'll just have to imagine it. It really was golden, though. He looked very much like Randy from "Christmas Story," flailing about on top of the inner tube. Ah, memories. Too bad I can't share them.

Akiko Gogli: The Underworld Tails, Chapter 2

Sometimes I wonder just how much I appreciate the weather in Kansas. People who hear me talk would, no doubt, say that I don’t appreciate it at all. They would base this on the fact that I bitch about the weather on a nearly daily basis. It is either too hot, too windy, too humid, or too dry. They don’t hear me piss and moan that it’s too cold or too rainy or too snowy, though, because I like all of those things and, frankly, I don’t think we get enough of any of it, which is why I bitch so much about the other stuff—which we seem to get far more of.

But Kansas does have one thing going for it: drama. I can’t think of anywhere else that I could get such a broad range of extremes. Our temperatures range from 0 to 105F in a year (and that’s not figuring in outlier figures where it has reached 112 and -20, in my memory, and even worse that has been recorded. The earlier numbers are sustainable temperatures, ones we might get for an entire week at a time). We get floods, we get ice storms, we get blizzards, and we get tornados (though, admittedly, I can’t think of any snowfalls I would classify as a blizzard in the last two decades). Drama! There’s never a dull moment in our weather system.

Within the last two weeks, we’ve had our first tornados, straight-line winds upwards of 50 mph (on a different day than the storms that brought the tornados), temperatures ranging from 80 to 28, and in the next 48 hours they are predicting that we’ll get the most significant snowfall we’ve had this “winter.” And this coming after it’s been averaging 50s and 60s pretty much since the end of January (I’ve been in shorts and t-shirts much of the last two months, and my flops have been getting far more use than they reasonably should for this time of year—see, there I go again, bitching about it being too hot. Though, really, it’s not hot, it should be categorized as too nice instead).

Last year our biggest snowfall came in the first week of May. Now, I love snow and the winter and the cold, but that was a bit ridiculous. For one thing, it killed pretty much everything with a flower on it. Just about the only thing that survived in our yard were the corn lilies, and I consider those a weed because they grow like weeds, they won’t die, and they aren’t that pretty. Most regrettably, it killed our tiger lilies, which are my favorite flowers, and that made me sad and their absence gave me just one more reason to hate the month of July (which is the devil’s month in Kansas—except for the part where my birthday comes, that’s the angel’s day, even if it is disgustingly hot and miserable).

But an end of March snow, I think I can get behind the idea of. So, Kansas Weather, to you I tip my hat for your crazy assed antics. Way to keep us on our toes, and I promise I won’t bitch about you again, at least through this weekend.

Akiko in the KGB

Akiko’s childhood was pretty unremarkable, really. She grew up on a dirt farm in Russia. Imagine “Fiddler on the Roof” without Topol to spice things up (whatever happened to Topol? He was huge there for awhile, doing Fiddler and then “Flash Gordon.” OK, maybe “huge” is a bit much, but I’ve seen both of those movies, so that’s saying something, anyway. And he’s not even dead yet, I just checked on the interwebs). Her times were tough, sure, but not that tough. Things were just tough enough to “build character” as my mother used to endlessly euphemize to me whenever I had to do something that I didn’t want to do when I was growing up, which made it a nearly daily mantra in our household. And, considering the breakdown of players in Gabe’s room, I guess it’s true. So far, she does have the most character. Or at least the most storyline.

One day, late in her teens, while she was standing in line waiting for her monthly ration of toilet paper and vodka, she caught the eye of a darkly clad, rather suspicious looking fellow.

Akiko standing in the necessities line (note the vodka bottle is an empty baby bottle)

This stranger approached her and, unbeknownst to her—since she was completely absorbed in the fun of queuing—slipped a piece of paper into her pocket. Later, when she got home and began to empty her pockets, which were brimming with flasks of bootleg vodka and massive wads of toilet paper (because Communism worked so well it long agoforewent the need for the cardboard rolls that make toilet papering a pleasant experience—at least that’s what the government sponsored newspapers argued), she found the note. It said, quite ominously, “We know who you are. Meet us at (insert name with lots of backwards letters and Ks) Street if you want to stay alive.”

Not surprisingly, Akiko freaked out just a little. She showed the note to her father and he sighed deeply upon reading it. There was something he hadn’t been entirely honest about. Nearly a decade earlier, to help make ends meet on their poor farm, Akiko’s Dad had taken a second job. Being a Cold War Russian stereotype, he had only two options: join the military and oppress somebody or join the KGB and covertly spy on or kill people. Preferring the idea of bringing harm to others subterfugidly, thus minimizing his own risk, he chose the KGB. For nearly a decade, he worked as a spy, pulling off some of the most boring missions imaginable—he was, after all, not what you’d call “spy stock,” being in his mid-40s at the time, so the KGB tended to send him on secret missions to swamp out the latrine and pick up some uppity up’s laundry from the cleaner—or whatever the stereotypical equivalent should be: perhaps some dowdy spinster with a washboard and rock down at the river.

Thus it was that Akiko was born into the KGB—this being the steadiest form of recruitment the agency employed: forced nepotism. She met her shady contact at an even shadier bar and, in short order, she was indoctrinated and trained as a lethal assassin. It’s also worth noting that she was Miss August in the KBG Swimsuit Calendar, which meant she was attractive enough to make the top twelve, but only attractive enough to be assigned to a second-rate Caesar month—one of the months people might not even notice they were in the midst of, thus not changing the calendar to until it was halfway over. After two years of rigorous training, she was sent on her first mission. In Japan.

After about a week of covert ops, Akiko learned the identity of her target: Mrs. Akiko’s Mom Gogli. According to the lengthy dossier, after leaving Russia, Akiko’s Mom had been swept up by the Japanese secret police (which may or may not exist as a government entity, I’m learning that the Japanese have a somewhat wacky system for their intelligence agencies, and I’m not entirely sure who their equivalent to the KGB or our CIA might be) in the hopes that she would be able to give them some vital information on the country’s inner workings. She couldn’t, obviously, since she’d been living in the middle of nowhere brushing potatoes while in Russia, but they offered her a job, which she accepted since she had no real prospects otherwise.

While a member of the Japanese intelligence system, she was approached by a mole working for the Yakusa, who tempted her to join their numbers with promises of free access to vending machines filled with used panties, designer condoms, and her favorite beverage, “water salad” (I’m not making these up, I swear. Also, I love the Japanese. They are wacky.).

After watching her estranged mother for far longer than she needed to (just long enough to be considered “stalking,” actually), Akiko decided to make her move.

Akiko hiding in an American mailbox, inexplicably in the middle of Tokyo

There really was no other way around it. In the dark of night, she crept into her mom’s house and quietly approached her bed. She paused for just a moment, not quite sure what to do next, and something surprising happened. Her mother spoke to her. And then she talked to her. And talked and talked and talked. My god, the talking (these are women we’re speaking of, of course, so that’s to be expected, I suppose). They talked for days.

Akiko sitting at her mother's bedside

Eventually, Akiko came to find out that her mother was dying of something—I’ll say Butt Failure, because it’s one of my favorite faux illnesses, it’s funny yet tragic—and that her father, spiteful old Russkie that he was, knew she was dying but wanted to be the one to cause her death before nature could take its course. Yeah, pretty screwed up. So, using his KGB connections, he arranged to have Akiko recruited and then sent on a mission to kill her own mother, just for the sake of vengeance. Possibly he took a little more head damage than was healthy while competing in that game show.

It sort of goes without saying that Akiko was devastated. And angry. Very angry. But her mother was dying, so she stayed by her side until her butt failed one last terrible, messy, disgusting, tragic time. Then, with nowhere else to go, Akiko swore vendetta on her father and was just getting ready to head back to Russia when she was shanghaied—toykoed, I suppose—by a group if ninjas working for the Yakusa.

Ninjas attack! (Yes, I know, they are wearing black dress socks. But that was the best I could do without actually coming up with a costume. Also note that one of the ninjas was standing in the toilet paper/vodka line. Something nefarious must have been going on there!)

After a very colorful action sequence, the ninjas convinced Akiko to join the Yakusa, and she did. But it only gets somewhat more complicated from there.

Video Note: After the last video's less than spectacular performance, we decided to rehearse for this one. After two rounds of rehearsal, I think you'll be able to see the clear benefit of a little practice.