The Characters (So Far), Part V
It’s amazing how and entire weekend can just slip by without one even noticing it. Is it just that I’m getting older or does it seem like the days go by much faster now than they used to? I mean, it’s already March! Christmas was almost three months ago! I know that time didn’t disappear this rapidly when I was growing up. For instance, high school took an eternity to get through. It was the longest four years of my life. Now, the things that happened five, six, even seven years ago seems like the very recent past. I don’t get it. I hope it’s not a product of getting older because, if that’s the case, what will it be like when I’m in my 40s and 50s? Will I wake up one day and be dead from old age and still think I should only be in my 30s? It’s just stupid. Whoever is taking all our time needs to stop it.
Bad King Wenceslas
Bad King Wenceslas is a Christmas bear—another Beanie Baby that we received from my grandmother around Gabe’s first Christmas. He is bigger than most of the toys in the room—except Bert, who is probably the exact same bear just a different color. Obviously, Dag is the biggest toy, but because of his melancholy nature, his size isn’t really a factor. Because he’s fueled with Monkey Anger, he could hold absolute dominion over the bedroom, but he just doesn’t have the gumption. Filling that power void is Bad King Wenceslas.
Wenceslas is an evil tyrant who rules the bedroom with an iron fist. One would think he would only hold dominion during the Christmas season, but that simply isn’t the case. In fact, the month or two before Christmas is when his stranglehold on the rest of the room is at its most relaxed because, during this time, he’s Head Overseer and Taskmaster Supreme in Santa’s Workshop.
It should come as no surprise that times are tough for Santa. With 6 billion people in the world, there are hardly enough hours in the day for him to manufacture all of the toys necessary to keep the greedy masses sated. Add to that the rapid complexicating (a new word which, I’m sure, is a poor replacement for an already existing word, but, hey, I have an MA in English, and if I can’t just make up stupid words on the fly, then what’s the point of having the degree at all? I’m pretty sure it’s the only thing I feasibly can do with a post-graduate degree with an emphasis on Medieval Literature) of the toys that are out there, and you have all the makings of legendary shortfalls of toy supply.
Once upon a time, Santa’s Workshop was a cheery place, filled with claymation characters who could ponder the possibilities of becoming a dentist instead of laboring away endlessly in the Toy Mines. When abominable snowmen and crazy prospectors could lend a hand and everyone had a song on their hearts. But those days passed with the dawn of the Chatty Cathy doll. Ever since then, toys grew increasingly complex, with many gears and mechanisms driving them, which, not surprisingly, put the elves, whose understanding of technology was pre-Industrial, at best, at a severe disadvantage. Not that it mattered, much. They had no choice but to adapt. Who else would make Santa’s toys? It’s not like he could strike up a deal with China. They don’t even believe in Santa, and though they work pretty cheap, cheap isn’t nothing, which is exactly the amount Santa’s elves show on their tax returns every year. Now, if an elf even hints at a desire to take up tooth doctoring, or any other profession, he is stripped naked and forced to sit for days on end in a sound studio endlessly repeating catch phrases for Elmo and Dora dolls until his throat bleeds.
Even then, though, the elves were only willing to give so much. Enter King Wenceslas. Santa didn’t want hire the guy, but he just didn’t have any choice. It was either move with the times or be left behind and all but forgotten like the Tooth Fairy or Elvis. Using techniques that could be euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation,” the King boosted productivity by 1000% and created the world’s first sub-arctic sweat shop—where, obviously, there were more cases of frost bite than heat exhaustion since factory temperatures were kept around a frigid 40 degrees to save on heating bills. The King’s favorite euphemistic technique for “inspiring” his workers was called the Sugarplum Fairy—which I’ll leave to your imagination because it is too horrible to actually put into words—and his favorite euphemized tool was a magic cattle prod called the Yule Log that sent 240 volts of Christmas Wonder into its victims, leaving them an incapacitated and incontinent mass of quivering cheer receptors for up to 36 hours.
The rest of the year, Wenceslas controls a vast, subtly complex, and unimaginably harsh underworld. Powerful to begin with, his reach exponentially increased earlier this year when he was able to buy the controlling share of the Italian Mafia. It turns out, the mob isn’t too smart when it comes to investing in sound business models. They sunk the majority of their liquid holdings into Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme, reinvesting every dollar they “made” until everything came crashing down around their ears. In order to stay viable, the mafia went public (NYSE: MOB) and within heartbeats of the opening bell, Wenceslas had scooped up 51% of the mafia’s shares, thus giving him control of yet another sweeping underworld organization.
How, exactly, this will affect “The Eye,” Akiko, and “Tarnations” is still to be determined.
Crotchy
Crotchy is a sasquatch doll that Jamie brought Gabe last October when he came to Kansas for a visit. His name is supposed to be Quatchy, and he’s the mascot for the 2010 Winter Olympics to be held in Vancouver. When Jamie told us the toy’s name, we misunderstood what he said (and how couldn’t we when “crotchy” is such a common word in the American lexicon and “quatchy” is a silly, made up, marketing name). From that moment on, he became Crotchy, and he was the first of Gabe’s toys to have a fun little game associated with it. At any point during the day, we could ask, “Gabe, where’s Crotchy?” And Gabe would start turning all around and roaming the room in search of the toy. When he found it—sometimes with our help if he wasn’t in easy sight—he would pick it up, laugh, and hand the doll over to us. Then we would go “Crotchy! Crotchy! Crotchy!” while we rubbed the hairy little beast all over Gabe’s head. Hmm. In the retelling, that sounds positively indecent! Well, it was perfectly decent—except for the name, possibly, but even that isn’t too bad since crotches can be found in trees. So get your filthy minds out of the gutter.
Crotchy has been, since we got him, one of the Downstairs Dolls. These toys, for the longest time, have been the red-headed step children of the stuffed animal world in our house. The Upstairs Dolls were the ones that I made stories for, and the Downstairs Dolls were lucky if they even got a name. Sad but true. As such, the only backstory that Crotchy has attached to him at this point is sasquatchal in nature. He is a big hairy beast that lives in the mountain forests of Canada. Since he has a big smile on his face, though, he’s obviously not a big mean hairy beast. More than likely, he’s a loveable missing link like the one in “Harry and the Hendersons.” But only time will tell.
Molly the Moose
Molly is a Flying Moose given to us by Gabe’s aunt Molly who lives in Canada. Molly can fly because, obviously, she’s a moose, and they all fly. Apparently the skies of Canada are often dark with the number of moose in the air. It’s a little known fact that one-time Vice Presidential hopeful Sarah Palin was, in fact, a moose poacher and not a moose hunter as she claimed. Moose, like other flying game, cannot legally be shot while on the ground. Personally, I’ve never understood this law. The animal is just as dead if it’s up in the air or running on the ground. Is it an attempt to give the animal a sporting chance? And, really, just how sporting is the chance when the hunter has a large barrel shotgun (or, as is commonly used when moose hunting, a “moose gun,” which is an “elephant gun” with a pair of antlers crudely fastened to the end of its barrel) and the animal doesn’t even have the intelligence of double-stick tape. There is an element of common sense to it, of course, with targets that like to rest on the water. It saves fishing them out after killing them—and believe me, you don’t want to fish a moose out of a lake, especially since they like to land and float in the middle of really deep lakes where the really big, filling fish usually live.
Anyway, Molly is, unfortunately for her, another Downstairs Doll. Though, because her namesake aunt Molly complained some months back, Molly the Moose has a bit of a story going on. Molly is a supervillain and part of a team of supervillains called the Punctuation Pirates (this is relevant because aunt Molly is a linguist) who are an elite group of evil word pirates. Besides supervillaining, Molly’s team is also the primary security force for the evil multi-national organization known as Semantic Enterprises. Molly’s supervillain name (because she’s only mild-mannered linguist Molly the Moose during the day) is The Parenthesis.
So far, Molly doesn’t have any superheroes to do battle with, but I’ve knocked around the idea of creating a team of heroes known as the l337 SPKRS, or maybe the TXTRZ (the idea being that they should be the polar opposite of the supervillain group they are battling). However, I detest leet speak and text speak so thoroughly that it’s entirely possible that the roles will, in fact, end up being reversed. We will find out that, in reality, the Punctuation Pirates are the good guys—Robin Hood type “villains”—and the Leet Speakers are the evil force bent on ruining the world’s grammar and attention span. We’ll see. Molly the Moose is still downstairs, so her time has not yet come.
Karl Weathers
First, let me be clear, this is not the Carl Weathers, just a Karl Weathers. The difference should be clear, one of them is clearly spelled with a “k” while the other is not. Karl is a large snake that Libby bought prior to us having a child living in our house. “Oh,” she thought, “what could be a better theme for an infant’s bedroom than a ‘bugs and wildlife’ theme? We can do it all up in greens and reds and buy lots of things to decorate the room so it has a ‘jungly’ feel to it.” The other things were mostly decorations she bought from Ikea. If Libby has a Mecca, I believe it is Ikea. Certainly, if we ever go to a town that has an Ikea anywhere near it, she would have to make her pilgrimage. She’s even sent family members well out of their way to make proxy pilgrimages for us to pick up things that she simply must have. The rest of it, she orders online, including most of the decorations for Gabe’s room (it should be noted that this room was supposed to be decorated for a girl, because our intention—and by “our” I mean “my”—was to have our oldest child be a girl. So, you go ahead and ponder what this decoration theme might mean in conjunction with a female child). Among the other decorations, there were two big palm leaves that create a “canopy” in one corner. Between these two big leaves, she hung a little ring of green LED lights that are shaped like leaves. Originally, curled atop this leaf light, as if he might fall on any unsuspecting victim, was Karl Weathers the snake. To me, this seems like an invitation for nightmares, but Libby thought it was a good idea. Karl didn’t stay up there long, though, as I found him far more entertaining down with the other toys.
Now, while Karl isn’t the Carl Weathers, he apparently looks enough like him (and no offense meant to the real Carl, I have nothing but the deepest respect for his body of work, and I’m sure many people find him to be a handsome fellow, and I'm sure I don't mean to insinuate that he looks like a snake) that, in fact, Karl has been playing the part of Carl for many years now. About the time Carl’s career peaked with “Action Jackson” in 1988, the now venerable actor decided that the limelight simply wasn’t his cup of tea any longer. So, in true Prince and the Pauper style, Carl went out in search of someone who could take up his roles and, in fact, his life. Though his search was half-hearted at best (he started with a phone book and settled on the first person he found who already had a name very similar to his own—our Karl Weathers), he luckily struck paydirt with a replacement that could convincingly take over his life—though not that convincingly, as his movie career through the 90s and this decade clearly attests. Thus it is that we can’t blame Carl Weathers for taking obviously terrible roles in movies like “Hurricane Smith” and “Alien Siege” and “The Sasquatch Dumpling Gang” (I’m absolutely serious here, these are all real movies) and ruining a once promising career with the cinematic equivalent of toilet bowl backwash. Sadly, even a nearly standard Weathers couldn’t keep the roles coming hard and fast, so Karl began to fall on hard times. Obviously, he was already willing to take any crap role that was thrown his way, but that just wasn’t enough any more. Now, he enthusiastically considers mall appearances a high point of his work month. To make up the difference in pay—though it is hardly enough to allow him to live the lavish lifestyle that the actual Carl still gets to live thanks to the residuals on his many still popular movies—Karl occasionally works with Dag Masters, P.I. whenever Dag needs a little muscle. This was where we first met Karl, helping Dag on a dangerous case.
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