Pnårp’s July, 2006 tentacles & manacles

This is Phillip Norbert Årp’s ship

Appeased prior to July 2, 2006

Tags: feet, Alyssa Milano, John Updike, Hell, seamanship, Mister Wilson, Samuel Dreckers.

Having learned the hard lesson that Varangian handbaskets are hard to come by this time of year (much like lobsters and John Updike, they’re seasonal), I had to send Captain Pinnfarb to Hell in a third-rate handbasket hand-made by the Kievan Rus’. It didn’t even have handles, but was made out of the finest Kharkov wicker, so it had to do. And it did do. And now it’s done, and there won’t be any do-overs, either.

After dispatching Captain Pinnfarb to Hell (and making sure that Samuel Dreckers and poor Mr. Wilson were getting along well with him), I claimed his old ship, the HMS Gormless Bastard, as my own. She’s a fine ship, all right, but now that her gormless bastard of a captain had been sent to the bottom of the sea (I think that’s where Hell is this eon—according to what a little birdie named Jehosafattie told me, it moves around whenever Yhwh gets grumpy), she needed a new name. A graceful, beautiful name, and one that would let people everywhere know, “This is Phillip Norbert Årp’s ship.”

I decided to rechristen her the Alyssa Milano’s Feet. I set sail next Tuesday.

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No dice

Gambled over on July 9, 2006

Tags: feet, Alyssa Milano, nose, rat-fighting contest, sandals, seamanship, Sicily.

Tuesday came and went, and Alyssa Milano’s Feet didn’t leave the harbor. Something about a rat infestation eating out her innards, the health inspector told me. I offered to take the rats to Sicily and sell them to rat-fighting contestants, but the inspector said, “No dice.” He threw a pair of dice at me, just like they do at those rat-fighting contests in Sicily when they run out of rats to fight (and rats to throw at the gamblers), so I threw the dice back at him, hitting him on the nose, and shouted, “Those are dice, you gormless bastard!”

Impatient to start my journey around the globe on Alyssa Milano’s Feet—at least around the part of the globe surrounding the tiny islands of Lakshadweep, off the coast of India—I manhandled the rats off the ship, wearing sandals and carrying the rats by their handlebars, and deposited them in the health inspector’s beard, one by one. He nodded brusquely, thanking me for my conscientious disposal of 549,173¼ rats (¾ of a rat got stuck under the mizzenmast and wouldn’t come up no matter what I flung at it). I conscientiously objected to his very existence, and set sail before he had a chance to molest the beautiful Alyssa Milano’s Feet any further.

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A disastrous pie-eating contest

Drawn and quartered on July 16, 2006

Tags: feet, toes, Alyssa Milano, Bob Dole, George Armstrong Custer, Rory Calhoun, Afghanistan, Bermuda, eigen, environmental disaster, flatulence, gnomes, nose, pi, pie-eating contest, screaming stars, seamanship, triangular briefcase.

Alyssa Milano’s Feet reached Bermuda this week, sailing into the triangular harbor with a feminine grace not seen since the real Alyssa Milano’s bare feet graced the pages of TV Guide. The harbor was full of green-gray effluent and dead, disemboweled fish; at first I feared I had gone on another farting spree in the night and ruined the whole island nation. But fortunately, that wasn’t true: The effluent was from the next ship over, the USS John Wilkes Booth (Americans sure are good at producing a lot of effluent), and the floating gutted fish were the result of a disastrous pie-eating contest the Bermudans had held four days earlier.

On my way ashore, I slipped and broke my eyeball. I tried to go to the local hospital, but it was full of casualties from the pie-eating contest, so I ended up having to sew up my eyeball myself. I think I put it back in backwards. Thinking about pies reminded me of the flying, floating pi I once knew long, long ago… and the screaming stars (oh… how they screamed), and a stiflingly hot little jail cell in Afghanistan in which I had languished several weeks while being tortured by a camel with a pincushion and an accordion.

“Where are you now, O screaming stars?” I whispered into the night, staring up at the silent, silent stars dotting the night sky like grains of sugar spilt across a Starbuck’s counter top and illuminated by a flashlight. “I hated you, feared you, but, oh, you were so much better than incipient lawn gnomes pouring out of the sky on gilt parachutes. Oh, to have you instead of gnomes, gnomes, gnomes.”

“And the pi!” I called into the night, baying like a coyote drunk on vodka and eigenberry-flavored V8. “The flying, floating pi! Alas, will you ever recite your digits to me again? Alas, will I ever have the sublime pleasure of setting my eyes upon your transcendent circleness again? Flying pi, how I miss you so!”

I was lost in memories of bygone days when a scrawny little boy came up to me and slapped me on my nose, hard. I went “squoing!!” and whapped him with a hose, harder. He giggled and snapped at me with his clothes, so I flapped at him and posed… so he crapped on my toes and ran away, still giggling. I chased after him, trying to get his autograph (or perhaps sell him a dishpan autographed by Rory Calhoun, and some old soda-jerk furniture), but he had disappeared quicker than Bob Dole at a Viagra convention. Wait, that analogy doesn’t make any sense… does it?

Great Custer’s Ghost! The Alyssa Milano’s Feet sets sail tonight whether or not I’m on her! Flee you next week, dear readers!

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Burkina Faso encased in pie

Tortured on July 23, 2006

Tags: feet, Alyssa Milano, Bermuda, death, environmental disaster, pie-eating contest, seamanship.

The effects of that disastrous pie-eating contest held in Bermuda last week are apparently far, far worse than everyone first feared. Coming into port in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso on board the graceful Alyssa Milano’s Feet, I witnessed a horror that will stick in my gooey greenish-brown brain for the rest of my life: thousands and thousands of helpless refugees clogging the streets beneath the abortifacient skies of the city, fleeing from the horror that the Bermudan pie-eating contest visited upon their shores. All of them—every last one of them—were covered head to toe in lemon merengue and pecans. Some were slathered in chunks of apple, pumpkin, or squash; others were smeared with hefty dollops of whipped cream and rhubarb. Many of the poor buggers didn’t even have any arms or legs anymore!

I should have known something was amiss before even reaching Ouagadougou—Burkina Faso is supposed to be landlocked!

The burning air.

The local constabulary told me that, so far, over 15,000 people had died, or become, as he put it, “encased in pie—that is, empied.” A whopping 5,237 fell victim on the first day alone, and by the time the emergency had passed over Ouagadougou, 80% of the citizens were expected to perish—or, at least, to never desire to touch another pie as long as they lived. Côte D’Ivoire was already a total loss. Damn those Bermudans and their terrible, short-sighted contests.

By Friday morning I had set sail on Alyssa Milano’s Feet again, headed as far from the now-poisoned Atlantic as I could get.

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New Gardegnomia

Navigated to on July 30, 2006

Tags: feet, toes, Alyssa Milano, Strom Thurmond, Bermuda, buttocks, Carpathian Mountains, dogs, environmental disaster, fez, gnomes, God, nose, Perfect Strangers, pie-eating contest, pigtails, porcupines, screaming stars, seamanship, Haldûrburðgar.

I was sailing in tight little ellipses in the middle of the Indian Ocean on Friday morning, drinking a broad swath of fish juice and rye with beans, enjoying my dizziness aboard the Alyssa Milano’s Feet, when suddenly I spied a small doofus-shaped island that hadn’t been there before I had started my loopy journey.

“Oh my doG, what is it?!” I shouted to my first mate. He didn’t answer. “Is it… is it an island?! A giant bar of Dial soap!? A gaggle of Strom Thurmonds out for a stroll!? What is it, what is it, what is it?!” I squealed like a little pigtailed girl, still in her pigtails. If I had had pigtails, they would’ve been bouncing up and down and flailing about like I was horsebuttock riding.

Suddenly remembering I didn’t have a first mate—that I was completely alone aboard the 2200-ton vessel—I panicked and began slithering lithe porcupines from my pores. Unfortunately, that didn’t help things much, but checking my email and listening to some MP3s on my iPoodle soothed my wracked brains.

I decided that, after firing my buttocks across the island to subdue the natives, and noshing on my trusty AZERTY keyboard for a spell, the best course of action would be to put ashore and conquer the place in the name of the Her Royal Majesty, the Queen of Spain. Being completely alone and with only a wet noodle for a weapon, I imagined I would have no difficulty engaging in this endeavor, as the island looked to be completely uninhabited save a few yaks and trollops milling about, and Larry Appleton hiding under a bush with his Mepiot cousin.

I scootled ashore aboard Alyssa Milano’s Toes (my trusty dinghy), waving the imperial Spanish flag high about my head, and immediately proclaimed the island the property of Her Majesty. I planted a flagpole in the nostril of the first native I found. He didn’t appreciate my presumption; he just stood their and laughed and giggled and even chortled at the women’s panties I had jammed up his nose.

“Now just wait a gall-darned minute!” I shouted frabjously, taken aback at his bergrumptious perflocasity. “Now see here! This is my isla—” I borked abruptly, freezing my veins in dried ice as I looked him over. “Just… just what the hecklegroober are you?” He was pale as a pail of snow, wore a pointed white beard that came to his knees, and had a little tapered cap on his head that would have looked like a fez if only it had looked completely different than it had actually looked. And… and he only came up to my knees.

“I’m a garden gnome, dear boy,” he answered me in tones that spoke volumes about entomology and endometrial reticulography. “Gnomus horti.” He snorted at my ignorance of his proper Linnaean binomial, his eyes twinkling, his beard snorkeling up and down enquiverously. “…Family Gnomidæ? Order Gnomidoptera?? Hello, are you slow or somethin’? I’m a bloody gnome!” He snobbled impatiently.

I stared, wide-eyed—my countenance vaguely reminiscent of a Carpathian Stinking Hound when it finds itself outstunk by another, stinkier animal.

He sighed and continued. “My name is Haldûrburðgar, and this is New Gardegnomia that you just tried to claim like Christopher bloody Columbus. Oh, and you should also know—those screaming stars? They were gnomes, too, in truth: Interstellar Sprongling Gnomes. Now, son,” he finished, his voice taking on an edge of hexadecimal warning, “don’t you think you should think things over about that flagpole there? Ehh, sonny?”

My answer was brief, succinct, and got quickly to the point: “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!” I fled back to Alyssa Milano’s Feet (alas, not the real ones!) faster than a Bermudan peasant can destroy an entire hemisphere in a thermonuclear pie-eating contest.

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