Wednesday, December 31, 2008

But the Octopus is our friend.

Every year at band camp, we play a variant of Never Have I Ever as an icebreaker game. The group forms a circle, with one person standing in the middle. They then say something they have done or mention an aspect of their character, and everyone who has done or is the same has to switch places. The person left in the middle goes next.

I'm actually not too keen on standing in the middle. I have a blog to rant about myself already, and I'd rather find out about other people. Besides, I always manage to embarrass myself somehow, and scare off the few kids who've made the mistake of talking to me.

I did get stuck there once or twice this year, though. (Apparently there are only three people in the band who play the guitar.) On one occasion in particular, I made the careless blunder of actually divulging honest information about myself.

'I'm really, really scared -- no, I'm terrified -- of squid. They're freakishly smart, and they have ten arms...and here's the thing. Scientists just keep finding bigger and bigger squid. I mean, they don't even know whether they should be making new species, like colossal squid. Lots of people are afraid of sharks but I'm just scared of squid. So I don't eat squid, so that when they all rise up and take over the world, I'll have more of a chance with them.'

Empty silence. Not a creature stirring.

I suppose I should have stopped after the first sentence, but no one was stopping me from going on about it, and I don't think that would have helped me very much anyway. The ignorance of the masses faced with the obvious impending disaster is staggering, much as it has been throughout history. Only this time, the danger is much greater than ever before -- colossal, in fact.

xkcd agrees.

It's 2009 in Tokyo. What's the big deal?

2 comments:

Sophia said...

SQUIIIDDDD!

I eat those in my soup!

WistfulSparrow said...

Hah, it doesn't look like I'm meeting the halfway mark for posts this year as compared to the year before. Although expressed as a percent decrease, it's less than between the first two years.

Of course, taking into account that I only began in the spring of 2006....

billy?