Klarinet Archive - Posting 000206.txt from 2004/08

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] screech-stick nightmare
Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 19:18:36 -0400


I'm making my stupid pet human type this. When she wakes up, she'll think
she fell asleep at the computer. For some reason, it's very easy to
control her big, wet, squishy, inefficient primate brain when she's sitting
in front of that computer screen.

Sheena the Canadian Tabby wrote that her pet human, Peter Stoll, has
>...gone *too* far. We all know about soprano
>screech-sticks, and even those rat-spawned
>half-soprano screamers.

Oh, yes, we know about those, don't we? My stupid pet human, Lelia, just
set up two nasty old screech sticks she calls "eefers," a wooden one and a
worse one in metal. She fixed up a fancy little house for the wooden one,
with a soft velvet lining and latches to keep me out. (She hasn't made ME
any fancy little velvet-lined houses lately!)

It's no coincidence that the rats have just finished a feeding orgy on
17-year cicadas, and they've been breeding like -- well, like rats. And so
have these small clarinets! Look at the way she fixed up two of them at
the same time! No, it can't be a coincidence. It's a global conspiracy,
that's what it is.

Our neighbor put out neck-snap traps and killed seven rats in less than a
week. One of his neck-snappers also killed a fledgling flicker, whereupon
his (no doubt rodent-controlled and delusional) wife talked him into taking
away the traps. (They eat chicken, so why do they care if a trap killed a
birdbrain?) Well, meanwhile, a big fat rat goes prancing all over our
terrace in broad daylight and calling himself Dick Vigorous. (Would this
be Dick Vigorous the second? third? fourth? fifteenth?) Why didn't HE get
caught in the neck-snapper? I'll tell you why: It's because the neighbors
caught ordinary soldier rats, but the big fat rat on our terrace is a spy,
pretending he's only a dilettante music lover when really he's passing
secret information back and forth between the G*rb*ge Tr*ck Monster, the
V*c**m Cl**n*r Demon and the screech-sticks. They protect each other.
None of the screech sticks got caught in the neck-snappers, either. It's
all connected!

>But somehow my human has discovered the
>ultimate nightmare. It's about half the size of the
>normal screech-stick (my human left it on a stand
>until he realized why I was sharpening my claws)
>and sounds like a mouse caught in the middle of
>one of our cat conclaves!

Disgusting! I didn't know there were smaller screech-sticks. They must be
younger v*c**m cl**n*r larvae. That's bad. That's what comes of letting
screech-sticks breed in the closets at night. You must have a serious
infestation. Probably they've set up a special school to teach these young
larvae all the subversive tricks. Yes, things are getting worse.

>I've had to resort to hiding
>in the basement while he howls and yowls on that
>little demon. It's armour-piercing! And can't he tell
>he's so out of tune he sounds like when he first
>started learning to play? That's progress for
>you...Alert all our cousins! We have to find the
>source of these monsters and chew them up fast
>before any more humans stumble on them!

Yes, I agree. It's good to chew up their little wooden tongues, too.
Catch those tongues and destroy them and the mousepieces can't squeal any
more, although destroying the tongues only silences them temporarily. You
have to watch out, because the screech-sticks recruit the humans to bring
home plenty of spare tongues. My pet human brought home boxes and boxes of
little wooden tongues, including *foreign* ones, from that Cl*r*n*t Pest.
You see what that's all about: They're teaching each other different
languages. Different codes. And she bought a new mousepiece to make the
itty-bitty metal screech-stick scream even louder than before. She says it
plays jazz. I say it plays RAT POOP.

(Oh, and that was very nice of her, too, going off with barely an apology
and making me demand my dinner from my big male human, while she went off
worshipping with the screech-stick cultists every day for *five days*!
She's supposed to feed me, and I expect my meals on time, or better yet,
early. He's reasonably good about scooping the litter box, but evidently
he doesn't know how to read a clock.)

And now you tell me there's an even smaller and worse screech-stick! The
horror! The horror!

>I just know those dirty rats are behind this. This
>is serious! This must be that Weapon of Musical
>Destruction all the humans have been talking about...

Yes! Yes, I'm sure you're right. And the G*rb*ge Tr*ck Monster controls
the rats. This is War.

Sssst!
Shadow Cat

Lelia Loban
http://members.sibeliusmusic.com/LeliaLoban
America can do better: Kerry and Edwards in 2004!

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org