Date: Wed, 17 Nov 1999 01:19:48 -0500 From: James "Kibo" Parry Message-Id: <199911170619.BAA09683@gatekeeper.vic.com> Subject: Re: STORY (new): SPOT'S UNDERWEAR PROBLEM Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Status: R A little story about a little puppy in little underpants. Please proofread this for me and circle the stupid parts. SPOT'S UNDERWEAR PROBLEM by James "Kibo" Parry Copyright (C) 1999 James "Kibo" Parry Spot was wearing underpants! Spot was running around the room in circles, yapping happily, as he showed off his new underwear. They were genuine Underoos(R) brand briefs, with a picture of Fonzie from "Happy Days" on the crotch. Spot's crotch said, "AYYY!" And his butt said, "SIT ON IT!" "I don't get it," muttered Albert Einstein, famous scientist and owner of one very dumb puppy, "but I'm glad the underwear fits you." "Wow, thank you for finding these in the back of you closet, Professor! Yap yap yap!" Spot was now pressing his butt against the window to show off his underwear to passersby. Einstein turned back to the big machine he was working on. "Silly puppy, stop yapping about my laboratory! I am building a time machine and time machines are best built without the help of puppies!" "Yay! You said I am helping you! That means I can do _this_ --" Spot reached into the machine and grabbed a handful of loose wires and pulled them out to neaten up the machine. "YOU STUPID PUPPY, STOP THAT, AND ABSOLUTELY DO NOT PUSH THE BIG RED BUTTON!" Spot looked around for the big red button, but he didn't see it, so he looked some more, and after several minutes he found it and pushed it. Einstein was livid. "DAMN YOU, SPOT! YOU'VE TURNED ON MY TIME MACHINE BEFORE EVEN I COULD! THAT MEANS YOU'RE NOW LEGALLY CONSIDERED THE INVENTOR! JUST FOR THAT, I'M TAKING AWAY YOUR SQUEAKY CHEW TOYS!" "I don't care, I don't care, I'm wearing underwear," sang little Spot as the machine began to glow. A computer voice came from the time machine's console. "WARNING... WARNING... TIME MACHINE ACTIVATED! ACTIVATED!" The glow turned red, then green, then to a color with no name. Spot didn't notice that the waistband of his underwear was snagged on the machine's orthogonality inverter. There was a sound effect that would put Don Martin to shame, something with ten each of five different vowels and no consonants, and Spot looked into the heart of the machine just in time to see the waistband of his underwear receding through time to an infinitely distant point before the creation of the Universe and/or underpants. "WARNING... WARNING... TIME WEDGIE! TIME WEDGIE!" "Waah!" cried Spot, "I not only invented the time machine, I invented the time wedgie! I don't want a time wedgie!" But it was too late! The waistband of Spot's underwear was now stretched from here to eternity. Spot looked through the machine's time portal at the most distant part of it, where his waistband passed the point where the Big Bang was about to happen. Suddenly, there was a tiny flicker of light. Spot was seeing the creation of the Universe from so far away that it wasn't a big deal! Except to the waistband of his underwear. It was hurled forward through time towards Spot. "WARNING... WARNING... RAPID CONTRACTION OF ELASTIC! ELASTIC!" Spot tried to run away before the flying, time-travelling waistband could snap against his butt with the force of forty billion atomic bombs, but he was held in place by his own underwear, which was not only snagged on the time machine but was rapidly crossing all time zones. Einstein, standing as far away as possible within the room, shouted an idea. "Spot! Take off your underwear!" "I can't! I spilled a whole bottle of spirit gum down the front of it this morning! And I did it by accident, too!" The waistband of Spot's Underoos was now approaching at 99.99999% of the speed of light. (Due to relativity, this made Spot's underwear look shorter and wider, and so people throughout the Universe looked up at their night skies at the flying underwear that must have belonged to someone with a REALLY WIDE BUTT.) Spot screamed and tried to chew off his own pelvis as approaching shockwaves heralded the impending return of his waistband to the 20th century. Then nothing happened. Absolutely nothing. Einstein stopped watching Spot's butt and looked over at the time machine's console. "Why, Spot! It says here that the waistband of your underwear ended up somewhere in the 1950s!" Spot wiped the sweat from his forehead. "Whew! That was a close one! Well, thanks for your help when I invented the time machine, Professor Einstein! I'm going to the mall!" He tried to trot away but discovered his legs were dangling in the air because his underwear was still stretched through the time portal. "Spot! You'll have to take off your underwear to go to the mall!" "But... I thought they had that sign that said I had to wear underwear!" "No, Spot, you'll have to take off your underwear because it's still caught on something somewhere in the 1950s!" Spot burst into tears. "Waah! I knew that pouring that quart of spirit gum into my underwear, and three tubes of Krazy Glue, might turn out to be a bad idea!" "Here's an idea, Spot. Jump into the time machine and let the elastic pull you to wherever the rest of your underwear is snagged. And then, when the two parts of your underwear are re-united, everything will be fine." "Wow! Sounds easy! All I gotta do is follow my underwear!" He was about to hurl himself butt-first into the time portal but Einstein stopped him. "Silly puppy, wait! Before you go, I have to teach you about the dangers of time travel! You must be careful not to change history by interacting with anything or anyone in the past! Don't do anything! Don't touch anything! Don't look at anything! Above all, don't exert any miniscule gravitational forces on nearby atoms! You could be like that butterfly in South America that started that earthquake in Japan!" "Me be a butterfly? Haw, haw, that's funny, Einstein! I'll tell everyone in the 1950s you said hi, and I'll bring you back lots of souvenirs! Bye!" With that, Spot hopped into the time portal and passed into the whirling maelstrom of eternity, a shifting maze of past and future ages, and some sparkles too. Spot was travelling down an infinitely long, infinitely wide, infinitely sparkly time tunnel. To each side he could see the only other people who had ever travelled in time: The guy from "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court", the guy from "Slaughterhouse-Five", ten copies of every captain from "Star Trek", and famous soap-maker Dr. Bronner. But they were all blurred and distorted as they whooshed past because Spot was moving at over a trillion times the speed of light. It made his eyes water! Up ahead, he could see the 1950s approaching. He could tell because he passed through a layer of spinning newspapers that said "EVERYONE LOVES JOE McCARTHY" and "GAME SHOWS ARE RIGGED". And the 1950s were the only decade where game shows were rigged, so Spot knew he was on target! Spot's underwear emitted shockwaves in ever-expanding hyperspheres as he passed the speed of light to the infinity power plus one. The amount of cosmic force concentrated in Spot's underpants was nothing short of incredible. And then it went away and a roller-skating waitress crashed into Spot. "Clumsy dog! Don't you know that dogs are not allowed here in Arnold's diner? They make Ralph Malph sneeze!" "But I'm a friend of Fonzie's! Look!" Spot showed the waitress his crotch. She looked at the picture of Fonzie saying "AYYY!" and left him alone (which is usually what women did after seeing Spot's crotch.) Thankfully, the trip through time had not completely obscured the picture of Fonzie as it made scorch marks all over Spot's underwear. Looking around the diner, Spot couldn't see Fonzie anywhere. But it was gratifying to confirm what he had always known, that "Happy Days" was a completely accurate depiction of the 1950s. Spot wondered if this was the episode where Mork From Ork came on and did all the jokes about Jimmy Carter, or the episode where the mad scientist made Fonzie turn gay, or the episode where Fonzie proved that classical music is always better than rock'n'roll. Or could this be one of the _early_ episodes that didn't suck? Spot knew he had to find out in order to find Fonzie, and he also had to be careful not to interact with anyone or anything. He shoved a roller-skating waitress out of his way as he went to see Fonzie about his underwear. He found Fonzie sitting at his desk in the men's room, wearing his plaid scarf and listening to classical music as he adopted an orphan while performing Shakespeare. Horrors! It was one of the late, sappy episodes after Fonzie had become a simpering square! And after Ron Howard had gone bald and left the show! But perhaps Fonzie could help Spot anyway. "Hey, Fonzie, look! You're on my underwear!" Spot showed Fonzie his underwear, which showed Fonzie saying "AYYY!" Fonzie looked through his reading glasses at Spot's Underoos, and he saw that, indeed, a cartoon of a twenty-year-old Henry Winkler was saying "AYYY!" And more importantly, the little Fonzie picture was wearing tiny underwear with a picture of a stupid puppy on the crotch! "Whoa! Those are some groovy underwear, li'l puppy! Whip inflation now! Boop-boop-a-doop! So, what can I do for you?" "Well, you see, this underwear made me travel through time, and now that I've found the other end of my waistband, I'm stranded here in the perfectly authentic 1950s and I can't change anything but I need your help building a time machine to send me back to the present day but remember you can't change anything while you stop dating girls for six months to learn about Einstein's theory of General Relativity." "Ayyy... Relativity sounds cool!" Fonzie threw open the bathroom door and yelled, "HEY EVERYBODY, I FOUND SOMETHING EVEN COOLER THAN SHAKESPEARE AND MANTOVANI! FROM NOW ON, "HAPPY DAYS" IS GOING TO BE ALL ABOUT RELATIVITY!" /\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ With Fonzie's help, Spot was able to return to the present. And he hadn't changed anything, except to make everyone in the Fifties think that theoretical physics was cooler than everything else. So, obviously he didn't expect the world of the present to be any different. "AYYY!" yelled Einstein as he rode his motorcycle into the laboratory. He was wearing a leather jacket and his hair was full of axle grease, but he was still wearing mismatched socks. Spot screamed and ran out in the street, where he was run over by Niels Bohr's Harley. An ambulance took him to the hospital, where doctors refused to operate on him because he wasn't wearing clean underwear. Spot died of dirty underwear. THE END -- K. The moral of this story is: a) Classical music is better than rock'n'roll b) Don't change history c) Always wear clean underwear d) Never wear underwear e) "Happy Days" kept getting lamer