Truly Horribly Wretchedly Awful novel

Over at Modem Noise, Adrian is conducting a little contest to “Write a brief synopsis for a Truly Horribly Wretchedly Awful novel“.

So, without further ado, here is the synopsis of my novel…

Title: The Rippingly Adventurous Tale of Narwin, the Golden Rhinoceros, and His Pelican, Pip

Synopsis: Long ago in the green Trellian Valley, a Rhinoceros named Narwin lives with his family and a sickly old pelican named Pip, whom they occasionally hire as a mime at family outings. Like most young rhinoceroses, Narwin pays little heed to the goings-on of the world outside the Trellian Valley.

Flashback 2000 years: Trellian sits the leaders of two armies on the twin rocks of Aelia and places between them a chess board. Corthnoc, Supreme General of the Army of Hortenoc, ends the chess game abruptly when he counters his opponent’s Kolnikov Gambit with a pointy object to the throat. With this, General Artonius capitulates with a solid thud to the floor. Thenceforth, the Hortenoc maintains possession of the valley.

Two thousand years later, Narwin and Pip embark upon a journey to rescue the Stones of Aelia from almost certain destruction, which is to be determined by a lengthy series of judicial hearings with presentations by all stakeholders. In a sudden twist of irony, Pip is revealed as the true owner of Aelia. They contemplate this revelation in several intimate scenes in various hotel elevators.

Then, in another twist of fate, Pip explodes unexpectedly after eating too many squid-flavoured jellies. The whole mission now being moot, Narwin returns home by way of the Rocks of Aelia and one of them tips over, crushing him. With that, Trellian returns to the valley, bringing the joys of chess!

Upgrading my CDS

All I can think about is my CDS. No, that’s not “carpal dunnel syndrome”. For crying out loud, that doesn’t even make sense.

I’m concerned about the state of my Caffeine Delivery System. For several months the vending machine coffee has been my standard CDS. The flavour is sub-standard, as I’ve mentioned frequently, but it gets the job done. Knock back a couple of those bitter, watery concoctions, and I’m good for at least an hour or so.

Then I considered upgrading my CDS from coffee to cola. Cola has several advantages, the least of which is that you get a sugar kick in addition to the caffeine buzz. I could, I conjectured, add sugar to my coffee, but as a coffee purist, that violates my principles. Even the vending machine swill deserves drinking straight.

So there’s cola, but what kind? As a geek, my first inclination is towards Jolt, but that’s hard to come by these days. That leaves the front-runners: Coke and Pepsi.

Yesterday I dropped by the grocery store, and there on the shelf, looking all exotic and purty-lookin’ was vanilla Coke. And next thing I knew, I was struttin’ home with a six pack of the stuff. I knew it must be good — Simon Cowell said so, right?

Wrong. It’s vile. It’s worse than drinking soda water with pancake syrup stirred into it. Not that I’ve tried it. Ahem.

Anyway, now I have a five-pack of vanilla Coke and coffee-swill to choose between as my CDS. Of course, if I could get up off my butt and walk over to the coffee shop on the corner, I wouldn’t have a problem, would I?

Wow. All this talk of caffeine makes me have t—

Small, Medium, Large

As I’ve mentioned before, our coffee vending machine delivers a disappointing cup of coffee. It’s often acrid and watery, which can only be fixed by disguising it with plenty of cream and sugar. That in itself is annoying if, like me, you prefer to drink your coffee black.

Curiously, the machine has an interesting idea of the relative sizes of the small, medium, and large coffees. On discovering that selecting “large” fills my mug just past the halfway point, I wondered if I could then top up my mug by adding a “small” to it. A fellow cubicle dweller and I performed a little ad hoc experiment to determine the ratios.

With a fresh mug under the spout, I dialled up the French roast… er… freedom roast… and selected a “large”. I repeated that again with the “small” setting. As it turned out, adding the small coffee to the large made my mug overflow slightly. Logically, then, the small coffee is at about half a mug. The medium coffee, we assume, would be halfway between that and the large. The difference between the sizes must be only a few millilitres.

We will have to approach this more scientifically in the future, using a graduated cylinder to accurately measure the amount dispensed with each size. This of course, will have to wait until tomorrow, when I’m down from this extreme coffee buzz and I stop giggling uncontrollably.