Continued from part 2.
“You look nice,” Earl told Keller.
“Thank you,” Keller said. “Your suit doesn’t have too many rumples,” she said.
“I’m quite pleased, I hadn’t taken it out of the closet since I was hired at the museum. I think that should prove my artifact preservation skills,” Earl replied.
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Continued from Part 1
Earl and Keller fidgeted while the mummy Sokolov argued with a bank teller. They dripped mud and sand onto the carpet. The security guard and custodian eyeballed them. Each hated the filth in this city.
“Sir, your ATM card will not work because your account has been suspended.”
“How? Why?”
“As near as I can tell, it is because that you’ve been declared dead.”
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Earl and Keller had scratched their heads so many times during this excavation that they feared that they would need wigs.
There shouldn’t be an Egyptian-themed burial chamber under the city of Constantinople. If it were the original Constantinople, it might make more sense, but this was a major city in the middle of Illinois. The Constantinople Museum of Natural History had received a call from city workers who had found a burial chamber in the way of a new sewer line. The museum had dispatched a pair of third-tier researchers.
“The Sokolov family has revoked a lot of their funding since their pater familias died. Find something interesting that will get us press or you’re on the curb,” they’d been told.
Earl and Keller had prepared their CVs after they began to x-ray the stone sarcophagus only to see the bones moving between slides.
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Hugh leaned out of his truck window and spoke into the intercom in front of the gate.
“Hello, this is Hugh with Great Lay Masonry.”
“Good, good!” said a crackly voice on the intercom. “This is the residence of Ludwig von Ludwig! I called your company yesterday!”
Hugh’s eyes drifted onto the letters “LvL” emblazoned in the center of the wrought iron gate. Copses of trees and fountains interrupted the grand lawn beyond the gate. A peacock watched him for a moment. When the gates swung open, the peacock flared its feathers.
“Yes, where should I drive to?”
“Just follow the path to the back entrance.”
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Pandora’s turned a profit. Awesome. More music is good.
Pandora says that it “play[s] only music that you like.” And through feedback from the listener, it will ostensibly learn what attributes you enjoy in music and make guesses for future songs. I’ve had good luck with it – I’ve managed to craft some narrowly-focused stations that, while crossing genres, manage to capture a specific type of sound.
Pandora includes a skip function to avoid stinkers, but it’s a limited one (and when you invoke a skip beyond the limit the program shrugs and says that their music license “forces” them. A separate issue but one you can guess my feelings on if you go look at the list of stories that I have accessible online). If you upgrade from the free service, you get more skips.
What occurred to me today, though, is that Pandora’s pricing scheme incentivizes playing what the listener hates. But only sometimes; most of the time the songs have to be good. It’s like taking a bag of chocolate chip cookies and replacing a handful with cookies containing dried salami chips. Damn straight you want those skips.
Unless you’re some sort of salami masochist.
Dan didn’t realize that his shirts changed the world. Not at first.
He hadn’t set out to change the world with the message on his t-shirt. All he’d meant to do was buy a boatload of new clothes with the inheritance from his crazy, late uncle Mort. One of the shirts that he’d purchased featured a cartoon bat hovering over the phrase “20 million kids are eaten by bats every second.” Normally he’d worn button-down shirts with bland slacks. Uncle Mort’s death came to Dan as a warning that his time on earth would end as well, and he may as well dress how he wanted.
Unfortunately for children around the world, everything on Dan’s shirts came true.
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