Most of us have coworkers that we dislike.  Some of them snarf in the coffee urn, some corner you in your cubicle and mooch off your life force like annoyingly boorish vampires, others merely spend all afternoon talking loudly on the speakerphone.  I am not so lucky, for I work with some most disagreeable individuals who incessantly loaf around, producing nothing of value, try to gather inside information by eavesdropping on important meetings, take three hour lunch breaks and last but not least, flee from squirrels and poop all over the sidewalk.  Who, you may ask are these dreadful fellow employees of mine?  They are, quite literally, chickens, each with their own unique flavor of evil and lack of useful skills (during a time when we’re on a very tight budget, no less!).  Follow me now, won’t you?  As we learn more about these Annoying Chickens of Henricus!

 

            First, we have Henry, the rooster.  Cock of the walk, he is also the pure an putreficent incarnation of evil in this world.  I can hardly think of where to begin as I ponder the depths of his depravity.  He is both vengeful and cowardly, an almost palpable pall of darkness hangs over him, granting him, it almost seems, a strange cadaverous aura of grandeur.  Forever beating the tar out of his harem like an impotent sheik, he flees at the very sight of a squirrel in the chicken coop and quakes beneath the junipers whenever a hawk draws near.  He randomly runs into blazing fires, and then goes mad when you chase him from the flames.  He draws curiously near when you brandish an axe, but flees like the very gates of Hell itself were flung open behind him if you shake a blanket at him.  Recently, he’s developed a case of termites or some such thing in his legs, and we fear that we’ll just have to cut off his legs and hope that his new ones grow in straight enough for him to gimp around on until we can build him a little Professor X hoverchair.  He is given to sudden fits of running off of the bluff, yet one more suicidal tendency that has yet, alas, to be his undoing.

 

Next, there’s Kate, the smallest of the group, she’s the only one that ever lays any eggs, a virtue she more than compensates for by having the most insufferable case of wanderlust ever to drive a chicken abroad.  Rarely does a day pass that we don’t hear Henry’s plaintive yet loathsome cry as yet again Kate wanders far afield in search of worms or shiny objects.  Sometimes for up to an hour on end, his piercing call will shatter the tranquility of Henricus, until at last he realizes that she’s only just behind that tree over there.  At least then all present get to watch the ensuing smackdown, as Henry flies (figuratively speaking, of course) into a livid and all-consuming rage, like I do whenever I think about how Ben Affleck pollutes the face of the Earth by his very existence.

 

Jackie is the largest and most useless of the hens, frequently getting stuck in the vegetable garden fence.  Her only natural defense is being too fat to be carried away by a bald eagle, and playing dead when threatened.  Unfortunately, she rarely keeps the act up for more than five seconds, so usually I’m not lulled into a false sense of dead chicken perception.  Usually.

 

Finally there’s Farah.  She suffers from a terminal case of Ugmo, an unfortunate condition which makes her look so freaky that decent people recoil from her in horror.  Also, she’s a walking toxic waste hazard (I’ll leave the details to your imagination).

 

So those are the abominable Hell chickens which whom I work (The Abominable Hell Chickens, might I add, would be a totally sweet name for a band).  Stay tuned for further updates about them, especially when Henry finally loses his baby legs.

   There is, deep within the hearts of all good men, a deep and abiding vacuum, an empty space, devoid of something inexpressible, a hole which can be filled only by a show about a bunch of rodents who live in a tree and fight the forces of evil.  Thank heaven then, that in the late 80’s Disney executives were drunk enough one day that someone fooled them into signing into existence “Chip ‘n Dale’s Rescue Rangers”, a show, which by it’s mere existence markedly improves the quality of life on this planet, while actually watching it has been known to heal the lame, raise the dead, cause undue amounts of mouse attraction.  Let’s take a look at the cast, shall we?

 

            First, there was Chip, who was new to crime fighting, after years of running around naked and harassing Donald Duck (really).  However, in order to pay off his mounting gambling debts and nut addiction, he decided to start fighting crime.  You can tell he’s the leader because he wears a bomber jacket and a fedora.  Seriously, when’s the last time you know someone who wore a bomber jacket and a fedora who wasn’t the leader of their gang?  I didn’t think so.  Also, Chip was perpetually consumed by his desire for the one female member of the team, but for reasons which will soon become pitifully self-evident.

 

            Dale was the raging Yang to Chip’s sober Yin. The combination of his loud Hawaiian shirt, lack of pants, and ill-concealed love of nuts clearly paints him as the most flamboyant one of the group (if you know what I mean).  Also, his red nose clearly betrays his status as the doofus of the group, as well as being a telling sign of both his uncontrolled alcoholism and shameful reindeer ancestry.

 

            Gadget Hackwrench was the only female member of the group.  She was also the only one that wore pants of any kind.  Though both Dale would occasionally make a half-hearted attempt to win her affection, it was clear that his first love was in fact Chip.  Chip therefore, with his dashing good looks and process of elimination, was pretty much destined to end up with her from the outset.  The only thing that kept this from ever kept the two of them from truly having a relationship was the highly controversial interspecies nature of their relationship.  Chip, you see was a chipmunk (Tamias striatus), while Gadget was a long-tailed field mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus).  Notice how they’re not even the same genus?  Hell, they aren’t even in the same family!  For comparison’s sake, imagine your sister getting engaged to a blue-butted pygmy marmoset.  To the rodent community, this would have been even freakier.  Speaking of freakiness, while I was researching this article, I found that Gadget is in fact the subject of a sizeable web-ring and fanfic club.  Now, I didn’t actually read any of the stories posted, but by looking over the titles and speculating wildly, I think I can safely say that the internet is indeed home to far greater perversities than ever I had imagined.

 

Monterey Jack was an Australian Mouse, who had raised Gadget from the time she was a mere squeakling, after her father died when the farmer’s wife cut off his tail with a carving knife.  He was the largest of the group, being the actual size of movie star and human speedbump Danny DeVito.  His sidekick was a fly whose name I can remember at the moment, so I’m just gonna call him Krell Fleshrender, who only hung around with Monterey Jack so that he might one day feast upon his decaying corpse, assuming he didn’t end up being brought back to vivid and terrible semi-life by mad scientists or Canadians.  He was also the big, overzealous, get everyone in trouble, guy, who existed in part to make all the other characters looks smarter, a common fixture in 80’s cartoons and totalitarian governments (“Who left all this perestroika all over the Kremlin?” “Gorbachev!!” insert laughtrack here).

 

Their nemeses were fairly standard for the genre, one was a fat cat named, creatively enough, Fat Cat, while the other was a mad scientist named Dick Cheney.  Usually, they wanted to harm little woodland creatures, causing said woodland creatures to call in the Rescue Rangers, like the A-Team, only furrier.  Our heroes all lived in a fiberglass tree that they took over after they killed off the Keebler elves with rabies and other less mentionable diseases.

 

One noticeable gap in the cross-section of rodent demography in the show was the conspicuous lack of squirrels.  Mysterious, no?  Not at all.  In fact, when you’ve known as many squirrels as I have, you begin to learn why they’re referred to by so many biologists and international rock stars as the white trash of the rodent world.  Nasty creatures, squirrels, step on your face as soon as say hello to you.  Why, these days a man can hardly set foot outside his door without seeing a whole clan of them passed out drunk on home-brew and their own debauchery, practically falling out of the trees above you, with all their tiny little rusted out Ford Pintos up on tiny little cinder blocks in their front yards.  If there was a law, it’d be agin’ ‘em.

 

Sorry about that, it’s just that my hatred for squirrels burns with the all-consuming fire of a thousand fiery suns and last week one of them pooped on me at work.  So yeah, as soon as the conquest of Richmond is complete, all the squirrels are getting evicted.

    Most of us drive to work in the morning.  Except for Amish people, welfare recipients, and Superman, though I’m fairly certain that neither of my readers fall into those categories.  And, like most people, few things strike dread into my little Ben heart like seeing one of those signs that tells you that half the road is closed and so you get into the lane that’s going to be staying open and then watch as all the selfish buttweasels of the road zoom past you in the soon-to-be-closed lane, merging at the last moment at the expense of more generous souls than themselves (Buttweasels of the Road, by the way, would be a totally sweet name for a band).  But one thing you are not likely to see as you drive to work, is Screech and the Road Crew (which would also make a stellar name for a band).  The other day though, that is exactly what I saw.

 

            It was, I believe, a Tuesday (that’s Dia del pantalones de los yacs, for all my readers South of the Border), or possibly some other day.  Anyway, as I drove along down Chippenham Parkway, named for the abundant (and resplendent) ham fields of Chesterfield, I passed a road crew.  In most respects, this was an ordinary enough road crew, a bunch of tough-looking guys, wearing wife beaters and jeans, standing around leaning on their shovels as their foreman gave them their marching orders for the day.  The foreman however, was not just any foreman. He was, in a word, Screech.  Yes, good reader, it was as if Screech himself had returned from the dead, or from South America, where he’s raising and army of Hitler clones, or possibly just hanging out in North Dakota, teaching baboons to do macramé, only to take up the mantle of highway foreman guy.  Now, as you might expect, most of the normal looking construction guys were looking at him kind of funny.  “Surely, Screech, the very world itself is your cashew.  What calls you from the marbled halls of your ivory palace to soil your hands with us mere Plebians?” they seemed to say.  But I think that for all of their wonder, it was not entirely unmingled with a newfound respect, like when Elvis joined the army, or when Darth Vader volunteered at that bake sale.

 

            Now, the question which next occupies my mind is this: What road construction project could possibly be so terribly important that Screech would return, whether from the very grave, or merely from the red-litten aeon-ageless City of Kadatheron, which rises lonely and majestic by the magical gumdrop river of Snarg.  All I can think of is that some higher power wishes to ease my daily commute to work.  Perhaps knowing of the recent plan between Twitch and I to conquer the world (or at least the Richmond Metro Area), the VDOT gods have desired to smooth my way along, by improving the last mile of Chippenham Parkway.  If this is so, I shall put up many temples and Chuck-E-Cheese’s in their honor when at last the triumphal day arrives.  Perhaps though, the forces behind this recent Screechly repaving are less than benevolent, and wish merely to lull me into a false sense of security, that they may speed me to my destruction all the sooner.  Only time will tell.  Even the wisest cannot always know the future, for as Twitch himself, diabolical genius that he is, once said, “Sometimes I just flap my arms, and hope something happens.”  Sobering words, and ones that we all ought take more to heart.