Wino Dinoh.

After several glasses of wine and thirteen more Pac-Man attempts, Jose realized that he was improving with drink.  This usually also occurred with both his billiard and bowling games.  There was a curve he could note where he got better and better with more drinks until it plateaued and finally he would have that one too many, and his game would once again go to shit.

But tonight, Jose was on fire for a while, because he'd decided to try to keep the plateau going by slowing down on the drink and supplementing the buzz with brownies and coke.
Joe stood by frowning with confusion as Jose got to the twelfth board.

"This does NOT feel like Deja Vu." Joe muttered.

Jose chuckled evilly and said "Waka waka waka waka waka waka waka...", simulating Pac Man's chompy chomp chomp sound.

Lemtata stood by and rolled her eyes, then did a three pointer with the empty wine bottle from across the living room.  It shattered with great dramatic effect inside the recycling bin.
Jose jolted, startled, then swore.

"I'm trying to fuckin' focus, god damn it!"

Lemtata retreated to the kitchen to retrieve yet another bottle of red.  She glared at them both sardonically as she passed.

"You fucking geekazoids." She smiled and shook her head.

Reboot Redux

Suddenly, everyone died.

This was only a minor inconvenience for our heroes, as they were all painless deaths, and they had no afterlives. Nor were there mourners or mourned, since they all died at once. No inheritances were squabbled over, and no one felt ashamed for not finding out about the deaths until they read Facebook the next day. Because they were dead.

Nature had a rough time of it for a while - lots of nuclear meltdowns, broken dams, continent-wide fires and the like, and the squirrels took it all rather personally, but too bad for them. After all, why should they complain? Within a mere billion years, before a slightly dimmer sun, two evolved Bonobos (though they called themselves, in translation to now-forgotten English, "Humans") stood playing a 20-year-old Ms. Pac Man machine in a northern province of Ameristanlee, a young nation that a mere 200 years before had dragged the world from monarchy to democracy.

"Man, you suck at this game," Joe tactfully informed Jose. Joe was always very proud of his tact, and of the crackerjack ring he wore on his left pinky.

"Joe, I can't practice this game 20 hours a day like you do," Jose retorted.

"Whiner."

"Diner."

"Forty-niner."

"Pizza pancakes."

"Snerrnnl GIGFLATTA!"

By then they were laughing so hard they didn't notice when Lemtata ("Man, my girl has a sexy name!" Joe always told himself) descended into the basement with a wine bottle in one hand and a handpiano in the other.

"Feeling dejá vu right now, Jose?"

"No way, Joe... say, though, y'ever feel like it did all happen before, a billion years ago and in a different way?"

"Not really, Jose..."

Joe reverently cradled his handpiano and began to sing and play.

Word Association with Joe

"Charles Manson, 1934, Kindergarten, "Just a Spoonful Of Sugar", Mary Poppins, ice cream, homemade, salt, sugar, The Rolling Stones, liver and onions, my Dad, chest hair, Martina Naterchalova, nothing, exists, Betty Gurley, Lucille Ball, money, Pink Floyd, Dark Side Of The Moon, prisons, bread line, Metallica, hair,Bugs Bunny, The Carol Burnett Show, death, mold, oranges, nerve center, St. Elmo's Fire, Don Henley, This Side Up, Eggs, B & B Foods, West Milton, Mr. Weidner, Fantasy and Sci-Fi Mag, Joe Knapka, big thesis papers, Greek Literature, Mac Lucky, Mac The Knife, jazz singing, Billie Holiday, Johnny Rotten, Sid Vicious, Watership Down, animation, creation, RNA, circular stairways, M.C. Escher, Erik Piper, erasers, candy, whores, Eddie Murphy, hairgrease, Ronald Reagan, S.O.B., soapy, film, Charlie Chaplin, Bill Wagner, bones, archeology, Marna Hostetler, cassettes, suitcase, "Leavin On A Jet Plane", Paris, prison, A Tale Of Two Cities, Ms. Jacobs, Shelley Long, "Cheers", Troy, BK Foto, glasses made while you wait, een uur, Zarathrustra, Black vinyl LP's, death, mold, peaches, unhusked corn, '76, Laura, Palmer, Pine Lysol, me, myself, rap, Uzis, George Steinbrenner, Knickerbocker, cricket, whine, cry, snuffle, Big Bird, "It's Not That  Easy Bein' Green", "Green Hell", Fuscia, "Heathers", Daniel, motorcycles, crime, Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly, "Crimson and Clover", Pat Benatar, running away from home, hand bags, Salem Mall, escalators, elevated train, Chicago, The United Center, snow." said Bob.

Reboot

"Cut! Cut!" cried Tubby.
"Why?" inquired Signore Pizzicato.
"BECAUSE I'M NOT CRYING ENOUGH! I LAID THESE ONIONS IN FRONT OF YOU FOR A REASON!! How are we supposed to break our children viewers' hearts if I'm not crying worth a damn?!" replied Tubby, sucking worriedly on his cigar, in tears (but not enough in tears).
"Yeah, Tubby? Well how can you have any pudding if you don't eat your meat, chum?"
"That's ridiculous, Pizzicato! I can't eat, I'm a fucking tuba!"

Huygens Vs. The Werewolf

Blind with range, Raymond Eawest leaped over the cemetery wall to track down the taunter. In the confusion, tiny Joe, intensely adventurous for his age, broke from his mother's grasp and escaped in the dark to wander further down the road, soon finding the cemetery gate.

Peering through the black bars was an older boy. He looked almost as old as Joe's babysitter's brother. The boy frowned and shouted, "We've been teasing a little boy! I think we should stop now."

Joe gaped further and started sucking his thumb and behind the youth there soon appeared a very shaggy man. He almost looked like a werewolf, but more sad than scary. He soon looked even sadder as he, too frowned.

Joe let out a small gasp as a robed figure leapt from the shadows at the... werewolf?... crashing him to the ground. "Christiaan!" the man—growing ever furrier!—shouted. "I swear it wasn't me! I'm not your enemy!"

But before this stranger could reply, yet another figure entered the fray. It was Daddy, Raymond Eawest. Still too furious to think, his thoughts short-circuited and he was more concerned with causing harm than the fact that one of these men struggling on the ground had not been his tormenter. And Raymond Eawest knew many ways to cause harm.

Jens, meanwhile, after his centuries of dealing with other people, knew many ways to size a man up, and even in the gloom, he quickly intuited much of the character of his unlikely savior Raymond Eawest. He also knew much about making the impression he needed. All he didn't know how to solve was the enormous inconvenience of lycanthropy and its occasional transitions, like the one he was undergoing right at this moment.

Standing up more falteringly than he needed to, moving subtly a bit further into the darkness, brushing off his thankfully-formal attire, he said "Thank you, good sir," in a practiced voice that was both stately and contrite.

Building #334

"It was Auschwitz-Birkenau's dirty little secret. It was a place more heinous than any Holocaust historian would ever know. Because it and all paper traces of its existence would be destroyed far before any Allies arrived. There were, among the Jews and other prisoners, of course, those who could be made to do the unspeakable to stay alive. To do the unspeakable against their own people. Against their own blood. For this they would receive food and some luxuries, and would not be mistreated by the guards, too harshly.

There was a large hanger inside the south end of the building, and many trucks came and went all the time, hauling..."waste". I was standing guard on the northwest door of Building #334. I was issued a semi-automatic pistol and this electric cattle prod. It was my job to keep everyone in the building. That included the workers. My job and the job of the other two guards who had the other doors. One door was the garage door that the trucks entered and exited from. Outside this door there sat a menacing machine gun nest, wherein sat Hans Gerlach, leaning on a deceivingly slim automatic assault rifle called the FG42, the Fallschirmjagergewhr. He loved that gun, even though it was a paratrooper gun and he was just sitting in a nest waiting. It was situated opposite the garage door, and for some reason, pointed not away from it down the road that led back to the main Birkenau complex, but toward the garage doors. Apparently there may be a need to fire in that direction?"

Glenn looked at Jens and chuckled. He felt like a schoolboy being read a fascinating adventure story by some really wise and excellent storyteller.

Jens eyes grew dark.

"I have never spoken about that building to anyone. Being a lycanthrope for hundreds of years has its share of blood and brutality, but it is closer to the instinctive actions of a beast than what we are talking about at Birkenau, and especially in Number Three-Thirty-Four. German scientists have always been brilliant, but most have been of weak stomachs and have never been able to deal with the guilt that accompanies proper research on human subjects. That is why most had opted for using rodents and monkeys and such, as they do in the West. That all changed during the war. Suddenly the scientists and doctors had labor to do their dirty work. They could act clinically and guilt free from a distance while their experiments were being carried out and documented by some of the prisoners. Slave labor. So the most extreme of these "experiments" occurred at # Drei Dreißig Vier. It was a lot to put up with even if I had plenty to eat all the time and lived the luxurious life of German oppressor."

Verse 23

"09. 07-15-20. 01. 04-01-20-05. 23-09-20-08. 04-09-12-12-09-14-07-05-18-19. 19-03-08-12-15-14-07."

End Of Transmission.