Up

2 The Going

It could not last. Laurinda’s hips were flapping, and she was hopping mad.

2.1 Our Hero’s Imagination

Our hero imagined her as a rabbit with long ears and a fine set of tusks. In a short time the image drifted to a walrus, and our hero could not help letting his sinister smile giving him away. Figure 2.1↓ shows a gross approximation of the rabbit-walrus.
figure rabbit-walrus.png
Figure 2.1 The rabbit-walrus.

2.2 Laurinda’s Anger

“Wasn’t it great”, said Laurinda. Actually she said it in the present tense, but our poor storytelling skills have changed that to a cheesy past. Don’t do this at home, kids. You want to be regarded for your authenticity, and misquoting isn’t going to help much.
Anyway, back to the story. Laurinda wanted to hit him in the head with a big ham that she kept just for occassions like this, and being a solid Hitchcock fan she was ready to cook the ham afterwards and serve the resulting stew to any policemen that might come by. She was also a huge Almodóvar fan, but she was unaware that in an early film the divine Pedro had copied the scene. Actually both directors had copied the idea from a short story by Roald Dahl, very much worth reading. Although it must be said that in this story it was a lamb leg, which hardly offers the consistency and stiffness necessary to kill a sturdy husband.
But who cares. Laurinda meanwhile had a funny appearance; if you want to see why please direct your eyes to figure 2.2↓.
figure laurindas-anger.png
Figure 2.2 Laurinda’s anger pictured in a mildly humorous tone.
And yet, how furious was really Laurinda, whom we may optionally refer to as Melinda from now on? Table 2.1↓ vainly attempts to quantify it.
Anger Time
1 2
Table 2.1 Laurinda’s anger as a function of time.
For the sake of Laurinda’s furiousness, here is figure 2.3↓ again.
figure laurindas-anger.png
Figure 2.3 Laurinda’s anger, again.
But how did Laurinda compute her anger? We cannot but speculate; here is a stupid suggestion in listing 2.1↓.
anger = time - 1
Algorithm 2.1 Laurinda computes her anger.
The result is in table 2.2↓, proving we were right all along. Also subtables a↓ and b↓ show anger and time, respectively.
Anger
1
(a) Only Anger.
Time
2
(b) Only Time.
Table 2.2 Laurinda’s anger quantified, divided in two.
Interested in that last table? Let us repeat it but without a label and with a table and a subtable a↓.
Censored
(a) The rabbit-walrus does an encore.
Anger Time
1 2
Table 2.3 One more time.

2.3 The Passing Away

Our hero was passing by the village. He had only stopped to say “Hi!” Again here our lousy skills have made us spoil the quote, but this time for the opposite reasons: everyone knows how to say “Hi!”, so we don’t need an actual quote. It is enough to report that the had stopped to say hi, even maybe qualifying it a bit to make do for the missing exclamation sign: he could have stopped to say a friendly hi. Getting all literary he could have stopped to say a longing hi, although this road leads to bizarreness. It could be cool though.
But anyway. Laurinda was so mad, so hopping mad that she called her friend, the Assassin. He was not in town at that precise moment, but that didn’t help our hero as he was just outside town killing people in a small barn. Just for practice.
Our hero left the village, but Laurinda cunningly annotated the MAC address of his laptop’s wifi card. The lack of networking knowledge on the part of our hero (who really couldn’t tell a SYN packet from an ACK) was to play an important part in the story — if he had known how to change the MAC address, which identified him with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel, he would have been safe.
Let’s not even get into that last scalpel metaphor, shall we not? It leaks worse than the Titanic.