By: Anima Zabaleta
Performed by: Anima Zabaleta and Arri Gaffer
Mmmm, smells good! What's the occasion? Did I forget some important date? Should I have picked up a cake?
Thanks, hon. Dinner's in an hour.
That long? but I'm starving!
Oh, you'll live. I was listening to the radio today, and there was an interesting program about the Slow Food movement. I had an epiphany! We are always so hurry-scurry with our lives, eating on the run, dashing from this place to that, multi-tasking our lives away…
So I sat down and listened to the whole show. Really listened and took it to heart. I'm not saying we need to live of the land or anything, but we can be more conscious about what we eat. I went through the freezer and cabinets, tossing out the convenience foods, the pop tarts and pizza pockets, that sort of stuff. I can bake pies and turnovers; I've already flagged recipes in the cook book…
Why are you looking at me like that? You know I can cook; I just haven't in a while. We'll spend time together on the weekend, putting in a garden… and in the summer, we'll have strawberry ice cream made from milk from the local dairy. If this is going to work, I'm going to need your help...
If you insist, honey. And, yes, I know you can cook. Are you sure you really want to go through with this? Tell me you don't like a greasy order of onion rings and a milkshake on a Saturday night, from the burger-rama…
Well, sure I do, but not for the tenth time in a week. I'm exaggerating a little… but not by much. Look at these receipts… We ordered take-out for dinner, when we sat down for dinner at all, and I bought lunch every day last week. These are just the slips in my coat pocket. How many more are in the car from my daily Joe-To-Go? Did you take a bag lunch to work even once?
Sure I did…
Oh yeah, like what?
Left over pizza from poker night.
Um hmmm…
Alright already! We'll try it your way for a while… What did you say was for dinner?
Soup… It's an old fashioned recipe from my granny… Listen to this: Start with 5 pounds of turtle meat… There were 14 in her family; I cut it down for us…
Turtle soup!?!
But of course! I figure, if you are what you eat, then our first slow food meal should be the slowest meat I could find.
Oh brother…
Low Master, High Master
By: Guy David
Justin was a low master, one of the 3rd class mages. The high masters didn't expect much of him. He wasn't the one they would summon to fight demons or battle the dark lords of mischief. Those mischievous dark magic practitioners where a real problem, an annoyance they would have to deal with, but Justin wouldn't be the one helping them with that.
Justin was their magical chef, and was pretty good at it. He could conjure up Italian dishes like no-one else could. His cannelloni was exemplary and his lasagña a wonder to behold. He started young and quickly became very popular amongst the mages. His name went before him and word reached even the dark lords of mischief themselves, who decided they needed to taste his dishes for themselves, so they did what dark lords of mischief do – they kidnaped him.
Justin wasn't one to fall victim to his own fear. Instead, he viewed this as an opportunity to prove his worth to the high masters. He had ambitions. He watched, and he listened, looking for a hint of weakness in his captors. After testing and tasting his skill they made him their chef. He knew he had to be perfect at it since they where known to be merciless and they wouldn't hesitate in torturing and executing him if they decided he was useless to them, so he created the most magical culinary masterpieces he had ever conjured up and listened. At last he found it. It was perfect since food was his speciality. All he needed was to magically slip 5 pounds of turtle meat into their dish of the day, timed perfectly, and they would vanish into nothingness.
As dinner began, Justin started dazzling the dark lords of mischief with ravioli and appetizers. He served one culinary wonder after another, seemingly almost invisible to them. They rarely noticed their servants. When the time came the magic ingredients appeared in their dishes. They didn't notice. They continued eating, talking and laughing cheerfully. Justin was so masterful with his magical dishes that neither the color nor the taste of the food changed. Eventually it began. They started shrinking one by one. In the end all that was left of them where little green paddles. Justin easily found his way out and escaped.
After he returned victories to the high tower of mages, he was granted a star of honor which is one of the mages highest of decorations, and he was promoted to middle mage. He knew as a 2nd class mage he would get all the training he needed to become a 1st class mage. One day he would fulfill his dream of becoming a high master.
Turtles all the way Down
By Jeffrey Hite
In his 1988 book Steven Hawking repeated this well known story:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"[1]
"What is surprising about this story is not that it happened or didn't happen, it is that is is true. Not the part about the scientist or the old woman, the part about the tortoise."
"What are you talking about old man?"
"Wait I am not crazy, I know that you think I am crazy, but you don't understand. I have been there."
"What, where?"
"Under the plate."
"Under the plate?"
"Haven't you been listening to anything that I have been telling you? Last year, I took a team with me and we travel under the plate that the world sit upon. I had spend my life searching for a way to get to the edge of the plate, but it was not until a few years ago, I figure out a way. We didn't go over the edge, but found a hole in the plate near the ring of fire in the South Pacific."
"So you went under the plate the Earth is resting on and saw the tortoise?"
"Oh yes, we saw it all right. And it saw us to. And as soon as it did it reached that monstrous head around and tried to eat us. At first we were too fast for it. But it has a very long neck. You the hole in the plate must have been from it sticking it stout up into the world, because we were right in it's reach, so you see we had no choice."
"What do you mean? You had no choice about what?"
"We had to kill it. See." He said pulling a bag of meat from the freezer.
"What is that?"
"I told you we had to kill it. This is five pounds of world supporting turtle meat. Soup?"
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