In Which I Fail to Tempt the Gods

Current Reading: The Best New Fantasy, edited by Sean Wallace

Inspirational Quote: "The hag Sedition was your mother, and Perversity begot you. Mischief was your midwife and Misrule your nurse, and Unreason brought you up at her feet - no other ancestry and rearing had you, you freakish homunculus, germinated outside of lawful procreation." -- Henry Arthur Jones, writing to George Bernard Shaw.

Ulysses is the Roman interpretation of the Greek hero Odysseus. I chose it as my nom-de-web because I liked the sound of it, and I'm a bit of a fan of Greek history and mythology. Unfortunately, there's never really been much similarity between he and I (unless you count the way both of us seem to spend most of our lives feeling somewhat at sea).

Picking an example at random:

A Greek hero, equipped with the modern miracle of a bread maker would no doubt turn out loaves of truly Olympian perfection. The crust would be crisp and golden, the interior would be soft and light. Zeus himself would declare it ambrosia.

I, however... well, meet Frankenloaf.



I don't know what I did wrong. I suspect everything. In desperation, I attempted to detach part of Frankenloaf and sample it, but it resisted every tool at my disposal and now I need a new hacksaw. Finally discouraged, I flung it into the farthest reaches of the swamp behind the Palace. I heard it hit the ground with a final thunk, no doubt digging itself a crater of notable proportion. I fear I may have done ill, however, for I suspect it will return. I think it will be eventually rejected by the denizens of the swamp and hurled bodily back into my yard... possibly even right in through the kitchen window by a flock of malevolent robins enraged by the damage done to their delicate beaks when they tried to peck at it. Should that fail, I have no doubt that it will remain a testament to the culinary incompetence of one man, a man whose name will be lost to history many years after the apocalypse when the mysterious lump is unearthed by puzzled scientists. "The scanners read it as organic. According to all tests, it ought to be edible but it isn't. Surely the ancients possessed some superior science or knew some magic now lost to us."

In the meantime, it will haunt my dreams: a frozen Blob, raging with impotent hatred for its creator.

Oh well. Maybe less flour next time...