Heisenberg replies, "No, but I know exactly where I am!"
The officer, annoyed, says, "You were doing 85 miles per hour!"
Heisenberg throws up his hands and groans, "Great! Now I'm lost!".
The enemy was everywhere.
The 7s did not fight like civilized numbers. They did not line up neatly in equations. They slipped between the trees at odd angles. They appeared in the mist, sharp and angular, then vanished before anyone could carry the one. They left behind signs carved into bark: 7 > 6.
At first, 6 laughed it off. “It’s just psychological warfare,” he told 5.
But 5 who'd been deployed earlier, wasn't laughing.
After that, 6 began hearing them everywhere. In the rustle of fractions. In the snapping of twigs. In the long silence between subtraction problems. The 7s had mastered fear. They knew that the worst thing you could do to a number was not erase it, but make it doubt its place value.
One morning, their commanding officer, Captain 8, told them they were advancing toward Base 10.
“We go in clean,” said 8. “No remainders.”
But the jungle had other plans.
The 7s had set traps: repeating decimals, unsimplified fractions, word problems with unnecessary trains. By noon, the whole unit was disoriented. By evening, nobody knew whether they were greater than, less than, or equal to anything anymore.
6 made it back, technically.
But not really.
After the war, he tried to return to normal math. He stood in number lines. He attended group worksheets. He even tried dating 4 for a while, but whenever anyone mentioned “rounding up,” he went silent.
Then one day, at a neighborhood barbecue, a 7 walked in.
Tall. Lean. Pointed.
6 froze.
Someone said, “Hey, why is 6 afraid of 7?”
6 stared across the yard, gripping his paper plate with white knuckles.
And in a voice barely above a whisper, he said:
“Because you weren’t there, man.”
“You’re the worst fruit ever!”
The lemon wobbled after him, but his oval shape made him list violently from side to side, which did nothing for his unsettled stomach. The potato followed behind, trundling along slowly.
When the potato finally reached the bottom, he found the lemon leaning against a lamp post, looking very pale and clearly sick. The pea, however, was already jumping up and down. "That was brilliant! Let's do it again!"
The potato looked at the lemon, then back at the pea, and said: "Easy peasy, lemon’s queasy.".
Child: I can tie a knot!
Me: You can knot!
Child: Yes, I can!
Poison IV caused constant itching.
"They are, of course, Nazis. They have a kind of Nazi attitude. They are the left wing of Nazism. These guys don't want any other point of view. They don't even feel guilty using tax dollars to spout their propaganda. They are basically Air America with government funding to keep them alive." - Fox News Chief Roger Ailes describing NPR executives
