Dinner Crashers

Some friends are joining us for dinner and just as we are sitting down the doorbell rings.

It's Anthony Bourdain! And he's brought a black dairy cow and many bottles of eggnog with him.

We all get drunk on the eggnog (which is Anthony Bourdain Brand Bacon-Flavored eggnog and somewhat surprisingly good) and build a big fire in the center of the room. I try to talk Bourdain into letting us kill the cow with machetes and eat it, Apocalypse Now-style, but he won't let us.

The next day, my friends and I wake up with massive eggnog hangovers. There's no trace of a fire, or of Bourdain and his cow, but there are empty eggnog bottles and cowshit everywhere

Tasty Slavery

I can't tell how big the warehouse is, because the only light is directly over my workstation. I know it has to be huge, though, because of the echoing sounds of boot heels on the concrete floor as my supervisors walk by to check on me periodically. 

My workstation is a long, smooth rectangular table, and I sit at one of the long sides. Off to my right, the table ends at the edge of a conveyor belt which slowly moves through an open oven. I'm surrounded on all sides by massive plastic tubs filled with fruitcake mix - mostly candied fruits and nuts with only a bit of flour and seasonings. It's my job to take handfuls of the fruitcake mix and pack it tightly into tins to be baked.

None of the tins are alike. There are round ones of all different sizes, ring shapes, and rectangles. I pack the tins until they are filled to the top with the mix, and then slide them to the right. They catch on the conveyor belt and travel through the oven to bake. I can't figure out how they can possibly all bake evenly, since none of them are the same size, but they do.

I work for hours. It's very repetitve, and every time I think I am almost done, someone walks through the darkness and leaves me more tubs of mix and more tins to fill.

The GWB Conspiracy

I have discovered a conspiracy related to the George Washington Bridge. Viewed carefully, the architecture of the bridge gives the precise location of an abandoned uranium mine in a remote location of Upstate New York.

For months, I study everything about the bridge: the placement of rivets, layout of the suspension cables, the number of strands in each cable and how they are twisted, even the pattern of cracks in the roadway. The more information I gather, the more I understand how the patterns present in the bridge represent and correspond to geographical features that can pinpoint the mine. I am on the verge of a breakthrough - I know the general direction of the mine from the bridge, and I think I can identify its rough whereabouts.

But I need to work more quickly. There are two opposing groups in the wings - men from the US Government, trying to prevent me from finding the mine, and a terrorist organization that wants the uranium.