“They’ll destroy the world if they’re let loose!”
“Do these ‘atoms’ have practical use?”
“We could eat ’em, and then
We’d become supermen!”
“Let’s just smash ’em to generate juice.”

Event: EBR-I in Idaho becomes the first nuclear power plant to generate electricity (it powered 4 light bulbs)
Year: 1951
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_plant

“Don’t you just put your lips together and blow?”

“I think that’s whistling.”

“Isn’t it basically the same?”

“No.  Have you ever played the flute?”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Then why are you giving me advice?”

“You look like you could use it.”

Simon Park Station was getting busier.  The people who took off early on Friday afternoons—who made up a significant portion of the downtown workforce—were streaming through, hoping to refresh themselves before going out again or to fall asleep watching TV.  Not a one of them was interested in the conversation between the old woman and a young man holding a flute.

“You could say that again,” Peter told her.  He liked to get things done on his own if he could, but he was not opposed to asking others for advice.  So far that day his only advisors had been the old woman, a variety of semi-reliable websites, and a sleep-deprived Peter Hamlin.  It was no wonder that things had gone so poorly.

“So, can we get started, then?”  The woman shifted awkwardly to remind him that she was handcuffed to a garbage can.  She didn’t see how anyone could forget something like that, but the boy hadn’t yet proven himself to be all that bright.

Peter didn’t answer right away.  He was still thinking about advice.  Unfortunately he couldn’t spot anyone around who looked particularly helpful.  He wished there was a police officer around who could tell him what the deal with this woman was, but there was none to be seen.  Shouldn’t there have been someone on duty?  For that matter, what about the cop that had handcuffed the old woman?  Where had she gone?  Why hadn’t she come back?

He sighed.  “No, I don’t think we can.  I just told you that I can’t really play this thing anymore.”  He looked down at the flute and felt a pang of guilt—guilt for not being able to help the woman, or guilt for losing a skill he had once had?  “And anyway, I don’t like your plan.  I’m not going to force someone else to break into the police station for me.  That’s despicable.”

“You’re going to give up now?  When you’ve done this much already?  You can’t back out!  You’re in too deep!”

“I’m ‘in too deep’?  What are you talking about?  You make it sound like I’m working for the mob.”  He briefly considered the possibility that the woman was part of the mob, which just goes to show how messed up his thought process was.  “What have I done?”

“You stole that flute!”

“I borrowed this flute—which I used to own—from my mother.  I don’t think they’re going to send me to prison for that one.”

The woman groaned.  “God, I’m bad at this.”

It took way longer than eighty days
And he wasn’t the first anyways
But to circle the girth
Of the entire Earth
Hey, let’s give Drake a smidgen of praise

Event: Francis Drake’s fleet departs from Plymouth. By the time he returned, he had circumnavigated the globe.
Year: 1577
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake#Circumnavigation_of_the_earth

A. 呆　B. 朽　C. 果　D. 床

E. 杯　F. 枕　G. 宋　H. 困

The holiday season is truly here.  You know how I know?  Because Theoman sees an empty box and immediately thinks trouble.  And what self-respecting kid on Christmas morning wouldn’t?  But really, he should think back.  When he first opened that box at the top of A, before he channeled his inner consumer and asked the question every child asks this time of year (“Where’s mine?”), his first reaction would have been one of utterly unmitigated amazement.

Shirley saw amazement in the next character over, but what’s really going on is that this unfriendly character is making a rude gesture, not a rude glance.  Why?  Well, rudeness breeds its like–someone just let off a really nasty smell over there.  Seriously, it’s like decaying flesh or something.  (Theoman knew exactly what was going on here at B.  I don’t mean to name names, but if I had a finger to point at the source of the problem, well . . .)

A Fan, on the other hand, saw decay in C: the ugly Mr. Potter.  But where’s his chair?  He couldn’t take over the town–except in an alternate reality–he couldn’t shut down the Building and Loan, he couldn’t beat the Bailey boys, and now he’s lying helpless on the ground!  Looks like his failure is complete.  (Theoman was in the know here again.  I guess we can thank him for giving the heartless old dinosaur a friendly shove.)

Celebrating his victory over the Scrooges of the world, Theoman decided to head to D to celebrate with a nice steaming cup of hot chocolate, cider, or other appropriately seasonal beverage (can one have steaming hot egg nog?)  Unfortunately, he picked a bad seat–see how it’s missing a side over there?  Now he’s flat on the floor with his old nemesis!  (Before attempting to sit, he really should have talked to Shirley, who knows a floor when she sees one.)

Shirley, ever the Good Samaritan, rushed in to help, of course, but found that she had rushed a little too quickly.  Tired, she lay down at E.  What she thought was a pillow, however, was actually Theoman’s dropped cup.  Hopefully it was no longer steaming hot.

Now at F, A Fan recalled the poor, disturbed Mr. Gower.  Mr. Gower didn’t mean to mix up the pills.  He didn’t know they were poison.  He shouldn’t even be at work at all; he just needs a place to cry.  I recommend a nice pillow.

At G, Theoman’s amazed, A Fan’s feeling just a bit scandalized, and Shirley wants to raise a toast.  To what?  To the Song Dynasty, of course.  Why?  Well . . . because they were so amazingly sexy, apparently.

And now we come to the end, and brother, it shows.  Shirley wants things to be over.  A Fan wants a drink.  Theoman can hardly keep his eyes open.  Sure, it would be nice to close out with children’s heads and the visions of sugarplums therein, but what we’ve got here is trouble.  With a capital T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for picture characters.  Time to go find some more.

You like bugs, huh?  Okay.  Meet the bug radical.  This little critter is responsible for all kinds of disasters, like . . . rainbows.  And, uh, Germany.  Also strength, snakes, scratches, barbarians, wax, and hedgehogs.  Better get your fly swatters.  Or your story-writing pencils.  Either works for me.

A. 蛮　B. 独　C. 蝟　D. 虹

E. 掻　F. 蛇　G. 強　H. 蝋

To the right of the door was a closet.  He pulled the door open and was greeted by a rush of wind, smelling of things that are too old to touch.  The closet was dark and expansive; god only knew exactly what had accumulated there over the centuries.  In the center, however, a shaft of light fell from an opening high above, a tiny hole far too distant to see.  All around were innumerable treasures, ranging from the dimly lit to the completely invisible, but Peter saw only the light.  He stepped forward carefully, looking now at his feet, now at his destination, knowing that the slightest misstep could spell doom.  The walk felt like an eternity.  The further he got from the door, the dimmer the light from the exterior became, until eventually it was only him and the pedestal that stood in the column of illumination.

Peter stood there, his goal within arm’s reach, for quite some time.  This was it.  This was what he had come for.  But he was afraid.  Afraid of what?  He couldn’t tell you—though in the murky depths of the ancient temple, being afraid of everything was always the safest bet.  He closed his eyes and thought of his mission.  Reaching down blindly, moving as gingerly as a safecracker, he traced the edge of the stone pedestal, and then his fingers spiraled inward, slowly advancing until they reached the hard plastic case.  With easy familiarity he flipped open one latch, then the other, then he gently lifted the lid.  Then, though they felt as heavy as one of the temple’s great stone doors, he raised his eyelids.

There it was: the flute, glimmering in the beam of light like a treasure worthy of an ancient king.  Before he really knew what was happening it was in his hands.  A tune started to play, seemingly from nowhere, starting softly but growing as he raised his prize up to eye level, and then climbing in a triumphant crescendo as he thrust it skyward, as if the flute could somehow carry him up the beam of light to safety.

And then he turned around and saw a huge boulder rolling toward him.  Yeah, right.

As before, Peter’s fantasy was based on a hint of truth: in this case, the amount of time it took him to search the closet.  It was nowhere near as spacious as an ancient temple chamber—either real or imaginary—but you could still have hired a professional treasure hunter to dig through it and felt that the expense was justified.  Mom and Dad’s opinions differed on many subjects, including cat naming, but one thing they agreed upon was organization.  They agreed it was overrated.

He eventually located it on a shelf, hidden behind a very old sport coat.  He decided to carry out any further investigation elsewhere, because the room still made him a little uncomfortable, partly because it was the place where (presumably) his sister had been conceived and partly because of thoughts of poison-tipped darts shooting out of holes in the wall.  He walked cautiously out of the closet, watching out not for differently colored stones that would trigger traps but trying to make sure he didn’t trip over any shoes or old tennis rackets.

Peter went out to the kitchen.  Sourdough turned his head around to watch.  Sourdough had a curious nature, but he also was smart enough to know what happened to curious cats, so he did his best to act like he wasn’t.  He relocated from the windowsill to the back of the couch and promptly pretended to fall asleep.

Peter opened the case, not as slowly as he would have if he had really found it on a dusty stone pedestal, but not as quickly as when he had been playing it every day, either.  It seemed to be in pretty good condition.  Knowing Mom, she probably dug it out once a month or so to polish and maybe even try a few notes.  Then she would return it to the mysterious morass of the closet.  He wondered how long before she noticed it was missing.

His concern, however, was not with the condition of the flute; it was with the condition of the player.  He hadn’t even touched the thing in six years.  Peter had no idea whether the forgetting curve for instruments was more like the one for bicycle riding (pick it up twenty years later and you’re still fine) or the one for calculus (stop doing it for a month and forget everything you ever learned).  His fingers found the appropriate keys quickly enough, and he raised it up, resting the instrument above his chin and just below his lower lip.  Then he blew.

About the best thing you could say for the performance is that it didn’t cause Sourdough to yowl, leap up, and run down to the basement to join Cicero.  It took him four tries to get any kind of sound out of it at all, and when he finally succeeded the noise was feeble and grainy.  He tried a couple renditions of “Hot Cross Buns,” which was the only tune for which he could remember the fingering.  It sounded like “Hot Cross Buns” always sounds, which is to say, pretty bad, because the only people who ever perform “Hot Cross Buns” are ten-year-olds who picked up their instrument for the first time less than three weeks earlier.

He stared at the flute accusingly, then turned to his audience to see the reaction.  Sourdough stared back, as inscrutably as you would expect a cat to do.  Possibly to himself, possibly to the cat, or possibly to the flute, Peter said, “This isn’t going to work.”

But with the possibility of inquisitive family members returning at any time looming—not to mention the Beherrschunglied—he packed it up and took it with him back to the subway station.

Not from TNT or from grenades;
This land suffered most keenly from spades
Drain the water away
And what lives cannot stay
‘Twas canals almost killed th’Everglades

Event: Everglades National Park is dedicated
Year: 1947
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everglades_National_Park

A. 試　B. 這　C. 診　D. 誉

E. 獄　F. 罰　G. 誓　H. 誰

Sometimes it seems as though the answers one gets correct on KYPC tell a story.  Theoman’s story seems to be fairly clear, as he got attempt(A), prison(E), and punishment(F).  We’ve all heard this story plenty of times: he’s in prison and, for some reason, decides he wishes to no longer be there.  So he makes an escape attempt–a fairly poorly arranged one, by his own description.  This, naturally, leads to recapture and punishment.  It seems like he’s wound up in one of those soft, white-collar prisons, though, as evidenced by the fact that the punishment for breaking out is just a noogie.  The real question, though, is how he tried to get away; he failed to identify one of the most popular modes of transportation for prison breakers, the crawl(B).  Maybe if he had thought to keep his head down, it wouldn’t have ended up getting noogied.

A(nother) Fan, on the other hand, had a(nother) plan: tunnels are the way to go.  Sure, it’s not easy, especially since he, too, failed to figure out how to crawl–good luck digging a tunnel big enough to walk through.  But if you succeed, you sure can cover yourself in glory . . . except that the character he identified as “glory,” H, is actually “who,” which, if you think about it, has sort of the opposite meaning.  Oh well.  Actually, if you’ve busted out of prison, a little anonymity probably can’t hurt.  It sure seems like it would have helped a lot of those guys in The Great Escape.  As a matter of fact, A(nother) Fan did not correctly identify any characters this week, which means that his tunnel ended not just short of the tree line but in the Kommandant’s office.  On the plus side, he seems to have missed any punishment because of it.  And he sure does remember an awful lot of that movie, which is a kind of victory of its own, I suppose.

Shirley’s story, however, is somewhat sadder, neither the standard failure of Theoman’s attempt nor the comical failure of A(nother) Fan’s–for you see, prison(E) is all she knows.  She is unfamiliar with the glory of D, so she makes no vow(G) to break free from her imprisonment.  She doesn’t even bother to examine(C) the bars for potential weakness.  But, if anyone’s keeping score, she took second place this week, so it’s not all bad.

It’s the Christmas season–time to put up the tree.  What does the Christmas tree mean to you?  Well, it depends on what you put on it, I suppose.  When you put different things on these “trees,” you get the following: a pillow, the Song Dynasty (of China), trouble, to complete/achieve, glass/cup, floor, to decay, and amazement.  Sound hard?  Well at least you don’t have to untangle all those damn little metal hooks.

A. 呆　B. 朽　C. 果　D. 床

E. 杯　F. 枕　G. 宋　H. 困

The door to the old Hamlin place creaked open, seeming to move almost of its own accord.  A strange sound rang out from some distant inner room—it could have been laughter, and if it was, it definitely wasn’t someone laughing with you.  A thick layer of dust coated the floor; no one had crossed that threshold in decades, except . . . were those footprints?  Hoofprints? A small shadow darted past the open door.  It was probably just a cat.  That’s it, just a cat.  Please let it just be a cat . . .

It would be difficult to explain why exactly Peter envisioned his return home—something he did almost every week—as though he had been triple dog dared to step inside the rotting mansion on the hill at the outskirts of town.  Suffice it to say, his imagination was running wild.  Thinking realistically hadn’t served him all that well so far that day.

The door did creak a little, but it certainly didn’t move of its own accord.  Peter had to put his shoulder into it, just as he had done every summer for as long as he could remember.  He stutter-stepped, hopped automatically over the three or four pairs of shoes that were inevitably lying right in the middle of the entryway, and skidded to a halt just before crashing into the inconveniently positioned coat tree.  It wasn’t the most subtle entrance, but Peter was pretty sure that no one was home, much more sure than he would have been if he was really walking into a house where no one had lived for generations.

Mom and Dad both started work early and left early, so on any other day of the week they would either already be back or be arriving shortly.  But Friday was Mom’s grocery shopping day, and she was one of those people who refused to buy anything premade and insisted on inspecting every purchase thoroughly, so it was a very time-consuming activity (often involving multiple stores).  Dad stayed late at work for extra-curricular activities.  Dizzy, being a teenager, was never in the house unless she was contractually obligated to be, especially during the summer.

So Peter was alone, and he was quite glad to be.  He sure as hell didn’t want to try to explain why he wasn’t at work.

Well, not entirely alone.  Shortly after regaining his balance, he was greeted by Sourdough, the more sociable of their two cats.  He rubbed up against his leg, consented to be petted for a few seconds, and then returned to his windowsill perch to get back to more important matters: scanning the backyard for birds, chipmunks, and other dangerous invaders.  Peter assumed that Cicero was down in the basement, because Cicero was always down in the basement.  Cicero only emerged at feeding time, when guests who were allergic to cats came over, or during thunderstorms—though in the last case she only came up so she could hide under his parents’ bed.  Mom liked to say that she was so shy because she was a girl who had been given a boy’s name, but Dad stubbornly insisted that they had agreed to each name one of the cats, and he wasn’t about to change anything now.  If the cat couldn’t handle being named after one of history’s greatest orators, well, that was his problem.  Err, her problem.

But Peter was not there to get reacquainted with his pets.  He was on a mission.  It comforted him to think of it as a mission, because the alternative was admitting that he was running silly errands for a crazy homeless woman in order to avoid joining her in madness because of an annoying song.  Yes, “mission” was definitely the better option.

He had told the old woman that he wasn’t sure where the flute was, but really, he could think of only one place it could possibly be.  Peter made his way to the master bedroom, hesitating only slightly to enter a place that for so many years of his life had been presented as the domain of his parents, well beyond the realm of children.  Of course, Mom and Dad did still sleep in the room, but Peter was too old to feel nervous just because of that . . . right?

Just a small tube with foil wrapped ’round
Was used first for recording a sound
Then came records; then tapes
CD’s did our way traipse
Nowadays, data’s how music’s bound

Event: Thomas Edison first demonstrates his phonograph
Year: 1877
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph

A. 碇　B. 磯　C. 砲　D. 碁

E. 磨　F. 妬　G. 砂　H. 砕

The website isn’t really cooperating with me right now, so we’ll see whether or not this actually gets posted.

Perhaps our knowledge of kanji can tell us what we are meant to be. For instance, Theoman would make a pretty poor apothecary, because he tries to grind up his medicines using an anchor (A). On the other hand, he might be a pretty impressive player of Go, because he sees the entire beach (B) as his board. Other than that, he easily recognizes cannons (C) and jealousy (F), so . . . pirate, I guess?

In other news, A Fan is back–or is it that he never truly left? As usual, he does his best to test the boundaries of relevancy. B could be Captain Kangaroo, provided that he is captain of a ship, and also provided that he has run his ship aground on the beach (maybe he, too, disagrees with the prevailing belief that ships are meant to be crewed). F is in fact Mr. Green Jeans because he is green with envy, presumably based on his desire to throw Captain Kangaroo overboard and usurp his position as Captain of the grounded ship. Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Moose are blatant rip-offs of Bugs Bunny and Bullwinkle, respectively, and will thus not be acknowledged here.

That poor anchor. First Theoman tries to use it in his mortar, and now Shirley is attempting to load it into a cannon. Well, at least it can’t be said that it doesn’t lead an interesting life. Shirley is, however, the only one who knows a good beach when she sees it, but she is also familiar with the darker side of life: smashing and crushing (H). Also of note is the fact that both Shirley and Theoman seem to favor a magnetic Go board, though the actual magnet is . . . oh hell. Looks like I actually forgot to put the magnet character up there. I instead accidentally substituted a character meaning “sand” at G. Magnet looks like this:

磁

And E is for polishing. Or brushing your teeth.

Anyway, since words seem to be such a big deal around here, this week we will be looking at characters containing the element that means “word.” Their meanings include: punishment, to vow, to crawl, to examine/diagnose, prison, to attempt, glory, and the question word for who.

A. 試　B. 這　C. 診　D. 誉

E. 獄　F. 罰　G. 誓　H. 誰