This week’s puzzle:

An embattled administrator struggles to solve a familiar problem while dealing with the ineffectuality of his assistants, the infidelity of his wife, and a man threatening to break his legs.  Even when he resorts to extreme measures and calls the military, his poorly educated enemies still get away.

Last week’s puzzle:

The new guy screws up his first job and experiences trouble at the airport, heart trouble, and car trouble on the next.  He offers to resign but changes his mind because of money troubles.

And the answer is . . . ▼

The Athletics to Huntington came
To defeat the Bostons was their aim
But their hope a leak sprung
When the pitcher Cy Young
Threw the modern day’s first perfect game

“So,” said Dave, as he rose slowly from the couch and backed away a couple of steps.  “It’s come to this.”

“It has,” agreed Jordan.  He followed suit, leaving the two of them standing at opposite ends of the coffee table, fiercely staring each other down.

“Well?” said Dave after a tense couple of silent minutes.  “Why don’t you start it?”

Jordan shook his head gravely.  “This is a sacred rite,” he said.  “It must be started by a neutral party to be legitimate.”

“Fine.”  Dave glanced around the room, and, failing to find someone who could be neutral on the basis of liking them both equally, fell back on the alternative: someone who disliked them equally.  “Hey Jon!” he shouted in the direction of the staircase.

The walls and floors of the apartment were not terribly thick, so they could hear a couple of muffled curse words before the upstairs door swung open.  “What?” Jon called back.

“Could you come down here for a sec?  We need you.”

There was a brief pause, during which Jon calculated the odds of this problem simply going away if he ignored it.  When the answer came out to be somewhere less than zero, he began his usual angry stomp down the stairs.  “This had better be quick,” he grumbled as he entered the living room.  “This ten-page paper I’m working on is due tomorrow, I hope you know.”

“It will only take a moment,” said Jordan.  “We need you to start.”

“Start?” Jon asked, his natural curiosity overcoming his better judgment.  “Start what?”

“The duel,” Dave explained.

Jordan and Dave were locked in that age-old struggle: who would get control of the television?  Dave wanted to watch a movie on the DVD player.  Jordan wanted to watch one of his favorite TV programs.  Being poor college students, of course, they only had the one television set and, even more importantly, the one couch.  Only one man could have his way.  They had tried to come up with a peaceful solution, but in the end all negotiations failed.  The only thing left was to fight it out, each man wielding the emblem (remote control) of the side he was championing.  The last one left standing would rule the TV . . . until the next time the two of them came into conflict.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Jon.  It was hard to decide which was worse: the fact that his roommates were actually going to fight each other over something as trivial as who got to pick what to watch, or that this monumentally foolish waste of time had to involve him.  “This is going to be really loud, isn’t it?  I’ll never get my paper done now.”

“We duel in silence,” said Jordan.

Jon was familiar with the phrase.  They played foosball “in silence,” which generally only ended up being about as loud as a jumbo jet landing next door.  But he had headphones, he had blankets to stuff under the door, he could pretend that the building was vibrating because of an earthquake.  And it wasn’t like things would go any better for him if he refused.  “So you just want me to say ‘En garde’ or something?” he asked resignedly.

“No,” said Dave.  “Do we look French to you?  You have to say ‘Fight,’ but you need to do it in a really cool way.”

“Fight,” Jon said in his most apathetic, tranquilizing tone.

“That’s no good,” said Dave, shaking his head.  “Say it like you’re some ninja kung fu master guy.”

“Fight-oh?” Jon tried.

This must have been good enough, because Jordan immediately lunged at Dave, who only barely managed to deflect the blow.  “You have fun with that,” Jon grumbled, though they were no longer listening.  “And could you at least try not to break anything?” he added as he went back up the stairs.

“I have the advantage,” said Jordan, as he swung his weapon in a broad arc over the table.

“Oh really?” said Dave, as he ducked and rolled around to the back side of the couch.  “How’s that?”

They had said that the fight would take place in silence, but that was only for Jon’s benefit; trash talking was a major component of the battle.  The Television Rite of Succession Duel, as it was known, was a serious affair, to be sure, but nowhere near as serious as a game of foosball, and thus it could be safely interrupted by talk.

“I have the larger weapon,” Jordan answered.  “Greater reach.”  He made a sweeping cut downward and almost caught Dave on the rebound when his arm deflected off the soft back of the couch.

“Hey, guys!” yelled Jon.  “I’m going to the library!  I’ll be back later!”  No one noticed.

“That may be true,” said Dave, “but my weapon is lighter, more nimble.  I can get in several attacks to every one of yours.”  He tried to demonstrate this by spinning around and getting in a few quick jabs, but Jordan retreated while attacking with a grace that belied his size.

The battle raged on for several more minutes, finally ending when Jordan, in a questionable maneuver, body slammed the couch to try to pin Dave.  He lost his weapon, allowing Dave the easy win with a tap on the forehead.  This brought the lifetime record to 23-20-2.

“There,” said Dave, “now we can finally . . . hey!  What’s going on?”

The television was already on and showing a nature program.  The letters “REC” featured prominently in the corner.  “Jon must have set it to record something,” Jordan said hollowly.

“Do you know how to make it stop?” asked Dave, pressing buttons frantically.

Jordan stared at his remote, as if realizing for the first time that it could be used for something other than combat.  “I don’t.”

They gazed at the television, out of their control until Jon came back.  “Truly,” said Dave, “we have been outmaneuvered by a master.”

His fun ruined, Cloud went below
To join up with the others
He really wasn’t wild about
This newfound band of brothers

“There’s Cloud!  There’s Cloud!” cried Jessie
Like she might break into song
Barret only grumbled
“What took you so goddamn long?

“Now you’re here, I’ve got to know
Something I’m wond’ring ‘bout
Was anyone from SOLDIER there
When we took that place out?”

“Sh’yeah right,” Cloud scoffed, “You really
Let this one go to your head
If more like me had been there
You would all be freakin’ dead”

“Dead?” squealed Jess.  “Wait, what?” said Biggs
Said Wedge, “Huh, who’d’a thunk?”
It really was quite obvious
That Wedge and Biggs were drunk

“Puh-leez,” said Barret, “I don’t think
That you’re really all that
Any time you wanna go
Come here; I’ll knock you flat”

This week’s puzzle:

The new guy screws up his first job and experiences trouble at the airport, heart trouble, and car trouble on the next.  He offers to resign but changes his mind because of money troubles.

Last week’s puzzle:

A building is almost closed because of issues involving the plumbing.  Of the three who set out to fix things, one loses his mind, one is relieved of a long-standing burden, and one meets the person who will become closer to him than anyone else in the world.

And the answer is . . . ▼

For that fateful trip to Tahiti
Old Lieutenant Bligh put ship to sea
He was to get breadfruit
A plan his crew made moot
When they mutinied on the Bounty

Jon was not enjoying the rain.  The wind had twisted his cheap umbrella inside out a long time ago, meaning that he looked and felt more like a drowning victim than a normal person, but this was not his chief concern; the tattered remnants of his umbrella were being used to shield his backpack.  The weather report called for rain, so Jon had left his laptop at home, but now his textbooks, notebooks, and other paper-based school materials were in serious danger of becoming soggy to the point of being unreadable.  So it’s completely understandable that when he attempted to open his door and failed, he became a little agitated.

Checking first to make sure that he had undone the lock, Jon gripped the doorknob and heaved his weight against it.  The door moved inward, but only slightly; it quickly shut again with a strange bouncing motion that was accompanied by an even stranger squeaking sound that called to mind something made of rubber.  This did not reassure Jon at all.

He weighed his options.  He could try calling his roommates on the inside, but even if they answered there was no guarantee that it would produce the results he was looking for.  It certainly wasn’t likely to get the door open quickly.  No, this was one of those desperate times that called for desperate measures.  Jon walked back down the steps, took a deep breath, spat out the water that got in his mouth, and ran full speed at the door.

The door swung inward, sending a great quantity of . . . something flying, and was followed shortly afterward by Jon, who skidded, tripped on an unidentified object, and collapsed.  He kicked the door shut and then lay there for a few seconds, letting his brain recover so that he could figure out what the heck had just happened.  His first priority: identifying what he had landed on.  It was not, as he might have expected, the floor.

Jon picked up one of the things and stared at it.  “Shoes?” he asked blearily.  His head was a little fuzzy from the two recent impacts.  There were shoes under him.  There were shoes on the foosball table.  There were shoes on the back of the couch, where his two roommates were engaged in their usual afternoon activity: being glued to the TV for hours on end.  Or rather, where they had been gazing mindlessly at the television until Jon made his dramatic entrance.

But where had they come from?  The shoes, that is, not the roommates.  Jon owned three pairs of shoes, which was at least one pair more than either of the other two did, and yet there were dozens of shoes scattered around the room, none of which looked familiar.  When his own brain failed him, he was forced to put the question to the two men who were sitting on the couch, staring at him as if he had just gone berserk and knocked down the door, which, technically, he had.

“Why are there so many shoes here?” Jon asked.  At the moment he was too confused to even be mad.

“We’ve been collecting them,” Dave explained matter-of-factly.

“But . . . why?”

“They came to us,” said Jordan.

“But . . . what?”  Jon had known ahead of time how difficult it would be to get an answer out of these guys, but he hadn’t known how literally painful it would be when he tried to do it shortly after hitting his head.

“We don’t know where they came from,” said Dave.  He got up from the couch and very slowly, very carefully removed one of the shoes that had ended up between the poles on the foosball table, making sure not to disturb the position of a single player.  It was the most delicate thing Jon had ever seen him do.  Then Dave hurled the shoe into the corner by the door.

“They just started showing up in front of the place a while ago,” he continued while performing a slightly less precise extraction of a sneaker that had gotten wedged into one of the goals.  “Being carried along by the water running along the side of the street.  We figured that they’d just get ruined out there, and somebody might come looking for them, so we brought them inside.  We were going to put up a sign about it when the rain stopped.”

Very strange things were transpiring.  A multitude of shoes had mysteriously floated along the rain runoff to arrive in front of their door.  Even weirder, his roommates were acting selflessly.  Was this deluge actually the end of the world?  Jon tried to clear his head by shaking it, but all that he accomplished was to make Dave and Jordan cringe when some of the droplets from his hair went in the direction of the foosball table.  “And why were they all stacked right in front of the door?” he asked wearily.

“You always tell us to take off our shoes when we come into the house,” Jordan admonished him.

“Right.”  It didn’t make any sense, but Jon didn’t have the will to fight the nonsense at that point.  “I’m going to go upstairs now, to . . . study,” he said, though actually he felt like he needed a nap to allow his brain to reset after the madness.

The upstairs door shut quietly.  “Damn,” said Jordan.  “He’s going to yell at us to turn the volume down now, isn’t he?”

“When does he ever not?”  Dave shook his head.  “Man, I never expected him to actually body slam the door.  I’m kinda impressed.”

“Impressed enough to turn down the sound while he’s studying?”

Dave thought about it for a second.  “No.  You go tell your football buddies playing out there in the mud that we’re going to need their shoes a while longer.  I’m going to go pile them in front of his room so he can’t get out.”

Cloud could not keep his eyes off
That white t-shirt, stretch’ed tight
Somewhere above, a voice said, “Cloud
You do recall me, right?”

Cloud felt that things were going well
He’d get a kiss, or more
But then the shout of “Where’s that bum?”
Came from beneath the floor

This week’s puzzle:

A building is almost closed because of issues involving the plumbing.  Of the three who set out to fix things, one loses his mind, one is relieved of a long-standing burden, and one meets the person who will become closer to him than anyone else in the world.

Last week’s puzzle:

Two leaders are captured by a depraved torturer.  After their escape attempts fail they manage to talk their way out of the situation, and they rejoin their comrades following a dramatic chase scene.

And the answer is . . . ▼

Known today for his fine pizza pie
Back in World War One he ruled the sky
He shot down eighty planes
But the myst’ry remains:
By whose hand did the Red Baron die?