Saturday Wordzzle Challenge: Week 6

Well, I think I'm going to post this early... Friday evening.... because I'm bored and restless this evening and I'm going to try to add a Mr. Linky and I want to know if it works. So....

Since this is week 6 of our challenge, I'm going to just get right down to it without any introduction. Two people - Jay and Michael - sent me email submissions this week. So, with a reminder of the words, I'll post their offerings and my own and hope that Mr. Linky takes care of the rest. (I'm not sure why the Mr. Linky isn't showing the links up front - probably because it's the free kind - but if you click on it, I think it does work.)

Words for today's ten-word challenge were: arbitration, music, salamanders, frankinsence, trojan horse, balderdash, bottomless pit, fantastic, pugnacious, Trivial Pursuit and for the mini challenge: maniac, video store, telephone pole, flute player, windy day

From Jay Cole Simser I received the following mega wordzzle:

It was a bright and windy day as I walked down the street to the video store. I was watching the clouds in the sky as they danced around the sky like a maniac in a disco.

As I walked past the store I noticed a flyer attached to the telephone pole. Missing: Pet Salamanders, it said Reward, Inquire within. Music was playing over a speaker attached to the door frame of the store as I entered. The not so subtle scent of frankincense filled the air with a fantastic aroma.

A flute player with a pugnacious attitude was seated behind the counter playing a game of Trivial Pursuit with an assistant. A picture of the Trojan horse hung on the wall behind them.

“I have come to inquire about your missing pets. I would like the reward.” I stated succinctly.

“Balderdash” replied the flute player, “There is no way you could have found them.”

“Oh but I have,” I said as I took them from my pocket and placed them upon the counter.

“Well, I’ll be,” he said as he examined them. “Where did you find them?”

“I was on my way to an arbitration hearing when I noticed them on the edge of the bottomless pit over by Hastings General Store. They were about to fall in.”

Losing his attitude he took the pets into his hands and kissed them gently on their moist backs. “The reward will be forthcoming” he stated and then turning purple and green from the chemicals on the salamanders he fell over writhing on the floor. His assistant opened the cash drawer and took out the reward money.

“Will he be all right?” I inquired.

“Of course,” replied the assistant. It is just his colorful way of saying thank-you.

****

Michael submitted the following - also a mega wordzzle.

"ANOTHER FINE DAY"

"It was a fantastic, trojan horse of a windy day... one you woke to and welcomed but afterward felt as if you'd fallen into a bottomless pit with a maniac flute player whose music was pure balderdash. In a word... pugnacious. A day you wind up fighting through like a game of Trivial Pursuit up a telephone pole, trying to maintain a grip on reality while your opponents insist on submitting every bone of contention to arbitration. Salamanders slithered in my brain as I stumbled to the video store... overdue again. Another 'fine' day for me.... I should have had the frankincense to stay in bed."

****

My contributions are as follows:

Ten word challenge:
Pugnacious and the Salamanders , rock group extraordinaire, were happily celebrating their hit single, "Trojan Horse Comes Riding." The flip side, "Frankincense But No Myrrh," was doing really well too. They were euphoric. Their music was finally taking off. "This is beyond fantastic," Pug was giggling, "finally we can pay off that bottomless pit of debt that's been stifling us and start living like the moguls we were meant to be. Just as he said that, his cell phone rang and the others could faintly hear the voice of their agent on the other end. "Bloody F***ing Balderdash!," Pug screamed into the phone. "Those songs are ours. Ours! We wrote them ourselves and Trivial Pursuit, those wanna be hacks, know full well it's our music. They couldn't write their way out of a paper bag. Stinking phonies. "What do we do next? Arbitration? What's to arbitrate? I wrote Trojan and Jay Cee wrote the other one. We can prove it. Well how much are these lawyers going to cost us? Bloody hell... Well, do what you have to do, I guess." The Salamanders, who, of course had heard only Pugnacious's side of the conversation, were sitting crestfallen, shaking their heads. "We never catch a bloody break, " one of them muttered and then noticed that Pug himself seemed oddly untroubled by this terrible turn of events. Just as he was about to comment on this, Pug - who never tired of practical jokes, even bad ones - shouted gleefully, "April Fools! We're still rich! In fact the album just went platinum!" Lucky for him, his companions were already too drunk to wring his neck.

Mini Challenge:
Crazy Louie who owns the video store hired some desperate, broke flute player to climb the telephone pole outside the store and give a concert. He thought it would bring in more business and it might have except they chose to enact this little stunt on a very windy day. Even before the poor guy blew off the pole and broke his leg, you couldn't hear a thing over sound of the wind whistling. Crazy Louie is such a maniac that first he tried to sue the flute player for breach of contract and then he went after the phone company for not making their poles wind proof. After that, people pretty much started avoiding the store. Now that's what I call a publicity stunt gone bad.


I got brave and tried a Mega challenge this week:

So I'm heading to the video store and some maniac in an old VW van painted all over with salamanders and those Native American flute player guys - Kokopelli, I think they're called - well, he runs me off the road right into a telephone pole, if you can believe it. It's an awful windy day. I was already running late and now I'm stuck dealing with some car accident that will undoubtedly waste more of my time with arbitration down the road. Of course I'm grateful that I'm not dead. There is that. And my car seems reasonably unhurt. I get out of my car and this antique hippy guy come up to me all, "Peace Brother," like some vision from the past. "The Trojan Horse here," he says, pointing the the old van, "gets a bit pugnacious at times and develops a mind of her own. So sorry. I hope you're all right." Now this is so surreal and fantastical that I'm torn between shrieking at him and laughing. And then it starts to rain. "Come on in the back," he says. "No point negotiating in the rain." So I think, "why not," and it's like stepping into an sultan's palace... all purple cushions and smelling of incense - he said it was frankincense - and there are these two incredibly beautiful woman sitting there... It was pretty amazing... "Have a seat," one of them says, pointing to a huge cushion. I'm so stunned by everything that I do - and then they offer me a cup of coffee and some brownies. Amazing brownies. What happened next is kind of a haze of food and smells and music. I remember being so hungry that my stomach felt like a bottomless pit. Seems like they had tons of food... all kinds of things... and at one point someone (was it me?) went out for a pizza. We played some kind of game. I forget whether it was Balderdash or Trivial Pursuit. Next thing I knew it was morning and I woke up in my car. The strange hippie and the van were gone. I'd say it was all a dream - that I must have bumped my head or something - but I still smell like frankinsence and I'm ravenously hungry.

And of course I have to add my vanity (stuff I wrote years ago that nobody would ever read otherwise) wordzzle from my collection. Feel free to use these words yourself if you prefer them: Ebullient, bonanza, Bambi, geyser, carpet, goose, turnover, Taos, aquarium, fun

Bambi Bonanza, as she had renamed herself when she left Pittsburgh and moved to Taos, was ebullient. She was free! She was loose as a goose and twice as happy. Life was fun again. Bambi Bonanza was no middle-aged frump like Agnes deBono. Nope. Bambi knew how to live. The day of her father's funeral, Agnes had baked her last apple turnover, and closed and locked the door of the family bakery forever. A week later, bakery and house were sold and she was on the road in a new station wagon, with a new name, a new wardrobe and a new profession. In Taos she had bought the small house on Cactus Creek Road because she liked the carpet and the view and because the owners had agreed to let her keep the aquarium. Besides she had just had a good feeling about the place. Two weeks later, trying to plant a tree, she had found the geyser. The reporters who came to cover the geyser story had noticed her paintings and liked them very much. Fascinated by her story, they had written a Sunday Supplement article about the lady who moved from Pittsburgh to paint fish and wound up with a geyser in her back yard. Now her paintings were selling faster than she could do them. She was rich and happy and suitors were asking for her hand. Life was very, very good.

NEXT WEEK'S CHALLENGE

Anyone who wants to emulate the amazing megawordzzlers can try merging both challenges and make another megawordzzle. I finally tried it this week and it was fun.

Next week's words are a mix of suggestions that came from Jay, Michael and Richard. I mixed their suggestions together just to make it more interesting. I would LOVE to have more suggestions for words/phrases from other participants.

Next Week's Ten Word Challenge will be: fruitcake, necromancer, gibberish, marshland, Lone Ranger, hog-wild, effluvia, plaintiff, phonograph, fern

And for the Mini Challenge: frozen, history, myrmidon, Shylock, incapacitated


Thanks for playing. For those who are new, here are some guidelines to make the process more fun.

Enjoy! See you next week.

And this week, if all goes well, I don't have to paste all your links in because there's a MR. LINKY! Yippeee! Let's hope it works.