h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A87815181

Affrontispiece

Blemnox [noun]: Architectural eyesore. Term is inverted shorthand for “NOXious BLEMish on the landscape.” It is applied to any large mansion that tries to impress by mimicking numerous iconic buildings, but with no discernible talent for making disparate elements or styles work well together. Wait a hundred years, however, and public reaction changes from “What were they thinking?” to “Wow, this is a historical building which must be preserved!”

Herein can be found the original annals of Blemnox as written for the short short story thread.

Part 1: That Sinking Feeling

As we walked down the spacious marble steps of Blemnox for the last time, Viola aimed a thunderbolt of well-deserved vitriol at me: "Thanks to you, Grandpa, we are now homeless, and likely to freeze to death when winter comes!"

True, I had lost Blemnox Mansion through heavy borrowing, but it had paid for my wife’s medical bills, Viola's failed nail polish company and, yes, my gambling debts. "Viola, dear,” I replied, “we still own the land surrounding the mansion, and it extends far enough south that we can live in the camper during the mild winters there." As we drove south the next day, Viola tried to convince me that the camper would be a dangerous place to live because of the herds of Komodo Dragons that would be there, but her point became moot after we accidentally left the road and sank inexorably into this quicksand…

Part 2

After a kind stranger rescued Grandpa and Viola from the quicksand, Viola decided that any further contact with Grandpa would be hazardous, so she married a wealthy Count from either Luxembourg or Poland (his accent was so thick she couldn't tell which, and the landscape at his estate could have been in either place). Meanwhile, Grandpa was living in the shade of a butternut tree behind Blemnox, trying to win the forest from a group of squirrels that were addicted to a betting game that used acorns as chips.

One day, Viola came to the foot of Grandpa's tree to tell him she had regained Blemnox by helping her son Jasper win it in a poker game, and that she now had custody of the lad after her divorce from the Count.

When Grandpa realized that he must be quite ancient now that he had a great-grandson, he restrained his urge to skip merrily along the garden path to Blemnox. His urge to drink himself unconscious was not so easy to resist, however.

Back at the house he slept off his massive hangover, while Viola began to suspect that her beloved Grandpa was in the beginning stages of dementia, and would need counseling at the very least.....

Part 3

The doctors who examined Grandpa determined that committing him to their psychiatric institution would do less good than leaving him under the loving indifference of Viola. Viola had little time for Grandpa, however, as Jasper was going through a difficult period regarding his sexuality. Several times a day she had to go down to
Bitterwater Pond to retrieve him from the water, where he was trying to mate with a particularly large catfish.

Grandpa didn't even notice any of this, as he was busy with hunting, the sport that his own grandfather had taught him back in the days before the estate's foxes, stags, and wild boars had departed for greener forests. The only animals left to hunt were wuheebies, giant snails that rode around in red go-carts with the letter "S" on the
license plates, as if begging onlookers to exclaim, "Look at that 'S' car go!"

Part 4

The years passed eventfully at Blemnox, with Jasper resolving his sexuality issues and marrying a woman geologist named Fluorine, and Viola taking clarinet lessons so she could play duets with her friend Claire, who played the viola.

Grandpa was on his deathbed a couple times, but he regained his health when Viola arranged to have Blemnox designated as a Historic House so developers would never tear it down in order to put up a Wal-Mart or a fried chicken franchise. In order to achieve the Historic House designation, Blemnox needed a geological analysis, for which Fluorine gathered a team of experts. The team's final report coincided with Jasper's giving birth to twins (Fluorine had been too busy to bother with pregnancy, so she had found a doctor who could make Jasper carry the babies instead), and was unexpectedly downbeat.

"There's a lot of bad news about Blemnox and only a little bit of good news," the team's leader told the family, "with problems that include radon in the basement, lead in the water, an ancient Indian burial ground 30 feet down, a geological fault two miles down, a toxic waste dump under the gazebo, sharks in Bitterwater Pond, crop circles in the corn field, poison ivy in most of the forest, major damage to the sewage system, and (here's the little bit of good news) not much likelihood that developers would want to deal with the preceding issues."

Part 5

Viola found it annoying that Grandpa would sometimes pretend to be wasting his time by chasing snails in go-carts, but actually be hiring surveyors and spectographers to debunk the geologists' claims about Blemnox's problems. As she sat down to dinner one night, she realized that this was such a time, as Grandpa kept throwing out tidbits of information such as "Y'know, I found out that the gazebo is on our neighbor's land, not ours" or "that's not an Indian burial ground under the house, but gold and silver deposits worth hundreds of millions of dollars..."

When she dug deeper, she realized that Grandpa was deeply worried that the geologists' report would cause the local government to condemn Blemnox as overly toxic and kick them all out.

As it turned out, an innovative minerals-extraction company found a way to get the gold and silver out of the ground without weakening the house's foundations. Suddenly they were wealthy enough to make the estate an environmental and aesthetic paradise that people would come from far and near to gawk at...


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Blemnox has been an entertaining part of my daily reading this month, thank you! And well done for making it to the end

Deb

[Amy P]

Any end would have been an accomplishment. And thanks for the kind words. With a little luck and some effort, I will print out the saga of Blemnox and give copies to people on my gift list this year.