About two and a half hundred years ago, George Washington spoke to me about a new plan to defeat the British. He said it involved a risky venture to remove a 77-gun British Ship-of-the-Line from Boston harbor and a farmer-inventor named David Bushnell. I asked Washington if the plan was to distribute phamplets describing us as the “Continental Army” and theirs as the “Incontinental Army.” He said, no, not exactly.
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Apparently the farmer-inventor’s farm-invention was an egg you crawled into, and then they sunk it. My job was to play with the little squeaky-handles and use the egg’s “propellours” to move it slowly in the vague direction of the British ship. Not an easy feat when all you have to see by is light from glowy fungus, what what!
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Then I was supposed to use another squeaky-handle to drill a hole in the ship, so I could attach a “flintlock time-bombe”, as Bushnell described it. This is me trying my best. But for some reason, this squeaky-handle was harder to use than the other squeaky-handles. I couldn’t get it attached.
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I floated slowly away, aware of the ticking bombe strapped to my egg. But my fortunes became even more dire when British soldiers on the shore saw me surface for air. (It is hard to breathe with no air, unless you are an anaerobic fungus, which all of my copilots, incidentally, were.) The soldiers gave chase in a barge, pushing it forward with their pole. It was an epic chase scene. Squeaky squeaky squeaky, ploosh ploosh ploosh. They were gaining. I released the time bomb. The deftly dodged it and after fifteen minutes of one-mile-an-hour evasive manoeuvers, off it goes! Fortunately, nobody was injured.
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I never got to sink that ship. Guess what happened to my egg a year later? (Bushnell, the goofy twat, called it a “turtle”–whatever.) My egg SANK.
I guess sometimes you really can be too good at your job.
