Ah, that was fun.
OOC: Reposted from theatrical_muse from 4/2/2006, 39 of 50.
I may have mentioned before that April Fools' Day is one of my favorite holidays. Humans are normally such a stuffy, serious race, attaching such tremendous weight and import to their silly little lives and customs. The fact that they have a holiday to celebrate trickery and misrule is simply delightful. So yesterday I took my son to the Renaissance (no, not the Renaissance Fair -- traveling in time to a holiday in a different year when it's *not* that day today is cheating, but traveling to a holiday in a different year when it's that holiday today is just good clean fun), where he actually managed to *not* get himself accused of witchcraft this time (to be fair, the people of the Renaissance weren't entirely sure they were unsophisticated enough to believe in witchcraft.) He played the role of a traveling magician and did a few very impressive tricks (well, impressive to mortals; to the Q they were about as remarkable as driving your car to the grocery store to get milk, but then again, in the Renaissance that *would* have been pretty impressive.)
After that, we dropped in on a former playmate of my son's -- admittedly, a not entirely willing former playmate. (When my son was a tad younger than he is now, he picked up on my fascination with humans, and particularly with a specific human starship captain, and snagged a human starship captain of his own to play with. Unfortunately, being a child, he wasn't exactly all that nice to his toys, so my not-yet-ex-then and I had to step in and take him back to the Continuum or he'd have killed the poor guy.) We turned their ship computer sentient and had it fall in love with the captain, infested their engine room with pink and chartreuse tribbles, and made the Vulcan science officer speak in iambic pentameter for the rest of the day. Good times, good times. The really funny part was when the starship captain figured out it was my son behind the whole thing, and gave him a stern talking-to, which included the line "Do your parents know where you are?" My son attempted to explain that I had actually *brought* him on this trip, but since I positively refused to manifest when he asked me to, it was a rather amusingly embarrassing situation for him. No, I'm not above playing practical jokes on my own kid, either.
What are you happy about right now?
That is. It's not often I get to have much fun lately -- the kid takes up so much of my time -- but he's finally old enough now that I can enjoy a little father-son bonding with him, take him out for excursions and the like. And as much fun as it is to play tricks on people, it turns out it's even *more* fun to have someone young and impressionable to share your amusement with. Teaching my son what constitutes a really funny joke is even more pleasurable than playing the joke out itself. It's also still quite a lot of fun to torment human starship captains, and I can't do that with my usual starship captains any more since I've actually developed some empathy for them (oh, the horror). I can't play tricks on Kathy or Jean-Luc without feeling bad about it. Jim Kirk, however, really deserves a few more jokes played at his expense.
So let's talk about fun and mockery.
Write about a time you mocked somebody.
A time? My entire life is about mocking people. But okay. Here's a good story.
The Emperor of the Filo Empire, on the planet Cherassa, about five hundred years ago, was considered so holy and godlike by his people that they were not actually allowed to look at his face. He could only go out in public with an elaborate mask on, and he spent a lot of time sitting behind screens or being covered up by giant fans held by blind naked slaves or things like that. He also wore tall gilded platform shoes because his feet were never supposed to touch the ground, was wrapped entirely in robes so no part of his skin was ever visible, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Now, at least some of the Emperors had the good sense to think all this protocol was stupid and privately rebelled against it or at least complained to their wives. But Emperor Zavoriat did not. *He* thought he really was all that and a chocolate biscuit. Despite the fact that he *had* to have been aware that he required food and sleep like any mortal, and had to take baths, and got mild illnesses, he actually believed his own hype about being a god in mortal form.
So I turned up in the guise of an old man, got into the palace as a supposed supplicant, bypassed the bureaucrats by turning invisible, and just kind of wandered in to the audience room. I said something like, "O great Emperor, you are the hand of God here in the mortal world, but is it not true that you yourself are a mortal man, and pass water and wind like any other?"
He didn't take that so well. He tried to have his guards drag me off and beat me, presumably to death, for insolence. I let them smack me around a little and pull me as far as the door to the chamber. Then I turned around, looked over at the masked emperor, and said "You *are* a mortal man, and the gods do not favor those who claim their status wrongly. They will punish you for your arrogance, O emperor."
Then I vanished.
Then I had a soundtrack of really loud farting noises accompany the emperor every time he walked anywhere. Step, fart. Pass by in a litter, fart. Sit on his dais, fart. He had all kinds of magicians come in and try to take the curse off, but since none of them really did have any supernatural powers and I really did, obviously this did not work. When he tried to have one magician executed for being unable to help him, I turned the executioner's sword to rubber, and it kept bouncing off the guy's neck. Then I jumped up on the execution stage, in the guise of the old man, and yelled, "It is the mercy of the gods! All praise the gods' mercy for sparing this man!" The emperor pretty much had to let the magician go at that point, and then he couldn't really justify executing any of the others. I also turned up in the emperor's bedroom a few times to suggest that maybe he might want to drop the "I am a god" act and perhaps *that* would convince the actual gods to rescind his punishment. He didn't. He made farting noises everywhere he went for another year or two. I added smell, and then I added clouds of harmless green and yellow gas, and then I started giving him terrible stomach cramps every time he said something really pompous.
Finally his son deposed him on the grounds that he had obviously earned the displeasure of the gods, and publicly admitted that yes, the emperor and his line *were* mortal men and should not claim to be gods. A wise choice on the young man's part, if you ask me. Cherassa's a constitutional monarchy or something like that now. Haven't been back in a while.
Did you ever intentionally make a complete fool out of yourself while fully realizing what you were doing?
Sure. I play the fool when it serves my purpose. You can't be all "I am omnipotent, fear me!" all the time, and in fact, I don't like doing it *most* of the time. My little boxing match with Benjamin Sisko didn't exactly earn me any fear and awe creds, but on the other hand, I actually got him to punch me out, which I never managed to provoke even *Worf* into doing. Now that? Was funny.
I also have to admit I probably clowned around just a bit too much when I was trying to get Kathy (that's Captain Kathryn Janeway to you) to have my baby. I'd *heard* human women like a guy with a sense of humor, and I certainly didn't want to scare her, and, you know, I've been told that when I'm actually trying I do come across as quite mad, bad and dangerous to know, so I was trying to put her at ease. Tone down the bad boy aspects a bit. Her ex was a kind of dull boy-next-door type (okay, a smart guy and all, for a human, but hardly a firework show) and the guy she was dancing around with a "will-we-or-won't-we" thing was a wooden Indian -- and I mean that literally. (Well, the literal part is the Indian part. The wooden part merely refers to his brain.) She didn't seem like the kind of woman who went for the bad boys. So I made a complete idiot of myself so she wouldn't be intimidated. I put flowers in her room, I fixed up her bed, I (temporarily) put on a tattoo to mock Chakotay's, I claimed my biological clock was ticking... Unfortunately, it didn't work -- she wasn't intimidated, but she also didn't think I was attractive. (I must, here, interject a graphic shudder at the tastes of a woman who could possibly prefer Commander Chuckles the Wilderness Man to *moi*.) Later on she nearly had a fling with an enemy fascist who liked to send telepaths to concentration camps, so obviously I *should* have gone for the bad boy thing, but who knew?
I may have mentioned before that April Fools' Day is one of my favorite holidays. Humans are normally such a stuffy, serious race, attaching such tremendous weight and import to their silly little lives and customs. The fact that they have a holiday to celebrate trickery and misrule is simply delightful. So yesterday I took my son to the Renaissance (no, not the Renaissance Fair -- traveling in time to a holiday in a different year when it's *not* that day today is cheating, but traveling to a holiday in a different year when it's that holiday today is just good clean fun), where he actually managed to *not* get himself accused of witchcraft this time (to be fair, the people of the Renaissance weren't entirely sure they were unsophisticated enough to believe in witchcraft.) He played the role of a traveling magician and did a few very impressive tricks (well, impressive to mortals; to the Q they were about as remarkable as driving your car to the grocery store to get milk, but then again, in the Renaissance that *would* have been pretty impressive.)
After that, we dropped in on a former playmate of my son's -- admittedly, a not entirely willing former playmate. (When my son was a tad younger than he is now, he picked up on my fascination with humans, and particularly with a specific human starship captain, and snagged a human starship captain of his own to play with. Unfortunately, being a child, he wasn't exactly all that nice to his toys, so my not-yet-ex-then and I had to step in and take him back to the Continuum or he'd have killed the poor guy.) We turned their ship computer sentient and had it fall in love with the captain, infested their engine room with pink and chartreuse tribbles, and made the Vulcan science officer speak in iambic pentameter for the rest of the day. Good times, good times. The really funny part was when the starship captain figured out it was my son behind the whole thing, and gave him a stern talking-to, which included the line "Do your parents know where you are?" My son attempted to explain that I had actually *brought* him on this trip, but since I positively refused to manifest when he asked me to, it was a rather amusingly embarrassing situation for him. No, I'm not above playing practical jokes on my own kid, either.
What are you happy about right now?
That is. It's not often I get to have much fun lately -- the kid takes up so much of my time -- but he's finally old enough now that I can enjoy a little father-son bonding with him, take him out for excursions and the like. And as much fun as it is to play tricks on people, it turns out it's even *more* fun to have someone young and impressionable to share your amusement with. Teaching my son what constitutes a really funny joke is even more pleasurable than playing the joke out itself. It's also still quite a lot of fun to torment human starship captains, and I can't do that with my usual starship captains any more since I've actually developed some empathy for them (oh, the horror). I can't play tricks on Kathy or Jean-Luc without feeling bad about it. Jim Kirk, however, really deserves a few more jokes played at his expense.
So let's talk about fun and mockery.
Write about a time you mocked somebody.
A time? My entire life is about mocking people. But okay. Here's a good story.
The Emperor of the Filo Empire, on the planet Cherassa, about five hundred years ago, was considered so holy and godlike by his people that they were not actually allowed to look at his face. He could only go out in public with an elaborate mask on, and he spent a lot of time sitting behind screens or being covered up by giant fans held by blind naked slaves or things like that. He also wore tall gilded platform shoes because his feet were never supposed to touch the ground, was wrapped entirely in robes so no part of his skin was ever visible, et cetera, ad nauseam.
Now, at least some of the Emperors had the good sense to think all this protocol was stupid and privately rebelled against it or at least complained to their wives. But Emperor Zavoriat did not. *He* thought he really was all that and a chocolate biscuit. Despite the fact that he *had* to have been aware that he required food and sleep like any mortal, and had to take baths, and got mild illnesses, he actually believed his own hype about being a god in mortal form.
So I turned up in the guise of an old man, got into the palace as a supposed supplicant, bypassed the bureaucrats by turning invisible, and just kind of wandered in to the audience room. I said something like, "O great Emperor, you are the hand of God here in the mortal world, but is it not true that you yourself are a mortal man, and pass water and wind like any other?"
He didn't take that so well. He tried to have his guards drag me off and beat me, presumably to death, for insolence. I let them smack me around a little and pull me as far as the door to the chamber. Then I turned around, looked over at the masked emperor, and said "You *are* a mortal man, and the gods do not favor those who claim their status wrongly. They will punish you for your arrogance, O emperor."
Then I vanished.
Then I had a soundtrack of really loud farting noises accompany the emperor every time he walked anywhere. Step, fart. Pass by in a litter, fart. Sit on his dais, fart. He had all kinds of magicians come in and try to take the curse off, but since none of them really did have any supernatural powers and I really did, obviously this did not work. When he tried to have one magician executed for being unable to help him, I turned the executioner's sword to rubber, and it kept bouncing off the guy's neck. Then I jumped up on the execution stage, in the guise of the old man, and yelled, "It is the mercy of the gods! All praise the gods' mercy for sparing this man!" The emperor pretty much had to let the magician go at that point, and then he couldn't really justify executing any of the others. I also turned up in the emperor's bedroom a few times to suggest that maybe he might want to drop the "I am a god" act and perhaps *that* would convince the actual gods to rescind his punishment. He didn't. He made farting noises everywhere he went for another year or two. I added smell, and then I added clouds of harmless green and yellow gas, and then I started giving him terrible stomach cramps every time he said something really pompous.
Finally his son deposed him on the grounds that he had obviously earned the displeasure of the gods, and publicly admitted that yes, the emperor and his line *were* mortal men and should not claim to be gods. A wise choice on the young man's part, if you ask me. Cherassa's a constitutional monarchy or something like that now. Haven't been back in a while.
Did you ever intentionally make a complete fool out of yourself while fully realizing what you were doing?
Sure. I play the fool when it serves my purpose. You can't be all "I am omnipotent, fear me!" all the time, and in fact, I don't like doing it *most* of the time. My little boxing match with Benjamin Sisko didn't exactly earn me any fear and awe creds, but on the other hand, I actually got him to punch me out, which I never managed to provoke even *Worf* into doing. Now that? Was funny.
I also have to admit I probably clowned around just a bit too much when I was trying to get Kathy (that's Captain Kathryn Janeway to you) to have my baby. I'd *heard* human women like a guy with a sense of humor, and I certainly didn't want to scare her, and, you know, I've been told that when I'm actually trying I do come across as quite mad, bad and dangerous to know, so I was trying to put her at ease. Tone down the bad boy aspects a bit. Her ex was a kind of dull boy-next-door type (okay, a smart guy and all, for a human, but hardly a firework show) and the guy she was dancing around with a "will-we-or-won't-we" thing was a wooden Indian -- and I mean that literally. (Well, the literal part is the Indian part. The wooden part merely refers to his brain.) She didn't seem like the kind of woman who went for the bad boys. So I made a complete idiot of myself so she wouldn't be intimidated. I put flowers in her room, I fixed up her bed, I (temporarily) put on a tattoo to mock Chakotay's, I claimed my biological clock was ticking... Unfortunately, it didn't work -- she wasn't intimidated, but she also didn't think I was attractive. (I must, here, interject a graphic shudder at the tastes of a woman who could possibly prefer Commander Chuckles the Wilderness Man to *moi*.) Later on she nearly had a fling with an enemy fascist who liked to send telepaths to concentration camps, so obviously I *should* have gone for the bad boy thing, but who knew?