I am awoken AGAIN by the person playing an
alchemist (Al Chemical's the name, since you asked) playing a part in this year's
Fool's Day Parade - she requires some sort of mystic gum as a prop for her character at rehearsal today and if it wouldn't be too much trouble could I go out and look at acquiring some for her? Always a sucker for such things, I do a spot of research on the web and find that they're most likely to be found in the Jewish neighbourhood.
So there I am in the "Jew supply store", looking for this gummy stuff, where I am informed by the shopkeeper there that what I'm seeking is not only used in a Jewish freezing process (the binding of what you want to freeze to a tin of kosher meat) but it is also an integral component in the formation of a
dybbuk. Dybbuk? I ask. A friend's mother replies:
Hans Moleman! I'm not convinced, so I ask for elaboration. According to this source, a dybbuk is the spirit of a man who is cremated in a hallucinatory or psychotic state (drug- or religion-induced) and cremated, his insane spirit bound, still living, to the spot where his ashes are located, only dying when they're widely dispersed. I am shown a picture of a mausoleum somewhere in The Holy Land where a dybbuk is rumoured to abide. It looks like a
Mahjong set marked with the names and icons of major nations, ideologies and corporations. (Note that this description of a dybbuk is neither consistant with the mention of Hans Moleman nor with
how it is conventionally known in
kabalist circles or in the
Monster Manual.)
So it seems that Robin Williams is starring with Brendan Fraser in a sequel to the less-than-critically-acclaimed Bicentennial Man, entitled a.c.i. containing a riotous scene in which Robin's robotic nose is detached and used as a combination smoke- and stink bomb, causing a stock market crash by disrupting the olfactory detectors of the small droids which buzz and hover above all the traders, picking up whether or not they want to buy or sell from sudden shifts in body chemistry.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, looking like a very pissed-off Gypsy drag queen, appears in a number of televised shorts protesting and physically attacking a video game simulating the piloting experience of the particular make of tank which rolled over his people's (?) freedom so many decades before. He punches and kicks the arcade cabinets and produces very amusing CLANK CLANG sounds, eventually moving on to also attack unrelated game cabinets made by the same company.
Dybbuk-gum is easier to come by than I'd suspected - pots of it are arranged, bowling pin-style, blocking the main entrance to a local supermarket, and what's more - it's on special!
DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, READ THE SHADOWRUN SOURCEBOOK JUST BEFORE GOING TO SLEEP.
it's strange that I seem to recall many aspects of my dreams quite quite vividly only when I am asleep for periods of 12 hours or more with intermittent interruptions. Hm.