“You got really drunk…” Uh. Oh. The MIB’s are gonna have to pull a switcheroo on the Nightly News and Newspaper pics and vids of the DRUNKEN RAMPAGING SPHINX.
Of course if Shelly sphinxed, then wouldn’t it shred her clothes? So she transforms, sobers up, gets control of herself, perhaps after pinning the jerks against the wall while offering her critique of their sociological opinions, then humanizes, and is once again drunk. And naked.
Everybody seems to be convinced Shelly morphed into a sphinx to devastate the area.
I seem to remember Shelly is quite of creating respectable amounts of damage and injury… as a human.
The fact she is sitting in plain view and not worried about being seen by police means she didn’t kill anybody (they’d be looking to get her off the streets if she had).
Her description would be unmistakable…. female, black hair, 5’4″, 165+ pounds, heavily muscled, 2% body fat (at most), capable of throwing V-8 engines 30 yards,… handle with extreme caution.
This could be amusing. I am sure we are all thinking the same thing, Shelly gets drunk, Shelly gets mad, and out comes Shellinx to whip their posteriors.
Or maybe not. Consider Shelly probably weighs 100 pounds soaking wet, Shellinx is at least 3 tons. Shelly’s blood alcohol is less than 0.2% (falling down drunk), so Shellinx’s blood alcohol will be less than 0.0003% (stone sober). So the idiots spend a few seconds pinned to the wall by a monster predator, who then shrinks back into a little girl and stumbles out of the bar.
Now, what are the drunk idiots going to do? Call the cops and it is a quick trip to the drunk tank, if they are smart and keep their mouths shut, otherwise they will be spending time involuntary committed for psychological evaluation. Think about it, the conversations go like this:
Cop: And how did this 12’ tall winged lion look coming though the 7’ tall door, sir?
— or —
Cop: So you are saying this little girl turns into a giant monster, tears up the bar for no apparent reason, and then just turns back into a girl again and leaves? Rriigghhtt.
Meanwhile, the bar owner is trying to figure out how to collect on his insurance to repair the claw marks without being sent to jail himself for attempted fraud. His best bet will probably be to claim that one of the miscreants brought a pickaxe with him and they took turns busting up the bar, so they are in even more trouble.
Shelly’s real problem is that she is worrying about her loss of control. But what she really needs to do is cut back on drinking until she is drunk.
You are jumping to a rether big assumption there. Nothing said at all indicates shell went shpnix on them. Tina would not have told M that it was all handled if shell had. SO more than likely Shell picked them up and threw them through the windows, or walls, abd then laid a whuppin’ on them. Now she feels bad because she knows her strength made it a totally unfair fight and is trying to justify it to M, Tina, and herself. That’s all. So stop worrying about who knows what, just remember M doesn’t want to shpinx about it anymore.
It’s a common trope in mystical traditions like Zen. The monk (or nun) goes off to a desert retreat and meditates for twenty years. He finds peace within himself, and joy in the contemplation of the bleakest desert scenery. Then, feeling ready, he goes to town and walks serenely into the marketplace. Then someone steps on his foot and he loses his temper…
“You must maintain your center even in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace.”
– some Zen Master
There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.
Abba Poemen says: “It is not through virtue that I live in solitude, but through weakness; those who live in the midst of others are the strong ones.”
And Abba Lucius concludes: “If you have not first of all lived rightly with others, you will not be able to live rightly in solitude.”
And, to return to the Buddhist traditions, as the Japanese Zen monk-hermit Ryokan said, “It is not that I dislike people, it is just that I am so tired of them.”
For those who don’t know, there is a huge benefit to signing up to nominate than is evident on the linked page. Even if you can’t attend the Con, sign up for the $50 supporting membership. You will get a DVD of all of the Hugo nominated works (except the movies), that is worth much more than the $50 fee. If you decide to go to the con you can always upgrade.
Last year the DVD included 5 each novels, novellas and novelettes plus short stories, non-fiction, fanzines, anthologies and magazines. That’s a whole lot of reading for just a few trips to the pun jar. And, of course, you get an opportunity to nominate one of our favorite authors for a Hugo award.
Here is last year’s World Con 2011 Hugo Packet contents so you can get an idea of the huge amount of material you would receive. I still haven’t finished reading mine. Now where did I put it…
I meant Justin arrives to find Shelly in normal mode, shirt torn, standing there defying the entire world to come at her so she can kick its collective ass.
Remember – this is the girl who tosses V8 engine blocks across the shop and teaches kickboxing…
Yeah, I’m guessing she didn’t sphinx out during the bar fight (at least, not enough for anyone to notice), for two reasons:
(1) Tina made a point of saying that the drama was all done with. If Shelly had been noticed (by almost anyone) going sphinx-form, it would almost certainly have had some serious repercussions that wouldn’t have calmed down and gone away by the next day.
(2) When Monica asked, Shelly looked much more embarrassed than freaked out, and she used the phrase “dumb bar fight”. Her upset (and her defensiveness) seem to revolve around the fight having occurred at all… if she’d gained several tons and clawed holes in things, she probably wouldn’t minimize the situation as a “dumb bar fight” and would be more seriously disturbed.
I think it was more like this bar fight:
“She beat the living shit out of an entire bar”
“You can’t beat up a bar”, Sy argued.
“I can’t. You can’t. Most guys who aren’t Seals or Special Forces or British SAS can’t either.”
“Bobby’s Girl”, J. D. Austin.
Three things…1) I’m really pleased I could figure out the movie (and scene) without watching the video since YouTube is blocked at work. 2) I really hope that Shelly wasn’t squishing everyone behind a piano. 🙂 3). I played the drinking game for that movie over the New Year’s weekend…it’s rough. 😛
I well believe it. Shelly would certainly be deeply and personally sensitive to that sort of nonsense (as I gather you are, for the same reason). If she already had a drink or so in her, and her fuse was a bit shorter than usual… yeah, she’d probably have tried to clean somebody’s clock, and probably have succeeded even without going sphinx.
As to the miscreants she interacted with… I hadn’t realized that the descendents of Lord and Lady Douchebag had immigrated to the United States. I thought they’d all been denied visas because they’re all … well, no need to belabor the point.
I approve of Shelly’s actions. We’ve been playing nice with racists for half a century. There comes a point when ignorance is no longer a valid excuse. There comes a point where sicking an angry Cherokee sphinx on them is the appropriate course of action.
That’s Comanche sphinx I’ll have you know.
Definitely *not* one of the Five Civilized Tribes.
As for “playing nice with racists” as far as I can tell the stupidity has been pretty much evenly distributed considering the Assumption of the Mantle of Victimhood that so many have used as an excuse for chronic underachievement.
That said, Shelly would be right in my eyes to teach the curs a short lesson in manners their mommas failed to drive home.
Shelly getting in a bar fight, at least before she went to the grove, is sort of like the Pope going to church on Sunday. It generally happens each week, and is normally only notable when it doesn’t. Historically, she has a been known to bend steel by yelling at it, welding practically nekked (and going to bars that way, for that matter), and being stronger than any given two people at any time. And, as has been pointed out, Shelly is not all that much taller than Monica. So any full grown man that lays a finger on her, let alone more than one, and gets his various body parts broken by her will get little or no sympathy from the cops. Or the bar tender. Especially when she does her ditzy act (Bud ain’t the only one) , and starts talking about the special moves her boyfriend, officer whats-his-name, showed her. (“Let’s see, you big guys insulted the little girl friend of a fellow cop, then tried to manhandle her, so she put her foot where now? Oh, right, she put YOUR foot up…”)
But, now that she is the muscle half in the crime fighting duo, The Rack® and Pinions®, the ability to change changes everything. She is not crying because she beat up some jerks, that’s why she went to the bar in the first place. She probably had to hold her self back, for fear of loosing it, and is crying out of frustration. (OK, there is the other kind of frustration, but the comic about that was our holiday gift, but it all goes together.)
See, continuing the metaphor, it’s as if, when the Pope goes to church, he is afraid that after the sacramental wine, he will turn into a raging beast with wings if he sees an alt… ERrrr… alright, lets not continue with THAT metaphor. The point is (there is one?), Shelly needs to practice and gain confidence in the ability to NOT change into a sphinx. The fear of changing involuntarily is starting to really make go a little [more] insane [than usual].
And yet, she lived her whole life with the ability to change forms, up until that day she touched the relic. The scoobies now need to help her to re-learn this.
This comic is quite humerous with it’s reluctant trudging over to Shelly (love the plod, plod, plod) and the “Screw this, I’m outta here!” quick turnaround finish.
I’m beginning to think her fuming has to do with NOT participating in the fight. She wanted to because she was really angry, but managed to control herself and stayed out of it, knowing what might happen, thus a high level of frustration.
Rats! This was meant to go with the thread above as an affirmation of JeffEpp’s thought. And, yes, I do know how to spell humorous, but my fingers sometimes don’t.
Maybe she went the bar for some ‘relaxation’ and actually hurt someone. Someone being a well deserving douche bag or two. She may not have been charged with anything (hey she’s just this little girl against these huge racists!) but feels very guilty about it.
As a rather large guy, myself; I purposely AVOID angering small people.
There is no winning if a large person gets ‘down and dirty’ with a small one.
In fact, I am one of those you occasionally read about who take standard martial arts classes to learn how to subdue people WITHOUT harming them (my dad taught green berets hand-to-hand and I learned a bit more from ‘special ops’ in the navy).
Thankfully, it seems my size keeps most troublemakers away from me and only drunkards take it as a challenge to their manhood.
That situation is easy to avoid (for me) since I don’t drink alcohol, don’t understand why others do, and avoid the scene altogether.
I’m reminded of a bit fron Niven and Gerrold’s wonderful SF parody/tribute novel The Flying Sorcerers in which all of a native tribe’s numerous gods are named after SF authors (the two suns are Verrn and Ouells, for example).
One god described in some physical detail is Elcin, the “small but mighty” god of thunder and lightning (presumably after Harlan Ellison). Favorite local curse: May Elcin strike you in the kneecap!
Somebody. Has. Been. Royally. Had!
And I’m not just referring to Monica. Thank you, Paul – you gotcha’ed us again! 🙂
Yep. I do believe that Monica is speaking for all of us.
I’m not so sure. That ‘I got really angry’ sounded quite ominous, in a Bruce Banner kind of way.
In a “you wouldn’t LIKE me when I’m angry” way?
In the “anger causes me to expand and destroy moderate sized portions of property with little control” way.
Actually, drunk Shellynx in a barfight could get dangerous.
The eternal dilemma: to engage with the drama or do your best to ignore it
you’d hate yourself either way.
“You got really drunk…” Uh. Oh. The MIB’s are gonna have to pull a switcheroo on the Nightly News and Newspaper pics and vids of the DRUNKEN RAMPAGING SPHINX.
Next question: Did she eat anyone important?
Sudden flash to one of the early iterations of Aylee from Sluggy Freelance (e.g. http://sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/980118)
Wouldn’t a dramatic shift in body weight (and therefore blood volume) be sufficient to insta-sober Shelly up?
Even forgetting the possibility that in sphinx-form, her metabolism might be better at cleaning the stuff from her system.
Of course, it’s still Shelly and she’s still mad….OK never mind. 🙂
Of course if Shelly sphinxed, then wouldn’t it shred her clothes? So she transforms, sobers up, gets control of herself, perhaps after pinning the jerks against the wall while offering her critique of their sociological opinions, then humanizes, and is once again drunk. And naked.
Is that when the cops show up?
Everybody seems to be convinced Shelly morphed into a sphinx to devastate the area.
I seem to remember Shelly is quite of creating respectable amounts of damage and injury… as a human.
The fact she is sitting in plain view and not worried about being seen by police means she didn’t kill anybody (they’d be looking to get her off the streets if she had).
Her description would be unmistakable…. female, black hair, 5’4″, 165+ pounds, heavily muscled, 2% body fat (at most), capable of throwing V-8 engines 30 yards,… handle with extreme caution.
She may be awaiting trial on some serious felony charges.
Or (perhaps worse) blacklisted from her favorite bar.
This could be amusing. I am sure we are all thinking the same thing, Shelly gets drunk, Shelly gets mad, and out comes Shellinx to whip their posteriors.
Or maybe not. Consider Shelly probably weighs 100 pounds soaking wet, Shellinx is at least 3 tons. Shelly’s blood alcohol is less than 0.2% (falling down drunk), so Shellinx’s blood alcohol will be less than 0.0003% (stone sober). So the idiots spend a few seconds pinned to the wall by a monster predator, who then shrinks back into a little girl and stumbles out of the bar.
Now, what are the drunk idiots going to do? Call the cops and it is a quick trip to the drunk tank, if they are smart and keep their mouths shut, otherwise they will be spending time involuntary committed for psychological evaluation. Think about it, the conversations go like this:
Cop: And how did this 12’ tall winged lion look coming though the 7’ tall door, sir?
— or —
Cop: So you are saying this little girl turns into a giant monster, tears up the bar for no apparent reason, and then just turns back into a girl again and leaves? Rriigghhtt.
Meanwhile, the bar owner is trying to figure out how to collect on his insurance to repair the claw marks without being sent to jail himself for attempted fraud. His best bet will probably be to claim that one of the miscreants brought a pickaxe with him and they took turns busting up the bar, so they are in even more trouble.
Shelly’s real problem is that she is worrying about her loss of control. But what she really needs to do is cut back on drinking until she is drunk.
So she hasn’t told Justin what she is but shows an entire bar? 😉
Sounds to me like she needs to get into an anger management programme.
I thought her time in the forest made her calmer and less likely to fly off the handle?
You are jumping to a rether big assumption there. Nothing said at all indicates shell went shpnix on them. Tina would not have told M that it was all handled if shell had. SO more than likely Shell picked them up and threw them through the windows, or walls, abd then laid a whuppin’ on them. Now she feels bad because she knows her strength made it a totally unfair fight and is trying to justify it to M, Tina, and herself. That’s all. So stop worrying about who knows what, just remember M doesn’t want to shpinx about it anymore.
Or maybe the Men in Black took care of it if she did sphinx out and that’s what Tina means.
I hope they didn’t use the old weather balloon filled with swamp gas explanation. I don’t think it will fly in this case.
Just when we thought Shelly was past the angry outbursts and had matured (yay 80K extra years of life). 😛
Then again, I’m inclined to agree that she probably didn’t turn into a sphinx. She probably just showed off a bit much strength. 🙂
It’s a common trope in mystical traditions like Zen. The monk (or nun) goes off to a desert retreat and meditates for twenty years. He finds peace within himself, and joy in the contemplation of the bleakest desert scenery. Then, feeling ready, he goes to town and walks serenely into the marketplace. Then someone steps on his foot and he loses his temper…
“You must maintain your center even in the hustle and bustle of the marketplace.”
– some Zen Master
Amma Syncletica (Desert Fathers) puts it:
There are many who live in the mountains and behave as if they were in the town, and they are wasting their time. It is possible to be a solitary in one’s mind while living in a crowd, and it is possible for one who is a solitary to live in the crowd of his own thoughts.
Abba Poemen says: “It is not through virtue that I live in solitude, but through weakness; those who live in the midst of others are the strong ones.”
And Abba Lucius concludes: “If you have not first of all lived rightly with others, you will not be able to live rightly in solitude.”
And, to return to the Buddhist traditions, as the Japanese Zen monk-hermit Ryokan said, “It is not that I dislike people, it is just that I am so tired of them.”
I feel sorry for whoever she tangled with…
Ahoy there, varlets!
Hugo nominations are now OPEN!
https://chicon.org/hugo/nominate.php
Support Wapsi Square!
All right. Thanks for the heads up Atomic.
For those who don’t know, there is a huge benefit to signing up to nominate than is evident on the linked page. Even if you can’t attend the Con, sign up for the $50 supporting membership. You will get a DVD of all of the Hugo nominated works (except the movies), that is worth much more than the $50 fee. If you decide to go to the con you can always upgrade.
Last year the DVD included 5 each novels, novellas and novelettes plus short stories, non-fiction, fanzines, anthologies and magazines. That’s a whole lot of reading for just a few trips to the pun jar. And, of course, you get an opportunity to nominate one of our favorite authors for a Hugo award.
Here is last year’s World Con 2011 Hugo Packet contents so you can get an idea of the huge amount of material you would receive. I still haven’t finished reading mine. Now where did I put it…
That’s true; the Hugo packet is a very cost-effective way to get some quality SF. And if you can get to Chicago this year, so much the better.
Let’s try again and see if I can get the URL right:
http://www.renovationsf.org/hugo-packet.php
Panels One and Four – love Monica’s expressions…
Lessee…
I prefer panel 2 to panel 4. 🙂
♬ Why do you build me up (Build me up)
Buttercup baby just to
let me down (Let me down)
And mess me around ♬
I.. think thats the first song someone here has quoted that i recognise…
Ah the classics. 😀
why assume she turned? a lady who throws around v8’s can easily humiliate a pack of drunks without going into sphinx mode.
I suspect that the wrong ppl found out just how strong she is – and it might affect her dating future.
Cop With Mustache: “Well, Justin, we got a call that some crazy drunk lady kicked three guys’ asses and now she’s tearing up the bar…”
I just had a horrble thought: What if she did sphinx out and what if Justin arrived (due to the police being called) before she changed back?
I meant Justin arrives to find Shelly in normal mode, shirt torn, standing there defying the entire world to come at her so she can kick its collective ass.
Remember – this is the girl who tosses V8 engine blocks across the shop and teaches kickboxing…
Because she was drunk and very angry, and now seems upset. Shelly don’t have the best of control over her Sphinx side.
It is also possible something else relating to the supernatural happened. Tina seemed VERY determined to get Monica to talk to Shelly…
Yeah, I’m guessing she didn’t sphinx out during the bar fight (at least, not enough for anyone to notice), for two reasons:
(1) Tina made a point of saying that the drama was all done with. If Shelly had been noticed (by almost anyone) going sphinx-form, it would almost certainly have had some serious repercussions that wouldn’t have calmed down and gone away by the next day.
(2) When Monica asked, Shelly looked much more embarrassed than freaked out, and she used the phrase “dumb bar fight”. Her upset (and her defensiveness) seem to revolve around the fight having occurred at all… if she’d gained several tons and clawed holes in things, she probably wouldn’t minimize the situation as a “dumb bar fight” and would be more seriously disturbed.
When Shelly says “bar fight”, does she mean she was fighting IN a bar, or USING a bar?
Or two bars fighting.
I think it was more like this bar fight:
“She beat the living shit out of an entire bar”
“You can’t beat up a bar”, Sy argued.
“I can’t. You can’t. Most guys who aren’t Seals or Special Forces or British SAS can’t either.”
“Bobby’s Girl”, J. D. Austin.
Today’s comic made me LOL. I’m satisfied with that and will just wait to see what happens next. ^_^
This is what I visualized when I read barfight.Minus the candygram of course.
Three things…1) I’m really pleased I could figure out the movie (and scene) without watching the video since YouTube is blocked at work. 2) I really hope that Shelly wasn’t squishing everyone behind a piano. 🙂 3). I played the drinking game for that movie over the New Year’s weekend…it’s rough. 😛
One of my all-time favorite movies – thanks for the link .
It’s the “racist douchebags” part that’s the real trigger. Trust me on that.
I well believe it. Shelly would certainly be deeply and personally sensitive to that sort of nonsense (as I gather you are, for the same reason). If she already had a drink or so in her, and her fuse was a bit shorter than usual… yeah, she’d probably have tried to clean somebody’s clock, and probably have succeeded even without going sphinx.
As to the miscreants she interacted with… I hadn’t realized that the descendents of Lord and Lady Douchebag had immigrated to the United States. I thought they’d all been denied visas because they’re all … well, no need to belabor the point.
I approve of Shelly’s actions. We’ve been playing nice with racists for half a century. There comes a point when ignorance is no longer a valid excuse. There comes a point where sicking an angry Cherokee sphinx on them is the appropriate course of action.
That’s Comanche sphinx I’ll have you know.
Definitely *not* one of the Five Civilized Tribes.
As for “playing nice with racists” as far as I can tell the stupidity has been pretty much evenly distributed considering the Assumption of the Mantle of Victimhood that so many have used as an excuse for chronic underachievement.
That said, Shelly would be right in my eyes to teach the curs a short lesson in manners their mommas failed to drive home.
Ok, how I see it:
Shelly getting in a bar fight, at least before she went to the grove, is sort of like the Pope going to church on Sunday. It generally happens each week, and is normally only notable when it doesn’t. Historically, she has a been known to bend steel by yelling at it, welding practically nekked (and going to bars that way, for that matter), and being stronger than any given two people at any time. And, as has been pointed out, Shelly is not all that much taller than Monica. So any full grown man that lays a finger on her, let alone more than one, and gets his various body parts broken by her will get little or no sympathy from the cops. Or the bar tender. Especially when she does her ditzy act (Bud ain’t the only one) , and starts talking about the special moves her boyfriend, officer whats-his-name, showed her. (“Let’s see, you big guys insulted the little girl friend of a fellow cop, then tried to manhandle her, so she put her foot where now? Oh, right, she put YOUR foot up…”)
But, now that she is the muscle half in the crime fighting duo, The Rack® and Pinions®, the ability to change changes everything. She is not crying because she beat up some jerks, that’s why she went to the bar in the first place. She probably had to hold her self back, for fear of loosing it, and is crying out of frustration. (OK, there is the other kind of frustration, but the comic about that was our holiday gift, but it all goes together.)
See, continuing the metaphor, it’s as if, when the Pope goes to church, he is afraid that after the sacramental wine, he will turn into a raging beast with wings if he sees an alt… ERrrr… alright, lets not continue with THAT metaphor. The point is (there is one?), Shelly needs to practice and gain confidence in the ability to NOT change into a sphinx. The fear of changing involuntarily is starting to really make go a little [more] insane [than usual].
And yet, she lived her whole life with the ability to change forms, up until that day she touched the relic. The scoobies now need to help her to re-learn this.
I’m just wondering if the crime-fighting duo’s trademarked names have been paid for. The pun jar’s hungry.
This comic is quite humerous with it’s reluctant trudging over to Shelly (love the plod, plod, plod) and the “Screw this, I’m outta here!” quick turnaround finish.
I’m beginning to think her fuming has to do with NOT participating in the fight. She wanted to because she was really angry, but managed to control herself and stayed out of it, knowing what might happen, thus a high level of frustration.
Rats! This was meant to go with the thread above as an affirmation of JeffEpp’s thought. And, yes, I do know how to spell humorous, but my fingers sometimes don’t.
It’s not that your fingers don’t know… it’s that your upper arm doesn’t let them use the knowledge properly.
Your humerus isn’t humorous.
I’m wondering if the tale of the bar fight isn’t a lie to cover Shelly’s real angst about her future with Officer Tight Buns.
Maybe she went the bar for some ‘relaxation’ and actually hurt someone. Someone being a well deserving douche bag or two. She may not have been charged with anything (hey she’s just this little girl against these huge racists!) but feels very guilty about it.
As a rather large guy, myself; I purposely AVOID angering small people.
There is no winning if a large person gets ‘down and dirty’ with a small one.
In fact, I am one of those you occasionally read about who take standard martial arts classes to learn how to subdue people WITHOUT harming them (my dad taught green berets hand-to-hand and I learned a bit more from ‘special ops’ in the navy).
Thankfully, it seems my size keeps most troublemakers away from me and only drunkards take it as a challenge to their manhood.
That situation is easy to avoid (for me) since I don’t drink alcohol, don’t understand why others do, and avoid the scene altogether.
I’m reminded of a bit fron Niven and Gerrold’s wonderful SF parody/tribute novel The Flying Sorcerers in which all of a native tribe’s numerous gods are named after SF authors (the two suns are Verrn and Ouells, for example).
One god described in some physical detail is Elcin, the “small but mighty” god of thunder and lightning (presumably after Harlan Ellison). Favorite local curse: May Elcin strike you in the kneecap!
Monica’s expressions are simply priceless here. Kudos!
Tina may be the best troll.