The 330 Word Game

[A Man In Black]

"Well, Prince, so Genoa and Lucca are now just family estates of the
Buonapartes. But I warn you, if you don't tell me that this means war,
if you still try to defend the infamies and horrors perpetrated by that
Antichrist--I really believe he is Antichrist--I will have nothing more
to do with you and you are no longer my friend, no longer my 'faithful
slave,' as you call yourself! But how do you do? I see I have frightened
you--sit down and tell me all the news."

It was in July, 1805, and the speaker was the well-known Anna Pavlovna
Scherer, maid of honor and favorite of the Empress Marya Fedorovna. With
these words she greeted Prince Vasili Kuragin, a man of high rank and
importance, who was the first to arrive at her reception. Anna Pavlovna
had had a cough for some days. She was, as she said, suffering from la
grippe; grippe being then a new word in St. Petersburg, used only by the
elite.

All her invitations without exception, written in French, and delivered
by a scarlet-liveried footman that morning, ran as follows:

"If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the
prospect of spending an evening with a poor invalid is not too terrible,
I shall be very charmed to see you tonight between 7 and 10--Annette
Scherer."

"Heavens! what a virulent attack!" replied the prince, not in the
least disconcerted by this reception. He had just entered, wearing an
embroidered court uniform, knee breeches, and shoes, and had stars on
his breast and a serene expression on his flat face. He spoke in that
refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought, and
with the gentle, patronizing intonation natural to a man of importance
who had grown old in society and at court. He went up to Anna Pavlovna,
kissed her hand, presenting to her his bald, scented, and shining head,
and complacently seated himself on the sofa.

[Heathansson]

"How many gish does this....this antichrist have in his gish army?" Anna Gishievitch Pavlovna Gishtovna Karanenina Gish Gisherer asked the bald gish worriedly.
"Well," he looked puzzled; scratching his gishtache puzzledly, "it depends entirely upon what you would consider a gish to be, a proper gish that is."

"Why, whatever do you mean by that?" Anna Gishy gish gishlovna Karaneninagish Gisherer further inquired.

"Well, there's.......all sorts of gish. I been gishing all my life, and I've had gish every way there is to have a gish. There's raw gish, popcorn gish, fried gish, blackened gish,......."

Two hours later, and some 330 different ways of preparing gish described,..... Anna Gish Gishevich Gisherina of Gishia, was knocked unconscious by listening to the veritable list of gushing gishy gishdom....

"gish salad, gish on a stick, gish shish-ka-bob, or I should say, gish-ka-bob....."

"And that's just the gish that I can remember off the top of my head.
See, I got this plate in my head from the Gish Wars.
I think Napoleon got stabbed by a gish; he's always got his hand in his coat holding his belly.
Or maybe he ate some bad gish with some snails or something; I don't know."

[Tensor]

In 1883, when interest was at a fever pitch for finding a way to
confirm the prediction by the Scottish mathematical physicist James
Clerk Maxwell of the existence of electromagnetic waves traveling
through empty space at the speed of light, everyone rolled their eyes,
and guffawed, “My these dorks will never go away. They are always
making up stuff. Invisible waves traveling at the speed of light…
everywhere?! Non sense.”

So, imagine how the lonely gish feels. No one is smart enough to
understand the power at his command. Everyone pokes fun of his kind.
Look on any message board, the name gish is thrown around like Erik
Mona’s face… hmm, now that is really a strange sight to behold.

Anyways, back to dueling. Dueling problems are of strong interest to
most people, perhaps because of their “life-or-death” nature. Here is
one that is also, I think, amusing. David and Black Fang decide to duel
but, being still unemployed and unable to afford nuclear powered
aircraft carries (unlike some current, major nation-states on planet
Earth) both stab at each other with various imaginary objects.

In this tale, that imaginary object is a gun. They only have one gun
(a six-shooter revolver) between them, and only one bullet. But, this
does not deter them and they agree to “duel” as follows: they will
insert the lone bullet into the gun’s cylinder, David will then spin
the cylinder and shoot at Black Fang (who, standing in an adjacent
square, is impossible to miss.) If the gun doesn’t fire then David will
give the gun to Black Fang, who will spin the cylinder and then shoot
at David. This back-and-forth duel will continue until one shoots the
other, thus winning the duel.

Now, an observing gish may wish to wager on this danger. To do so he
must calc the odds, so he can fleece a sod (or two.) “Just what is the
probability that one will win?” he wonders while grinning dangerously.

[Irv]

The odds are one in six of the bullet being chambered, however this doesn’t take into account for the bullet being a dud round, or the shot missing; it also ignores completely that the gun is imaginary, which makes the odds of winning the duel zero. Imaginary guns don’t fire ammunition. The best thing David and Black Fang can do is start drinking cheap beer, and either go on a drunken rampage where they fight their duel with fists, or drink themselves into a drunken stupor and forget about the duel completely. The odds on either event are not calculable, you can not throw dice where human biology and temperament are concerned, and it also depends on how well they hold their liquor.
I prefer to hold mine in a rocks glass in my right hand with a splash of ginger ale, while having the hair of a serving wench , who has her hands bound behind her back for bringing some patrons blended whisky when they ordered a single malt in my left. She will be dealt with later and probably cruelly by the master of the taproom.
A quandry now arises, the girl pleads to be let go, and the unruly mob threatens to tear apart any man who would ruin the evening’s entertainment, I have two coach guns cocked and loaded, and my cutlass, but I also have a handful of girl, and one who’d be no use to me in a fight with her arms lashed behind her back. Outnumbered thirty to one, cautiously, ever backing towards the door; her tearful pleas answered by lewd taunts and threats, when finally some hapless townsman who hasn’t had his fill of cheap booze stumbles into the tavern, is immediately grabbed by me with my free hand, and hurled into the drunken mob. It is then I draw one pistol, and take aim on the man nearest to me, “Thirty of you, one shot for me, Which one?” I ask.

[Tensor]

A sense of loneliness and shame drifted in through
the bar’s open door. Men shouted for action, but
not their own action; men shouted for blood, but
not their own blood. Each man knew well his tiny
place in the world.

The only release from this knowledge was a few
gulps of overpriced fire-water imbibed a few nights
per week. Yes this fire-water is basically a poison
to evolutions’ apex creatures found in this corner
of God’s creation -- in this corner of a handful
of finite dimensions. Why is it always the corners
from which they enter?

“It is all so meaningless,” thought the bar wench.
She had been working hard and scurrying to fill
each man’s shot glass in a timely manner. All
the while her body danced like a ninja, dodging
groping hands, and misdirecting a few foul-mouthed
stolen kisses. “I’ve been working 23 days
straight -- for tips alone.”

The woman broke the bind on her hands, and drew a
six-shooter. It only had four shots left. Two rounds
were used to murder the landlord last night as he
attempting to rape her. With a shout, she aimed at
the chain from which hung a 24 wax candle candelabra.
Each of the 24 candles burned brightly, and a
shadow of dark smoke stained the wooden ceiling
directly above it.

Blam! Bang! barked her tool. The first shot
ricocheted off the chain half way down between the
ceiling and the candelabra. The strong vibration
of the chain knocked nearly a dozen of the candles
loose, and they rained down on the crowd of 30 men.
The second shot did the trick and broke a link in
the chain. The candelabra fell to the ground, its
remaining candles added to the growing fire in the
middle of the room.

Four or five men took the full force of the hit as
the candelabra rushed down into gravity's mighty
embrace.

She laughed and ran out into the night.

[A Man In Black]

It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five. Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period, as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People, from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane brood.