Sixteen Alligators and a Trebuchet

by Trevor Mcinsley

  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: [Alligator Hunters]

  Understandable. Depends on the size of the hunting boat really. When mounted on a sturdy surface the thing is dead accurate and I have rigged up an overhead projection system using a weather balloon and a laptop for the purposes of aiming. The system then calculates the trajectory and adjusts the gas flow accordingly meaning the house brick comes down square on the target’s head. Pretty foolproof.

  I have rigged up some explosive arrowheads for my hunting bow using 12 gauge cartridges, biros and masking tape... unfortunately I later found out the things are illegal. Ludicrous! I probably should have read up on the law prior to undertaking this task as I now have two hundred irrevocably modified arrows I can’t use... and it took me two hours just to find a pen to write a check the other day. Anyway if I brought my bow I would have to restock on ammunition first.

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  Perhaps it is just me but when I read about one place rearing alligators for food and leather in a bid to ‘conserve’ the species and another place hunting the things down with a powerboat I got a serious ‘Bond villain’ vibe. I couldn’t help but picture a line of a hundred young alligators out in the courtyard with some kind of Scaramanga character parading about in front of them as he decided which would live and which would become jackets.

  Of course conserving a species by eating/wearing them is the right way to go about things. The day someone discovers that polar bears produce caviar is the day we can stop worrying about them all vanishing. It’s just their marketing is a little... in your face. Rather than selling the meat and the leather it seems they sell pretty well every part of the animal...

  Jeffrey Mongot

  to: [Alligator Store]

  Bit of a strange request here. I need a dozen alligator penises.

  My wife is very keen on alligator meat and is always cooking it so I thought, as a joke, I could give her a jar of the things in vinegar. I have printed up a label which says ‘Skinless Alligator Sausages’ so now I just need to source said sausages.

  Thanks. Jeff.

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  I can’t comment for the penis in particular but apparently the meat tastes a bit like beefy chicken... which sounds good. Ostrich was like beefy chicken but primarily I enjoyed it because I couldn’t help but picture a guy trying to wrestle an ostrich to the ground with a spear.

  Penises aside (how often do you hear a sentence that starts like that?)... mostly in saunas I imagine. There’s also a joke in there about nudity and five-a-side football I’m sure...

  Apologies. I’ll start over. The place sells a rather shockingly creative array of alligator products... but I suppose when a 700lb river-dwelling dinosaur breaks into your back garden and devours your dog in one bite getting ‘cruel and unusual’ in your retaliation is to be expected. The last days of William Wallace come to mind.

  Anyway, after discovering that Buffalo are literally the tastiest animals on the planet I’m all for trying some exotic meat (not gay) and frankly alligators look tasty but... I have never had an overwhelming desire to decorate the fireplace with their skulls...

  I got especially concerned when they said that the alligator population in Louisiana had increased from 150,000 to over 3 million in the past fifty years. It sounded like they simply were not going to stop and wouldn’t be satisfied until every man, woman and child in the state of Louisiana was an alligator. That’s conservation in action right there...

  Their mission statement of ‘The more alligators people consume, the more alligators are released into the wild’ sounded like an ultimatum. The sort of thing the Bond villain comes out with when it turns out that he isn’t satisfied with holding the world to ransom over stolen nukes and is in fact building some kind of orbiting doom cannon because a waiter once spilt soup on his shoes... yeah, that.

  Speaking of taking over the world with flawed technology...

  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: Apple

  Hello Apple. I’m heading up a small team of artists and developers at the moment as we attempt to create a fun little publicity game for the iPhone and iPad. However we’ve run into some issues regarding copyrights and patent law and I have been unable to find any answers on here. The last thing we want to do is publish a game only to have it removed due to such problems...

  The game revolves around flinging alligators at the homeless using a trebuchet. Do you think this will be an issue?

  The game in question is for Help the Homeless’ new campaign ‘Alligator UK’. The slogan they are running with is ‘You’d help an alligator but would you help the homeless’... which is a bit of a dig at the National Reptile Trust of America who recently blew $200k of donated funds building an enormous fence around a part of the Florida Everglades which, as it turns out, is entirely devoid of alligators.

  Anyway the issue is that after a bit of research on google patents I have found a pending application (granted from several years back) for a trebuchet designed specifically for deploying fourteen foot alligators into warzones. I’m pretty sure it was never submitted seriously... but it bears a startling similarity to the graphics we are using. I mean... frankly there’s only so many ways you can catapult an alligator at someone so I think it was fairly inevitable.

  So just wondering if you know if this will constitute a breach of developer’s contract, the iTunes store T&C’s or International Alligator Law?

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  In the past I have genuinely needed to contact Apple and found the experience both horrific and ludicrous. I cannot stand the overly positive, at least partially automated, manner in which they respond. Everything seems to start ‘I understand that’ or ‘I know that’ and they have a tendency to overuse your name at the beginning of sentences... which is just unnerving.

  All in all, for a company which supposedly prides themselves on the quality of their products, it all feels very... plasticky and fake. It’s like faux leather: from a distance it looks appealing but when you get up close you can quickly see the repeating patterns designed by a computer. When you stroke its surface it soon becomes clear that it never really had a soul in the first place and that it was never killed with a bolt gun and then skinned. That’s the problem with Apple customer service.

  It’s all fake. Fake concern. Fake gratitude. Fake bonhomie. Granted you don’t want a customer service agent to start every sentence with ‘oi bastard, here’s what you do’ before signing off with simply ‘piss off you wanker’... but when they at least seem as dissatisfied with their day to day routine as you are with whatever product you are complaining about... you at least know it is genuine.

  Frankly I know that if I worked in a call centre or customer support office I would end up hanging myself in the stationary cupboard with a length of telephone cord one lunchtime. Guaranteed. I mean I barely managed to cope in an office of only ten people without going borderline insane and simply staring blankly at the computer screen all day. Yes, one of my co-workers was some manner of computer coding genius responsible for developing one of the very first PC game engines... but it didn’t change the fact that he had a propensity to walk up behind you and suddenly crunch into an apple. When you are concentrating deeply and all is silent it’s a pretty terrifying experience... it was a bit like sharing the office with a horse...

  Before that, in university, I attended maybe one in five days at best and earlier still, when I was in college, I got so infuriated with people playing music on the study room computers that I systematically went into the BIOS of every single machine and disabled the sound card. Point is... I do not do well in loud, crowded offices and I don’t think many people exactly revel in such situations... so for them to sign off with: ‘Thank you for allowing me the opportunity to assist you.’

  Clearly something is not right.

  Anyway, ultimately the two most annoying things are their tendencies to write vast amounts without actually saying anything (I can talk) and their unwillingness to provide you wit
h email addresses... opting instead for infuriatingly convoluted graphical forms.

  However it seems that the way around this (take note kids) is to simply send them an email regarding catapulting alligators at the homeless...

  Then, all of a sudden, they are quite willing to send you an email address which I failed to find anywhere on their, again massively convoluted, contact page. Curious the way big business works sometimes...

  Apple

  to: Trevor Mcinsley

  Hello Trevor,

  My name is [Terry], and I want to thank you for taking the time to write us regarding your app design and concept questions. I understand that you would like to know if alligators being flung onto homeless characters would violate copyright laws within your app.

  While we cannot pre-approve apps...

  ----------

  See what I mean about their bizarre formula for replying to customer questions? Naturally there was only one way of responding to this...

  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: Apple

  Thanks for the information. Would it help if we were to depict crocodiles being thrown at muggers instead?

  Apple

  to: Trevor Mcinsley

  Hi Trevor,

  It is really tough to determine all of the intricacies of what would be acceptable or not, unless we were able to test the functionality. I know you do not want to lose time and money creating an app that may not be approved to the App Store but again, without testing the app, we will not have many answers unless you form your questions along specific App Review Guidelines.

  I apologize that I do not have a more specific answer for you at this point Trevor.

  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: Apple

  Ok a high-g centrifuge, five thousand elephants and the Taj Mahal. Last offer.

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  Next book title there I think...

  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: [Prop Makers]

  I require a sixteenth century trebuchet capable of launching an alligator.

  I should probably clarify that... we are working on a comedy film at the moment and as a bit of an homage to the famous scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail we are going to have one army lobbing fourteen foot alligators over the walls of the castle they are assaulting... as you do.

  I think the construction of the device should be within our budget and the director is adamant about not using CGI where we don’t have to. Although frankly his insistence regarding the matter of creating an Archimedes style flying machine without using any special effects has sort of pushed me to the breaking point with these increasingly bizarre requests he is tasking me with but... in this matter I feel it should be possible.

  Basically we just need a large trebuchet capable of the job, we already have the alligators (already dead).

  If you need the measurements and weights of the stuffed alligators I can contact the taxidermist we have working on them at the moment. How much do you think such a project would be likely to run up?

  Thanks.

  Trevor Mcinsley.

  [Prop Makers]

  to: Trevor Mcinsley

  Hi Trevor,

  This is something we can certainly do for you, in fact it sounds like great fun. Probably the best way to approach this would be to find out what you have budgeted for this item, then we can try to work out a plan to fit your budget. Obviously size will be a big factor along with other issues like mobility and how closely it has to match a specific design/look. Initially I would suggest we build the Trebuchet in steel and clad it with heavy looking timber which we can age down appropriately. This is a technique we’ve used before on heavy vehicles for movies like Gladiator with some success.

  If there is any further information you can send that would be great, also if you wanted to come over to talk about the project we can arrange a meeting.

  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: [Prop Makers]

  Yes, building it from steel and cladding it in timber certainly seems like the logical route to take... the problem however is our director. He has this unbridled persistence that everything be ‘authentic’. I mean when the animal rights people told him it was ‘unethical’ to launch fully grown alligators over the wall of a castle he went into a rage for days. I’d already sourced some full sized resin alligators but no... this wasn’t good enough and he demanded that at the very least they be stuffed.

  Ever tried finding sixteen alligators that have died of natural causes and a taxidermist willing to fill them with sand? It’s not easy. Hence I have some concerns that he will want the trebuchet to be fully accurate to the original and function without any modern technology.

  I suspect this will probably add to the budget a little but strangely this aberrant man seems to have all the funding he wants... me and the crew think he may be a bond villain. Anyway given that he is currently in talks with an engineering firm about the prospect of building a working helicopter out of wood and cloth... I suspect he will want the siege weapon to be constructed solely from wood and rope. Is this possible?

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  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: Toys R Us

  Hello Geoffrey.

  I have a number of questions which, bizarrely, I have been unable to find any information on via your website.

  My six year old son has a board game in which you fire alligators at villagers in an attempt to destroy their houses and get them eaten by alligators. I’m pretty sure it is where Angry Birds got their idea from.

  We picked the game up in a small town in France several years before he was born and I am pretty sure it was handmade. Apparently it was inspired by a real event some 400 years prior in which a Prussian army laid siege to the walled town using alligators and trebuchets... Much like how diseased pigs would be flung into besieged castles to spread pestilence... only with alligators. Historians still debate whether or not this actually happened or if it is just myth. The key point of this argument tends to revolve around the fact that there were no alligators in either France or the Duchy of Prussia at the time of the supposed event.

  Anyway, the game was unfortunately stolen when our house was broken into and my son is terribly distraught. Since we rediscovered the game in the loft my son has cast aside his Playstation and practically run home from school every day just so he can sit in front of the fireplace flinging toy alligators across the room. I mean how many kid’s games these days come with a fully functioning trebuchet? So I was hoping you could help me track down a new version of this game for him, or at least find something similar. I imagine some big company must have caught onto the idea by now and recreated it.

  If I recall correctly the name of the game, as written on the box, was ‘Monsieur! Pour le attention du l’alligator!’ which I had always assumed meant ‘Watch out for the alligators!’ but google translate seems to think it means ‘For the attention of Mr Alligator’ so I might be wrong. I imagine that would be a game about working in a mailroom for an alligator boss... which doesn’t sound as fun frankly.

  Thanks... Oh and my other question is this: When we visited your ‘flagship’ store in Times Square we found a frying pan... so, yeah... why did we find a frying pan?

  It wasn’t in a little section of diversity for the parents to browse whilst their kids ran about going mental, it was just... a frying pan. On shelves right next to toys and without any other cookware, camping equipment or pancake making apparatus. Diversification is one thing but this was just puzzling. Never before have I been able to buy a frying pan in a store which has a full size Ferris wheel in it... frankly if I could I think I would be likely to buy frying pans more often however.

  Thanks.

  Trevor Mcinsley.

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  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: Bamburgh Castle

  If I recall correctly you have a sword and scabbard set on display which is made from crocodile hide. In fact I believe the scabbard is simply the entire head of a crocodilian and the swords slide
between gaps in the mouth.

  Anyway I am unsure what period this was from but was wondering if this is proof that people in medieval England had access to alligators. Specifically if they ever used them in siege warfare.

  I read a story a little while back about a French town which was besieged by an attacking force that launched live (mostly) alligators over the walls and I simply did not believe it to be true. However when I recollected the croc/alligator weaponry I wondered if it might have credence after all. Do you have any information regarding the use of alligators in medieval warfare? Maybe you have a book in your shop on this subject?

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  Trevor Mcinsley

  to: Wormwood Scrubs Prison

  Hello I am a social worker and was recently talking to a family with a loved one in Wormwood Scrubs. If I understand correctly he was running some kind of bizarre animal fighting ring and when the police raided the premises they found a half dozen beagles, a cage full of chinchillas and a 14ft alligator.

  Anyway that is really neither here nor there. I am writing to you about one detail in particular they mentioned regarding prison life which had me a little concerned for this prisoner’s safety. They told me that during the prisoners’ recreational period they are encouraged to work on a fully operational trebuchet out in the exercise ground. Apparently the project was started several years back by the warden and it is nearing completion now. Since my house is within... firing range of Wormwood Scrubs I am rather concerned by this news.