Alchemy: Not just for sorcerers (or hoboes) anymore!

I bought the chocolate fondue fountain. I totally meant to wait until Christmas, but then I was watching the episode of the new HBO series "Big Love" where Zombie Harry Dean Stanton* sings "Big Rock Candy Mountain", and I was complled to buy the chocolate fondue fountain.

What I didn't know then, but know all too well now, is that if you witness Zombie Harry Dean Stanton* singing "Big Rock Candy Mountain", soon enough the words change from "big rock candy mountain" to "chocolate fondue fountain". Not only that, but the song changes from a weird hobo-pedophile lullaby into instructions on how to keep Zombie Harry Dean Stanton* from coming to your house and putting his leprotic fingers in your soup.

[* -- Zombie Harry Dean Stanton is not a real zombie, but he sure looks like one. You know how wasted and wan he looked in Repo Man? Well, that movie was twenty years ago. Do the math!]

I've encountered only one problem with the chocolate fondue fountain thus far: It's damned hard to get the chocolate just right. I'm going to a potluck tomorrow night where my contribution -- apart from my preternatural ability to lie to total strangers as I compliment them on their unappetizing casseroles -- will be the chocolate fondue fountain. Thus, the hours remaining before the party must be spent trying to devise a recipe for chocolate where it's liquidy enough to cascade over the chocolate fondue fountain, but not so liquidy that it doesn't taste like chocolate anymore. Last night I was experimenting with the correct chocolate-to-oil ratio and I think I broke physics or something -- the chocolate started hard, then got melty, then liquidy, and then starting clumping into hardness again. Given another ten minutes, I think the chocolate would have formed into a homunculus. Scary to consider, but he'd also be the tastiest lil' devil ever!

Back to creepy hobo songs: It was John Hodgman who pointed me in the direction of "Big Rock Candy Mountain" being the most depressing song ever. (He didn't point me personally, but I forget where I read it exactly, so lacking additional details, we are left with "He pointed me ...") Over the last month, I've been reading his book, The Areas of my Expertise. It's ridiculously funny. Thankfully, I don't have to feel bad about not reading it at quicker pace; right across from the copyright information page, it reads, "Under arrangement with the Publisher, purchasing this book frees you from the obligation to read it."

There's an entire section on hoboes in the book -- though "Big Rock Candy Mountain" isn't mentioned there; god, where the hell did I read that? -- including a listing of 700 historical hobo names. As he writes in the book:

... if you do decide to take to the rails, you should take for yourself a proper hobo moniker. Here are seven hundred more known historical hoboes whose names you can steal. You should not feel guilty about this. If they were still at large, they would steal your name without hesitation. If they could manage it, they'd steal your reflection from the mirror and sell it to the still surface of a moonlit pond. And then they would drain the pond out of spite.

Today I found out that he recorded himself reading the hobo names.

I think if you reverse the audio on that, a hobo homunculus appears. A hobo homunculus is like a regular homunculus, only it wears crusty pants.