Posts Tagged ‘lime-toss’
In Cold Pulp: The Unauthorized, Untold, Unresearched Story of Lime-Toss
Thursday, August 20th, 2015In Cold Pulp:
Sex, Drugs, Schadenfreude, Mopery, Extortion, Sodomy, Ennui, More Sex, Graft, Treason, and Loitering:
The Unauthorized, Untold, Unresearched Story of Lime-Toss:
Complete and Unsliced
by Truman Wolfe (feat. Nate Dogg)
Editor’s note: the “In Cold Pulp” manuscript, evidently a history of Lime-Toss written by modern-day “New Journalists”, fell into the possession of Dr. Byron Clavicle, the BTSH writing staff’s foremost reclusive nonentity. As BTSH’s Oklahoma City “Beach” tournament nears, we’re publishing this excerpt to help newcomers understand the origins of a game that has taken America’s shorelines by storm (not literally; limes grow on trees or vines or something, they do not fall from clouds). Lime-Toss, in its modern renaissance, has come to symbolize unprecedented levels of stupidity.
“In Cold Pulp” Book Jacket Cover
Chapter 1: Uh-Oh, Lime Comes to Town
August is the second cruelest month, but for a small-town jive turkey named Freddy “Sticky Fingers” Norblatt, it was so much more. For a small-town jive turkey with an idea and a dream, August was rancid with hot, buttered opportunity. On the twelfth of that soupy month, 1965, he rolled into Ocean City, Maryland, or possibly Delaware, in his 1988 Iroc-Z with a dream, a sack full of nickels, a sweat-stained Army raincoat, and a trunk full of limes.
He’d seen it all. You just needed an idea, an idea and a dream and a vision. An idea, a dream, a vision, an ambition, a concept, and a hot-tub full of moxie, plus also a lime supplier, a zester, and maybe a fried clam once in a while–
He’d seen Whammo hit the big time with the “Frisbee.”
He’d seen Duncan hit the big time with the “Yo-Yo.”
He’d seen Oswald hit the big time with “Kennedy.”
Now it was his turn.
LIME-TOSS.
On the O.C. boardwalk he’d strut around in a sandwich board, shoving around a wheelbarrow piled high with limes. He passed those sweaty days screaming at passers-by: “Lime-Toss. Five bucks a lime. Twelve bucks a throw.” The rules, chalked onto his signboard, were simple. For seventeen bucks you could chuck a lime out to sea. If it landed on a sailboat, you could keep it. If you whacked a swimmer, he or she became your permanent concubine. If you knocked out a seagull, you could stick it on a skewer and eat it. The skewers were offered free of charge.
Last known photo of Freddy “Sticky Fingers” Norblatt.
By the end of the month, beachcombers turned up “Sticky Fingers” Norblatt, floating in the reeds of the waste canal behind the dunes by the Seahawk Motel, starved, beaten, drowned, and deceased. The poor man who’d come to make himself a rich man left town as a poor dead man, his viscera so much stuffing for Ocean City’s crab-human-crab food chain. Limes were strewn all over the goddamned place, roosted upon by colorblind ospreys. Those green eggs would never hatch. Stupid ospreys.
Freddy didn’t hit the big time. History does not remember Freddy Norblatt, and neither should we. History never found his wheelbarrow or his sandwich board, but history did find his raincoat, and the rest is history.
Freddy Norblatt’s Last Gasp
Chapter 1, Part 2: A Sub-Lime-inal Message involving Limes
It was the best of limes, but it was, paradoxically, also the worst of limes. Nineteen seventy-four. Citrus fruit worldwide suffered an outbreak of Bohemian Weltschmerz, growing too apathetic to fall from the trees. The international lime shortage thrust Gerald Ford into the White House, while a young Donald Rumsfeld secretly negotiated to trade Gavrilo Princip to the Iranian Sandinistas in exchange for surplus helium.
But come October, a young botanist named Kookie Apsigurgle made a discovery that would change the course of history forever for a few days. It was a raincoat, stained with dead moths and rutaceous angiosperm. Freddy Norblatt’s name stitched on the inside collar. In one pocket Kookie found a crumpled up napkin, with a note inside, a note written in shaky, drunken letters, each letter painstakingly inscribed using a system for recording handwritten words that involved ink in some way, and the words were:
1. get limes
2. people throw limes to one another
3. points are for style but points mean nothing since game is not actually scored
4. limes can never go over the tallest man but that’s not really a rule
5. game makes hands smell good, cures scurvy, great for kids and assertive pets
6. there are no prizes
7. there are no winners
8. …get SUPER RICH!!!
9. use riches to settle bar tab, buy warhead, kill Billy Joel
Kookie Apsigurgle knew genius when she saw it. She quit her pointless botany gig. Bought a lime farm. Convinced the damn things to grow again. Spread the game across the East Coast. Changed her name to Kookie Limepleseed. She founded Seacrets, and eventually, ISIS. The rest is history.
A lime tree in full bloom
Chapter 1, Part 3: Lime Me to the Moon
It was early 1986 when a young President Ronald Reagan…
Editor’s note: “In Cold Pulp” continues for another twelve thousand pages, explaining the role of limes in ballistic studies and eventually as propellant for the early Saturn-V rockets, plus Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey’s tour of the country in a giant lime. Unfortunately we at BTSH are about to run out of pixels so we will end our excerpt he
Different editor’s addendum: that was actually a typo. We meant to write, “we will end our excerpt she”
Third editor’s codicil: just to be clear, these editors’ notes are not pa
Ken Kesey’s Citric Kool-Aid Automolime, which toured the country, freaking out the lemonheads.
THIS DAY IN LIME-TOSS HISTORY (#3) – October 9, 1984
Thursday, October 10th, 2013
THIS DAY IN LIME-TOSS HISTORY (#3) – October 9, 1984
The year was 1984 and worldwide tensions were tense worldwide. Canada’s new prime minister Brian Mulroney pledged to establish a subcommittee by 1986 to summarize a study on trends in the trade of beige rubber-coated paperclips. Here in North America, meanwhile, the CIA introduced crack cocaine to relieve the expense of normal cocaine. A team of Nicaraguan Sandinistas, funded by the Pentagon and led by Ayatollah Khomeini, began designing the arcade classic “Contra.”
Little did the Contra team know that the video arcade would almost nearly be sort of a thing of the not-too-distant future past, just 29 years later, all because of a little five-hundred year old megacorporation transitioning into consumer electronics from their original line of business (chocolate-covered panties). Their new product: the Limendo Entertainment System.
The original L.E.S. came with two games sharing one cartridge. The first was called Super Mario Brothers and allowed the player to live the life of a struggling Italian plumber who gets mixed up in a regional drug war and ends up strung out in the metaphorical castle of his own decaying psyche, reliving a bad trip until his body succumbs to mushroom abuse. The game didn’t fare too well with kids; its outdated countercultural themes in the tie-and-blazer Reagan era doomed its audience to paranoid HAM radio operators and literature professors.
But the other game, Lime-Toss, proved so popular that entire families starved rather than tear themselves from the screen. Taking the ancient tradition of “Old Timey Lime-Toss” and transferring it into the digital era, players manipulated an electrified lime to control a retriever tasked with catching limes. Points were scored for style (not for actually catching the lime), as is traditional, so players were rewarded for spastic hand motions. Crushed limes and juice-squirted faces were familiar throughout America’s rec rooms, and trillions were spent on replacement controllers from neighborhood fruit stands.
1984 advertisement unearthed by Zardoz K. Norristrophy
The runaway success of 8-bit Lime-Toss changed the face of America for all eternity. Children would never leave their homes again, and their fingers would never smell the same. It also led to a decline in participation for the original, non-digital game, until its chance rediscovery at a retoxification retreat for degenerate middle-aged teenagers in Maryland [1]. This quickly led to the founding of the NLTA and the NLTAPA which licenses the likeness of Lime-Toss superstars in modern video game adaptations such as Lime-Tosser 2 Turbo Champion Edition and Matt Workman’s Lime-Toss!!.
What does the future hold for video Lime-Toss? Scientists speculate that by 2014 we will be driving “virtual limes” down the “information superhighway”, operating these vehicles through direct electrocortical stimulation of neurocitric phlogisthon waves. Nobody can say for sure, but one thing’s for certain: the future is bright for the electric lime!
THIS DAY IN LIME-TOSS HISTORY (#2) – Sept. 24, 1965
Tuesday, September 24th, 2013
The separate sides submitted this sanctioned skirmish would stifle the strife, settle the seething, and squash the squabble.
The night would end badly for Listerine.
Like a man incensed, the emerald-handed Walker-Black dominated the pugilistic showdown from the starting bell. In fourteen minutes of frantic fisticuffs, Listerine landed nary a blow. Subjected to a withering harvest of tangy taps, juicy jabs, and fructose-fingered uppercuts, the lemon-lovin’ upstart fell by knockout seconds before the end of the fifth round, his face and neck dripping with rutaceous angiosperm.
The only other casualty of the night were the limes on Walker-Black’s hands, destroyed by his own fury. Sports reporter Howard Cosell was heard to remark on the scene, “I’ve seen a man beaten to a pulp, but never before have I seen a man beaten by a pulp.”
As the referee ended the bout, Listerine’s manager seized the ring mic and shouted, “Johnny Walker-Black has clearly been juicing.” The judges were unmoved and ruled unanimously in favor of Fruit Punch, thus cementing that most controversial of Lime-Toss rules for all time.
Asked to comment on his defeat, the felled fighter could only shake his head and quip, “It was the best of limes, it was the worst of limes.”
“That’s why they call it Lime-Toss, bitch,” Walker-Black shot back. “I dangle like a Sweet lime, but I sting like a Key.”
Though lemons are now officially outlawed in Lime-Toss, debate remains stalled over Fukushu kumquats.
–excerpted from the Daily Squirter of New Jersey, printed Sept. 24, 1965
Photo credit: Weegee Z. Norris
THIS DAY IN LIME-TOSS HISTORY
Monday, September 16th, 2013
Chutney Downs, London, 1846.
Moments after, the madding crowd razed Chutney Downs and unleashed a “Horrific Tsounammy of Hooliganism.” Cities worldwide now lay in cinders, and Millions are dead, mostly from pneumonoultramicroscopicsilico
Lord Dogstuffer-Browncastle has not been located since the Incident; leading phrenologists speculate that his head has imploded.
Such a tumultuous tide of Orgiastic Devastation has not rampaged across Britain’s homeland since the previous match of Lime-Toss, which was yesterday.
–The Royal Crown Daily Journal of Farm Animal Relations and Citrus Sports,
Editor’s Note: No, we don’t have any idea what it means either.
