Tape 45 – Face Eyes and Moon Howls

Bootstuck begins the day with a greeting both dramatic and obvious: “Here I am. Look at my face eyes.” From there, the conversation turns lunar. The townsfolk celebrate the moon depending on its fullness—full moons get full howls, half moons get hoots, and cloudy nights simply mean supper. This tradition, naturally, comes from a wild dog.

Dinner is also a focus, thanks to the arrival of 72 cans of dinosaur soup. The red-sauced noodles shaped like brontosauruses and spiky dinosaurs quickly become the new staple, though the question remains whether a brontosaurus tastes different from, say, a camel-shaped cracker.

Between meals and moonlight, Bootstuck’s radios start pulling in mysterious commercials, including one particularly insistent ad for “Ributon” or maybe “Rabutol,” promising to cure tiredness with suspicious zeal. The cross-talk raises questions about whether they’re speaking to the outside world or just another misfired frequency.

Finally, the town hints at its next big ambition: “Building Bootstuck”—a television program to document their expansion, exposure, and maybe even notoriety. Press is press, after all, and in Bootstuck there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

www.bootstuck.com

Transcript

UNKNOWN 0:00

Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

Here I am. Right here. I haven't moved. It's me. Look at me in my face eyes. Here I am.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

I can hear you now.

SPEAKER_02 0:20

It's a new day. It's a new day and the sun is shining. Here I am. Last night the moon was outside. Is that right? Half of them anyway. The other half must have been on vacation. Maybe in the south.

SPEAKER_01 0:32

Right. Do the people at Bootstuff do anything special to celebrate the moon?

SPEAKER_02 0:37

Yep, we certainly do. We do a howl once in a while. when the moon becomes all the way here. And when it's only halfway here, sometimes we just do a little hoot, and sometimes we just look at it and light a candle because it's not as bright as it should be. Understood?

SPEAKER_01 0:51

No. So you howl at the moon.

SPEAKER_02 0:53

We do. We like to. Yeah. When it's all the way turned on. We got that idea from a wild dog. Wild dog was outside going, and we said, wow, what's he all going about? And then we looked upside, top, top, nightlight, whoo, real bright. So we did it too. Then the clouds came and we went for supper.

SPEAKER_01 1:12

Well, that's good. Speaking of

SPEAKER_02 1:14

supper, hang on, I'm speaking. We got a new Dropbox team last week, Thursday. Wednesday or Tuesday? Thursday. Tuesday. Not too sure. Thursday. But we got one. And guess what we got? Dinosaur soup.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

Dinosaur soup.

SPEAKER_02 1:26

Comes in a can.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Yep. Right. It's got the noodles that are in the shape of dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Yeah, dinosaur-shaped noodles in a red sauce. It's got a brontosaurus. How many cans did you get? Yeah, we built dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_01 1:38

How many cans did you get? 72

SPEAKER_02 1:39

cans Thursday. Wednesday or Tuesday Thursday 72 cans of dinosaur soup and we want to know the rest of our inventory that we got this weekend coming up the last time

SPEAKER_01 1:48

sure

SPEAKER_02 1:48

we also got cauliflower

SPEAKER_01 1:50

72 cans

SPEAKER_02 1:52

hang on I'm speaking we just put it in the water and let it sit there for an hour and a half and then we all stabbed at it I don't know if they was traditional to like cave people if they really ate dinosaur soup I'm not sure so I need you to remember it's not real dinosaurs

SPEAKER_01 2:06

oh I was aware of that

SPEAKER_02 2:08

okay then we that's a good one we're gonna have it for or supper, I'll let you know if a brontosaurus and a spiky-haired dinosaur taste the

SPEAKER_01 2:14

same. You know, we

SPEAKER_02 2:15

had crackers one time that was the shape of a hippopotamus and a camel, and I can tell you, they taste the same.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

They're just shapes.

SPEAKER_02 2:25

Speaking of songs, we heard a radio advertisement thing come around on the speakerphone. It was just like...

SPEAKER_00 2:34

Is this the way you feel in the morning? Too tired? Too often? Try Ributon Mr. Daniel Spillane. Still tired after a good night's sleep? Too dragged out and nervous to face the day? I was feeling tired. Too tired, tired. Too often? I was feeling tired. My wife heard about Rabutol on the radio.

UNKNOWN 2:55

Try Rabutol.

SPEAKER_00 2:57

After taking it, I feel full of...

SPEAKER_02 3:01

I get those

SPEAKER_01 3:03

too. When I'm trying to contact you, sometimes the signal crosses over and I get some sort of radio station from somewhere else. So what was the

SPEAKER_02 3:12

commercial for? It was talking about something like that. It was a type of commercial. It was weird. It just came off all scritchy-scratchy on the radio like somebody was trying to play DJ with my 45.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Yeah, we get a lot of commercials, actually, when we try and talk to you. We've also talked to people that we thought were from Bootstuck, but they were just radio operators from other areas. So, you know, crossover.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Yeah, we have a crossover here. Woo! Building Bootstuck.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Building Bootstuck. Is there plans to expand Bootstuck? Are you looking to... We're hoping that

SPEAKER_02 3:45

a television program show wants to come and do a film about us building boat stuff. That would be a good time for us, and then we'd get a lot of exposure. You know, even without a slogan, though.

SPEAKER_01 3:55

I don't think that's the kind of exposure you're looking for. Well, I

SPEAKER_02 3:59

don't think it really matters. Anything that grabs attention is good exposure. You ever hear the saying that there's no bad press, except...

SPEAKER_00 4:10

I'll owe you there.