Today’s post brought to you by Luke “Tendicks” Coulter! Enjoy!

Okay, so I’m not the normally profane and blasphemous fellow you’re used to seeing here (as evidenced by the fact that this line is longer than any line in the past fourteen months. Maybe. I haven’t actually gone back and checked.) but you guys are going to have to deal with it. Or snort in derision and press the close button on this tab as you stroke your white cat and push your thick framed glasses up your nose you fucking snob.

For those of you still here, you’re in for a treat. Today, we are figuratively travelling to the far east with my words, which are like first class if first class didn’t have snobs, who aren’t here any more because of that thing we just went over.

Anyway, this story takes place during the reign of King Hung the Sixth, a fact which I only included because King Hung sounds like the name of a male Asian stripper with no sense of subtlety. Other important things that happened during his reign: Grass grew, paint dried, and he took off all his clothes just before he dropped dead, which makes him sound even more like a stripper but with death instead of sex. Maybe he was a stripper for necrophiliacs?

I have gone off on a tangent. This will probably happen a few times before I’m finished.

The legend I’m about to tell isn’t actually about King Hung. It is about Phu Dong, which also sounds like the name of a male Asian stripper with even less sense of subtlety. He may get naked, too, later, but you’ll have to read on to find out.

It starts out with an old, childless couple just kind of hanging out in their house, talking about how miserable life is and how much they’d love to have a baby. If you really want to dwell on this part (I have no idea why you would, but sad, boring and depressing is what some people really enjoy. Otherwise, why the hell would you ever set foot into a cubicle? Personally, I start screaming whenever I get within ten feet of one and don’t stop until I can’t see it anymore or it’s burned to the ground. This quirk made “take your kid to work” day pretty interesting during my childhood.) just imagine basically any scene from any artsy French movie ever. Or… France in general.

Anyway, they finish their annoying conversation, cry a bit, and then the lady goes out to work in the rice paddy while the husband sits on his lazy ass and masturbates or something. It doesn’t really give an explanation for why this old lady is doing back breaking labor while her husband hangs out at home, but these are the questions that you’re not supposed to ask in the middle of myths. So as this lady’s walking around in the rice field, doing whatever the fuck you do in a rice field, she comes upon a massive footprint.

Now, if I randomly happened upon a huge footprint, my first reaction would be to run away before I got raped by giants, but this is an old lady who just doesn’t give a shit anymore. “Giant footprint?” she says, “Don’t mind if I do!” and goes and steps right the fuck in it.

And then she gets raped by giants. Duh.

Well, not really. Then she gets pregnant, which is a lot less tragic. Still, I kind of prefer to think that it was, like, really fast giants or something. Like maybe so fast she didn’t even notice. Here, I wrote them a theme song, look.

Premature Ejaculation Giants, roaming the land,
Impregnating sterile women who step in footprints, just because they can!
PREMATURE EJACULATION GIANTS!
Doo doo de doo okay so maybe I suck at writing songs.

I’m on a tangent again.

Okay, so this lady steps into this footprint and balloons out like a… a… balloon, I guess. Hm. Lost that one.

Does anybody else think this sounds a little unbelievable? Like… a month later, when she finally tells her husband she was pregnant and he’s all “What?! How!?” and she says “Well, a while ago I stepped in a huge footprint…” and the husband was all “Are you sure it wasn’t that gang bang that I heard about out in the field that I missed because I’m a lazy fuck?” and the lady was all “NOPE, NOPE, IT WAS THE FOOTPRINT.” Reminds me of another story about a girl who got pregnant and nobody was sure how… What was it again? Agh, it’s on the tip of my tongue…

Ah well, it’ll come to me.

OR! OR! As soon as she stepped in the footprint, a four month old fetus popped into her uterus! That would have been hilarious to see. An old lady in a rice field randomly falls over and when she stands up she’s fat.

Where was I?

Oh! Right! Baby gets borned, and appears to have all of the cognitive function as a sack of potatoes with way less practicality, since you can eat potatoes but eating your own children is generally frowned upon unless you’re a shark. For three years this thing is a vegetable (see what I did there?), until one day a messenger of King Hung (hur hur) sprints into the village, looks around wildly, grabs the nearest dude by the lapels and screams “OH CONFUCIOUS (Or Buddha? Maybe I should research this so as not to offend anyone…) SAVE US THE CHINESE ARE ATTACKING AND WE’RE TOTALLY FUCKED TELL ME DO YOU HAVE ANY MIRACLE BABIES STASHED AWAY SOMEWHERE THAT CAN FIX THIS!” and the villagers are all like “Nope no miracle babies here, sorry, all we’ve got is this really stupid one who can’t walk or talk or anything.” and the baby is all “sup?” and the villagers are like “What the fuck?” and the messenger is like “YOU’LL DO, EVEN THOUGH THERE IS OBJECTIVELY NOTHING SPECIAL ABOUT YOU.” and the baby is like “Yeah, I’m gonna need you to go and get me a fuckton of arbitrary shit. I want a metal stick, and a metal helmet, and some sweet ass metal armor, and a metal pony.” and the messenger is all “YESSIR RIGHT AWAY SIR.” and runs off to get the king to do the bidding of some random bumpkin kid.

Meanwhile, back in the village, the kid looks around and says “Okay, time for you guys to start doing my bidding, too. I want a mountain of chocolate, a million tons of rice, some dog (because this is Vietnam) some goat, some snails, some more rice, a bit more chocolate, and I want it all yesterday! Feed me I am hungry!”

So they begin feeding this kid, and he eats more than an industrial shredder. Like… once a cart of schoolchildren were going to school and they accidentally drove in front of him and there were huge casualties. And, as they’re feeding this kid, he grows an grows and grows until he is roughly the size of a barn. A small barn, but a legitimate one. One that could fit horses and hay bales and stuff.

Anyway, the messenger comes back, hauling all this iron shit that the kid wanted. The kid (who, although he is now huge, is still 3 years old. Remember that.) stands up, straps on the armor, (which somehow fits him, a plot hole that I can’t figure out, but fuck that, it’s magic!) picks up the iron stick, climbs on the iron horse, and rides off to do battle.

Does anybody else want to know what would happen if you got the wooden horse from that cat myth earlier and this iron horse together? I bet it would be horrific to see, but I also bet I would get some sweet furniture out of it. Like a bed frame made of horse legs, or a nightstand that whinnies. Or at least a freaking sweet album cover, if I had a camera handy.

Back to the battle, the entire An army (that’s it’s name. It is an army, and also the An army. Awesome.) sees this freak of nature coming, a sort of colossus made of metal, swinging a metal stick, and riding a metal horse that is breathing fire at this point, because why the fuck not, and all of the soldiers are basically like nope nope nope nope and they turn around and run away.

See, if this was a modern day myth, that would be the end of it, but no. There hasn’t been nearly enough bloodshed. So Phu Dong rides after them, swinging his metal stick around and screaming, and he hits the army (the whole army and nothing but the army) SO HARD that he breaks his IRON STAFF in half.

Again, this could possibly be the end of it, a properly chastened enemy getting their ass handed to them by a three year old baby with a glandular problem. But no. “No iron stick?” says Phu Dong. “That’s okay. There’s a whole bamboo forest over there I can use.” So he rides his iron horse over there, picks up the bamboo forest, and hits the fleeing An army with THAT, too. Until they were all dead.

That last part is probably an allegory or something, but I don’t really care. A baby just picked up a bamboo forest and beat one of the modern world’s superpowers over the head until it died, while riding a fire breathing horse made out of metal.

And after Phu Dong did that, he and his horse flew to the top of a mountain where they both lived forever.

The moral of the story is listen to your coworker’s baby stories, because, if you’re lucky, you will hear something more metal than you have ever heard in your entire life. Also, don’t invade Vietnam, but we already fucked that one up so there’s not really much of a point in including it.

When Mister Tendicks isn’t lampooning the Vietnamese, he is busily lying to the internet over on this website