Basil Baxter dances with the children

Written by Basil Baxter

Basil Baxter loves sports. In fact, he loves anything that makes people gather in large crowds. One of his favorites is figure skating. It may not be apparent, but figure skating is singularly deadly. Young girls and latent homosexuals start doing it at an early age, giving them ample time to develop all the heart conditions associated with professional athletes.It is also done in the cold, yet in skimpy costumes. Obviously Basil Baxter thrives on such silliness.

Today proved to be a fine day for a major sports event. The stadium had been booked well in advance by a TV production company. Whenever TV production companies, governments, sports clubs, and other like organizations on Basil Baxter's watch-list do remarkable things like, for example, book a large venue, Basil Baxter is notified. How and why he arranged this, he would rather not tell, but it involved large sums of cash, setting up false floors under a few of Google?s semi-secret data-centers and one assassination. (Well, one that was part of the deal. Not counting deaths on the building sites, obviously. Those are a matter of course.)

Today's event would be an exceptionally good one. Having all but completely depleted the sordid pool of muck that is TV-formats that end with "with the stars", the TV production company had moved on to "with the children". Basil Baxter can think of many things to do that involve children. Mostly it also involves either killing them or recruiting them as assassins. At the very least, Basil Baxter never neglects to pass around cartons of cigarettes whenever he encounters large groups of the little runts. What he would never have thought of, however, was to feature children of celebrities in a TV show, and make them dance with professional figure skaters. While, obviously, there is a significant potential for death and serious maiming, it still would seem to Basil that it would have been better to use bears, or at the very least rabid dogs. They charge less than professional figure-skaters, too.

Still, Basil Baxter had decided to make the event, which would go to air live, more interesting. He had stayed up the whole night working it out. It turned out that the freezing of the ice was the hard part. It had to freeze over quick, and this is harder than it seems. Fortunately, Basil Baxter really only needed to freeze small amounts of liquid. The rest of the volume would be made up out of other objects. Basil Baxter did have to tinker with his schedule, which messed up his plans to visit Pakistan. Fortunately his loyal followers had things pretty well covered over there.

Then he would have to order extremely large numbers of pizzas...

When the day finally arrived, Basil Baxter assured himself of a good seat and sat down to polish off the last three of the pizzas. Polly gave a little whirr as she saw all the people coming in but Basil Baxter hushed her, she had had her fun. Slowly the stands filled up. Then the announcer announced the "stars" as they skated up the floor. When the little kids in their glittery costumes were at the center of the rink, the main lights came on. Basil Baxter watched the show as he ate his final slice of pizza. Kiddies were screaming, the audience was panicking, the announcer had quite audibly died of a heart attack. It was beautiful. Under the ice the dismembered corpses of twenty five pizza delivery boys grinned up at the world. Basil Baxter left for home, where he hoped his ageing VCR would have recorded it all for posterity.

Remember; A pack a day keeps the doctor away. Alligators are a great surprise gift. Thermite is the best replacement for charcoal in any barbeque.

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