Friday, October 10, 2008

DQ Dead Zone™

Okay, remember that part in the legendary cinematic masterpiece Tomb Raider in which the gang is journeying to the arctic circle for some reason, and they enter a mysterious "dead zone" which inexplicably makes their vehicles and cellphones and handheld gaming devices cease to work, and also makes that one geeky dude whose sole purpose was that he had a laptop completely superfluous?

Either way, check out this map of Dairy Queen locations around Seattle:

[dqdeadzone.jpg]

If you and your rag-tag team of scantily-clad, death-defying adventurers were thinking about hunting for mysterious Illuminati relics in Ballard, be warned that entering the DQ Dead Zone™ will render your Blizzards and Peanut Buster Parfaits inoperable.

I first witnessed this stunning natural phenomenon several years ago when Admiral Heenkypants, BRG, and I undertook a long and dangerous mission to achieve $1 Blizzards. Despite our universal belief that we'd seen various Dairy Queens around town, we ended up all the way out in Woodinville before we could finally enjoy our invertible cups of frosty delight at special promotional prices.

This knowledge came in handy after Jason and I achieved ultimate revenge upon McClellan Butte a month or so ago, when on our way home Jason decided that he had a Blizzard-shaped hole in his tummy that needed to be appropriately and immediately filled. Fortunately, we had not yet breached the DQ Seattle Perimeter, an ancient defense designed to distract advancing invaders with delicous frozen treats, thus buying time for Seattle residents to escape to Bainbridge Island by riding on the backs of seals (city planning used to be much more comprehensive than it is now).

Anyway, I bring this up to let you all know that I finally distributed Taco's haiku prize ice cream the other day, so you can all finally sleep at night. However, if you are jumping to the conclusion that I must have taken him to Dairy Queen, you're wrong (the riveting Dairy Queen tale was just a diversion). We went to Molly Moons in Wallingford and got ourselves some delicious waffle cones. Taco tried to get them to put a sundae in the cone, but this was just too much to ask of the poor high schoolers toiling away in the middle-class salt mines of the service industry. I got salted caramel. It was delicious.

The end.

3 comments:

Dr_Lorney said...

I think I may have a clue to your mysterious DQ dead-zone. I believe it is a military-corporate conspiracy against Laurel and I. Not only is there a large DQ exclusion-zone surrounding our long-lost home of Seattle, please refer to the attached map of San Diego, demonstrating the places we've lived (red x's), and the surrounding DQ exclusion-zones (yellow). These are smaller, and less mature than the Seattle zones, due to our shorter stay in San Diego.

San Diego DQ exclusion map

Also, each yellow zone contains a major military base (blue). Marine Corps Air Station Mirmar in the north (Top Gun!), and Naval Air Station North Island in the south (where they train Navy SEALS). Coincidence? I think not.

noisy penguin said...

There was also the time we decided to find a Dairy Queen after an Angels game in Anaheim, and the stars conspired to confuse us into driving north, away from the Dairy Queen, until we reached another Dairy Queen that was closed.

bdoepker said...

In travels to Butte Montana (don't ask), I found that this modest town of 33,892 had at least 2 Dairy Queens. This comes out to 1 DQ for every 16946 inhabitants.

A cursory glance at the DQ.com store locator shows a total of 50 within 50 miles of Seattle. Assuming the metro-area has 3.4+ million people as Wikipedia informs me, that comes out to 1 DQ for every 68488 Seattleites.

Truly, something needs to be done. Send a message to Barack Obama and John McCain and tell them to include comprehensive Dairy Queen placement reform at the top of their agenda.