Survival Guide Spectacular: A 1,000-Pound Gorilla Of Wisdom

A 1,000-Pound Gorilla Of Wisdom

Laura Marrich
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3 min read
Survival Guide Spectacular
(Jeff Drew jeffdrewpictures.com)
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Sound the trumpets! The Weekly Alibi turns the page on its millennial issue this week. That’s 1,000 editions of the best food, film, news and entertainment coverage ever to lay ink on this great City of Duke.

If we do say so ourselves.

To thank all of you folks on the other side of the page—certainly the most passionate, creative, smart and inquisitive readers ever to lay eye upon tree pulp—we commissioned a special treat for you.

We asked our good friends La Llorona, El Kookooee and the guy from the Blake’s Lotaburger sign to bake you guys a cake. They flatly refused.

“Not eeeeven,” they said.

“Don’t be all pee-pee hearted,” we countered, adding, “
Alibi readers were born here their whole lives, just like you. You think you’re all bad, or what?”

To this, they had no reply. Then the work began.

First they built an horno in the arroyo behind the middle school. They packed the silty mud of the Rio Grande onto pink granite hauled from the Sandia Mountains. They encrusted the whole thing with creepy religious tchotchkes from Old Town and woven ribbons of VHS tape picked up from the side of I-25. “A la vegers,” they solemnly intoned as they superglued the final Virgen figurine to the sun-bleached dashboard on top, which they had secured with a whisper of stucco-colored duct tape.

Then, under the fullest moment of light shed by a thousand full moons, they slowly, slowly, slowly baked you a cake. And the cake began to grow. By the time it was done, no ordinary plate could contain it. Our trio of bakers gingerly lifted the monumental pastry onto the Kirtland Air Force Base trestle, and laid out 1,000 candles across its glittery horizon.

Weekly Alibi scientists, meanwhile, had been doing some work of their own. Furiously running cake-to-candle algorithms on the vintage Macintosh computers back at AlibiHQ, they’d determined that a cake with that much heat on it would burst into a frosting-fueled fireball. That would in turn suck up fumes from the Kirtland jet fuel leak, doubling the fireball’s size again, and then quadrupling once it hit the chile vapors rising from incalculable plates of huevos rancheros. The Scoville units alone would singe the arm hair off of every Chavez in Bernalillo County.

We just don’t have that kind of insurance.

So forget the cake. Instead, we’re commemorating our behemoth birthday with this special issue. Seeing as how we’re busting at the seams with two decades’ worth of invaluable insights, we thumbed through past Survival Guides for a few of our favorite crash courses on Burque.

We hope you enjoy our retrospective guide to getting by in Albuquerque. With a life span of 1,000 issues, who better to help you guys survive this dusty, monkey-filled maze we call home?
Survival Guide Spectacular

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