Vikings are the new Ninjas anyway Part 3: Make a little birdhouse in your soul

This is the continuing saga (a word of Icelandic origin, by the way) of our attempt to give our wedding cake a proper Viking burial. Here are Parts One and Two. This one is going to be a little boring. The fire comes tomorrow.

The first step in this bird house to Viking ship debacle was to figure out exactly what a Viking ship looked like. The second step is to decide that there is no way this thing is getting a sail*. The third step is to turn on the Sci-Fi channel because they show the 13th Warrior about 90 times a weekend and it features some good Banderas on Grendel action. The final step was to gather the tools and start screwing this up because there was a very small chance it would be successful.

Using a small hand saw I removed the front wall off my little pseudo-duplex bird house. (It didn’t occur to me at but this house is impractical for a bird. It has two front doors, but there is nothing separating the entrances. A sparrow entering the top hole would just fall down to the second. Unless this bird could somehow fly, which is just crazy.) The cheap pine, or whatever this is made of, was too weak to handle any real manly sawing, so after a few unsuccessful delicate strokes I just grabbed the manliest of tools and started hammering with inexact whacks. Amazingly, this thing started to look a lot more boat like.

Time to test its floatability again so I drafted the one toy the dog hasn’t eaten. Kissy Bear climbed in and set sail.


That’s CAPTAIN Kissy Bear to you.

Success. Next I removed the overhanging parts of the roof to give a more sleek appearance and better mobility in the water. We want this to be less like a D-Day landing craft and more like those boats that zip up and down the Jersey shore in the summer. This will no doubt be a fast moving craft that will exude manliness. And for no other reason than Kissy Bear’s penis is really small, just like those guys who zip their boats up and down the Jersey shore. It was still a little too Volvo-like so I sanded down the edges to give it more curves. They’re far from symmetrical but they work.



Next we needed the signature Viking characteristic: the Dragon Bowhead. I don’t have the proper skill set to carve my own so I had to go back to AC Moore and see the options available to the type of people who want to put lady bugs on everything they own. (it seems to be their most vigorous market.)



I don’t exactly know what these are supposed to be used for but I felt they would serve my purpose. That’s an elk, caterpillar, brontosaurus (or whatever they’re called now) seahorse, and a tank made of flat, thin particle board.

I didn’t think the caterpillar would be striking much fear among the soon-to-be-pillaged along the Upper Volga. And if I have one fault, it’s that I’m a slave to historical military accuracy, so the tank was out. (Though it would have been awesome) The elk was of a like climate but didn’t seem tough enough. And while the dinosaur was the closest when it came to Chinese farmers digging up dragon bones 300 years ago, the brontosaurus’s head was too globular. So it took some imagination, but the seahorse head wins it. I tacked the elk head on the back for whatever reason. Let’s say it represents the Nordic noble spirit.



Though I’d given up on making a sail I felt it still needed that last little touch that would make Odin proud. At the crafts store I picked up some wooden clothes pins in the hope I could glue them on as oars. This turned out to be a huge hassle and quickly gave up. (But not before momentarily gluing the ship to the table. Naturally I would have had to throw both in the river to be burned together had I not been able to separate them.) Ever risking the destruction of this entire project, I decided to drill holes and force the pins in. Again using Kissy Bear for the approximate weight for 2 year old piece of wedding cake, I noted the water line and drilled 4 holes about in inch higher. They were a little small but with some more sanding I was able to get them in.

And so finally, I tested her again.



Oh yeah. Tomorrow, I hope you have 911 on speed dial because we’re going to burn some shit up.

*I also found a report some college kid did on Vikings and he/she referenced a book of sci-fi fiction, which I am very familiar with, as historical fact. So busted.