Inside Mtsac: Fill & Download for Free

TL;DR - The poorly preserved remains of Barney’s unborn alien love-child.Still reading? Understandable. This does require some explaining.In 1997 my brother and I were both attending Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut, California. He was taking an English course that required him to make a presentation and he decided to tap me, taking advanced TV production classes, to help him make a video. He created a character called Commander Neb, an alien studying human beings. We enjoyed making his 10-minute class project so much we decided to attempt to make a whole series out of it. We manged to make three episodes before we ran out of steam, time and money.As part of the production we created a whole set, including some props. Here’s a screen shot:Now, take a close look here:Suspended in that jar is Barney’s Unborn Alien Love Child. We made it as an inside joke. At the time, Barney was the big thing in children’s TV and while we didn’t see ourselves as a direct competitor (we were on local cable access, so we had no “competition”) we still loathed the show with an abiding, burning hatred. The fetus was made out of oil-based clay suspended in pure, uncolored, unflavored gelatin. Yes, gelatin, the perfect growth medium for just about everything. I made the gelatin with a little bleach to try to inhibit the growth of anything nasty, and then I sealed it all with a thick layer of canning wax. It was an impressive prop, but after a few weeks I noticed black tendrils extending from BUALC and I knew the jar was compromised.When my brother and I decided to end the show and the MtSAC studio asked me to get rid of the set I had a problem. It was pretty big and I had no place to store it, so one summer morning I dismantled the set and threw it away (I saved the globe). When I got to BULAC I tried to be extra careful, but the moment I cracked the seal on it, separating it from the pedestal, I smelled it.I had smelled death before, but this was beyond that. This was concentrated, putrid, essence of Death. I immediately turned the jar open side up and ran for the dumpster out the back of the studio.I must pause a moment to describe the layout. The Broadcasting Department (now called the Learning Technology Center) is in the basement of the library. Lots of offices with people working and studying. It was through this labyrinth of corridors that I flew trying to get my toxic payload to the dumpster.The whole time trying not to vomit.I burst out the back doors to the loading dock and heaved the jar into the dumpster. In retrospect this was a really, really bad idea and I realized this immediately when the jar exploded, spilling the noxious sludge all over the interior of the dumpster. I now realized what I was smelling wasn’t just the concentrated, purified, essence of Death, but just a sample of it. What I had created now was a gigantic Stink Bomb of Death just around the corner from the entrance to one of the most used buildings on campus.I fled the loading dock gagging on a lunch I hadn’t even eaten yet, grateful I’d skipped breakfast. I grabbed the last few set pieces and rushed them out, holding my breath outside the doors. I could swear I smelled the Death Bomb through my tear ducts. On my last run I found one of my colleagues taking a smoke break on the loading dock. Astounded, I figured her 2-pack a day smoking habit was suppressing her sense of smell.“What’s that smell?” she asked, apparently not as repulsed I was.“Yeah, that’s my fault. Sorry. It’s one of the props from Commander Neb,” I said, choking back the bile in my throat.“Wow,” she said. “That’s pretty bad.” And then the took another drag on her cigarette.I went back inside to gather my stuff and get out of there before the administration started asking questions and the Hazmat team shows up. I ran into another friend who had just arrived, his eyes wide as saucers.“Greg, what’s that smell outside?” he asked.“My fault. I threw out the Commander Neb set and one of the props has gone horribly wrong.”“That smell came from your puppet set?” It was more a declaration than a question.“’Fraid so. I’m really sorry,” I said sheepishly.“Man, you can smell it all the way in the parking lot! The people upstairs are starting to ask questions! You better get out of here.”I took his advice and got out of there as fast as my 1985 Chevrolet Sprint could carry me. I found out the next day that the administration was forced to call the trash company and have the dumpster picked up early. It had just been emptied the day before. The library and Broadcasting Department were rendered uninhabitable until it was. I am responsible for a biohazard on an American college campus thanks to Barney’s Unborn Alien Love Child and gelatin.