hypo, baby!

sweet little "el guapo"

Ned Nederlander, an elderly farmer residing in the fictitious state of Confusion, lives on a parcel of land that shares a common border with another piece of land owned by his neighbor Dusty Bottoms. Ned is engaged in the business of growing soybeans, which he sells twice monthly at a local farmers market. Ned is grows exactly twelve bushels of soybeans per month, in accordance with the mandate put forth by the Department of Agriculture. In return for following the mandate, Ned receives an annual subsidy of four thousand dollars.

However, Ned also maintains a secret thirteenth bushel of soybeans that he grows on a small plot of land beneath his back porch. On the first Friday of every month, Niederlander trades these soybeans with Lucky Day, a local hashish peddler. Immediately thereafter, Ned spends 48 continuous hours in a drug-induced stupor.

Ned lives alone on his farm, his only companion being an old gray donkey named El Guapo. Every morning at precisely 9 a.m., Ned leads El Guapo to the Hershey Squirt River, Confusion’s only source of fresh water. El Guapo typically spends an hour or so drinking and bathing in the Hershey Squirt’s brown and mucky waters, then another half hour sunning himself on the sandy river bank, where he lazes in the sun, and shoos away flies with his gray donkey tail. While El Guapo bathes and lazes, Ned typically either naps on the sandy river bank, swims in the river, or masturbates furiously while concealed in a thicket of brush.

Ned has two ways of reaching the Hershey Squirt River. He may lead El Guapo down the road, along the perimeter of Dusty’s adjoining land, or he may cut directly across Dusty’s property.

Ned spent several years taking the road, but found it rather unpleasant. For one thing, it took him twice as long to reach the river by that route. Furthermore, the shoulder on the road was quite narrow, and it was extremely upsetting to Ned (and arguably to El Guapo as well) to have to travel such a great distance with so many cars whizzing by only a few feet away. This was particularly true when Ned was high on hash; the sounds of the honking horns and the gravel kicked up by the cars only served to severely harsh his mellow.

Therefore, Ned began leading El Guapo directly through Dusty Bottom’s property. At first he did it just once or twice per month (only on the days that he was high), but it wasn’t long before he and El Guapo were cutting through Dusty’s land on a daily basis. In fact, it has been months since Ned has used the original route along the road.

The benefits of the shortcut are numerous. For one, there are many acres of wild orchids growing on Dusty’s land. El Guapo found these orchids to be delightful both to smell and to nibble upon. Furthermore, Dusty’s property used to be the home of a summer camp, so there were several old but still attractive trampolines, see-saws, and swimming pools along the way, which both Ned and El Guapo would enjoy.

As the months passed, Ned and El Guapo’s daily sojourn wore a path through even the most thickly overgrown parts of Dusty’s land.

Dusty was very much aware of their presence, and it angered him endlessly. He was tired of having his orchids nibbled upon by the old gray donkey, tired of finding clumps of donkey fur along the banks of the Hershey Squirt River, and tired of accidentally walking into the sticky ejaculate Ned would leave in the thicket. So, like a good little tortfeasor, he decided to do something about it.

On the first Thursday night in the month of November, Dusty spent several hours digging a gigantic pit in his property. The pit was approximately twelve feet deep, and was situated directly along the path to the Hershey Squirt River. “Ah reck’n this’ll teach’m,” he said with a laugh (Dusty had a proclivity for using contractions). Satisfied with his efforts, he went in for the night to watch his favorite episode of the Cosby Show, the one where Theo gets his ear pierced, and Cliff sits next to him on the bed, and the two of them lean back and forth together, Cliff trying to see the ear, Theo tries to conceal it; hilarity ensues, etc.

Early the next morning, Ned slung his secret 13th bushel of soybeans over his shoulder and carried it to his secret meeting spot for his monthly rendezvous with Lucky Day. The deal went down as planned, and a few minutes later, Ned was blazing up a globule of some of the dankest, stickiest, blackest hashish ever to have been criminally possessed in all of Confusion. He was more fucked up than he had ever been in his life, and was not even halfway back to his farm when, subdued by the hypnotic powers of the hashish, he tumbled down onto the ground, and slipped into a deep and rich slumber filled with brilliantly vivid dreams replete with orchestral scores.

Now Lucky Day was a drug dealer with a conscience, and he realized that that day’s product might have been more powerful than what Ned could handle, especially considering that Ned was an octogenarian. He went back to Ned’s farm to make sure that the old fellow was all right, but was unable to find him anywhere in or around his house. All he saw was the gentle old donkey El Guapo, who was fidgeting anxiously in his barn because he desperately needed a bath, and was jonesing for a sweet little taste of orchids.

Lucky knew that El Guapo needed to be brought to the banks of the Hershey Squirt, and in an act of infinite kindness, loaded the donkey into back of his Escalade, and tore off down the main road towards the river. Of course, as this is a torts problem, Lucky lost control of his vehicle while he was hollering at some honeys driving alongside him in a convertible. The Escalade began to swerve back and forth, then began to roll off the edge of the road. Unfortunately for Lucky and El Guapo, the Escalade just happened to be passing over a bridge as it began to roll. The bridge’s guardrail had been in need of repair for over a year, but Confusion’s Department of Transportation lacked the manpower and the funding to fix it. Therefore, the car rolled right over the edge of the bridge.

As they plummeted towards the earth, both Lucky and El Guapo comprehended the fact that they were going to die, causing them a degree of unhappiness that was significantly more than mild. Strangely enough, just before smashing back to earth, El Guapo turned to Lucky Day, and in his rusty, braying donkey voice, wailed: “I’ve always loved you, Lucky.”

Both died instantly upon impact.

Several hours later back at the farm, Ned finally woke up from his slumber, and struggled groggily to his feet while rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “Hot damn, kilogram!” he said. “That sho’ was some bubonic chronic.”

He realized that poor El Guapo had been all day without drinking and bathing in the runny, muddy, chunky waters of the Hershey Squirt, so he ran back to El Guapo’s barn. You can imagine his surprise when he found it empty.

“That crazy ol’ Donkey must’a decide to take hisself to the river!” he exclaimed. “Don’t worry, Guappy. Daddy’s on his way!”

Ned sprinted off towards Dusty’s property, and began following the trail that he and his donkey friend both knew so well. Resisting the urge to play on the see-saws and trampolines that he and El Guapo had both enjoyed so often, the old man ran on and on at a seemingly impossible speed toward the river. However, he skidded to a stop as he came across something he’d never seen before along the path.

“What in tarnation* is that?” Ned said with a start. He crept nervously up to the edge of the pit, not at all able to tell what it was that he was looking at.

“El Guapo, is that you?” he asked tentatively as he continued to move closer. “Guappy, why ain’tcha answerin’ me? Wake up, boy!”

Believing that he was looking at his donkey lying on the ground along the path, Ned leaped forward quickly to comfort his fallen friend. Of course, it was not El Guapo, because El Guapo was a couple of miles away, being moved into a Confusion State sanitation truck, one shovel-full at a time. Rather, it was the pit that Dusty Bottom had dug the day before. Ned fell to its bottom (which was, strangely enough, dusty), breaking both his hips, shattering his illusions, and lacerating his pride.

You are the lawyer to whom Ned tells this tearful tale.

You have three hours to answer the following question (100 poins): What possible claims does Ned have against Dusty, Lucky, and the state of Confusion?

***

please list any responses to this hypo – serious and otherwise – on the discussion board. by the way, there is one “master issue” that i hope someone will be able to spot. let’s see how smart you all are...

i enjoyed writing this ridiculous little exam question. i hope you enjoyed reading it as well.

-menlove

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*The noun and interjection tarnation illustrate suffixation, the addition of a suffix to a word. Tarnation and darnation (the latter probably having come first) are both euphemistic forms of damnation. Tarnation seems to have been influenced by tarnal, another mild oath derived from (e)ternal! The Oxford English Dictionary cites late-18th-century examples of tarnation from New England, indicating that it has been part of American speech since colonial days. - Dictionary.com