Geraldine kicked her ride into gear and rumbled out of the gate, into the Istodrome and its ambient thunder. The others were already circling the floor: Dallas Gator and his two-treadle rig, Jingo Smith on her lean ShuttleMatic, and Sam Scarwood’s weird upside-down contraption. Geraldine shook her head. Unless he got with the times and added a double back-beam, he wasn’t going anywhere.<\/p>\n
The announcer’s boom brought her back to the arena. “Your final contestant… the Tartan Trampler… Geraldiiiiine O’Maaallleeey!<\/i>“<\/p>\n
Geraldine grinned, checked her trigger action, and shot off a salutatory flare from her Battle Loom’s smokestack. The crowd went wild.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not online, unfortunately, but trust me when I say that the front page of USA Today has the sub-head U.S. Olympic hopefuls face drug accusations Battle looms to compete which, I… I don’t know, might just be the best ambiguous headline ever. Geraldine kicked her ride into gear and rumbled out of the gate, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,19,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines-and-ads","category-mild-lunacy","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/801\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.xorph.com\/nfd\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}