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Nick (Rick) Ventrillo - written by Bobo
This is what you will see if you are fortunate enough to win Nick's attention for a few moments. His nose was broken in a bar fight in Germany against a jealous man and his three friends. They sucker punched him, which was a mistake. He knocked-out all four men with one punch each, winning himself the moniker, "One-Hit-Nick." He will tell you the gray hair is caused by his Melanocytes, but it is really the result of a short temper caused by "Hot Dogs." The goatee is his attempt to be like his big brother :-)
This is his default expression, and the one 98% of the people who speak to him will encounter. Notice the glazed over eyes and condescending smirk. This is what 40 years of dealing with people who literally have half your IQ will do to you.
Oh sure, it may LOOK like he's listening, but he's really playing his favorite game... "Recidivist." Recidivism means "the chronic tendency toward repetition of criminal or antisocial behavior patterns." If you listen carefully, you will notice that everyone has a favorite word they repeat over and over, usually incorrectly. Nick's game is simple. Once you have used your favorite word three times, he excuses himself, abruptly.
James (Bobo) Ventrillo - written by Nick
Observe the Bobo in his native habitat... sitting on his ass in God-knows-where. He will tell you he wears the shades because his eyes are sensitive to the sun, but he's really checking out your girlfriend while you talk to him. The scraggly goatee is not a fashion statement, but rather an ineffectual attempt to hide a nasty scar he received from a kick boxing fight where he was grossly outmatched. And I had the goatee first! This is the expression 100% of the people who speak to Bobo will get. It may LOOK like he is paying attention... actually, he is. He will listen to anyone, forever, until the heavens fall from the sky, no matter what idiocy they are regurgitating. For this he is considered "likeable."
Why we wrote Rick and Bobo
We are big movie fans, and loved the Matrix movies. But like many, were disappointed by the third one. We wondered how that could happen, how could the first one be perfect and the rest go so awry when they wrote the entire series before making the first movie. We looked at each other and said, “Hell, we could do better than that!” So we started writing the Rick and Bobo quadrilogy. We have spent six years writing the entire series before releasing the first book. In fact, the last line of dialogue for the entire series is somewhere in the first book.
What are Rick and Bobo up to today?
Rick is driving his own truck with no ties to any companies, just the way he likes it. Although for fun he picked up a few Microsoft books to pass the time. A few months later he took a battery of Microsoft Certification tests and passed them all, of course. His best one was a 3 hour test that he finished in just under 3 minutes.
I know, how is that possible? It was one of these progressively difficult tests you take on a computer, there's a better name for it but it escapes me at the moment. If you get a question right, the next one is harder, and so on. He got every question right and answered them so quickly, that he finished before most had time to answer their first question.
James Ventrillo (Bobo), me, joined the army at 17 and never looked back. They had me jumping from one place to another, one job to another, and I got hooked. I have moved about every 3 months for 20 years. The longest I stayed in one place was one year, Las Vegas, for obvious reasons. This month I am a Joomla Website Developer in Los Angeles. But I spend most of my time working with Rick on Rick and Bobo 2! |
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