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All of a sudden, there's a (human) guy with a shaved head at my side, feeding statistics into my ear kind of like a Vin Scully who is inordinately enamoured of inflammable materials. "The jaws can exert 1200 pounds worth of force," he barks. "It has 44 razor-sharp teeth and four tusks."
Now Sirena has a megaphone, and she's shouting at another (human) guy who is zipped into a leather S&M mask, and looks like "The Gimp" in Pulp Fiction. He's wielding a serious-looking machete. Here's where I start to get confused, and my conscientious reporter's notes get more illegible than usual. There are percussive blasts--recorded sounds of battlefield explosions, airhorn pollution, megaphone babble, etc. A 12-foot-tall stationary robot with a TV set for a head (filled with an extreme close-up of Rush Limbaugh's substantial, sweaty pate--now I'm really scared) smashes its cymbals-for-hands together; like those toy monkeys, the difference being that every time this iron-scaffold primate bashes its copper fists together, an arc of electricity ignites a jet of propane gas, yielding an orangy explosion. Assorted peripheral SEEMEN are stumbling through the confusion, wielding backpack-mounted air cannons and air horns-slash-public address loudspeakers.
The most impressive robot is "Drunken Master," named for the Jackie Chan movie, and also for the way the machine walks. It's about the size of a Russian Lada car and it looks a lot like one of those mechanical walkers in The Empire Strikes Back: four hydraulically articulated legs attached to a naked chassis, driven by a deisel engine and radio controlled by someone in the shadows. It weighs 1800 pounds, lurches over the dirt, and sprays water through its head-claw, which consists of 13 sharpened meathooks that move independently of one another in a strobing motion, like a lethal Magic Fingers Vibra Massage. After about 20 minutes of ear-splitting chaos, it's over. But exactly what it was that is now over is a bit puzzling.
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