Post #508137 by Formikahini on Sun, Jan 31, 2010 10:09 AM

Aagh, you beat me!
I've been struggling with parts of this for days, but you helped me clear up a couple, amigo!

Here's my try, trying to make it both understandable and faithful to the very inflated prosaic style it contains:

Have you all ever tried “Okolehao Punch”? It is served in a coconut shell, and besides the coconut milk, it has pineapple juice, lemon juice, Cointreau, whisky, gin, and a few drops of some unidentifiables, which are the secret weapon of the Aloha Bar. Laudanum? Chloroform? Prussic acid? In the Hawaiian Islands, the poisons are typically much more subtle, and the Aloha Bar in New York is a typically Hawaiian bar, with its palms, its coconut trees, its artificial beach, where an overwhelmingly bright sun made of quartz toasts the bathers’ skin, its ukulele and handsaw music, its "hula" dancers, among whom especially stands out Kanihomanoleokeohokaole, or rather, “The girl with the pearly white teeth, not one of which is ever separated from its socket,” her name in Hawaiian, which perhaps turns out a bit too long, but one which, given all that it entails and expresses, should almost be seen as an abbreviation.

The Aloha Bar also has special machinery for producing tropical rainstorms, and from time to time, under the action of that machinery, a hurricane force wind begins to blow throughout the whole enclosure, which bends the palm trees and causes the coconuts to fall on the customers' heads. The waters of the pool churn and surge, darkening the quartz sun, and if they are not waterfalls from the heavens, they are at least pouring forth from the ceiling, inundating everything with a torrential rain. There is thunder and lightening, and the patrons, soaked to the bone, believe in good faith that they are running a great game, which given the subjectivity of our perception, is perhaps sufficient so that, in effect, they are. Then, and like the calm that always follows the storm, the heavens suddenly become still. A magnificent rainbow displays its colors across the back of the room and everyone hurries to ask for the Okolehao Punch to avoid getting pneumonia ["congestion of the lungs"].

This is what happens, or was happening just a little while ago in the Aloha Bar, and knowing it, I consider it extremely unlikely that there is anyone who could capture Okolehao Punch in a bottle, because strictly speaking, one could possibly bottle the punch, but in order for it to conserve all its efficacy, it would be necessary to bottle with it such hard-to-bottle elements as the storms and rainbow, the cry of the ukuleles, the sobbing of the handsaw, the thunder claps, the lightening flashes, and lastly, the whole chorus of hula dancers, where, without forgetting of course, is “the girl with the pearly-white teeth, not one of which will ever come loose from its socket.” To deprive Okolehao Punch of these elements would be like depriving it of its secret droplets, and because of this, even if a large American manufacturer were to patent its famous name, I do not believe that I would ever give it any of my business.

"Zazz captivates felt."

[ Edited by: Formikahini 2010-01-31 19:13 ]