Phineas L. MacGuire . . . Gets Slimed! Read Online Free PDF Page B

instead of Chester or Stacey?”
    Ben chewed on his pencil. “Because I’m a good artist?”
    â€œThat’s all you’ve got?” I asked. “Why should anybody vote for you just because you’re an artist?”
    â€œI’m a creative guy,” Ben said. “Creative people are creative problem solvers, Mrs. Tuttle said so.”
    â€œSo, what problems are you going to solve?”
    â€œI’ve been thinking about that,” Bensaid. “Have you ever noticed that around ten thirty everybody’s stomachs start growling? But there’s still an hour until lunch, and you can’t concentrate on anything because you’re, like, totally starvazoid.”
    â€œStarvazoid” is one of Ben’s made-up words. He practically has his own dictionary of Ben words that sound like they just jumped out of a stack of comic books.
    â€œSo, what’s your idea?” I asked. “Mandatory snack time?”
    â€œExactly!” Ben exclaimed. “It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. I’m thinking doughnuts and milk, maybe, or candy bars.”
    I thought about this for a few seconds. “It’s got to be nutritious,” I told him. “Definitely no candy. But overall it’s nota bad idea. You could be onto something here.”
    Ben grinned. “Okay, then, check out this cool-a-bomb idea. Two words, buddy: mucho, mucho longer recess.”
    â€œThat’s four words.”
    â€œTwo words, four words, same dif,” Ben said. “My point is, we get fifteen lousy minutes on the playground after lunch. By the time you choose up teams for kickball, you have, like, three minutes to play the game.”
    â€œBut you hate playing kickball,” I said. “Today you spent recess trying to build a T. rex out of broken Popsicle sticks.”
    â€œIt’s not about me,” Ben said. “It’s about the people.”
    I had to admit, the people would definitely vote for more recess.
    â€œThose are good ideas,” I told him.“But you’ve still got a problem. Chester and Stacey are really popular. You’re, well, less popular.”
    â€œI know,” Ben said. “I still haven’t figured how to creatively solve that problem.”
    We decided to work on my mold presentation. Sometimes if you stop thinking about something for a while, you get an awesome idea without even trying. It’s like all the neurons in your brain just keep popping away all by themselves until they hit on the exact right thing.
    The brain, in case you were wondering, is an incredible machine.
    I showed Ben this killer mold book I’d checked out of the library. “I figuredI could write down a lot of interesting facts about mold, and then you could copy them over on a poster and draw some good pictures. I mean, pictures that make the mold look really amazing. Like art, practically.”

    Ben nodded. “I could do that,” he said. “In the close-up pictures mold isn’t nearly half so gross looking as it looks in real life. You could probably fool Mrs. Patino into thinking that mold is something really cool. Like something she might want to give someone for Christmas.”
    That was probably taking things too far. Nobody likes mold more than I do, but I still don’t want to find it in my stocking on Christmas morning.
    Still, I was glad Ben was finally on Team Fungus.
    Ben started sketching out pictures ofmold on a piece of poster board, while I wrote down fascinating mold facts, such as:
    We eat mold! Lots of cheeses are naturally moldy — Camembert and blue cheese get their flavor from molds,
Penicillium camemberti
and
P.
roqueforti,
to be exact.
Slime molds move! It’s how they get their food—they sort of creep over rotten stuff, like old logs or leaves, then surround it and eat the bacteria that’s growing there.
A bunch of slime molds are named after foods, including tapioca slime,