Aspirin

aspirin This is your garden variety buffered analgesic -- an ancient tribal remedy, made from tree bark and stuff. It's little, white, and different from things that are large and/or not white. Type: usable Cannot be discarded (In-game plural: aspirins)

View metadata Item number: 1381 Description ID: 775883133 View in-game: view View market statistics refreshedit data

Obtained From

Obsoleted Areas/Methods

Crimbo 2005

Advent Calendar

When Used

You put the aspirin under your tongue and let it dissolve. Tastes nasty, but man, is it effective!

You gain 101 hit points.

(You lose the effect Beaten Up).

Notes

• Found in the Advent Calendar on December 13, 2005, with the text:

An Adventer is You!

You acquire an item: aspirin

"They can't all be winners, kid."

References

• The item's appearance in the Advent Calendar and the Advent Calendar text are references to the film Bad Santa. Billy Bob Thornton's character rips apart an Advent calendar belonging to the boy in the film and eats all the chocolates. Then he feels badly about it, puts a bunch of junk in it instead of chocolate, and tapes it back up. After the boy opens it to gets the first piece of junk, Billy Bob Thornton's character says, "They can't all be winners, kid." The last day on that calendar was refilled with aspirin.
• The "tribal remedy, made from tree bark and stuff" is possibly a reference to the book American Gods, by Neil Gaiman. One of the characters in the book offers the protagonist an ancient tribal remedy for a headache, which turns out to be aspirin. Incidentally, aspirin (salicylic acid) was originally made from willow bark, and in 1853, Charles Gherhardt (a French chemist) created a process to "buffer" it with acetyl chloride and sodium, in order to decrease its stomach-upsetting qualities, yielding modern asprin, or acetylsalicylic acid.
• The "little, white, different" quote is a reference to the analgesic Nuprin, whose slogan is "little, yellow, different."
• It may also refer to the joke: "Why is an elephant large, gray and wrinkled? Because if it was small, white and smooth it would be an aspirin."
• The specific use of the term "buffered analgesic" in the description is probably a reference to the old Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy game by Infocom, in which you must find and use a "buffered analgesic" item to solve an early puzzle. The use of a technical description rather than the term "aspirin" is just one of many small touches that combine to make that game famously difficult.
• It's likely that users received this item as a joke. Knowing that Jick doesn't like the number 13, the fact that an item that isn't that good is given on the thirteenth day makes it seem like a joke.

See Also

• HP Restorers

Collection

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