Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
About These Urban Legends …
Monday, May 10th, 2010
As a public service, following please find some common misconceptions debunked.
1. Honey is not bee sperm. Honey is made entirely by female bees, only a minority of whom in a recent scientific study were found to be even very aroused while making it.
2. Cancer does not cure crabs. (The origins of this particular tall tale are obscure, but we speculate they may be astrological.)
3. Not only is Sarah Palin not the devil’s daughter, but as of recently the devil hasn’t even been taking her calls.
4. The World Health Organization, while it does involve doctors and is abbreviated WHO, has no official affiliation with Doctor Who. However, by coincidence it was run briefly by Tom Baker in 1983 after he won it in a poker game.
5. If you have sex 50,000 times, your brain does not automatically explode. However, in a recent poll of the small number of people who have actually tested this theory all respondents said they would have done it anyway.
6. No hot babes are searching the Web for you.
7. Area 51 in Southern Nevada does contain the corpse of an alien, but he is actually an illegal Mexican immigrant employed at the facility for a month and a half as a janitor before he was killed in an incident with one of the monsters that are kept there. The monster has a 1,400-year digestive cycle, so the corpse is still present on site, but there has been reluctance to retrieve it.
8. The world is not coming to an end in 2012. It is in fact coming to a beginning.
The Day Without a Story
Friday, May 7th, 2010
It was the day without a story. At least, if we were reading the dials and blinking lights correctly.
The fictiometer sat in the middle of Professor Woodfern’s desk, whirring and clanking.
“According to this,” he said, nose grazing the pages of the operation’s manual as he read, “we’re in a state of storylessness. It has no beginning and no end.” He looked up, and got that voice he had when he dictated articles on critical theory, “An atemporal state of irremediable middleness. A paramodern and yet curiously prelapsarian condition attended by the utter suspension of causality.”
“Meaning?” I said. The machine was beginning to overheat, so I hoisted the nearest window open a couple inches.
“Events happen, and other events follow, but nothing causes anything else. It’s all isolated, as if the laws of profluence had been suspended.” There was a quiver in his voice as he looked out the window, where the shadow of the clock tower didn’t fall on the roses.
An airplane droned overhead.
My scalp tingled.
In the next office, someone sang a tune without words, only to be interrupted by their own laughter.
I picked up the operation’s manual, and clonked the side of the fictiometer with it the way you’d bang the side of a malfunctioning TV.
The readings didn’t change.
“So it’s true,” I said.
And then, other things happened.