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Writing from our regular staff writers.

The March of Progress: August 2004

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Thomas Alva Edison and the New Electro-Ethereal Power

Edison

Great advances come to the Paris of the Pine Trees which promise to invigorate our bustling municipality. A few years ago the process of refitting and upwardly mobilating the gradient of lighting and power systems was begun by fellow members of the Pluto-Theosophy party. These have come to a fortuitous and American conclusionwith the ignition of our very own direct current power station, provided with the good graces of famed constructomaton Thomas Alva Edison.

It has been bandied about, with no lack of help from the craven Oligo-Unitarian Party, that alternating current, not direct current, is the proper and patriotic current. Such specious remarks are patently false, unabrigedly non-sacrosanctand perhaps incorrect. While alternating current, like the party which supports it, changes direction many hundreds of times a second, direct current efficiently and continuously (except during recharging) flows in one direction, directly into your own home!

One wouldn’t be desirous of a type of current which scores of times plied the ether in a direction not that of one’s fine Bethany’s lamps, would one? Whereas alternating current, like the Oligo-Unitarian party, requires miles and miles of wiring and urban sprawl to function, direct current satisfies one’s power needs with a fraction of the wiring and no such ungainly sprawl. Alternating current is the power of filthy immigrants. One can only imagine such generating stations powering and protecting growing Katharinetowne for true-born West Dakotans in the years to come!

A complicated system comprised of scary items; dynamos, mutable amalgams endowed by their decidedly European creator Tesla with the moniker “transformer,” the enigmatic a.c. motor; is clearly not the system for greater Katharinetowne! Clearly a system involving a simple battery is better. Batteries recall patriotic visions of our forefathers battling the scourging British and lobbing liberty shells from their batteries. Such is the American-accepted, American-invented system supported by the Pluto-Theosophy party; a system made by an American. Direct current is the American current.

Jeremy Rosen

Jeremy-Joseph Rosen is the greater Katharinetowne City Council member for Ward 14 and Chairman of the Council Sub-Committee on Modern Powering Systems. In 1997, he won several prizes in the Grand Nationals of Underwater Floral Arrangement.

How to Do It: August 2004

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With Regular Commentator LeMuel LeBratt

By Permanent Guest-Commentator Marcia Spatzelberg

Greetings, boys and girls. This month’s fun project is going to be totally fun. I’m going to teach you how to make a bird feeder out of an important French Enlightenment figure.

Materials

  • One Rene Descartes’ skull
  • Two feet of aluminum wire
  • Two 3?4 inch washers
  • Two 3?4 inch wood screws
  • Two 3?4 inch wing nuts
  • One remains spatula

Step the First:
Use the handy remains spatula to clear away any three-hundred-year-old bits of rotted, decrepit flesh. Although it isn’t necessary, you may want to snazz up Mr. Descartes’ with some water-proof varnish or skull wax.

Step the Second:
Turn the skull upside down and use a handsaw (sorry, the handsaw should have been mentioned in the Materials section above) to remove the skull cap; the first two centimeters of the domed top of Mr. Descartes’ earthly remains.

Step the Third:
Use the other items to make a handle.

Step the Fourth:
Fill with birdseed and hang from a tree.

Step the Fifth:
Enjoy watching birds eat from one of the world’s greatest philosopher’s heads.

Condensations of Literature

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Lesser Known Quotes from the Well Known

From the Tome by DAVE GHANA

“A can of WD-40 is your best defense against squeaky hinges”
-Maralyn Monroe

“Today I feel like a sleep machine.”
-Sir James Brown

“Tasmania is ours, too?”
-John Howard (Australian Prime Minister)

“Move it 20 spans that way.”
-Khufu

“Seek the lower road lest ye be sought upon the left one.”
-St. Paul

“Pound the metal. Pound the metal. Pound the metal!”
-Admiral Zheng He (Last Words)


“On your life, underestimating the proclivities of finches is likely to lead to great internal hemorrhaging.”
-Charles Darwin

“Hmm…that’s a good one.”
-Will Rogers

“I said the green sash, moron.”
-Emilio Zapata

“Yes, you do need to see my identification.”
-Sir Alec Guiness (1991 traffic stop)

“Stabbing them with a spear might work.”
-Shaka Zulu

“What does Bindusara want this time, clean sheets?”
-Ashoka the Great (Upon being called back from exile.)

“Oxford shirts. Definitely more oxford shirts.”
-Mao Zedong

“Hey buddy, can I get a leg up?”
-Napoleon Bonaparte

“Avalanches of potatoes, rivers of vodka, fusillades of borscht. Your destruction comes!”
-Nikita Kruschev

“I still think Ned Beatty should’ve played Don Corleone.”
-Francis Ford Coppola

“And don’t forget to load the couscous.”
-Richard I (On his retreat from Palestine.)

“Eventually they run out of bullets.”
-General Hideki Tojo

“I keep the pornographic stuff in a bus station locker.”
-Norman Rockwell

“If you pick a pineapple in the morning, you’re sure to have a Yankee sniffing your pants in the afternoon.”
-King Kamehameha

“By any means necessary.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

“I don’t know how to say it either.”
-Ernesto Guevara

“15 concubines ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at.”
-Gary Coleman

“It’s just a dirty rock.”
-Cecil John Rhodes

“Numberless times have I told you that ostrich feathers applied to a
small boy’s behind will not create the desired effect.”
-Tiberius

“Splendid is the court of Kublai Khan, with anal cleaning papers for all.”
-Marco Polo

“Can I please have 50 cents?”
-John F. Kennedy

“If the replanting plan of the north Essex grasslands goes forth, all will
pay dearly the price of that emerald weed.”
-Winston Churchill

“I think a robot could knock out Cassius Clay”
-Isaac Asimov

“Tight pants are just uncomfortable.”
-Samuel Longhorn Clemens

“If I could have three wishes, one would be to take an ’88 and shove that barrel up Hitler’s ass so that cocksucker can cry like the little god-damned girl he is. And hell, after that, I wouldn’t need two more wishes.”
-General George Patton

Dave Ghana is head of the Custodial Department’s Mopping Division at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Huntsville Space Center.

On the Subject of Turtles

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A Learned Diatribe by D.B. Cooper

D.B. Cooper (whereabouts unknown)
is a seasoned air traveler.

I knew a turtle once. His name was Larry….

Unlike a lot of guys named Larry, he didn’t wear glasses. He had really good vision and could see almost five feet in front of him (or to his left or right if he turned his head that way). Larry had a big brown shell. You could knock on it and he would let loose such a string of expletives that there was no doubt he came from an aquatic environment. Just tape a sail to his back and call him Seaman Larry. The truly strange thing about him was that he had a writing desk at which he was working on a 27 volume philosophy of turtles. He called it Philosophiae Pan-Testudines and it covered all aspects of turtleine existence, morality and belief.

The major thrust of his work came in Volume 5 On Emigration. In this work, Larry proposed the mass emigration of the turtle family from its mother planet Earth. Using high technology borrowed from Man, turtle life would leave the great confines of the planetary sphere, sheltered in personal vehicles no thicker than a molecule. They would then form a large sphere about the orbit of the Earth, absorbing nutrients from the raw power of the Sun through chloroplasts engineered through gene-splicing to be formed naturally in the turtle’s body.

This theme was put aside for the place of the turtle in world history in Volume 6 The True Foundations of the Earth, but was brought up again in Volumes 7, 8 and 9 (A Parable, The Carapace of Freemen and Control From the Heavens, respectively).

Turtles, Larry proposed, would rule most of the inner planets by controlling the sunlight that reached them. He imagined billions of members of the family Testudines adjusting the temperature of Venus, making it habitable. Mercury would be turned to higher revolution by the pressure of millions of turtlenauts. The once-mighty lords of Gaia, Man, would be brought to heel when their planetary atmosphere was gradually dropped in temperature.

I agree with the pundits on most of the middle volumes of Philosophiae Pan-Testudines; they are dry, uninspired and mostly concern the place of vegetable matter in the Universe. It’s understandable that vegetable matter, particularly lettuce and cabbage, would take an important role in the turtleine lifestyle. One can even account for the focus on the intended audience of the work, Chinese pediatricians. However, most of Volumes 10 (The Leafy Benefactor) through 21 (Dialog with a Cabbage) may be passed over for the juicier bits in Volumes 22 (Mounting, Mating and Matrimony), 25 (Thoughts on Tortoise Sperm), 26 (The Pleasure of the Pond) and the ultimate volume 27 (Putting it All Together: The Destruction of Man and the Sultry-Clawed Sex).

I only read through it once, but it was worth an afternoon’s read. Larry was not eager to know what I thought about the work, though he often asks me to comment on his lithography. I have never quite seen pond-scum rendered in such an ornate fashion. You won’t either if you visit the Maximus Gallery this weekend, where Larry is having the opening for his new show Nordic Lake Experience. Donald Sutherland will be there to give opening remarks and Madonna will perform a Kabbalic blessing over the assemblage. At the end of the evening, the Lake McMurtry Marching Turtles will perform a fanfare composed in honor of Larry by John Adams.