Bunch of crotchety old fools in here let me tell you. I said where do I get the Internet I got writing lessons I got to keep up. Mrs Doodlewhatsit was all, ‘you got TV and you got bingo what you need Internet for that’s for kids’. The only time I get online is pizza night and that’s got be shared with Alfred Stott and his dumb ass Facebook.

So we will now learn how to write a real ghost story. You will want to do this to scare your wretched ungrateful children into line or to have something to do when you’re 3 days into lunar orbit and run out of drinking songs. Note this SUBTLE ART of DEFLECTION. You basically have to say everything backwards to the way you want the audience to take it. By making yourself sound like a complete idiot you will have everyone convinced. GHOST STORY JUJITSU! I will give you the MASTER STEPS.

STEP ONE: Always start by saying of course you don’t believe in ghosts and hauntings and all that shoot. Because the more you say you don’t believe in it the more they will believe everything you say. “Of course ghosts are a load of crap” immediately gets the response ‘Yeah? Maybe they ain’t!’ The audience wants to argue and this is the first thing they latch on to.

STEP TWO: Now you have to throw in some Essence Of Humble Times. This was back when you were ‘ a poor student living on noodles’. Or you ‘were stuck without a job living with your crazy religious parents’ or ‘had this job in a dingy office’. Never ever place the story when you were running the local Wells Fargo and sniffing coke off a hooker’s tits. People are suckers for hard luck stories and somehow being a bum makes you more attuned to the spirit realm. Or maybe rich people don’t get haunted, I wouldn’t know.

STEP TWO and a BIT: If you do go for the student/hippy/wacko angle you should throw in some weed or booze or whatever kids do these days, Quaaludes? But you always got to say that you didn’t notice any effects. Like ‘I was up to my fifth bowl of Quaaludes but they hadn’t kicked in at all’.

STEP THREE: So the place you’re at has a really bad reputation but you don’t think much of it. Like ‘people said that my front room was where 3000 Indian braves were squashed by a giant alien skull but the rent was pretty cheap so I took it.’ Always make the bad stuff sound real bad and your nonchalance real flippant. Because then they think that you deserve what comes next!

STEP FOUR: Keep it mundane! Whatever you were doing that night has to be really dull. Like slopping out the pig pen or arranging the fork drawer so the forks are all lined up. No one ever has ghosts when they’re disco bumper bowling.

STEP FOUR and a BIT: This is where you need a pardner. Lots of ways to play this – a younger brother works great, some people use the dog but whoever it is they have to be Robin to your Batman. You get to excuse all kinds of stupid moves in convincing the pardner that there’s no such things as ghosts. Fool me once fool you twice or fool me again or whatever young Bush said.

STEP FIVE: Now something’s definitely not right but you are going to shrug it off. Sure, some problem with the aircon makes it below zero which is why the cat is now hoisting itself up the wall backwards speaking Latin and I reckon it’s the wind that is making those cupboard doors slam in Morse code U R  G O I N G  2  D I E. Same old.

STEP SIX: Here’s where your pardner is going to suggest something sensible like let’s get the hell out or don’t you go wading into the dark pit where the screaming is from. Because then you have your excuse to go do exactly that dumb ass thing just to show them up.

STEP SIX and a BIT: Sometimes you can use the little brother wandering off as the excuse. Or sometime you think you hear him calling from down the Hall Of Doom, when really he’s still straightening those forks.

STEP SEVEN: All systems nominal, we have ignition! You can drop in pretty much anything now, although creepy little girls in period clothing has served well for the last couple of centuries and damned if people won’t be seeing creepy little girls on Mars in the year 3000. Apart from that bitch of a daughter of mine I don’t know what it is that makes little girls the worst case scenario for floating upside down in the basement gibbering.

STEP EIGHT: Robin having already got the hell out of Dodge you are right behind him and somehow end up in the Bat car first. Get out of there!

STEP NINE: the next day everything is normal and you look stupid.

So let’s check out this writing system in action!

“Now I don’t believe in ghosts or any of that but something weird happened back when I was out of school one summer back east. I just couldn’t find a vacation job and my parents were giving me the evil eye every breakfast about it. So when I heard they needed somebody to straighten the forks at the local piggery I figured the low pay would be offset by a break from the toxins at home and maybe be enough to buy me some underpants.

There wasn’t too much competition for the position, probably due to rumors that circulated about the place. The farm was supposed to have been built over an old graveyard and pigs would occasionally go missing only to be found picked clean and buried some days later. Joe at school reckoned he’d once seen a hand come out from the muck reach up and reel in a squealing pig, trotter first, but then he also said his dead mother slept with him at night which was a better reason to avoid the guy entirely.

I got the job. One other guy was already working there called Smiley on account of his being a bit simple, an oversized kid but seemingly harmless & not much for conversation. I asked him about the graveyard and he just shrugged it off. He’d do the spoons while I was on the forks, the manager would do the knives during the day. Did I mention this was the night shift?

The night in question was extra muggy and the pigs were making a hell of a racket over something. I’d soon learned that pigs enjoy bacon as much as anyone and there was always a smaller or sicker animal being noisily worn down by the pack. Smiley was in a foul mood and kept bending the spoons. My forks were tangling around each other for no reason and it was taking all my concentration to keep the prongs on the straight and narrow. The racket from outside kept on the up and up until it reached a crescendo of porcine howling and hooting around 3am.

Suddenly the noise from outside went dead quiet. Not a grunt, not a squeel – quiet like a gunshot. Once the shock wore down a little I started to feel curious. Something was going on in the yard and even while real scared I had to know. Grabbing one of the bigger forks I started out to the back door.

‘No! You no go!’, howled Smiley, ‘Under yard bad pigs! Pigs coming!’

Somehow the warning made me more curious to find out what was going down. Plus I figured it was my job to reassure Smiley that everything was going to be just fine.

‘Just fine’, I murmured.

There was no light in the yard – I guess I’d never been out this way at night. I stumbled softly to where I knew the gate would be, rolling the fork along the wire for sonar. Nothing stirred, no sound. What on earth was making the pigs that quiet? Maybe I could reach in and tap one, see what happened. Right then I heard the front door slam shut. Smiley had exited the scene, at speed. Coward I thought.

Through the gate and tiptoeing gingerly through the yard, I kept sweeping my boot to touch a pig. But the slush kept on further than I seemed to remember – or just deserted? As my eyes adapted I could catch a soft pink glow coming from up ahead, at ground level. What would you do? I went towards it.

It – was a ditch – no, a hole – straight edged – a big hole – light was coming up out of the ground – pink light – a kind of haze and – there were the pigs. Lined up. Lined up in rows. Making…

Stairs.

Damn Alfred Stott wants his Facebook now I’ll have to finish this next time.

Surely you would know we have a new way of government, with the ascent of His Royal Highness The Blessed Santa XIII, The Good, The Fair, The Wise. How lucky we are to have this paragon of mankind at our helm and you will not hear a disputing voice in all the rafts that remain afloat. Of course HRHTB Santa XIII has no qualm with dissent, but such disorder leads to errors in nature itself and the spontaneous capsizing of those that would speak such madness.

One that spoke in such terms was our previous Dean, who took it upon himself to denounce Our King’s leisurely book burnings. What are a few ancient books when compared to the merriment of our liege? That the Dean ended up with the books is only natural. For a short while we fell disgraced, until our new Dean spoke to the King, reminding him of his lineage running all the way back to the Santas of antiquity. Who else but the Faculty could establish once and for all His Highness as the one true world king? From that day we became the Royal Faculty of Recall, something that UNP Engineering can only sourly admire.

So your loyal correspondent has a task of some importance, tracking down the great kings of the past and ensuring that all reigns lead to Santa XIII.

So what was a king in the pre oops period? It seems there once were many kings, all with quite exotic and magical names. There was King Tubby, who could explode and not be hurt. King Jeans was very strong, King Kong was very tall. The Sofa King could sleep 100 years and the White King seems to have something to do with bathrooms. The modern reader is dazzled by so many and suspects that tales are being told as they often were by the ancients. That’s not to say they are lying – the ancient mind is just an alien world for the modern to explore.

One interesting theory put forward by Prof. Mersh is that each queue had a king at the front. That would make the numbers, but doesn’t explain another story about kings, that they lived in castles that did not move about, and so it is equally likely that a king was someone not in a queue at all. (For ancients a very rare position!) Dr. Robutussin has pointed out that ‘castles’ follow straight lines in the game of chess and suggests this is based on some forgotten fact. For my part I have seen evidence of things called rail tracks, which are straight lines running across the old cities. I will soon be presenting a paper that argues that castles moved along these rail tracks, each controlled by a king and that this is how queues were able to move great distances.

But my main interest of the moment is King Krause, sometimes written Kai Krause, who lived in a castle hidden somewhere in Germany. He became King (the story goes) by inventing certain magical technology.

As with most images of the ancients, we are left puzzled by their position somewhere ‘twixt reality and speculative magic. What to make of this?

Robutussin has argued that kings were able to make animals out of surplus people and there is quite solid support for this in the archaeological record. That would mean they were the suppliers of flying animals to each Santa and had a symbiotic relationship with the ultimate ruler.

Krause alone is credited with (at least) the following incantations:

The Lens Flare bedazzled enemies and caused them disorientation and nausea. This weapon soon multiplied into genocidal proportions and was banned by treaty shortly before the Oops Event.

Drop Shadows seen here surrounding magical orbs. Quite what these symbols mean is curious, but the two seem inextricably bound together. We suspect a kind of code where the king alone may see through the confusing muddle.

Similarly the Page Curl, which fools the viewer to turn over the image and find nothing on the other side.

The Algorithmic Texture is hotly contested. Some have it as a form of camouflage, yet are unable to demonstrate any naturally occurring area where that would be effective. I would concur with Mersh that what we are seeing is a kind of threat exhibited to the enemy – if you do not accept the king, this is a symbol of your fate. Hence the resemblance to diseases and parasites.

More magical orbs. We can fathom no use for these.

Santa XIII is very taken with this information and an expedition will venture south in the winter. We seek a castle somewhere in the land just below our state. From there we hope to find the means to convert some of our crew to animals, and set course by air for Germany. If you are in your final undergraduate year at UNP Recall we are seeking volunteers via the drop box outside the school office.

Thank you for the letters you have sent to us! We had no idea that people were alive in so many places! We treasure them all but it can’t hurt to mention some of our favourites. Hello to Issi in Ice Land – a land made of ice is wonderful (but The Faculty of Physics were very sceptical when we told them). And to Yuri in faraway Omsk whose letter came via the water trail from Mumanak. Nathaniel says greetings from Al Aska. Hello also to our familiar friend Margethe in New Nuuk, Green Land.

This time we are looking at a recurring fragment from the pre Oops days – this strange blue rectangle:

Those of you that have been following this series would recognise it as a simple design from The Gap. Some of it is deceptively obvious, some is beyond our wildest guesses. Literally translated it reads: “Rank greater than captain, 64, simple, Second World War rocket(?) – 64K, male sheep biological structure(?), 38911 simple bites(?) free. Ready.”

We are sure you find that as unhelpful as do we.

Frankly this is not a message that can be understood with a modern mind. The ancients, as we have seen time and time again, had a proto-mind that straddled that of man and the animals on which they flew about – some of their thoughts are like our dreams – others are based on magic concepts alien to our scientific world.

We can develop a guess based upon common sense and other artefacts from the period. Firstly, this image is found very often in digs, so it must be an important or at least popular item. Secondly, the word ‘commodore’ is an old word that is still in use today for a 10 raft officer, which you would agree is a very important posting. ’64′ is likely to be the age of a person – it is always 64 and never older than that. Which must surely lead to the conclusion that we are seeing a memorial to a naval officer of some sort. So what is meant by ‘basic’ and ‘V2′? This is not even an ancient name but – recalling our own history we come up with famous raft captains of legend such as Captain ‘Rusty Birdhook’ Evans & Admiral ‘Clubber’ McJollo. This surely is a similar use of nickname for some great achievement of this primitive seafarer – and from what we know of the Second World War (which drove the Germans back up onto Mars), he or she must have been a great warrior. A rocket was a flying animal that fought in wars and we know from pictures that the V2 was a very large rocket indeed.

So great was this Commodore that people seem to have carried the memorial around with them inscribed on small shrines.

As great as the person may have been we cannot think that their ‘gravestone’ would be carried about unless there is more to this than we first expect. Consider the next part of the message: again the age, with a K attached – frankly we know not why, then a confusing reference to a male sheep ‘system’. We know that sheep were animals, we now know what animals were like, we also know that the male sheep is used as a symbol of virility in other writings we have collected. If the ram was used here as a symbol of potency the clues start to arrange themselves: Our great man is being used to ensure fertility.

Does your head spin to try comprehend the ancients? Put yourself in a half sleep. Dull your logic. This is a time of magic – where likeness could often mean equality. The great man dies (we suspect a man based upon this magic) and yet his energy is captured in this fetish – if you keep his name close to you during the act of love your offspring will be as he – bold and powerful.

The blue square is likely some formalised vision of the sea on which this man sailed. 38911 has no meaning for us; perhaps it is a magical number or the number of people on his rafts – we suspect that as it is followed by his nickname and ‘bytes’ it could be the number of enemy he killed in the conflicts he fought or perhaps as it implies – captives freed. Truly an astronomical number! The ancients loved to exaggerate numbers whenever possible.

Here at UNP we are gaining respect for this long gone civilisation – true, they knew nothing of science but their lives were full of mystery and enchantment. Every year we discover more puzzling evidence of a past that seems like a madman’s poem. In our softer moments we ponder: perhaps it is not that we are right and they were wrong – it is just that living on the ground, queuing, at places where the spin of the world was noticeable in tides and nights that came every day … how could one expect any mental overlap between these people and their polar descendants? No – they are as distant from us as the Martians. But more about them in the next instalment!

An ancient person, not in a queue.

We have already provided a number of updates of great interest to the modern student. Here and here and here and here and here also. Their didactic power is now overwhelmed by fortunate events.

While we do not hold the theoretical abilities of our Southern rivals in much esteem, it must be admitted that South Pole University makes good use of their diggings. In the mountains that rise above the Tasman Desert, the ancient city of Hobart looks out over the Derwent Chasm – a charred remnant like most cities but offering up the occasional surprise to the archaeologist. Such a surprise was unveiled some 6 months ago, and the professors of the South have bundled up copies of the artefacts for our Northern minds to dissect and discern.

Three months it takes from pole to pole and expensive it is, given the toxic landscape and the primitives that harass the motorcades. But this is a prize worth the highest price.

For we have an image of a living Santa. And AN ANIMAL.

Behold. The man wears the ceremonial facial hair of the Santa. We see him at a time when he is not garbed in red but in blue – being a Prime Minister; we would venture to say that this image records the very moment when the older Santa has died and this male child has been handed the first of many animals that will fly him around the globe. The animal is content to rest momentarily in the Santa’s hands, it will fly off through the exit at the right.

On the back of the artefact is the word SNOWBALL. We have already a cylinder marked SANTA SNOW. We believe that SANTA, SNOW and BALL are linked, but SNOW remains meaningless.

By what means does this animal fly? The professors of the South were defeated. No two limbs of the device are the same – two seem to be legs fore and aft, then there is a small dark curved arm at the right, perhaps another dark arm at the middle? Dispute rages about a shape below the head of the animal – is it arm? Why is it so short? Our faculty have worked long through the dark part of the year on this question and have decided that the clothing on the pictured animal is loose. It has not been put carefully into the cloth and so some leggings are not aligned with the limbs underneath. This is disappointing in that we cannot be sure of the shape of the animal. We suspect it has two legs and three equally spaced arms.

The head of the animal faces left, close inspection seems to show two eyes about a nose and strangely cupped ears. This is disturbing because insects do not have two eyes, only people. Are animals related to people? The line of thought here is disturbing.

Also found at the site and awaiting examination.

Is this some kind of fertilty charm?

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Nope he says I have to write about Chick-Lit.

(I was going to write about how to make a rock opera. The second wife and I once went to see a show called HAIR. Years later the third lady and I saw one called CATS. I said at the time I should write a show called CAT HAIR and it’d be twice as good.)

Now you are going to say, Vincent, what would an old man like you know about writing ironic self debasing novels for young women? Well you see it’s like a chair you bought from IKEA. You get a bunch of struts and some Allen keys to assemble the chair and the instructions are written in gooby gooby with some pictures. Believe you me, a space mission is just like that except you are floating upside down. There ain’t no man in the agency better than me at piecing together a robot arm and this is no different.

So let’s open the box and make sure we have all the parts.

PART A is the fat ugly girl. She’s not really that fat or ugly but she has to be kinda dowdy and drink a lot of fruity vodka for this thing to work. That connects to PART B which is the cute guy who was burned in a previous relationship and is now cynical. You need to use ROD A which is their sibling like relationship which conceals the real attraction that PART A is hiding for B. PART C is the bitchy boss woman which goes up above PART A and connects via ROD B which is the exploitative employment contract. Got that?

OK now you need the large ROD C which is an impending marriage between PART B and PART C which everybody knows is a real disaster waiting to happen. This needs a nut at either end. PART A should at this point hang helplessly below the the other two, and the structure should seem pretty stable.  Here’s the turning point: We have to bend it a bit to accommodate PART D, which depending whether you have purchased model 34 or 56 is either PART A’s hairdresser BFF or a comedy gay guy. Either way the trick is to have PART D leverage PART A into taking the weight off ROD A and passing their combined weight onto STRUT D that makes a new connection with PART B that counteracts ROD C.

If you do this just right PART A can be seen at an angle where she suddenly doesn’t seem nearly as fat, ROD C breaks off, PART C flies off out the window and ROD B swings around to elevate PART A up to where the bitch was. You now have a nice join between PARTs A and B on two levels. PART D cries and claps its hands like an idiot.

You do that on a space walk.

Now I want to get back to my idea for a Rock Opera.

Some people might think the plot or the music is the most important thing. They would have not seen CATS. It didn’t have a plot and the music was appropriate for a lot of people dressed up as animals being sexy on each other. I would do something which was more classy. And this starts with the right costumes.

You would enjoy this guy singing.

This is opera, like in Bugs Bunny. I go for the ‘olde tyme’ costumes myself. I want them to have powdered wigs like in real operas. And horned helmets. We need a mechanical dragon. Two dragons.

Now you’re saying Vincent, this frock coat and powdered wig thing is for Mozart or something. But I don’t think so. I think the kids like a show and wigs have been keeping people entertained a long time. Maybe some parents will come along, more money for me. No matter what age, people like a classy act.

Wigs and frock coats are always class.

Maybe I could glue some horns onto my helmet. Just saying.

Dinner bell’s ringing, gotta go. But listen, you and me make this opera happen next time!

- Vincent

Traditional Sci Fi.

First you need a nautical romance from the nineteenth century. This is the hardest step. You can’t just pinch some Conrad or Melville, they’ve all been raided already and besides the plot of Moby Dick is kind of familiar. In the library there’s sure to be some old tome by Captain Pugwash that no one read in the first place. I find the best ones are in prison libraries but that’s another story.

Now it gets easy. We make up a substitution chart.

• For ‘ship’, write ‘spacecraft’
• For ‘Africa’, write ‘planet’
• For ‘African’, write ‘alien’
• For ‘sea’, write ‘space’
• For ‘island’, write ‘moon’.
• If in doubt put ‘space’ in front. Like ‘space food’.

So ‘At first light the ship made port on the coast of darkest Africa’ becomes ‘At 0800 hours the spacecraft touched down on the dark side of the planet’. ‘The African chief waved his spear’ becomes ‘The alien chief waved his blaster’.

Already you got a pretty damn fine sci fi novel happening, although you might need to change stuff like ‘dusky native girl’ to ’2 headed Venusian bride’ or something. The neat thing is that ‘pirates’ stays the same although you might need to swap ‘space blaster’ for cutlass. Not everyone even bothers to do that. There! You’re L Ron Hubbard!

New Wave Sci Fi.

Now this can be tricky but you just have to keep two things in mind. New wave Sci Fi comes from the beginning of the 70′s (heck now I’m showing my age) and so it’s filled with a lot of Age of Aquarius gobble gobble. Remember the way kids used to protest in the 60′s then became advertising executives soon after? Right. So imagine if those protests actually meant shit. Like changed the government or something. Got that? So like Logan’s Run (the book – not that stupid movie). It’s got kids ruling the place, mad bikers, bombed out Washington D.C. You know the drill.

The other thing is you have to write two stories. But really they’re the same story, but you have to be maybe a kid and a grandma at the same time. So you do kid for two pages. Then you do grandma for two pages. Then the kid again. Now every time you do the kid you use italics. These two guys don’t hear each other until the end of the story when suddenly it’s hello the kid is a robot. You end up with a book where the writing changes every couple of pages. That’s called new wave. Get some practice and you can do three or four switcheroos in the same book.

The cool thing is that there doesn’t have to be a story. Just throw a whole bunch of vague stuff together. If you want you can throw in stuff about ‘little boys’ at random and be William Burroughs.

Alternative Realities.

These days all the cool school are making up alternative realities. What if Hitler won the war? What if I had told Cindy Lou she didn’t have a big ass? Who knows?

Now this one is a natural. You’ve got some hooch hidden behind the flight console and the captain catches it. Well you say somebody else put it there. He says you’re the only one in that flight seat. You say OMG there must be a Russki hidden somewhere on board. He says ain’t no place for any Russki. You say maybe there’s a hidden panel. And so on. Thing is, you start with a little lie. Then you make up a bigger one to cover the first one. And you keep going until you are sure that Napoleon flew jet planes over the whole of Europe. Except when it’s a book you won’t get taken off the mission.

Now you’re saying Vincent, I am no liar like that. But this is for Science Fiction. You have to get into the swing here. Like those 9/11 Truthers, doesn’t matter if it makes sense – just as long as they can link two things together somehow, they are on a roll. (So the bad guys would have to spend weeks drilling explosives into every wall to make the towers go down – ‘yeah but there was a lot of deliveries that week’.)

Dystopian Worlds.

Shit happens. Your job here is to spread it around. Like you are writing one of those $100 stories for Readers Digest but instead of it being Things That Really Get My Goat, it’s everything gets everybody’s goats plural. So there was a line up at the local DMV the other day and when I finally got to the end they say that at 90 years old I shouldn’t be driving anyway. And no they don’t care if I had flown three shuttle missions I was too old. Well what if the whole world was like the DMV and if you were too old you couldn’t get a license? But what if this was a license to screw? And you had to wear an orange hat with TOO OLD FOR A LICENSE on it? And with robots?

So what you do is take some little thing and blow it up into a whole big bitch. Throw it all on. The weather is crap, the gin sucks, the television is black and white and the girls aren’t much to look at. You need one guy that stands in line and then they say no and that’s when he loses his cool. And he kicks butt until the robots come and put him in the nursing home. You can add as much bad stuff as you like, the more the merrier. Like that 1984 book, the only thing that lacked was an electric cattle prod and you know he wanted to stick that in.

That’s all we have time for now but later on I’ll come round and let you know how to write a rock opera. Thanks for letting me write the blog this week! This is Vincent signing off!

Professors may dispute, this does not call upon their charges to carry the dispute to violence. Weigh the evidence and not the reputation or singing voice of Doctors A or B. Read below and think on it.

Just beyond the Oops we have great difficulty in forming a reputable time line. Consider – here no written records were kept, we have only oral history – the epic history of the age were rendered in rhyme such that a travelling bard could memorise the tale. If they could not recall a name or a date, they would simply insert something of their own rather than disappoint the audience huddled about the fire. And so the epics are organisms that mated, mutated and cross pollinated – you cannot draw absolute truth from a song cycle.

The earliest songs of which we have fragments are simple tales of survival and wit, sung by all. We mention a few. I’ll Swap My Daughter For A Cup Of Water is direct and heartfelt. Man’s Best Friend obscurely refers to an edible something with four legs, perhaps a dining table. That life became a little more grim over the 21st century can be glimpsed in the popular titles that follow on: Mus’ Be Mud ‘Cos Jam Don’t Taste Like Dat, Spoonful of Roaches, Lil’ Old Cave Of Mine and the evergreen Please Kill Me.

But some pockets of the world entered into a time of chivalry, of kings and battles that resound through the ages. Here we find the professional troubadours, the songsters – rhyming for their tinned meat. This is where we learn of the legendary Mac. You will recall from your schooling the Ballad of Mac. We reproduce an excerpt:

Crept ’round the depths of the castle
the surly terrorists
tested the windows of the tower and found them lame
and in they came!
Alas! Alack! Their attack swept up the fire stairs
(as fire indeed they were that day!)
bursting through the wall of desks
lept o’er the office chairs
they bested the best of the Heroes.
Lolcat fell that day, and aside him poor Prince Fresh
Opensource and handsome Cartridge too
No match for this evil crew
Yet when all seemed lost the king of kings
fleet of foot and mighty of brow
our Good Lord Mac held fast the foe
swinging His mighty Laptop ‘gainst the fray
The Devil would not wrest His water on this day!

As commonly conceived King Mac is a character of fiction – the mighty Laptop, his Suit and Tie, the Boardroom Table – all of these elements in the Ballad stem from the Great Tales of Mac written in around 2620 by Fred of The First Raft. In this respect, Doctor A is correct. Before you crow, followers of A, there is evidence that someone like Mac was a real person and the battles we know are exaggerations of real events. Doctor B is correct that there was a king, just that he has been inflated in the telling. You students, shake hands and sing the anthem of UNP. There.

In 2890, an expedition to ancient Edmonton in the Shallow North discovered a castle, tall, with multiple windows just as described in the legend. They saw only the top but by dropping stones down the central shaft confirmed that it was very deep. Near the top in a central chamber they found a dusty table of great size, round at the edges, as if many men sat about it. And yes, a water container, although not of the size needed for such a mighty building. The chairs of this chamber had wheels just as described by the Bard. Surely stories of Mac circulated on the First Raft and were collected in writing by Fred – with some extra spice thrown in to win popular acclaim.

The historical Mac was just one of many petty kings that ruled the edges of the old civilisation, migrating their people north and south as the temperature gained. Illiterate and guided by cunning they would squabble over the aging cities and sources of water up to the earliest stages of the Age of Science. The last inbred kings, Alert IV and Resolute III of Nunavut, claimed a mixture of real and mythological ancestors and their lineage itself is of feeble use. Nevertheless desire for lineage restored the act of writing. The rest of this tale can be found in any modern history textbook.

We shall start from the simple and proceed to the complex. There are five days in the week, seventy three weeks in a year. The names of the days being in order – Sunday, Today, Midday, Mayday, Santaday.

Sunday recalls an ancient ritual in which persons would read a journal of the week’s events. These journals were called Suns, and went by multiple versions including The Sun, The Sun Herald, Sun News etc. Our concern is that such a weekly ritual would require many more books than can be found in the archaeological record. The most cynical view is that each Sun had the same contents as used before and that the ancient had simply forgotten the events of the week previous.

A common misconception is that the name has connection with the sun itself. The notion is nonsensical given that the sun shows no particular preference for the day in question.

It is generally held that Today is a corruption of ‘two day’, namely the second day of the week. Recent work by UNP’s Faculty of Recall suggests an interesting alternative. Recently unearthed artefacts have inscriptions such as COOKING TODAY or USA TODAY which seem not to mean cooking (or ‘usaing’) only on the second day of the week, but over a longer period. Here we need to grasp the ancients’ primitive conception of time. Being equatorial they would see the sun rise and fall fully each day over the entire year, which to them ’caused’ days. But they had need of longer periods of time and so created a ‘day’ more like our seasons of long light or dark. That might be the old ‘today’.

Most startling is an artefact labelled TODAY TONIGHT. Obviously the nights had their names as well – we are at a loss to comprehend a culture that had a ‘sunnight’ but the evidence is plausible that a ‘tonight’ existed. If so the ancient week was complex indeed, having 5 days of which one was a season, and 5 nights.

Midday is the most sensible and scientific of all the names and can be traced to more modern times. It is the middle day of the five, and the day on which resting takes place. It is claimed (without proof) to be the invention of the first Chief Scientist of The Southern Polar Region. While we would not dispute this claim without hard evidence, we do note the superior record of invention in the Northern realm.

Mayday has conflicting origin myths, none of which are convincing. Best known is the legend of the parade that would take place on each Mayday. The ancients would assemble at one place carrying tools and weapons and walk all day in the one direction. The most important of them would stand and watch with approval. The recent theory of queues lends some credence to this tale, but what are we to make of a heavily equipped journey with no task at the end? If they had been about building a monument we could fathom it.

Another tale is about flying people, who would call ‘mayday!’ at each other so as to avoid collisions. Again, another line of explanation is suggested by a music container of the brittle sort that is labelled HERE WE GO GATHERING NUTS IN MAY. No nuts were found at the site.

Santaday is so known after the greatest ruler of ancient times. That this Santa ruled the globe for such a length of time was due to his place being taken in turn by many generations of the one royal family. Each person was known individually as Mr. President, and would in turn step through increasing levels of power, from Elf, to Senator, to Prime Minister to Santa.

So that each Santa would seem to be the same immortal, the royal would be disguised in a red suit with white hair, holding a Coca Cola as sign of rank. He was said to fly with the aid of animals. He would judge all of humanity and reward or punish as the case demanded. Obviously the one Santa could not be everywhere at once and so Prime Ministers would act in each Santa’s stead. Santas were enthroned at the North Pole, hence this legendary figure is displayed within the logo of UNP. Alas, we know not why he wore such heavy clothing for our tropical clime.

The doctor would have us take note of ancient people’s ability to snap together into larger units.

The queue, of which a large version is shown above, is an entity for which we have no modern analogue. Individuals would join this queue, and from that point on act as if a single individual. The queue would go about daily business of obtaining food, viewing entertainments and using transport. The doctor notes that these queues are portrayed in 43 percent of our available pre Oops artefacts and show therefore an astounding co-operative spirit ‘that is at odds with any savagery’.

The queue existed as a number of geometric shapes governed by rules of surface tension. We have images of circles, lines, stars and complex forms that are not obvious – but that the members are wearing similar garments.

The smallest form of queue was called marriage.

Even more fascinating for Dr. Assets was the living arrangements of these people. While un-queued persons lived in houses not far different from our own, with doors, windows and a roof, those in queues had smaller houses on wheels, that joined together in long chains that matched the person’s position in the queue.

While we share the good doctor’s fascination with our distant ancestors, we must remark on the repulsion that any thinking person will hold for the dissolution of individual intellect in this queuing. To have one’s mind subsumed into the mass is horrifying to the Scientist. While we can faintly imagine being the front of such a meat ‘hose’ (the comparison is hard to deny) to be the rear end would be alien to our ideal of mankind’s progress.

We see this kind of thing in ants, and in the absence of any contrary evidence, suspect that animals once operated in this way. If, as some firebrands have argued, the image underneath is one of animals, the case is made for our original opinion.

First, the Oops. This is the popular name for a momentary interruption of power that took place early in the 21st century. By all accounts this was much the same power we use to cook and light our homes at night. However, back at that time, power was also used for ‘books’. What we call ‘books’ might not have had the same meaning long ago. We have images of people apparently using books that open vertically, and seem to involve some kind of touch. Perhaps the endless plagues of that time made many people feeble sighted.

It was long believed that paper had not yet been invented, until in 3044 the archaeologist Dr. Hans Polar discovered a large supply of ancient paper covered in numbers and symbols. Perhaps paper was only available for special religious purposes. Since then we have found paper stored at several places around the globe, always with unreadable quasi text.

In any case at some point in 2056, power was lost and all the books made blank. The only known contemporary record of what took place is a single word, ‘oops’ marked on a wall in charcoal. It took nearly 100 years for a unknown historian to explain in passing the loss of power and the date while eulogising a petty king of the equatorial region. This event marks the point where our pre-history crosses over into history.

While it may seem that mankind lost a great deal, it’s important to note that much of it was endlessly duplicated magical recipes and not the scientific information we store on paper today.

As for musical containers. Today we have many musical instruments – flutes, drums and xylophones are some common types. Prehistoric people also had music containers, which had different sizes and colours at different times. Digging at archaeological sites first reveals small silver discs at about the end of the 20th century. Just below these are comparatively large flexible black discs. The most numerous containers lie just underneath, these are slightly smaller and more brittle.

The only clue we have to their use is a single image:

No doubt this is a tribal leader of some sort – he wears a sign of rank around his neck and his hair is dyed with a priestly colour. More importantly he is using the large music containers and two of them are powered – possibly in the same way as prehistoric books. We think that he is making music and the pile of broken containers are ones where the music has been used up. The ones we find are like this.

A close examination of a dig site shows that all the containers seem to have been made over a short period and were used up long before the Oops. The last sort are poor copies of the earlier, with only one side and no black ink. This has led to most scientists agreeing that the ability to make music containers was in decline around 1970 and completely forgotten by 1990. The same seems true for paper – by the time these savages had arrived at the Oops, they had lost their skills and become decadent – that event was just the final blow to an inferior people.

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TAPR 06/07

12″ ”LP 62 SOUNDTRACKS 10 SECONDS EACH W/ LOCKED GROOVES

BARBARA SCHROEDER CLARE COOPER & CHRIS ABRAHAMS MICHAEL PRIOR ANTUONG NGUYEN & BLASE ROCCISANO ROSS MANNING ANTHONY MAGEN DING DONG BONNIE CLARKE BOORGES ERNIE ALTHOFF CLAYTON THOMAS MU CHILD JOEL STERN RAT CREEPS SUMUGAN SIVANESAN MICHAELA DAVIES QUE NGUYEN JIM KNOX MARKHAM WIGHTMAN BUFFALO JUMP BAND 12 DOG CYCLE HARRY WILLIAMSON ZOE SCOGLIO MONICA BROOKS DAN WEST ALICE HUI-SHENG CHANG KRISTI MONFRIES MOFFARFARRAH THEMBI SODDELL THEE MONUMENTAL MATTHEW DAVIS NAT DYLAN MARTORELL HORSE HOSPITAL ANTHONY MAGEN LAWRENCE ENGLISH ROSALIND HALL TARAB ECHO KHALIDA IT’S IS MALAKAT EMMA JEAN GILMOUR ANTHEA CADDY WERNER HOECK PHILIP SAMARTZIS JACQUES SODDELL ROBERT CURGENVEN SEVERED HEADS BEN BYRNE DAVE PHILLIPS PAUL RODGERS DEAN LINGUEY SAMUEL ACRES I=IT DER KOSMONAUT TOECUTTER EMILE ZILE DJ YSL DJ RAINBOW EJACULATION