Josh came out and hurdled over the lower mandibles this afternoon. I could see it all from my terraforming platform. The upper mandibles are still a bit out of his league I guess, but the way he's going he'll be ready to tackle them soon. That's if they don't get up and move, or if that procession of 'eyebrow' numbats which has been inching across the valley at a glacial pace for the last several months don't get there first and knock them over. They did that at the Botherington v Maganese Oxide fixture in 1962, and we all know the controversy surrounding that game. Just last year they named a new brand of hair-dryer after it. It's a sort of retro-model; a big, wasp's nest shaped thing with a purple top and transparent bottom, which, when it descends over one's head, shoots out thousands of tiny jets of warm gravy. This has rendered it quite unpopular, except, for some reason, in Quebec. Where, I might add, it is legal to take a shower dressed as a pine cone and smelling of aniseed, and to blackmail women into eating zircons. Fact is, these activities are legal not so much because of permisiveness but because of the extreme rarity of anyone ever being caught performing them. Now that internet communites are forming around forced zircon-eating and wet 'aniseed coners', people are noticing, and now, ironically there's legislation pending, having been forced into being by conservatives who claim Quebec is a laughing stock, and has become known as the 'Zircon-eating Province', and even 'That place where you can make women eat zircons'. The further irony is, there are places in Alabama where women can be seen freely wandering around eating not only zircons, but talc, crocoite, feldspar, moganite, keatite, various other silica polymorphs, owls, raisins, geraniums, Lesney toys, dopamine, nasturtiums, schelite, calcite, several scorpions, mud, railway sleepers, guidebooks, depth-charges, nazi war memorabilia, candles, phospur, cadmium, porcelain, bolts of cheesecloth, brittle sea-stars, blind cave fish, and papal indulgences. So voracious are these women, that, if this ever became widely known, Alabama would almost certainly become known as the 'place where women will eat almost anything at all, but especially odd minerals, and you don't even have to blackmail them' state.
Tim Gadd 4/2001
There is some actual satire floating about up there somewhere, but no-one seems to have spotted it, not even in Missouri.
