bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 49–51
From the Keyboard of THE DUKE OF URL: “The Past Just Ain’t What It Used To Be!!”
Welcome back fellow time travellers, as we continue our explorations into the real past — the past denied by the powers that be, the smug so-called experts, the elites with an agenda to do you down and keep you there. And have I dug up some treasure for you!
First, let’s talk about China. Up and comer, no question about it, and so, so proud of their thousands of years of culture. Except that it’s all baloney!! Research by the Centre for Advanced Hindsight reveals there is no evidence of Chinese culture until about 1550. Before then, the country was full of settlers from Zimbabwe and Fiji, with completely different societies, languages and ways of life. It was only after simultaneous floods and earthquakes of near-Biblical proportions wiped out the whole population that refugees arrived from Roswell, New Mexico and started to create an “ancient Chinese” culture to justify their land grab. Gotta hand it to them, they really are hard workers — just imagine building all those fake ancient ruins, writing all those fake histories of emperors who never existed — planting fake documents not just in China but all around the world — that Marco Polo effort was a classic. Of course there are always doubters. But I figure if God could build and bury all those fossils to create a back-story for our 6000 years of world history, then the Chinese could do the same for theirs.
And when it comes to fakes, don’t talk to me about the French!! The Neo-Annales School, a group I ignore except when they accidentally support my prejudices, has just announced that no President of France has had a mistress for the last 50-plus years!! Who knew — but we should have guessed, right? All part of the intellectual-macho fantasy trip they have pulled like a soggy beret over everyone’s eyes since at least Louis XIV — a guy, by the way, who wore high heels and a wig. A bas Sartre! The last French President who did have a mistress? — Charles de Gaulle. And the General was actually a woman! A great soldier and someone with lots of smarts, but back in the day when you couldn’t be a woman and lead your country to war. This from the land of Joan of Arc? But he was wrong about one thing — you can govern France, because there are really only two kinds of French cheese — one blue and runny, the other like white cinder block — the rest is imported from New Zealand and re-branded.
And then there’s Germany. Be honest now: have you ever tried to read Hegel? Incomprehensible, right? Well, don’t feel bad. He’s supposed to be incomprehensible! The man we know as Hegel was a mild-mannered postman in the small town of Bratwurst-am-Odour. His whole philosophical shtick was a joke perpetrated by some bored scholars meeting in a beer-hall in Heidelberg, led by three clowns named Goethe, Fichte and Herder. They bet they could create a totally bogus philosophy school by dressing up utter drivel in blindingly obscure jargon, using a writing style closely resembling warm tar and praising it to the skies in learned papers and conferences. Goethe held that academics as a group would refuse to admit they had no idea what this “Hegel” was talking about and so would have to declare him a genius. And he was right. The postman turned out to be such a natural that the joke got out of control: do the names Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Derrida ring any bells?
Talking about out of control, let’s poke our noses into the White House. You are aware (but I’m going to tell you anyway) that the current incumbent is actually a guy called Oscar Diggs? You may know him better as the Wizard of Oz. Obvious when you think about it, am I right? He arrived by balloon (hot air of course), 1 Entrée Chardonnay
Riesling
2 Main Bordeaux
Burgundy
3 Dessert Sauterne
Tokaj
stapled a dead albino weasel to his head and built himself a new model of the stupendous Flim-flam Machine that kept him in power so long in the Emerald City. How else can you explain the campaign, much less the results? Need more proof? How about the fact that Washington is full of flying monkeys and panicking munchkins? Or that the Cowardly Lion, the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow are all in the Cabinet now, running the country? All I can say is, we’d better find Dorothy and Toto fast before Vladimir Putin starts weaponising Kansas farmhouses and dropping them around the country.
While we’re in North America, let’s talk about Canada. Go back a few years. Stevan the Terrible is running the country, the Liberal Party is running out of leaders and an election is coming up. Out of the West rides this knight on a white horse. Suddenly, there are posters everywhere — Justin Justin! Justin! ! But this one-word campaign has a flaw. The party hacks are over the moon that new memberships are soaring, but nobody asks who the newbies are. Teenage girls, that’s who. And come the leadership convention, who comes out atop the secret ballot? Justin, of course. Justin Bieber, unfortunately. The party is stuck with him, but the election is coming up, something has to be done. Something in the great Canadian political tradition: something sneaky. So they cut a deal with the Bieb to let Justin T run things. Like the girls care, right? Want proof? Well, for one thing, the T doesn’t live in 24 Sussex, does he? Well then, who does?
Turning to the entertainment world, a new movie on the horizon that I just have to tell you about. It’s the story of a billionaire philanthropist and former IT geek now into medical charity. He invents a time machine and decides to recruit great medical figures from history — Hippocrates and such — to serve on his board of advisors. Modesty is not his problem. He goes back to the Russian Black Sea Coast of 1855 to find Florence Nightingale, who is nursing the British army in the middle of a big war there. Of course they fall in love and he winds up in the Charge of the Light Brigade and it’s all very box-office. Angelina Jolie as Florence. They’re bringing Johnny Cash back by CGI to sing the theme song, “Crimea River”. Don’t miss “Heaven’s Gates”.
Well that’s all for now. Just remember — never believe something just because they say it happened that way. As Orwell Co-poison 1
Antidote
Co-poison 2
reminds us, “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
Wow,” said Felix. “I’ve seen some conspiracy theories in my time, but this guy is something else. What an awesome collection of wackerie.”
“Tf it was all wackerie, the Duke wouldn’t be dead downstairs,” said ace logician Ludwig Liebnitz. “In fact, it’s all true. Except for the movie, which he made up. But the rest of it — well, there are five countries with strong reasons for not wanting that blog to hit the net. And it looks like one of them decided to make sure it didn’t.”
“How?” asked Felix. Liebnitz replied, “The Duke was cocky enough to host a formal dinner here tonight with representatives of four of the countries named in the blog. He was going to upload it at the end of the meal, while they were all sitting around unable to stop him. But one of them got to him first. “With what?” “Poison in the wine, Felix.” “That gives new meaning to the word ‘intoxicated’. But why didn’t everyone die?”
The ace logician glanced at his notes. “It was a binary poison — you had to drink two specific different kinds of wine, for it to kill you. A third kind of wine contained an antidote for the poison, so the killer had a way to make sure other guests didn’t get assassinated by mistake. The killer must have known what wines the Duke would choose.”
Esmeralda raised her voice. “So there were many different types of wine being served? Seems overly complicated.” Liebnitz replied, “Only a choice of two wines for each of three courses. I have it all in a chart here.”
Esmeralda said, “As someone who’s put on a lot of dinners, I want details. How was the table laid out? Who poured the wine? Do we know which diners got which wines?” Replied Liebnitz, “The five diners were seated out on one side of the table. The whole serving staff has been cleared. All the guests had access to the wine bottles in the pantry after they had been opened, but no-one was seen doing so and there are no fingerprints. Fortunately, the restaurant had a security camera in the ceiling of the dining room, so we are able to keep track of what went on there. Unfortunately, the system it is still in beta-testing and the pictures aren’t much help. Fortunately, the AI running the system was able to provide a written interpretation of what it saw.
Country
Unfortunately, it isn’t very coherent.” He circulated a chart and I t a list of ten points.
1. The Duke of URL, who celebrates Christmas at home in the I t summer, was in Chair 3.
2. The man from New York was served Riesling.
3. No more than three diners chose the same wine for any course.
4. Major Ma Zhi was in Chair 4. She was served Riesling | / and Sauterne.
5. The diners in Chairs 2 and 5 were both served Chardonnay.
6. Both the German and the Australian were served Chardonnay | I and Sauterne.
7. The American was seated at one end and was served Tokaj. So was the Frenchman.
8. The diners in Chairs I and 2, as well as Jean Stein, were served Burgundy. The Chinese diner was served Bordeaux.
9. Winston Fat Wa and the European Johannes LaPierre had I c adjacent chairs.
10. At the start of the second course, before anyone had drunk | ; that course’s wine, the diner in Chair 2 switched his glass with the one in front of the man on his left, unobserved.
Liebnitz examined the chart and the clues. “Not so difficult. | / Yes, that’s our killer. If we hurry, we can wrap this up before | / pressure from their Embassies forces us to let the diners go home.” | 1 The group dashed down to the entrance, where their suspects | ( were retrieving their coats. The ace logician stepped up to one of I c them and said, “Your colleagues can go, but I believe we will have | « to detain you a little longer. I can understand that you felt you had I c Chair 4 Chair 5
to protect your nation’s past, but this is a foreign country; we do things differently here.”
The diner looked up, smiled and said, “You know, it wasn’t tonight’s blog that really set me off. It’s something he was planning to put in his next one.” On the screen of the smart phone the killer held up, Liebnitz read: / hear about a planned remake of an Australian classic. A race across a post-apocalyptic desert in heavily-armed dune buggies. The crews are headed by Lenin, Trotsky, Che, Mao and Ho. They are all seeking the broad proletarian masses, and only one can win. Despite the leftie veneer, this one is going to be an action winner. Keep your eyes peeled for “Mad Marx”.
“The man had to die.” Liebnitz just nodded and led the killer away.
Can you duplicate Liebnitz’ feat and provide the name of the murderer? bout de papier will decide the winner by drawing from a hat containing all correct submissions received by July 28, 2017. The winner will receive a book autographed by A Aalto.
Free-lance prestidigitator A Aalto acknowledges the help of L Frank Baum, LP Hartley, Yogi Berra, the cartoonist Bizarro, George Orwell and Gene Chandler (the original Duke of Earl). Kudos to Danny Kaye and Sylvia Fine (who wrote his material) for inspiration: “The pellet with the poison’s in the flagon with the dragon, the vessel with the pestle has the brew that is true” (from “The Inspector General” — ZID to note). And thanks as always to Mrs Aalto, this time for riffing on Hegel and for the observation that satire is getting tougher and tougher to pull off as reality gets weirder and weirder.
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2017), pp. 49–51. Read the rest of this issue →
