the news from the
(ivica)
"
enriching itself on the destruction of
(Noam
Chomsky)
Somebody snapped. The name
or names were suppressed at first. Hard to believe
that suppression exists in the
It turned out to be Melvin.
Nobody had suspected Melvin. He had finally shown some initiative and rigged it
somehow to his liking. For two full days, there was nothing but programming
from the
Then the diabolical fiend
allowed all programming to pass through his hands and wires, except for sports
programming. No sports period No sports for two days period Marriages were
being strained and stretched beyond any known natural limits period Then he resumed normal programming. Except once in a while, someone's favourite
show or sport or news would appear in Australian or Spanish or some other
language with subtitles.
"G'day."
(Bob McKenzie)
"G'day."
(Doug McKenzie)
"How's it goin', eh?" (Bob and Doug McKenzie)
"Vidiots."
(Marshall McLuhan)
Meanwhile, I was following
up on a certain Mary Minto. (Or
as she was soon to be forever referred to: Marrying Mary Minto.)
She (and her computer) scanned through the whole of Sweethaven.
And as she was retiring soon (under their very strong
insistence), she quietly registered the marriages of every single person over
the age of 39.
She matched them up blindly
(but according to her own personal special romantic vibrations) and then had
notices mailed to them with the new spouse's name, address, and phone number,
and a request for the prompt payment of five dollars (cash only) to the city's
Water Department.
"Great God! this is an awful place."
(Robert F. Scott)
"I don't know if you still learn any Latin in this school, but if you do,
you know that the word ponder comes from the Latin 'ponderare',
which means "to weigh." Weigh up your life,
and do it every day."
(Robertson Davies)
Melvin commandeered one
channel (channel 2) that was connected to a
closed-circuit camera at the corner of a busy local intersection. When the
authorities complained, he ignored them. It would take them 3 working days to legally attack each intersection, which he simply then
planned to move with one of the vans. It was soon the most popular channel on
the box. That one I couldn't quite figure out with any
certainty---but it says something about entertainment and style in today's
world. He connected channel 18 to a camera at his own front door.
When they pulled Marrying
Mary in, she had no defence and no answer. She just
shrugged lightly. When they demanded to know if she had authorized these
marriages, she nodded yes. When they demanded an explanation, she said that she
didn't work for "youse
guys" anymore.
They had to let her go, the
city lawyers didn't want to press any charges or go
for damages. They didn't think it would make the city
look very good. The Water Department had over $4,000.00 (in five
dollar bills) that they didn't know how to properly input into their
computer. They forgot to ask her about the email that all the city employees
received just before her retirement day that declared every Monday to be now designated as "Resume Monday". On every
Monday, resumes will be routinely checked and
re-checked thoroughly and completely starting in alphabetically order.
They
eventually fired Melvin. He would however sneak back in and "CLICK":
nothing but music videos on every channel for 2 days. They threatened him. They
dragged his name into the courts. "CLICK": 2 days of lawyer shows,
court programs, detectives, cops-and-robbers, and predatory animal
documentaries. The man had a mean streak in him, that's
for sure.
They tried backing off. "CLICK": 2 days of British programming! (Bread,
The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Alas Smith and Jones, The Black Adder II
& III, Mr.Bean, Dr.Who,
Rumpole, Monty Python, Secret Agent Man, The
Prisoner, The Avengers (Mrs.Emma Peel only), The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Singing Detective, Yes Minister, No
Honestly, BBC News, obscure odd detectives, wordy Shakespearean plays,
historical miniseries', cultural literate stories, et cetera.)
Now they were really mad. They gathered their lawyers
and clerks and papers together. Viewers complained that their TV guides didn't cover this. A few viewers called in and demanded that
he be rehired. A few more called in favour of Melvin and the cable authorities reluctantly gave
him their best offer.
However his answer was still:
"CLICK": 2 days of cartoons. (a channel for
each of: early-Popeye, Rocky& Bullwinkle, The Simpsons,
early+middle+late-Bugs Bunny&Friends,
Heckle&Jeckle, early-Tom+Jerry,
Huckleberry Hound&Friends, Krazy
Kat, Top Cat, early-Felix the Cat, et cetera.) It turned out that he had a cute
grey+white kitten. She was called
Muchka.
"CLICK":
2 days of Parliament, every hour, every channel, from the archives, over the
years. (The
hair-cuts-of-the-week, the romance-of-the-week, the pension-lists, the top 10
thieves, find-the-Senator puzzles, the Un-Democratic Party joke-of-the-month,
the Deform/DeBlock comparison-of-the-day, the best
on-camera snoring, et cetera.) And then
"CLICK": nothing. Nothing but normal programming
again. Melvin had disappeared. They thought he might have finally
clicked himself off.
"Does
this story have anything to do with love, money, conquest, or disaster?"
(Gordon Sinclair)
I asked
Marrying Mary why?
Why did she do it? Why did she bother? She said...well, she said a lot of things over coffees at the Weirdo Centre. The
Weirdo Centre is the biggest mall in downtown Fat City (where the mayor (Mr. Fatson) insists that it's really
no problem when one of his favourite elected city
politicians discharges her democratic duties while living full-time in
Essentially Mary said that
in the Water Department, everyone always complained. Nobody ever phoned up,
"Hey, Babe, thanks for the clean water
today!" Nobody ever said, "Hey, good work this week, Miss Mary."
“And certainly not with any sincerity!”
I asked about her
authority. She almost hit me with this huge green leather purse. She emphasized
that she was one of the most senior-ranking members in the city government. She
mentioned over a sly coffee that Melvin was her nephew, her favourite
nephew.
I asked her about the five
dollars. "It was the smallest paper currency still circulating and it
showed a certain commitment." As she left me, I whispered,
"Why?" She smiled back and half sang, "Oh, I am a cook and a
captain bold." And she was gone before the bill
arrived. (Cherchez la femme!)
Recently I heard about some
place in
I finally met him before he
left for good and Melvin said to me, "They pick your channels, your
children's education, the contents of your newspapers, your classmates, the shoes in your stores, the words in your dictionaries....
They throw some poker cards at you...and where does it get you?"
be seeing you, the-ivica-package
"Even if we take matrimony at its lowest, even if we
regard it as
no more than a sort of friendship recognised by the
police."
(Robert Louis Stevenson)
P.S. I got the Muchka.
[COMMANDATUM RETICULUM ET UNITUM PROPTER LEGEM ET INFORTIATUM]
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