Fri Aug 4 13:02:52 1995
The scene opens in the summer of 1939, a pleasant time of year, with the harvest due soon and the threat of war somehow not quite near enough. Dennis had recently opened a ironmonger's shop, and was selling used kneebraces to the new Spanish government, which had only just won the Civil War against the democratic government with the help of Nazi arms. Dennis did not see the irony of meeting Ho Chi Min at the time. The Nazis were quite hospitable at this time but were really only interested in a jade shipment run due from Nom Peng at any time before Chinese New Year, which they were trading for a Polish Jew who just happened to be a world expert on puns in the Viet language, a skill which saved him from the gas chambers and made him a trading chip in the jade business. His son, a Henryk Koscziousczko, had already escaped the Third Reich and had obtained a job with the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, a job concentrating on total memory loss.
Henryk found it very difficult to go to work each day when he couldn't remember where it was. He tried taking a map, but usually left it on the kitchen table. Instead, he began selling Pepsi and spying bugs from home, but that also became difficult and he began to spy with Pepsi and you can guess what he tried to drink! Life became tedious. He was restless to the extent that he began counting the bricks in his office, one by one, because he could only count that way.
It came to pass that not only was he restless but he was lonely. Something had to be done! Life is too short he said to himself ... he got off his very large posterior and began to sit down heavily on the small furry kittens that were walking past him. They didn't like this attitude, and so attacked him en masse, threatening him with used kitty litter and warm sardines. `The Troops of Feline Power', as they were called, was led by Bron the Tom. Not only did he lead the felines but he also had a doggy group called ``Poodle Power''. By playing these two groups against each other, and selling weapons to both sides, Bron the Tom managed to make a fortune in hard currency and precious metals, which he laundered by putting it through the campaign contributions fund of a Senator from Michigan, who spent his cut on buying weapons (also from Bron) to fund a small Central American extreme right-wing group of terrorists.
Bron found this Michigan connection to be very useful, because it gave him contacts in the car industry in Detroit. In fact, it was during the previous winter, when Bron was making a brief visit to Detroit before skipping to Miami for the duration, that he bribed the inventory manager of the warehouse that stored the finished M1 Abrams main battle tanks (built by Chrysler in Detroit) to write off a couple as `Damaged, stripped for parts', so that Bron could sell one each to his two pet terrorist groups, who were then conducting a turf battle in east Detroit.
Unfortunately for Bron, the tanks came with complete and easy-to-read instructions (after all, around 20 percent of the US Army is functionally illiterate, so they keep things simple) so that as soon as the ``Poodle Power'' group powered their tank up, they fired some armour-piercing shells at Bron's bullet-proof Cadillac Fleetwood stretch limo and made him cry. His mother ran out from the kitchen, brandishing a wooden spoon, and yelled ``Leave him alone, you bullies''. Shamefacedly, they kicked their heels at the dirt and left, moping. Poor Bron. Tears streaked down his face, he ran to his mother sobbing.
Just then the oven went `Ding' and upon opening the door, puffs of smoke rose intermittently from the foaming mass that seeped to the kitchen floor. Mother started sobbing and the two of them looked a particularly sorrowful pair until the next day when the cheerful man from the insurance agency arrived. ``Hmm, you seems to have had a bit of an accident.'' he said. He agreed to pay them $10,000 for the damage, as long as he could bill the agency for $30,000 and keep the rest. As they cleaned the mess up, Mother tried Ajax but it didn't get the stains off the leather upholstery, especially from the stitches. So Mother grabbed her Uzi submachine gun, put it into single-shot mode, and neatly blew the insurance man's head off just as he was going out the door.
After quickly skinning him, and using some extra-strong tanning fluid, she stretched the skin out on the clothesline during the hot afternoon and spent the evening turning the skin into new `leather' upholstery. By dawn, Mother could sit on the luxuriously soft leather facing the television. On a whim, she turned it on, and was amazed to see it explode, as Bron had poured water and sulphuric acid into it the night before. Mother was quickly rushed to hospital, suffering second degree burns The doctors were mystified, as to how it had all happened. Poor Mother had her legs hoisted up on pullies and was wrapped in enormous amounts of gauze. She then remembered about the small cyanide tablet that had been surgically implanted in a molar many years ago when she first joined the CIA. Unbeknownst to here, the ``cyanide tablet'' story was merely what they were telling expendable agents of the CIA at that period in its history, and it was actually a pressurized container of nerve gas, with enough to kill everything in a medium-sized room.
Her arrest in the middle of a large field in the middle of a blowing gale was as much a surprise to her as the subsequent lack of death of her attackers due to nerve gas wasn't to them. She was taken away to be questioned by Doug, who was actually a time traveller from the 23rd century in disguise. Most people are unaware of the fact that today's streets are peppered with time travellers, all desperately trying to blend in and look inconspicuous. In some places, such as airports, the majority of people there are time travellers from the future, which is why you often run into people you know at airports (because the other people are not real people at all, but time travellers). Popular time travel only became possible with the perfection of Stealth technology, which allows aircraft (and spacecraft) to be built that are almost invisible at the wavelengths of light at which humans see. Every major city's rooftops has a few parked time machines, invisible to the naked eye, whose passengers are slumming it in the streets down below.
Why are they slumming it you may well ask. Well there is slumming and slumming it. Some live in it others loller in it. They dawdle around thinking it all belongs to them! Well, it behooves me to think of them slumming it in this way, in these circumstances, and under these conditions. For that matter, exactly what does it mean if something behooves someone. When you actually look up ``behoove'' in the dictionary, you discover that it was made up in 1943 by a professor in psychology at Columbia University, New York, to test whether or not people used words they had heard but didn't know the meaning of. Alas, his students did so, and so has everyone else since. This is the result of the last author dribbling on so much that he had to be taken out the back and shot. BANG!. Well, that's that.
Back in Spain, Bron had remembered to pass on warnings about his blood relative, Patrick, to the Gestapo. Stunned by the revelations, began singing, ``the rain in Spain lays mainly on the p l a i n - la la la la la, the rain in Spain lays mainly on the p l a i n - la la la la la la, and where does it rain? In Spain!'' And suddenly, in walked Arnold Schwarzenegger, wearing a bullet-proof vest and carrying a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launcher. ``Hasta la vista, baby,'' he muttered, while he pulled the trigger that sent the RPG into the source of the annoying singing, destroying the house and everything in it except Arnold, who merely brushed off the dust and stood up in the wreckage that lay about the place. Hitler was never more impressed than when he heard of these events. His sequel to the Spanish Civil War, although not as eclectic nor art-nouveau, had a much greater cast and was enjoyed by more people. Spain was never the same again.