User Tools

Site Tools


Sidebar

Recently Published:

The Mister #monologue #absurd

Carmen Electra #absurd #wordassociation

SCUM Manifesto, a book review #reviews #screed

Don't Destroy Universes Over Spilt Milk #writingprompts #absurd

Actually, She's An Aquarius, But Gemini Makes the Joke Work Better #personalessay #medium

The King is I #fantasy #silly

Look Up There! #monologue #wordswordswords

Please Follow These Instructions Carefully #silly #rules

I Came Upon My Beverly, Clearly #poetry #satire #adult

Kitchen Rules #satire

The Xirtam #satire #monologue #scifi

Speed Dating #monologue #vampires #gonowhere

Biffy's Eulogy #meta #metaasfuck

Everything Sucks in the Rain #personal

celebrating_february_24th

Celebrating February 24th

Five years ago today marked the third anniversary of President's Johnson's signing the Efficiency in Narration Act. This, an historic act, included a “fictional truth” loophole that has been used to great success by writers all over the globe. In Sommerset, a small town that takes liberties with the preposition “in” with regards to it's location as contextualized by 'country called Pango-Pango, Alfred Tennisbaum edits a small newspaper, the Sunset News, which has benefited greatly from this loophose [sic], despite or even because of the fact that there is no Alfred Tennenbaum, Editor, Sunset News, Sommerset, Pango-Pango, or Efficiency in Narration Act. To whit, an op-ed that claims a portion of the previous sentence describes a reasonable attempt to put a business card, as-is, into a work of fiction…

Alfred Tennenbaum
Editor, Sunset News
Sommmerset,
Pango-Pango

…other than obvious punctuation and line breaks. In an interview with ace reporter Acere Porter, editor of the sport desk at the Sunset News, Alfred was quoted as saying:

You're fired, there aren't any sports in this god-forsaken country, much less a country.

Discussion grew on social media, questioning punctuation's role in Porter's axing. This was the impetus behind the founding of the Coalition for Compulsory and Correct Use of Semicolon, a cabal that lobbied congress to commemorate the day, three years ago, America celebrated the fifth anniversary of Johnson's signing of the Quarter-Colon Abolishment Act. According to Professor Pro Fessor, a historian at His Torian liberal arts college:

Full colon now; semicolon: forever

And coincidental with these august (e.g. not February) occasions was the day, four years ago, Pango Pango celebrated the fourth anniversary of Alfred Tennisbaum's induction into the Somerset Sports Hall of Fame, a laud heard round the city/country/island/micro-continent/figment. At the ceremony, which he did not attend, Porter is ace-reported to have spoken. Quothe the reporter:

Full colon now, semicolon forever, but what's not there? Quarter colon never. Period. Which is why it isn't there. That's it. Nothing else is not there, because there's no nothing to be not there there, there.

This is what many a historian (one: Fessor) believe led to Johnson's sponsoring a subsequent This Act Does not Exist Act, which died in committee, or would have if it, and a committee that supervised such a thing, existed. The impact on the business-card industry has been, evidentiarilly, adjective.

But others disagree, while a few abstentions from the discussion are practiced by some. “They're Their There,” a band, rose up a chart (none) with a hit tune describing the debacle. “Passive Voice, a track on Imperative begins:

This is a heck of a story! This is exclamatory! Let it be said? Now you say it.

Members of the sub-committee that supervised the drafting of the Efficiency in Narration Act where only made aware of the song's hype well after cutting the codicil that bands and other music groups as well as ensembles including nonettes, decatents, octets, soloists, and pentagroupists were exempt from any ban denying access to provisions that enforced limitations on juices (legal term) allowing for expeditious benefit under the overreaching grasp of the act itself. Hence the loophole.

An unforceable (sp) rider on the act stipulates that all “fourth walls” must have posted on them an easy-to-read poster of the letters of the act. Breaking the fourth wall, like I'm doing now, is in this way considered to be destruction of government property.

And while, for example Close Encounters of the Third Kind had not been filmed by the time Johnson was in office, it is well known that his son, Hisson Johnson, was an enthusiastic enthusiasts of “erstwhile puzzles” (™) and would boldly tell anyone who would listen:

Nonette, decadent, octet, soloist, pentagroupist.. Nine, ten eight one two. Re mi do, lower-octave do, lower-octave si. That song from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Which lead inevitably to Alfred Tennebaum's SSHoFame nomination, thanks in no small part, or large part, or any other parts to compare it to in size, just one part, to the ARG created to discover the missing part of “Full colon now; semicolon: forever”. Singing those five words to the tune of that Close Encounters song, the so-called “missing part” : “Quarter colon never. Period” could only be thence sung to alleged notes that don't profess to exist. Hence Not the Non-Existence of Aliens (™).

As an epilogue, any afterword would suffice for such a tale. Begging the question as to the improbable possibility of calling a whale's tail a fluke, this tale, told through that self-same third-person fourth-wall fictional truth loophole, can best be described as having been written at the tale-end of a day, that it was impelled by grammatical and vocabularical “flukes,” and had nothing to do with the whales in Star Trek which is a movie that can be viewed, in the impassive voice, as the analog inverted Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

–From “20-24-2: My High school Locker Combination as a Metaphor for Grams, Fluid Ounces, and Hours Spent Browsing the Internet” by Professor Acere Johnson, written 157 days after February 24th, 2020.

celebrating_february_24th.txt · Last modified: 2021/09/28 10:16 by jason