From: mdw@db.TC.Cornell.EDU (Matt Welsh)
Subject: The Paradigm of Fish. Part 4.
Summary: adj. [ < L. _summa_, a sum ] hasty and arbitrary
Keywords: fish
Organization: The Linux Inquisition, Propaganda Division
Date: Thu, 17 Dec 1992 00:30:18 GMT

Some explanation is in order here. Recently, I was kidnapped
by the Cambodian Red Army over a series of napkin designs I
had developed and distributed across most of Southeastern 
Asia in 1973. One of these napkins depicted a rice paddy
with the "Lite" beer logo blazoned across it by a troupe 
of nondescript farmers in the background. This didn't fall
in line with the now-defunct Cambodian Red Army's economic
philosophy, so I was detained and forced to translate half of
John Archibald Wheeler's _A_Journey_into_Gravity_and_Spacetime_
into the modern Cambodian dialect before the death of the
emperor. Luckily, I finished in time.

Since then, I've barely had time to finish this, part 4 of
my soon-to-be epic saga. Enjoy.

The Paradigm of Fish. Part 4. "She's like a cat, on drugs."

	There it loomed before me, black obsidian, hovering about
three feet off of the ground. I ignored this quaint physical
snafu for the moment, and focused entirely on my immediate goal:
The Paradigm. An enigma that had haunted my very being as long as
I could remember. The chilly upstate New York morning whipped
around me like a damp tissue, clinging, wrenching its way into my
bundles of arctic clothing: white extra-large T-shirt, screen print
of Calvin. Fading green flannel shirt, unbuttoned. Cuffs poking out
of the sleeves of my worn army jacket, emblazoned with the name of
a veteran long forgotten, over the right breast pocket: "Pookie."
	However someone named "Pookie" got into the armed forces
was not my concern. I was literally freezing, and sprinkled a small
decanter of salt on my shoulders and head to lower my freezing point
and to keep any pedestrians walking over me from slipping on the ice.
I stood alone, cold, and small snowflakes, each one completely unique,
meandered their way to the ground, in a pattern as inexplicable as 
the wanderings of wood beetles on a sheet of plexiglass. 
	Why was I here? Simple. Hovering three feet off of the ground,
just in front of me, was an immense obsidian monolith, carved into 
shape of a mackerel. The dimensions of the monolith were indeed 1 to 4
to 9, the squares of the first three natural primes, but I did not see
in this any measure of intelligence. Lumberyard workers cut boards in 
similar dimensions every day. There was a much better reason to assume
the intelligence of whoever-- or whatever-- had carved this giant
floating statue. It was shaped like a mackerel, in such a way that it
appeared to be frozen in motion-- as if it were gasping helplessly
for breath on the dry shore. Or the bottom of a pool that had just 
been drained. Or perhaps on the carpet floor of a child's playroom,
where said child had knocked the huge fishtank off of the dresser and
left the mackerel there, suffocating. It was quite a powerful motif. 
And as much as I am trained not to workship graven images, I felt 
a sense of reverence in the presence of this work of art. 	
	I was here to fulfill a quest. For looming behind the giant
floating fish statue was Herbie's Aquariums and UN Controlled Weapons
Depot, just one in a chain of superstores that speckled the globe with
their 80-foot-tall flashing neon signs, which remained lit 24 hours
a day and were supposedly visible not only to astronauts but also to the
automated targeting systems of modern ICBM's. Inside the mall, which
covered no less than 400 acres and was totally devoted to Herbie's,
I ran into Jim who was looking over a Toxoco Mix-It-Yourself Chemical
and Biological Warfare Kit. The kit contained everything you needed to 
singlehandedly wage small-scale biotoxin war on any number of Third World 
countries, which were listed on the side of the box.
	"Jim, that's very impressive, and it could be yours for just
$89,999.99 plus applicable sales tax," I said. "What's it for?"
	"My dad, for Christmas," he replied, but put the seven-foot-long
box back on the shelf and moved down the aisle to the piles of fishtank
heaters, all on sale. 
	"Ah, I see. Why don't you just get him another one of those
Canadian divot replacers, like last year?"
	"Nah," Jim said. "I'd have to go all the way to Winnipeg for
that."
	Jim and I wandered together through the endless aisles of fishtanks,
heavy munitions, atomic warheads, and little bags of colored rock. Insidiously,
we were searching for clues to unravel the mystery of the Paradigm of Fish--
characterized, in part, by a series of dreams I had been having recently
where I found myself swimming along with schools of mackerel, breathing through
gills, eating small plankton floating in the water, etc. So naturally, Herbie's
Aquariums and UN Controlled Weapons Depot was the first place to start, with
73 convenient locations in New York state alone. 
	Our hopes were getting low, as we had traversed more than half of the
superstore without a single bit of evidence. Jim looked bleakly around. 
"This isn't good," he said. I was undaunted, however, as the presence of the
floating fish obelisk in front of the place had to mean _something_. Jim was
about to panic. The salesmen were getting nervous, and it was nearing closing
time. I was getting ready to call it a day, when suddenly (without any kind
of warning) the mall PA system sprung to life, a store-wide announcement 
reverberating through the endless rows of shelves. It said:
	"Mmmmffffm mffmm bmmmm hmm mffffffmm mmm mmffffm bmm."
	"What?" asked Jim, who was close to tears.
	This was it. The clue we had been searching for. The first step on
the trail of unraveling this enthralling puzzle.
	"Clear as a bell, Jim. He said there was a phone call for me,
in the back."
	I took off towards the rear of the building, Jim in tow. You'll
have to wait to see who the call was from. I will tell you, however, that
they called collect, on MCI.

mdw

-- 
Matt Welsh     mdw@tc.cornell.edu     Cornell Theory Center
  "It's a Katana, ya Midwestern Computer Geek." --Tom Payne
Xref: sparky alt.non.sequitur:850 talk.bizarre:42572