I Presume 2: More Explorers

All mankind was searching for the famous Northwest Passage. Where was it? Where should they look? Finally Lachlan found it. "I have found the Northwest Passage," he said. "It begins in the bathroom and ends in the kitchen." Everybody took his photograph and the government gave him a present.

Ancient conveniences: enlightenment.

A tyrannosaurus rex stood alone in the rain like a boat on the sea.

A memory from the future ran backwards through the centuries and she thought, "I am alone in the rain like a boat on the sea." Then: "What does that mean?"

Infused with curiosity and determination she ran through the grasslands asking the other tyrannosaurs, "What is a boat?"

No one was sure. "A new kind of tree? A beetle? Describe it. What does it do?"

"It goes on the sea."

"And?"

But that was all she knew.

"You're thinking of a wave," they said. "Waves go on the sea."

She went to the beach and stared at the waves.

"That's not it."

The dinosaurs pointed to other objects floating on the sea: a log, a leaf.

"No, no, oh, I felt it, I am it, it is me, I am it, the boat ..."

"It sounds to me as if you've answered your own question," said a tyrannosaur who had a reputation for wisdom. "The boat is you and you are the boat. Float on the sea and you will be fulfilled."

She got into the sea and paddled to and fro. "Yes! This is it! I am the boat!"

The others danced on the beach, chanting, "She is fulfilled, she is enlightened, she is a boat on the sea."

"Let me try," said her friend. He shut his eyes and concentrated on enlightenment until the future occurred to him. "I am ... a plane in the air."

"He is a plane in the air!"

"I am enlightened. See what I have for you ..."

They ate the trays of plastic-wrapped muffins and reconstituted powdered scrambled egg, remarking, "This really is delicious."

Foot binding

She came back to her rooms weeping.

"Mistress, what is wrong?"

"He said my feet were not like little lotuses ... he said they were like some larger, uglier flower ..."

They murmured in sympathetic chorus, "Nonsense ... your feet are tiny ... delicate ... perfumed, perfect lotus blossom feet ... he's blind ... he must be in a bad mood tonight ..."

"I won't let it happen again!"

She went to a pond covered with newly-opened lotuses and put her feet in the water, singing, "Lotus, take my feet, lotus, be my feet." Her feet replaced the flowers on two lotus-stems and two lotuses appeared on the end of her legs, perfectly soft and small. She crawled back to her rooms in triumph.

I Presume

All of the great explorers were men. Timothy Jones found a pond. He named it after his mother. John successfully located a hill. It was the first hill he had ever seen, so he called it, The First Hill, and under this name it appears on maps. A cow was grazing on the hill. He returned and said, "I have met the natives." There was rejoicing. A statue was erected in his honour.

Snapdragon

For fun they would put raisins in a bowl of hot brandy, set it all on fire, and pluck the raisins out with their mouths. This game was called snapdragon.

"It never fails to amuse."

One day it did.

"Enough," said the most popular man in the room.

"Beg pardon?"

"I am tired of this. Tired of raisins. Bored with flaming brandy. O, and the mouths like dragons. The fire within. I sigh." He sighed.

They tried to modify the game to please him. Apples instead of raisins? No. He groaned and moaned. Tea in place of brandy? No. He cast his eyes to the ceiling.

Then, with a great effort of will, they turned the world of the room inside-out, so that up was down and cold was hot. "There." Now the whole fiery thing was frozen, solid ice.

"A new challenge!"

He was entranced. They laughed with delight to see their friend so happy. "Hooray!" The room filled with hot breaths of pleasure. In their joy they threw the windows open.

The inside-out world flooded through the open window and affected everything outside.

"No, no! What a mistake!"

The popular man stared at the rest. "The polar bears! The icecaps will burst into flame! The polar bears will explode in torrents of fire!"

The first environmentalist.

Dynamite

There is a Nobel Prize for Modesty but no one ever knows who wins it.

Cage: a second variation

The youngest prince had gone missing and the royal city of Kyoto was in a dark mood. No one was more unhappy than three sisters who had decided that they were going to marry him. They had been fighting together for at least two years about it, and the screens in their house kept breaking when they threw one another around during epic battles.

Now they decided mark the loss of the prince by travelling together into the fields around the city to watch the fireflies.

"But where are they?" they said when they arrived. "It's the right season. Where are the fireflies?"

The fields were as dark as the inside of a hat.

"Wait. There they are. Is that a house?"

It was a tiny house. Three beads of light moved restlessly in a cage outside the front door. "Old woman," they said to the owner, who was sitting outside. "Let the fireflies loose."

She refused. "I'll keep them in this cage. That way you won't have to move your eyes so much to see them."

Impatiently and without respect, one of the younger women leaned forward and opened the cage herself.

One dot of light flew free and the first sister said --

"Oh, I don't want to be married to the prince after all."

Then another dot of light flew free and the second sister said --

"I don't want to be married to him either."

A third dot drifted away and the third sister said --

"Nor do I."

So they all went home and wrote poems to one another and the old woman was left to sigh after her lost fireflies.

Cage: a variation

The youngest prince had gone missing and the royal city of Kyoto was in a dark mood. Three sisters who were in love with him decided to cheer themselves up by travelling into the fields around the city to watch the fireflies.

"But where are they?" they said when they arrived. "It's the right season. Where are the fireflies?"

The fields were as dark as the inside of a hat.

"Wait. There they are. Is that a house?"

It was a tiny house. Three beads of light moved restlessly in a cage outside the front door. "Old woman," they said to the owner, who was sitting outside. "Let the fireflies loose."

She refused. "I'll keep them in this cage. That way you won't have to move your eyes so much to see them."

"She's blind," whispered one sister to another. "She won't see me if I --"

And with that, she reached forward and opened the cage.

One dot of light flew free, and the old woman shouted.

"My left eye!"

At that, one of the sisters saw that the old woman was the prince and that she was not truly in love with him after all.

Another dot of light flew free and the old woman shouted.

"My right eye!"

At that, a second sister saw that the old woman was the prince and that she was not truly in love with him after all.

Another dot of light flew free and the old woman shouted.

"My heart!"

At that, the third sister saw that the old woman was the prince and that she loved him truly.

All four of them returned to Kyoto.

Cage

The youngest prince had gone missing and the royal city of Kyoto was in a dark mood. Three young women who had been in love with him decided to cheer themselves up by travelling into the fields around the city to watch the fireflies.

"But where are they?" they said when they arrived. "It's the right season. Where are the fireflies?"

The fields were as dark as the inside of a hat.

"Wait. There they are. Is that a house?"

It was a tiny house. Three beads of light moved restlessly in a cage outside the front door. "Old woman," they said to the owner, who was sitting outside. "Let the fireflies loose."

She refused. "No. I'll keep them in this cage. That way you won't have to move your eyes so much."

"She's blind," whispered one of the young women to another. "She won't see me if I --"

And with that, she reached forward and freed the three dots of light from their cage.

The old woman screamed.

"My eyes, my eyes!"

Two of the dots of light flew away in one direction.

"My eyes are gone!"

The third dot of light shot away in a different direction.

"My dick!"

The old woman fell forward on her face.

"Oh, oh!" said the young women, who were not bad-hearted. They turned her over and saw that the corpse had the face of the youngest prince.

Their part in his downfall

The filmmakers and photographers came after the Allied soldiers into occupied Germany. They saw the camps and the corpses.

"We have never seen anything more horrible." Click, went the cameras.

They noticed captured camp guards staring at the dead bodies. "You watched it happen!" They began to kick and beat the guards in a rage. Then they came across Germans in the streets who trembled and said, "We saw terrible things, books burnt, people stopped by brutes and taken away."

"We are unable to control our emotions at these atrocities," they said, and beat them too, using their cameras as weapons. A lens broke.

Then they came to Hitler's ghost, which was sitting mildly on a wall.

"You, Hitler! You must have seen people dragged away."

"No, I didn't see anything like that."

"Shot, gassed, imprisoned!"

"Honestly, no. I was in bed or in parliament at the time."

"You witnessed nothing?"

"Witnessed? No. I have a house in the mountains, you know."

"He saw nothing." They went on their way and let him be.

Captain

They killed Captain Cook on a beach in Hawaii. A small girl accidentally saw it happen, and for years afterwards she would say, "I was a witness. I will write his biography."

"Then do," her friends said, bored. "Get on with it."

So one day she did. She wrote, "Captain Cook was on the beach, pushing a boat. They hit him on the head. He fell over."

"Where's the rest?"

"That's all I know."

They rolled their eyes at her and she shouted, "Then how do I find out about the rest? You're so smart, you tell me."

"Put yourself in his place. That's a good technique for an author."

"Yes, that's true. Do that."

"That should give you the answer."

They acted it out. She ran to the beach and pretended to push a boat with her imaginary crew, whereupon her friends struck her playfully on the head and she fell down, imagining herself dead.

"Realistic," they said encouragingly. "It's as if you were really him."

"Yes, it really is," she said, getting up. She'd had a brainwave. Going back to her manuscript, she started at the beginning. "I am Captain Cook. I was born on Hawaii, a little Hawaiian girl. When I was growing up I loved to eat fruit and play on the beach. One day I saw a group of men chasing some other men towards a boat. There was a fight. They hit ..." and with that, she died.

Southern Africa: the difference betwen kraals and purses

A rich person was one who had more cattle than you. "A pen of cattle in this place is like a purse of money in that other place," the universe said to itself, trying to form connections between different ideas so as to keep life simple. "Pen, purse, pen, purse, pen, purse."

Instead of making life simple it only confused itself. Unexpected things began to happen.

A woman opened her purse in the supermarket to find out if she had enough money and a young bullock fell among the tomatoes.

A man approached his kraal and saw that it was as small as his hand and at the same time as large as always. The walls were made of leather and the cattle were made of metal and paper. They were stamped flat on the air, and at the same time fully rounded.

"This is too strange," he said. He called to his friend, "Come and look at this!" The friend looked. He was right: it was too strange.

"Your cattle must be cursed," he said. "This must be witchcraft." Then there was nothing to do except burn the cattle to get rid of the witchcraft. They melted into a puddle of gold and flew into the air as scraps of ash; at the same time they were barbeque.

Window tax

In 1696 they introduced a window tax. People began to brick up their windows. It was dark indoors. Bats became popular household pets.

Soon people realised that a bat could be more than just a companion. Bats could do anything. Their cooking was outstanding. They knew how to embroider cushions. They answered the door. Hello, said the window tax man.

No windows here, the bat said. I'm a bat.

Where's the homeowner?

I'm the homeowner.

Eventually the bats owned every house in town. They developed a mighty civilisation. The last of the windows were sealed over and the authorities gave up on the window tax. The bats came and went.

Squee squee squee.

I'll see you later dear.

Squee squee.

Welcome home.

Modern inconveniences: Neptune's son

Neptune had a mortal son who became a tradesman. He left the water running through toilets for hours, he stepped on a garden tap to reach the top of a shed and snapped the head off so that water spouted out in a flood. When he went home there was a storm, and the people who lived in the house didn't notice the sound of flowing tap water in the onslaught of the rain. It was days before they found out what had happened.

He cleared asbestos, which gave him a reason to spray water around indoors, dampening the dangerous fibres into mulch. Unaware of his father's identity, he never knew why this largesse gave him so much pleasure. "It must be necessary to the continuation of the world," he said to himself. "Otherwise why would I like it so much?"

The Modern Mariners

It was an age of accessorising liquids. Some you smeared on you, some you drank, some cleaned you, some concealed blemishes, some made your hair stick up. Scientists looked for more efficient ways to apply liquid. They hunted for more effective and concentrated solutions.

"Deep sea fish. Living at the bottom of the sea, they concentrate liquid wonderfully within their bodies. Deep sea fish are the way forward."

People bound deep sea fish to their sores and put deep sea fish in their sparse hair to promote luscious growth. Seabirds inhaled the wonderful new smell and began to appear in cities more often. Soon there was a flock of pelicans in every town square. Albatrosses soared over railway stations and other places where people congregated. They swooped down over the crowds at rock concerts. Security guards tried to remove them, but the people tied the security guards to anchors and threw them overboard, chanting, "Bad luck, bad luck!"

Two els

One high-ranking Chinese military person turned to another.

"I wish our superior would not use English as a code language. It makes everything so confusing."

"Agreed. What does the communication say?"

"Mountains. Lama. Invade."

"Lama?"

They squinted over a tiny English-Chinese dictionary.

"A hairy ungulate with a long neck. They live in ..."

China invaded Peru.

Ancient wonders: birth control

A documentarian from Hawai'i went to Bhutan to record cultural marvels.

"This is a dance to banish demons."

"Wonderful. Magnificent."

When she got home she found she was infertile.

Babies

"I am going to visit the church to say thank-you to God for the new baby," a pious man said to his exhausted wife.

"Tell God I'm here," the newborn baby said, sitting up and shaking its fist. "Make sure he knows."

"He knows already."

"How?"

"God is everywhere. God is aware of everything."

"No prestige in that, is there?" the baby said. "Get him to forget me then."

"Impossible."

"Aha," said the baby. "So that's the challenge." It looked at its mother. "Why is she sleeping like that?" it asked.

A million rectangular windows

In every Thai house there is a picture of the good king Bhumibol Adulyadej. It is as if he is looking indoors through a million rectangular windows.

Sometimes at night all of the portraits will sigh or sneeze simultaneously.

Medicinal Properties

"Bread, too," wrote Pliny the Elder, "which forms our ordinary nutriment, possesses medicinal properties almost without number."

A modern Italian tested one of the remedies he described. She soaked bread in wine, added myrtle, and applied it to a pustule on her head. "It doesn't work," she said. "Why doesn't it work?"

She considered the problem.

"Of course. Bread must have changed over hundreds of years. It has lost its medicinal properties."

So she researched ancient bread and sold it as a medicine. It was so good that it cured everything. Rich international drug companies sent assassins after her. They shot her, but she applied bread to the wound and it healed; they poisoned her with the undetectable extracts of plants but she swallowed some bread and was cured.

At that the assassins gave up and she employed them as bakers. They changed their black shirts for white aprons and sang as they worked.



For the full translation of the passage from Pliny, go here.

Falconry

In Persia people flew falcons. The falcons captured animals and other birds and brought them back. Their eyes were fierce. Their brains were trained towards those eyes. Everything else was almost an afterthought and operated automatically.

To make the sheikh's favourite falcon more efficient, a clever mechanist devised a third eye which he attached to the bird's forehead.

Everything in the bird's new field of vision became monumentally tiny and detailed.

The falcon lost the ability to dream, and also its appetite. It began bringing back plants instead of animals. Then it brought back clouds. Then the thoughts of people who lived in the city. Then the thoughts of people in other parts of the country. Then the thoughts of foreigners.

The sheikh put all of these things in a cage and charged the equivalent of five dollars to anyone who wanted to look at them.

This was the first zoo in that city.

After a time the falcon drowned in a thunderstorm.

Thailand, 1995, a paw

Tourists glimpsed part of a statue at the end of an alleyway in Chiang Mai. No one ever saw the whole statue, only a piece of it, a paw, part of the pedestal, or the muzzle of a creature that resembled a dog or a dragon.

The tourists went home clicking their tongues and saying, "Those Thais are mysterious people."

The Story of the Woodlouse

"Objects with wheels will make America great," said Henry Ford. "Fast-moving objects with wheels."

America listened. There was a frenzy of wheels. They put wheels on everything, even the trees. Trees whizzed up and down the mountains. Elms went fastest. Whole forests drove themselves down to Florida when they began feeling old.

"We're retired," they said. "Animals, birds, insects -- get out. Time to leave the nest. Go to college or something. Get a job."

The first animal to enter Harvard was a squirrel.

The first animal graduate to run for public office was a raccoon.

The first non-human president was a bald eagle. The eagle's detractors said that he had been chosen merely because he was photogenic.

They said, "The woodlouse didn't stand a chance."

They added, "Even though he had a better economic policy."

The Floating World

It was a dull day in Edo.

"I know," one of the prostitutes said. "I'll wear men's clothing. That should liven things up."

When her most reliable regular customer saw her in the new clothes he looked confused.

She said, "It is I, your favourite, Aya!"

He was filled with understanding.

"I'm gay!"

"No, no, you aren't."

"I am! I am! Look," he said to all of the other clients of the other prostitutes. They looked at Aya in her manly clothing.

"We're gay," they said. "We're all gay."

It was a revelation. So the clients fell into one another's beds and arms and the prostitutes became professional fishermen.

Marie Antoinette's shopping

"Marie Antoinette is a fool," people said.

To prove that they were wrong she ordered everything from them: shoes, food, dresses, hats, rose bushes and white wigs.

"Marie Antoinette is a fool," they said again.

She ordered more things: dog beds, cake, keys, curtains and cages.

"Marie Antoinette, what a moron," people said.

"Ha," she said to her friends, "I have made them change their tune. A victory."

Synchronicity

The town of Dunwich disappeared beneath the sea. You can still hear the church bells ringing underwater when the tide is right.

One night in 1980 the ringing was so loud that no one who lived near the coast could sleep. It was a noise like a wisdom tooth. The people gathered together and said, "We must hire someone to dive down there and muffle the bells."

"They will replace the clappers with pillows."

"They will line the bells with porridge."

"They will wear a diving helmet shaped like a bell and in that way achieve synchronicity."

As they were speaking, a figure swam down from the sky.

Before reascending it stole all of their doorbells.

China, 1227

As Genghis Khan lay dying he began to smile.

"Why do you smile, great one?"

"I am tortured by the memory of an event from my childhood, a terrible humiliation, witnessed by only one other person. That person died years ago. Now I will die, and so the humiliation will pass out of this world forever. This alone makes me pleased to die. Here I am the lord of my life at last. My kingdom, what is it to this? In a few moments I will have perfect rest, for the first time, knowing that this memory has been destroyed. That is why I smile."

"Mighty Khan, tell us! We wish to compose a vast biography of you in song so that you will never be forgotten. Every detail perfect. Whatever you tell us, even the worst thing, we will find forceful and impressive. We promise."

"Then I will tell you," he said. They leaned forward.

Modern conveniences: whales

In earlier times, telephone systems were so small that you could call the person at the switchboard and say plainly, "Put me through to my friend Joanne Smith please," and it could be done. This has not changed. The difference is that nowadays the switchboard operators are whales.

Each number struck sends out a sonar impulse, which is understood by the whales as one letter of a mysterious place-name.

Once it has identified the place-name, the whale plugs your telephone line into the correct spot on the board.

So we speak to them through sonar impulses. Every number is prefaced with an impulse meaning Please. The whales believe that we are fastidiously polite.

The History of Transylvania and Hungary.

In 1003, Stephen of Hungary defeated Gyula the Young of Transylvania, and Transylvania was absorbed into Hungary.

In 2008, the American Kellie Pickler said that she had never heard of Hungary.

The Transylvanians laughed.