Stupid Hill

In the year 1900, General Sir Charles Warren decided that his soldiers were going to occupy the peak of a tall hill named Spion Kop. "Men," he said, "go up that hill in the fog." The whole affair was a disaster in ways that you can read about in history books.

"Stupid hill," he raged afterwards. "Stupid, stupid hill! Everybody listen to me! From now on that hill is to be known as 'Stupid Hill.'"

"But it already has a name."

"Yes it does. The name is Stupid Hill."

"No, Spion Kop."

"Stupid Hill!"

"Spion Kop."

Nobody was persuaded. "I'll become a cartographer and change it myself!" So he left the military and studied cartography. During years of study he learnt a million things about the world that he had not known before. He learnt the dimensions of valleys and the constitutions of plateaus. He learnt about the weather in distant places he had never visited. He learnt about the housing that people constructed on mountainsides, and the ways in which they made plain land arable. Then he learnt about the societies of these people, their habits and laws, their histories and rulers, the pets they liked to keep, the songs they liked to sing, their languages, and their systems of writing. He taught himself six new languages and obtained a koto, which he played on moonlit nights, under a blanket of stars, while wearing a hat in the style of a South American Indian.

After all this he graduated. Finally he was a qualified cartographer. "What are you going to do now?' his fellow cartographers asked, much impressed with his accomplishments.

"This," he said. Leaning across a map of South Africa, he crossed out the words 'Spion Kop' and wrote in 'Stupid Hill.'

Trains, part 2

The graffiti artists prowled the suburbs, looking for clues. "Hmmm ..." Nothing, nothing. They painted their names on houses to keep themselves busy during their operations.

Then one of them realised that he had painted off the corner of a house and onto the side of a train.

"Hidden!"

The trains were in the bushes.

"Behind an ordinary suburban house."

"Whose?"

It belonged to the fanatic with the moustache. They saw him. He blanched -- discovered! There was only one way to avoid imprisonment. He picked up the boys and put them inside his moustache.

This narrow escape made him feel that he must now become paranoid. The managers had sent those boys after him, surely? Then he would put them in his moustache as well. When the families of the kidnapped managers came looking for them he stashed them in there as well. Then their friends. And so on, until everyone in the world was inside his moustache.

After that the world was a lot calmer.


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Trains, part 1

Trains

Old men with white moustaches worked on the railway. One of them deliberately grew his facial hair to a huge size and then tucked locomotives in there at night to take home. The people in management were bewildered. Who was stealing their trains? They had to cancel the 10:12, the 12:52 and the three o' clock express.

The passengers fumed and the management said, "It is a mystery that must be solved."

The thief felt sorry, but he told himself that he was an autistic fetishist and that this explained everything. He continued to steal trains.

The management tried everything. Finally they called in their old nemeses, the graffiti artists, and asked them for their assistance. "Otherwise we'll have to cancel all of the trains and you'll have nothing to paint on."

"Disaster!" the graffiti artists agreed. They clasped their hands on their chins and looked thoughtful.



To be continued.

Wax and moths

The freak show barker pointed.

"The tallest man in the world!"

"Ships will run into him," they sighed. "Planes will fly into him."

Ships ran into him and planes flew into him.

They put a candle in his hand and a candle on his shoe.

"Now ships and planes can see him."

They could, and moths surrounded him at night.

"How beautiful," they said.

The freak show barker rubbed his hands.

"They love it," he said to the tallest man. "A moth zoo. From now on you'll only come out at night."

The tallest man began to weep.

Tolstoy and the peasants, part 4: Revolution

With the fall of the dog from the pie tin the Russian Revolution began. Everyone rode to the Winter Palace on their bicycles and stole the chandeliers.

Then every house had a chandelier. Even the poorest.

Tinkle tinkle.

So began Communism, otherwise known as The International Movement of the Chandeliers; and the world was filled with light.


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Tolstoy and the peasants, part 3.

Music

A Kazakh man began to play his dombra indoors.

"That's an outdoor sound, like a galloping horse," said a visitor from another country who had dropped by to observe the native customs. "Why don't you play outdoors?"

"That would be overkill."

"Then," the visitor said, "why don't you find an indoor instrument and play it out of doors?"

"Put my hat outside."

The visitor did.

"There," said the musician. Then he continued to play the dombra.

The History of Polar Bears

1500
There was a polar bear.

1600
There was a polar bear.

1700
There was a polar bear

1800
There was a polar bear

1900
There was a polar bear.

2000
There was a polar bear

Experimental production of emotions, continued.

"What's that noise?" they said in the new South Africa. People of all races were united in puzzlement.

It was the elves, come to complain that they were being exploited and underappreciated: they wanted a slice of the economic pie, they wanted good houses, fair treatment, and dignity in labour.

"Look: they are doing a toyi-toyi," one old ANC man said. "That's so cute."

"Meat not milk!" the elves shouted. "Dignity for elves!"

"So adorable. Give them a toadstool, see what they do."

"Oo!"

The elves sat on the toadstool and the protest was over.

Now there was a toadstool in the street blocking traffic.

"Bloody elves."



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The end of apartheid, the employment of the elves.

Fishing

"What are you doing friend?"

"I am fishing for cod. Fishing for cod in this cold northern sea."

"A virtuous occupation."

"Aye. There's no sin in fish."

At that moment he caught a fish with sin in it.

He dug it out. The sin was a small nugget.

"Wickedness has afflicted this cod."

"Quick," suggested the other. "Throw that little nugget-thing back into the sea. That way no one will know that it was you who found it."

"I must not. If I do that then all the brine will be infected with free-ranging sin." A thought occurred. "I know who you are. You are the devil. I was wondering how you got out to my boat."

"I walked," the devil said. "I've learnt a few tricks. Are you sure you don't want to throw that away? Someone might find it on you."

"That I won't, hell-king. But you can eat the cod if you like."

"If that's my only option," said the devil sulkily. He ate the cod.

A method for the experimental production of emotions

It was good to have black people who could do all the laundry, but why couldn't they just vanish when the work was finished? The South African government pondered the problem. They held meetings about the matter and titled them, "The vanishing African -- why not?" It was at one of these meetings that Mr Van Der Merwe came up with the solution.

"Brownies. Elves. Remember the story of the elves and the shoemaker? They did the work at night and went away ..."

The next day the president made an announcement. "We will remove apartheid on one condition. Tonight, everyone has to go to bed early and leave a saucer or bowl of milk by the door. People who run mines will leave milk by the mine entrance. Don't do any housework."

The next day all the housework was done, all the day's ore and gems had already been extracted from the mines, and the country was cleaner than anyone had ever seen it. Even the cattle were polished. Apartheid was repealed.

"Oh good."

Everyone went to the beach and played volleyball.



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This post is getting too long. I'll write the second part of the story later.

Naturwissenschaften

"Where's the baby ... there's the baby!"
"Where's the baby ... there's the baby!"
"Where's the baby ... "

This game was known as Schrodinger's Baby.

Temperance

Prohibition! Speakeasies! Hidden dens of vice!

Knock Knock.

"We don't know you."

"Joe sent me."

"Come on in."

Music.

"Get me a beer and put beer in it."

But the police were shutting these places down. They had uncanny successes. People were desperate. Unable to find processed barley, they began licking the grain in the fields.

The farmers went to the president and complained. "Stop people licking our crops. Look at them out there. It's disgusting! Lap lap lap .."

"What can I do?" said the president, sighing and sucking a potato. "It's a free country."

"Sir, you're sucking a potato."

"I used to like vodka. Leave me alone."

The Waste Land of J. Alfred Prufrock

T.S. Eliot worked in a bank. His friends came to him one day and said, "Look, T.S., here is some money to support you. You need to leave this bank and devote your time to poetry."

"Ah, my friends," he said. "This bank has been an inspiration to me. One afternoon before I worked here I came in and heard the bank clerks singing, each to each. I asked them if they would sing to me and they said, "No." Out of that incident I made a poem. More recently there was a manager who walked around with his arms full of hyacinths. They dripped water on the floor. We called him the hyacinth manager. Another poem."

"We're sorry T.S., we didn't know."

"All great poets work in banks. A little-known fact. Keats handled hedge funds. Byron dealt with loans and interest rate adjustments. Ezra Pound, he is planning to fake his death at the age of eighty-seven and take up residence here as a bank vault."

"Really?"

"Yes. In the future, when his poems have been forgotten, he will still be remembered for his e-z swing hinges and dependable locking mechanism."

They sighed with longing. "Oh tell us, where do we sign up to work in this bank?"

"Here, my friends. Here."



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The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, for the singing.
and The Waste Land, for the hyacinths.

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.

Dynamite

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

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.

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.

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?"

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.

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.