Saturday, January 22, 2005
Screwed
Water Balloons
What's this?
Sanctiblogger catches a rush of movement out of the corner of his left eye and then someone is shouting out of a deep yellow madness. He turns in his seat to look, but sees only a pistol waving about in the air. He ducks without thinking, and sees on his plasma screen a clean-cut Concerned College Conservative with a light saber, mouthing the words "For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny--prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder--violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders and raise a mortal threat." Then comes a series of thwoop-thwoop implosions like disappearing water balloons as heavenly reinforcements flood into the bus to take out the threat. They are, Sanctiblogger notes from the red and white feathers in their berets, members of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers. They scuffle. They skirmish. They exchange fisticuffs. They have words. They grunt in pain.
Then the gun goes off and there is a vvvvoom sound and one of the Fusiliers stands with his arm cut off at the bicep and spouting blood and the dirty shabby angel driver is slumped over the wheel with a red spot on his back beneath his right wing. The bus speeds up, and is suddenly buffeted by aeolian winds. The Fusiliers' hair stands on end, and they short out like--well, like fuses.
Sanctiblogger looks down and sees a red diagonal line stretching slowly but inexorably across the screen, where the only post-human presences he can see still on the bus are his own, hunched desperately over his laptop, and the shapelier one of the young woman in the sports bra, who stares straight into the camera with her eyes humorously crossed and the word DOG written in red Magic Marker across her bangless forehead.
Friday, January 21, 2005
Another Controversial Firing at Sufi U
Sufi circles buzzed today at the news that Dr. Spiriti Sanctiblogger, chaplain mullah and a tenured associate professor in the Department of Advanced Smegmatics at Sufi University, had been fired.
President Bernardus J. Wockle, who was behind the firing, cited "religious differences."
"This is the last straw," Whaling Mullah Dorset K. Baber declaimed to this reporter from the hammock in his office. "Wockle has been pushing the boundaries of Sufi love and tolerance for years now, but this time he's gone too far."
President Wockle has long championed an "all is one and one is all so what the hell" doctrine. Many Sufis consider this position lax and weak-minded. Dr. Sanctiblogger was one of President Wockle's most relentless critics.
"Spirry never tired of exposing the flagrant contradictions in Wockle's views," Mullah Baber explained. "And now, of course, his firing has exposed the greatest contradiction of all: to defend his antihierarchical views, President Wockle has wielded his hierarchical powers. That's like raping someone who challenges your celibacy policy!"
President Wockle, asked about these charges, only smiles.
"Jesus Christ," he chuckles, "can't anybody around here take a joke?"
