OPERATION SHREWD EUPHEMISM

If we were not above apology, we would offer regrets for our recent absence from the blogosphere. Suffice it to say, we are deeply embroiled in a project that will be taking up more and more of our time over the coming months. It would not behoove us to share with you the goal of this project, but since you, faithful Reader, have been such a faithful reader, we will bestow upon you a series of hints that will enable your imaginations to catch fire. This new project involves:

• A jarful of mosquitos
• The home telephone numbers of all members of the United States House of Representatives
• A carefully drawn map of the Paris sewer system
• Three syringes of pure oxyglutamine
• 23 signed headshots of Jennifer Hudson
• A dozen Lascar strongmen, primed for adventure
• Two rocks
• A Rembrandt painting entitled “The Conspiratorial Blessing of Isaac Firkkens,” which is believed to be a fake but is actually a Rembrandt painting entitled “Christ Oversees the Swineherds”
• Three Charles Darwin beard hairs
• An incriminating Betamax cassette of Jimmy Carter cavorting with Roy Cohn
• A cyborg giraffe
• Deep love for our craft

Anybody who can guess the object of our scheme will get a free signed first edition copy of our book. When we write it.

SPRING FORSAKENING

We were so stymied by our recent trip to America’s Floor Show that we nearly neglected an important solar occasion: the Vernal Equinox. On Wednesday morning at 12:07am (UTC time), the sun lined up directly with the equator for the first time since September 23, 2006, adding one more notch to the earth’s still-unbroken streak of doing the same exact thing year after year after year. (The equator, for those of you who may be unfamiliar with this conceit, is the less fashionable companion of the better known Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.)

Though lacking the breathless pagan appeal of the far sexier Solstices, there’s nothing like a good Equinox to remind you what it’s like to be at the exact middle of something. We spend so much of our lives slightly to the right or left of the middle that we forget just how boring it can be when you’re flush up against the real thing. During Vernal and Autumnal Equonices (the plural of "Equinox"), the brain’s level of oxyglutamine reaches a steady equilibrium, resulting in most people not caring much one way or another – only much more so than is the norm. The upshot is that the Vernal Equinox is one of the two most staggeringly mundane days of the year.

It’s well-known that eggs can be balanced on the earth during an Equinox. It’s less well known that you can also balance almost anything else from almost any angle on such a day, provided you have the patience to spend a REALLY long time doing it (any more than 24 hours, though, and it’s no longer the Equinox now is it?) You can balance a bull on the horns, a skyscraper on its spire, or (most dazzlingly) a spinning plate on the end of a stick. Fascinating pornography has been filmed on the Equinox, though the difficulty of getting camera equipment to work properly under such conditions makes the result one of the rarest, most sought-after sights in recorded titillation. We’ve never seen any of this special footage ourselves, but as always, any hot tips can be forwarded directly to theapocryphist@gmail.com.

SOPHISTRY'S CHOICE

You know how some people believe that “the more we learn, the less we know”?

This is totally incorrect.

Seriously, flip it around: “The less we learn, the more we know.” That doesn’t make sense either, which merely exposes this syllogism for what it is: Sophistry.

Sophistry is a disease of the brain that can be linked to excessively high levels of oxyglutamine, the chemical that causes Sophistry. Discovered in 1962 by someone whose name we won’t bother telling you because you’ll forget it soon anyway, oxyglutamine is a neurotransmitter that is identical in composition to partially hydrogenated corn syrup. In fact, in undeveloped countries oxyglutamine is often drained from the skulls of dead prisoners as an inexpensive substitute for this wonder sweetener.

Unfortunately, this poses an ethical question: if it tastes so good, then how can it be good for you? The answer will shock you like a licked battery: it can’t.

Soon after the discovery of oxyglutamine, when the chemical's neurological function was still unclear, studies showed that very little of it actually exists in the human brain: about as much as would fit in a raindrop-sized thimble. Protests arose from the usual assortment of cranks, crackpots, and the government: America’s oxyglutamine levels had to be brought up to snuff if we were to compete with the wily Japanese, and the even wilier Nipponese. Despite the fact that nobody knew why we needed more of this chemical than anyone else, a wide variety of procedures were initiated, and abandoned, and then initiated again before being abandoned twice more.

Baby food manufacturers attempted to address the crisis by including jacked up levels of oxyglutamine in their strained yam gravy. Public schools initiated mandatory spinal injections, and oxyglutamine tests became de rigeur for executive corporate positions. Also, they made it taste better.

But it soon became clear that the brain rebels against being told what to do – like a disobedient teen in a trampy outfit, it would rather make its own mistakes. Excessive levels of oxyglutamine causes synapses to “clear the way,” as it were, rearranging themselves all in a line to avoid contamination by the interloping compound. With the synapses all queued up, the brain can only make the most general of sequential connections - and the result, in the end, has been an epidemic of Sophistry.

Sophistry can most accurately be described as a condition in which things that sound true are assumed to be true; or, alternately, that things that are assumed to be true sound true. Though the condition dates back to caveman times, it is only today, when we are surrounded on all sides by teetering towers of verbiage in all spheres of our lives, that the condition has became more than a horsefly-level inconvenience.

To avoid Sophistry, simply don’t believe any cause/effect or if/then or and/or statement. When reading a sentence, analyze every word for possible “Trojan horse”-style deceptions. Shun your friends and neighbors. And above all, avoid oxyglutamine. If you see oxyglutamine walking down the street, cross to the other side, or shoot it right between the eyes. If you don’t have a gun, break a bottle over its head. If you don’t have a bottle then you’re screwed. Sorry.