Tuesday 5 June 2012

Bathysphere


Over at Terrible Minds there’s another flash fiction challenge to incorporate 4 out of 8 random words into a kiloword quick fiction. I chose zoo, wheelchair, bully, and heretic.


Conspiracy theories and arcana online:http://crackingwingnuts.com/377028/forums



Los Angeles trial a bully pulpit for conspiracy fantasist Frank Blunt.”

Posted by UKType42Destroyer June 3, 2012, 7.35 Greenwich Mean Time.
How come you Yanks haven’t picked up on this one? It’s in your own back-yard, ffs!

From the LA Chronicle Online June 2, 2012
   Accused heretic, Frank Blunt of Orange County, was brought into LA’s Superior Court in the Esther Williams Building in a wheelchair today to conduct his own defense against multiple charges of heresy, defamation and incitement to riot after his controversial conspiracy website PedestrianNews.com published a forty thousand word rant against swimming on 20 January 2011, the 27th Anniversary of Senator Weissmuller’s death.
   Refusing professional counsel, Mr. Blunt addressed the jury for two hours in defense of his theory that, before the Second World War, swimming was merely a minor sport throughout the developed world and little more than a tragic necessity in naval and other military operations. Swimming’s defining role in human culture, politics, literature and history simply did not exist prior to the worldwide meteorite strikes of 1938, as immortalized by Orson Welles’ news broadcasts in October that year.
   “Sometime between the Austrian Anschluss and the JFK so-called ‘Drowning’, our entire world changed completely; secretly and unremarked by its political leaders, intellectuals and mainstream ‘media.’ What had previously been a hobby in North America and for the élites of the Soviet Bloc and the British Empire became an all-consuming and unquestioned obsession with all of Mankind; sweeping every other consideration and value into second place.
    I intended no offense to anyone in my article but I feel strongly that someone, somewhere has been pulling the goggles off our eyes for seventy years and that the human race is in great danger.”
    
And he’s right. Why don’t you chaps stop obsessing about 9/11 Truth and the Illuminati and mermaids and such nonsense and ask yourselves: where’s all the bloody swimming throughout history before 1938/39?



8 Comments



Anonymous, Roswell NM. June 3, 2012, 02.59 EST
And you Brits accuse us of being crazy! What’s wrong with you, Type42? Don’t you remember Winston Churchill’s famous speech? You Brits quote it all the goddamn time!:

“We shall fight in the surf and in front of the beaches, we shall fight before the landing grounds, we shall fight in the rivers and in the streams, we shall fight in the mountain streams and rivulets; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of its waterways were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God's good time, the New World, with all its power and might, swims forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”



UK Type42Destroyer June 3, 2012, 9.17 GMT
But that’s my point. Why did he obsess with the waterways? Why not mention the fields and streets and hills which comprise the vast majority of our country? Why go on about all that hydrology when the armaments of the time were mostly designed for dry land combat – which was where the war was won, after all?



MidwestNavySeal June 3, 2012, 3.24 CT
Are you serious Type42? What about the Normandy landings? Our guys died to keep you Europeans free and all you can do is disrespect them because they swam ashore?



UKType42Destroyer June 3, 2012, 9.39 GMT
I do respect them, and the Canadians and Indians and French and God knows how many who fought and drowned, but why do history books and TV documentaries concentrate on the initial battles at the coast? It was a long hard fight from Normandy to Berlin but who hears about the struggle out of the bocage into the rest of France and towards the Netherlands? You can hardly find anything about the Allied armies until the Rhine crossings. Months of high intensity combat and thousands of deaths followed, but the history books go all fuzzy until the Arnhem disaster. And why is there no discussion, anywhere, of our aviation? Surely the air war must have helped considerably to beat the Nazis? Why have we neglected powered flight since 1945 or so?


MidwestNavySeal June 3, 2012, 3.46 CT
But we don’t. What about the Berlin Blockade? I seem to remember that there was aviation of some kind involved there.



UKType42Destroyer June 3, 2012, 9.49 GMT
Yes there was, and a jolly good thing too. But it’s the political aspect that’s always stressed; not the use of aircraft. And have you looked at the report of the cargo brought in to save the free people of West Berlin. Here’s a report from the (London) Times on Wikipedia.

“…The United States Army Air Force and the British Royal Air Force organized a massive effort to deliver needed water chlorination equipment, snorkels, water wings, nose plugs, food, coal, and medical supplies into Berlin to thwart the Soviet blockade. The round-the-clock operation, which became known as the Berlin Airlift, sustained the residents of West Berlin…”

Look at those priorities, MNS. The Soviets were trying to starve the city and the first stuff off the transports was swimming equipment, ffs! And whatever happened to your air force, and ours? Why did Humanity abandon powered flight in its newfound obsession with swimming and all things maritime?



MidwestNavySeal June 3, 2012, 3.55 CT
Maybe we were doing important things, like Neil Armstrong planting the flag at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, huh? Why don’t you go and watch the Queen doggy-paddling up the Thames for her Diamond Jubilee? You deserve to be in a zoo somewhere Type42, with the dugongs and manatees and Bigfoot.



UKType42Destroyer June 3, 2012, 9.59 GMT
“… one giant dive for Mankind.” Very noble and jolly well done. But why head down into the oceans instead of heading up into outer space? 
    And what kind of global rallying cry is ‘Watch the Seas anyway?’ Who gains?

2 comments:

Jeff Xilon said...

Wow. Love the presentation! That's some real dedication. Also - fascinatingly bizarre. I quite enjoyed this.

AB Singer said...

Why, thank you Jeff, and welcome. Despite my pretty obvious and predictable favourite genre, I'm working on learning the writing trade and one thing I want to do is learn how to exaggerate or eliminate or twist ordinary things into extremes, or glaring absences or into obsessions.