A World Of Napkins And A Pineapple

It's not impossible. This is an achievable task. Somehow, I will write this post and eventually finish reading 'Kai Lunk Unrolls His Mat'. It's not a bad book, and this is not a difficult thing to write. They are not impossible, and therefore definitely tractable problems. Oh, for a world of napkins and a pineapple!

A world of napkins and a pineapple? Is this madness on the page? No, not at all. You need the world of napkins, preferably orbiting between Earth and Mars, in order to soak up the vast amount of electromagnetic soup we aim at that serene other world, and the probes that have been crawling over it. Yes, a world of napkins... The pineapple? Well, you eat that, of course. What a funny question to ask! Yes, the world might be coming apart at at the seams, but we would still eat the pineapple, or use it to power nuclear fusion.

These are what we might call 'interesting times' and our curse is to be living in them. Things will change radically over the next few months, and no-one can quite say how. Whatever happens, we can only hope that they change based on reasoning, rationality and philanthropy, and not xenophobia, hatred or corporate puppetry. Yes, a lifetime of cynical experience of the real world must be proven incorrect.

'Eli's Coming' said Dan Rydell on 'Sports Night', and we'll have to see if he's right. I'll explain more in a couple of days. Now, in defence of 'Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat', I have to say that every individual story in the book is very well written, but... Well, there's no point in repeating my frequent rant about the difficulties of reading short stories. These are really good. Maybe I need therapy? Short story therapy? Is that possible? Oh, this is the penalty of consistently putting off short story collections until they're the only things left in the box of unread books! It's literary karma!

The first season of 'Sports Night' (see Dan Rydell remark) has been wonderful to watch again. The second season still sounds miserable and messed up, though, so it will continue to be passed over. Such is the way of things. You see, what they really needed to introduce was a world of napkins and a pineapple, or a mango if they couldn't find that sainted fruit. Mangos are allowable in leap years, or months which end in a 'y'.

O.