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Mr. Lampooner, literary superhero.
Tuesday, June 24, 2008

This story involves characters from the story Captain Hooker and the story of the mysterious, moldy MacGuffin. Read it first, here :
http://loonylampoonery.blogspot.com/2008/06/captain-hooker-and-story-of-mysterious.html

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"This is Candy reporting live from the Docks in West Metrosexopolis. I hope you're getting this at the studio. This is going to be good."

"We hear ya, Candy. Loud and clear. Go ahead."

"Thank you, Matt. We have a strange situation here. A man has turned up in pirate costume and is demanding to see the Mayor. He calls himself The Lampooner."

"The Lampoo-who?"

"Apparently, he is one of the extras in the recent hit TV show, Cap'n Hooker and the story of the mysterious, moldy MacGuffin, though he claims to be the protagonist. He demands a TV show of his own with him playing the titular role."

"His fifteen minutes of fame, eh?"

"More like twenty two episodes of twenty five minutes of fame for a season."

"Oh Lord! I'm going to have to drop the objectivity of the Press for a moment and warn you folks now. For those of you who tuned in late, we are covering the demands of a hysterical man in pirate costume down at the Docks. Yes, this is a slow news day. If this man gets his own TV show, forget about Paris Hilton, who puts the ass in asinine behaviour, and her TV show. This is going to be the Crapfest of this season. Nuff said."

posted by foogarky @ 11:45 AM, ,

The Man from the South
Friday, June 20, 2008

I tapped my watch in despair. It seemed that the hands hadn't moved for a while now. The forecast on the television this morning predicted normal levels of gravity, so the forces slowing down the clockwork was obviously something else, something far more mysterious.

"Or something far more mundane", chipped in the girl beside me, yawning.

I swear on my ancestors' graves as I tell you this : I have no idea how she reads my mind. If it was a solitary occurrence it could perhaps be explained as a coincidence of two minds with the same thought at the same time. It wasn't. It happened with an unfailing regularity, to the point that she could do it at will and even, if she agreed, possibly demonstrate the power to, and befuddle in the process, a panel of rational Antimystics, members of a cult which obsesses over debunking myths and popular legend. Her explanation for this supranatural power would have outraged the Antimystics though.

"We are sisters", she replied in answer to my question, questioning her on her mind reading, privacy invading powers.

I suppose it was better than the "Magicians never reveal the tricks of their trade" answer that I was expecting, but I had to point out to her that we were not sisters, nor even remotely related, unless she was aware of some long forgotten scandal in our family histories that could have made us blood relatives, the pantheon of Gods forbid.

"Not boring biological sisters, silly. We are Sisters", she said, emphasizing the last word.

And I remembered the night we met, brought together as roommates by the alphabetical ordering of names in the dormitory register, and not by fate or an act of the pantheon of Gods as she claimed it was. That was the first time she invaded my mind, reading my most private thoughts.

"You need to pee", she said, cheerfully.

The tone wasn't a questioning one. It was a statement. How would she know I needed to relieve myself and was about to look for the privy, I wondered and then realized that she was probably hearing the call of nature too, after a long drive to the University.

I was wrong. It happened again the next day as we walked to the library. A jogger, probably another student senior to us by a year or two, passed us and I said aloud, "You'll be shocked if you knew what I would love to do with that man. I would..", and trailed off into silence with a smile.

"Oh, I wouldn't be shocked. I'm not from the conservative districts, you know. I would love to be on a tree too, eff you sea kay eye...", she replied, trailing off with a mischievous smile.

The expression that appeared on my face is hard to describe now. It was an unique expression, expressing emotions that one felt at that moment, impossible to replicate now in the absence of the shock that caused it. I would use the word flabbergasted, a word that I loved from the day I set eyes on it in the dictionary, to describe the emotion that I felt, though it would hardly do it justice.

"You look like you downed a scotch up the wrong end. What happened?", asked she, looking upon my flabbergasted self.

"I am flabbergasted", I replied.

"At?"

"Your ability to read my mind! I don't want anyone knowing that I love love-making on trees!", I screamed, realising later, the next minute actually, as passers by stared and a smart alec claimed on being descended from a direct line of monkeys and sharing a love for treetop sex, that we weren't alone.

I put my arm around her neck and growled, "My fetishes are mine, okay? The next time you read my poor little mind, you keep it to yourself. I hope there aren't more of your kind, because if someone reads your mind while you're reading mine, we kill her. Agreed?"

She nodded weakly. I let her go.

She did not keep it to herself, of course. By the end of that year, everyone in the University knew of my fetishes and fantasies and though I started coming up with creative ways to kill a roommate without arousing suspicion at first, I began to be thankful later as my fantasies turned into experiences with the help of like minded men.

A second yawn brought me out of this nostalgic reverie. "It is boredom that slows down time in your perspective, not increased gravity or an unexplained quantum effect", she explained, "Why must you always look for the more fanciful explanation?"

"Because we enrolled for a course in flights of fancy?", I replied, laughing, referring to our course in Retro-Futurist Fiction.

If you asked me why I chose this course over Governmentalism, which would help our Lords extend their governance far beyond what the Rebels called 'Total Control' or Modernist Shamanism which would help save lives every day, I could not say. As a child I was fascinated by the theory of Alternate History, which constructs worlds different from ours, changed because of some event in history that could have happened differently. Would the world be different if Cleopatra was a man, was a favourite poser of mine, that I posed to guests during dinner table conversations in our ancestral house. And why was my mind reading roommate, Kaikeiyi enrolled in this course? I had no idea.

The professor droned on. He was a pure born Greek and he taught his favourite subject. The History of the World. It was an important subject for retro-futurists. They needed to know their history in order to begin constructing alternate histories. But his droning voice took the last bit of juice out of this subject. If it wasn't for his Greek looks, which was what kept us girls in the class and led us to wonder why the guys remained, the class would have been empty.

"The Greco-Roman empire led an invasive force into the Indic Lands in prehistory", he droned, as we pretended to take notes, "defeating the pagan king Sandracottus. Ashamed in defeat, Sandracottus hands over the rule of the Indic lands to the Greco-Romans but warns of certain defeat and a horrible fate that should befall the army unwise enough to venture into the lands south of the Vindhyan mountains. According to historians, he is quoted to have said 'Fear ye the Pandyas of mystical war powers and the Rashtrakutas, eaters of their own dead. Cross not the Vindhyas, lest ye be annihilated and your women in your homelands be impregnated mysteriously with their children.' The Greco-Romans ignored his warning as a pagan fear of the unknown and sent a large army into the South. The fate of the army is unknown, though possibly recorded in the histories of the Unconquered South. It was thought to be lost to time, until our recent peace treaty that is..", he paused, with a rare smile.

The professor was of course referring to the treaty that was signed recently by the Greco-Roman Regent of Maurya and the representative of the Pandyas, who had in the course of two thousand years established dominance over the Southern Lands. Maurya was an advanced colony of the now two thousand year old Greco-Roman empire that ruled most of the world. Our empire colonised most of the lands on this planet through technological supremacy and the free lands that remained, like Nippon, Scandinavia and the Southern region of the Indies, were insular cultures that fought battles with magical technologies.

"Finally we historians have a chance to know what happened in the Dark Ages of the Indies", continued the professor, "We have with us a professor of anthropology from Pandya, Mr. Sevuna Yadava.."

I did not hear what the professor said after that, as this man entered. A strange man, how would I describe him; I looked at Kaikeiyi and she was staring at him too. He was tall and dark of skin, a colour that we thought had been lost from human existence with the annihilation of the African kingdoms, with wavy black hair and deep black eyes. He was built like a warrior. I could almost imagine him bare chested, wrapped in a sarong, climbing a tree.

Kaikeyi giggled.

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Kaikeiyi?"

"Well I obviously am", she replied, tapping her forehead, "but I must say I love what you're thinking of now."

posted by foogarky @ 11:34 PM, ,

Cap'n Hooker and the mystery of Lesbos [Incomplete]
Saturday, June 14, 2008

Floundering about the cabin from the aftereffects of the Leap and realizing that I looked like a fish out of water, or more accurately a fish in a dense alphabet soup, I managed to mumble "I seem to have lost my bearings" to the Captain.

"Ah, me confused laddie, we be sailin' Sou' 70 degrees West", replied she, consulting a compass fished out from the folds of her dress.

Making a mental note that twentieth century idioms with a nautical origin would be taken in a literal sense here necessitating the careful avoidance of its usage, I asked in a nonchalant manner, "And in landlubber's terms, where exactly are we headed?"

"Lesbos."

My eyes widened. My ears heard what seemed to sound like 'Lesbos', but with the Captain's piratical accent I couldn't be too sure that I heard it correctly, so I repeated it again questioningly,

"Lesbos?"

"Aye."

"Like the island Lesbos of the Greeks?"

"Nay, I be referrin' to the homeland o' the Mermaids."

I confess I could not fathom why the homeland of the Mermaids would be called Lesbos and a question put forward to the Captain to shed light on the matter only received a cryptic reply, "Ye'll see fer yerself at nightfall".

And as if to fulfill the prophecy of that answer, when the Sun went down, there was an excited scream from the crow's nest,

"Land Ho!"

"Land Ho!", the lookout cried again, squinted, then took out his looking glass for a better view and corrected himself, "Well, sort of!"

I ran over to the port side and sure enough there was land, which was not actually land, well, sort of, resorting to the phrase the lookout had used to describe the homeland of the Mermaids. If I ask you to imagine in your head a village constructed on the sea [or was it in the sea?] entirely from the foamy produce of the sea, this would be what I was looking at now. It was a fantastic sight. A landmass that was solid enough for Captain Hooker to jump down upon from her ship and yet allow the native Mermaids to swim through it effortlessly.

I jumped in after her and landed on what seemed to be froth. Concentrated froth. I knelt down to inspect it and a head, red haired and pretty faced with eyes blue like the deep sea, popped up from the bubbly white ground, smiling. I smiled back. Hands emerged from the ground, wiping foam off the hair. "This is the secret of our lovely hair", said the creature, "You landwalkers must try it too, on your.. on the growth on your noggins", her face expressing disapproval at our windswept appearance.

"Well, we have foamy shampoos in our world too", I replied, only to be interrupted by the Captain with a boisterous laugh.

"Has it been years since I've seen ye, Coral, me beauty?"

"Arr, it sure has been, Cap'n", replied the Mermaid, emerging from the foam, her upper body human-like and the lower piscine. The tail transformed into legs in the blink of an eye and standing before us was a human, or perceivably human, female; albeit unclothed and smelling of fish.

What followed next could only be described as a strange form of a greeting ritual of two individuals who evidently must have shared a history sometime in the past. As I watched amusedly, my attention was drawn to a huge statue that seemed to be carved out of wood. Curious, I went closer to examine it and found that it was driftwood and it depicted two Mermaids in their natural form coiled around each other intimately. I now knew why this place was called Lesbos.

-------------------------------------------------

posted by foogarky @ 11:30 PM, ,

The Last Letter
Friday, June 06, 2008

My grandfather had this amusing tale from his youth in the later years of the Twenty-First century. The world had briefly witnessed a revival of High English; which began its decline in the turn of the Twentieth century and died out in the next, only remaining in classical literature like the Harry Potter Saga and the Bridget Jones' Diaries; and the dying art of letter writing seemed like it was poised for an unexpected turnaround in its fortunes.

However, it was not to be so. Fingers long used to the familiar feel of buttons were unfamiliar around the contours of a pen. While the populace struggled, the finest letters were written by historians and connoisseurs of classical literature but the numbers were too few. So, it was with a heavy heart the Post Master General of the world decided that it was time to pull the plug. Post offices around the world were instructed to work round the clock to clear their backlogs within seventy two hours.

As the Post Offices commenced their final duty to the world, the world watched. There was only one question on everyone's minds. Who would write the last letter of all humanity?

As the hours counted down to the deadline, everyone waited with bated breath. Would it be a passionate, poetic missive from a lover to his beloved? Would it be an erudite discourse on the ancient Greek war strategies from a historian to another? Would it be a letter from a loving son serving in the battlefield to his mother?

Rumours that the Last Letter would be probably sent from a Post Office in the autonomous region of the East Indies spread, probably because of the region's notorious bureaucratic delays. The Press rushed to the region and sure enough, the Last Letter was waiting to be sent in the Post Office of the Capital.

It was delivered to a teenager in a neighbouring state. The Press broadcast the contents of the Last Letter of humanity. It was written in an almost unintelligible scrawl, with the hand that one presumed had never held a pen before in his or her life.

It read : "hi aryan... i lost ur email address... can u mail it back 2 me?? luv, kalki".

posted by foogarky @ 11:15 PM, ,

Captain Hooker and the story of the mysterious, moldy MacGuffin.
Monday, June 02, 2008

I stare at the copy in my hands. It is a leather bound volume with the words Captain Hooker embossed across the front cover. Captain Hooker. I read it aloud and chuckle.

The book has seen twenty summers, in a manner of speaking. For the sake of reducing the incidence of misunderstood metaphors, it must be clarified that books are incapable of vision and the summer season cannot really be seen inside a dusty old library, but rather felt by the effect of the raised temperature. I had noticed the book as a lad; the library was a bustling centre of intellectualism at that time and this volume occupied the proud position of the best of the best sellers (a title that did not really refer to the sales figures of said volume, but rather the creativity of the hype machine of its publishers). The machine must have run of steam though, the wizened old Librarian tells an older me, both of us aged by twenty years, pointing at the book, now tucked away in the discount bin.

"This book is cursed", he says, interrupted by a rasping cough, "It has brought this library bad luck since the day it was placed on these shelves. It has been borrowed not once, not even once, and I wait for the day that it might be begged for or stolen." A part of me, the rational part to be specific, wants to correct him. To dispel the myth and the superstition. To tell him that sailors are entitled to be superstitious about having women on board their ships, but Librarians are not, especially when the superstition is not about a woman on board a ship, but about a book about a woman on board a ship. But I haven't the heart to do it so I offer to steal the book while he sets a rat trap or perform whatever other activity he can think of as an alibi to offer the bored investigators who turn up to investigate a book theft.

He agrees. I steal. I walk out with the book. And customers come in. In droves.

My eyes bulging, I look back into the library. The Librarian is standing, looking back at me, with his right hand outstretched with a closed fist and thumb pointing upwards, mouthing a silent 'Thank you'. I smile weakly and glare at my inner rational self who merely shrugs and goes back to his cave, shaking his head in disbelief.

As I reach home, I open the book and place it cover down on the floor, showing pages three hundred and forty one and three hundred and forty two. I stand in front of the book and take off my shirt. As I unzip my pants, I hear a scream from beyond the Fourth Wall. A prude perhaps, I think to myself and continue the process until I'm down to my birthday suit. A couple of she-wolf-whistles this time from beyond and I blush. I recover my composure quickly and crouch down and dip my finger into the book.

I suppose describing the following process to an audience ignorant of the fourth dimension of a book is going to be difficult. However, to avoid losing audience interest in this narrative, I dig into my arsenal of plot devices and pull out my trusty explanation monologue :

"And this is part where I, the yet unnamed first person protagonist of this story, reveal my modus operandi. The mode of operation to perform what task, you ask? It shall be revealed soon, my impatient friend. Sooner or later. Mwahahahahahaha!

Oh, terribly sorry about that. I tend to get carried away by the dramatic nature of monologue delivery. As I was saying, before I interrupted myself, books have an unseen, to the human eye that is, fourth dimension. Humans can see the length, width and height of a book, but I, the still unnamed protagonist of possible superhuman origin, can feel the viscosity of it.

"The viscosity?", you may ask loudly and incredulously. "Yes", I reply in equal volume. The viscosity. For books have been known to be written in a range of writing styles from the negative extreme of sparse, minimalistic writing to the positive extreme of an ornate, flowery style and the only book in this entire universe to lie in the middle of this scale with a perfectly balanced writing style is the unpublished memoirs of an opium farmer, thought to be eaten by a goat driven so far by hunger to bother not about the earth shattering loss of this literary treasure. A dip of my finger, which I refer to dramatically as the Finger of God, which really does not have anything divine about it though, into a book and the subsequent stirring motion calculates the viscosity of the book. "

"Is that all?", an anonymous coward heckles from beyond the Fourth Wall.

"No, that is not all, you swine without a spine. My real power is something that needs to be demonstrated. Look upon my unclothed body as I begin.."

"I'd rather not", replies the cheeky, disembodied voice, emboldened by his anonymity, "You are a rather ugly person."

Resisting the urge to break through the Fourth Wall and strangle this anonymous annoyance, I stir my fingers through the pages and feel resistance. I read a few sentences. Flowery language. I sigh, wishing for the power to deflower books.

"That is the wrong usage of deflower, dweeb", continues the heckler, apparently able to hear my inner thoughts. I shut him out, shut my eyes, clench my nose and take a dive.

Into the book.

As I splash into page number three hundred and forty two, a liquid; so viscous that words cannot describe it, precisely because it is made of words; engulfs me. I think of a clever metaphor comparing my situation to a swim in a bowl of extra syrupy alphabet soup, as words enter my every orifice choking me. I lose consciousness.

I wake up in a strange bed, in a strange room. I feel the room moving. I try to remember where I am, my memory throwing up the number 342. I cannot associate the number to anything so I give up and look around.

I see a strange lady beside me. I shriek and jump out of the bed.

"Ahoy! Mister Lampoonist! Ye come down 'ere to be Cap'n Hooker's First Mate?"

I shriek again. And look down and find myself still wearing my pants and then realise that the First Mate referred to was the nautical term for the Chief Officer of the Captain.

"Aye", I reply, grinning.

posted by foogarky @ 10:11 AM, ,

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