An Editor out for...

A late night as usual. The clacking goes on above me; one of these days this whole business is going to drive me insane. If I'm not inspecting the rows of workers, I'm usually standing behind my editorial staff trying to figure out the daily news. No one really knows whether we can bring out the daily news on time. Then the archiving begins, hoping against hope that we have the news for tomorrow, or the day after that, or maybe even for the next New Year. I only hope these palpitations in my heart decrease this year. The chill isn't good for me, the medicine man said. In any case, work is worship they always say, and even if I don't get to meet interesting people on the job, there is always the Cafe Malt. A veritable bordello, the Cafe Malt. Sirens scream outside jarring the ears, while red lights flash on the inside jarring the eyes. The waiters, of course, go about their business in the most prosaic manner until you begin to wax eloquent. With your purse, of course; gilded wallets are superior to glib tongues. The experience is enough to give one a doze of epilepsy if one isn't careful. But then, thats for the outsiders. For the regulars, there is a little nook on the inside, with good ol' Ralf playing softly on the piano, dim lights, the works.

This night of all nights, I needed to get to the Malt. After all it was my business to know things; and he had promised information. The Cafe Malt was always an interesting place on a Saturday night. A well-to-do editor like myself could go there with my papers and bore a hole through the sheafs in my search for truth without being disturbed the whole night. In wino veritas, a fine motto indeed, or should I say a vine motto; atleast one that I ascribe to. On the other hand, one could go there to spend the night savouring earthly delights. A malt in one hand, sitting chatting with the barkeep, Ozzo, listening to Ralf playing Eggret's Seventh on the piano, one can't imagine a more relaxing time anywhere on the Egg... or what's left of it. The nook isn't exactly a nook. It starts off as one and then distends into a large hollow and then keeps going on ad infinitum, and ad nauseum if one looks long enough when one is drunk on the drinks served there. On the walls hang paintings of upcoming artists. No fancy stuff, no modern art. That died out when the Egg cracked. Now all one remembers when one sees modern art is the shrieking of The Dragon during its birth. After all it was that fool, Ankhys who decided to merge art with reality.... less said about it the better. I feel nauseous wondering what would happen if It returned breathing Dragonfire. Not just dragonfire mind you, but Dragonfire.

The Malt is also where I met him; and where I first learnt of the Falchion. Little did I know then that it would turn my little world upside down all over again. I'd had enough of that with the cracking of the Egg, but no, he had to come into the picture. He used to come often enough to the Malt; usually with a bunch of his brothers of that strange Order. After the Cracking though, it appeared as if the Order of the Paperweight cracked as well. They had been waiting for the day a long time, and when it finally arrived and shook all the paperweights off the sheaf of papers on their desks, their narrow, twisted, dogmatic minds couldn't take the pressure, and cracked, if you'll pardon the expression.

However, A.D.A.S. Knight seemed to have somehow withstood the strain on his mental faculty by, I understand, strictly following his Order's stringent requirements, which mainly seemed to consist of attending as many orgies as possible. Stranger things have happened. After all, its not every day that I meet a man whose name is A Dark And Stormy Knight. In fact, I still haven't figured out what to call him. Does one call him Dark, or perhaps, Stormy? I'm quite familiar with him now, so do I dare call him Storm instead, or perhaps And, or even A? I've restrained myself from doing any of the above, as I have this deep resolution inside of me, that says to me everyday, "I will not have my head cut off by insane knights." That's the only New Year resolution I've ever managed to hang onto in my life, for dear life.

He was sitting in his usual place- a table for two near the toilet, sampling one of the many local wines that the Malt happened to stock. He would sit like a gargoyle on a particularly Gothic gable, one of those gargoyles that you imagine in your nightmares, the ones whose eyes open when the music reaches a crescendo. He slouched so much, it gave you a backache, till you realised that his back was straight as the proverbial arrow. Straighter, in fact; more like a butler serving on a royal yacht at a dinner party for his or her majesty's distinguished cousins. And yet, when you turned your head away, you felt he was playing tricks with your eyes and creeping off into another one of his slouches. I had met him at the at very place before; talking about this and that until he accidentally mentioned the Falchion. What a coincidence, I had thought then, to talk about the Falchion at the Malt. Every prophecy had mentioned a drink when the Falchion was mentioned, but to sit at a cafe called the Malt... does that count I wondered, or is just wishful thinking?

When he found out that I was the editor of the Daily Banshee, he wished to know more about the profession, how we got the news, how we managed to obtain scoops that we then ran into pages of useless print. Little did he know about the profession. Investigating news the old way was passe. We had better methods now. I, on the other hand, was hoping to glean some more grain from the chaff of useless data he was flooding me with. Somewhere in that, I knew, there had to be the Order's secrets of the Falchion. Whether he knew it consciously or not was rather irrelevant. What mattered was that he was a Knight of the Order, in fact, the only Knight of the Order... and what a knight. Shoot!!

"Ah Diogenes!!" he ejaculated when he saw me, "Come! do sit by my side!!" We chewed the old fat for a while. I remarked about the vapours that seemed to follow him everywhere. "You know how it is," he explained, "when you're cooped up in the office and by the government building all day long, you begin smelling like one of the vermin you're looking for. What's a knight to do nowadays? If it weren't for this prophecy about the Falchion, I tell you, I have a good mind to give up being an errant, and err on the side of being a Private Investigator. Ha Ha!! My little joke!! That always cracks me up, get it?? Errant and err on??" Yes, quite.

He finally asked me about the news business after the Cracking. "It's actually pretty simple. You've heard of the Borel-Cantelli lemma haven't you?" Of course he hadn't. "Well, it's pretty mathematical and half of it goes above my head as well. But, what is germane to us are its consequences: if you have an infinite number of monkeys typing away at keyboards for infinite time, one of them will type out the entire text of Hamlet... well, we decided to extend it with Rohit's corollary: you probably wouldn't have heard of him either; well, his corollary is pretty simple: if you have an infinite number of monkeys typing away, you're eventually going to get one that types out tomorrow's news. Not just that but one is going type out day after's news and so on. So in essence, you're actually predicting the future. Now, we've been capturing all sorts of monkeys, gorillas, orangutans, you name a simian, we've got it, and we've put all of them to typing out stuff. All our editors have to do in the end is to sift through the material, archive the one's that make sense, that is, the ones with the right syntax and such, and then search through the archives for potential candidates for the news."

"How do you know that it's the news until it happens?" Knight asked. "That's quite a simple problem actually. Newspapers contain stories about events that happened a few days back as well. We read the archives to see if anything corresponds to events that occured a couple of days ago. Of course, there will be multiple copies that correspond to this, but as the day rolls on, the number of potential candidates for the day's news become less and less. At the end of the day, we have all the newspapers that correspond to the events that occured until 12 o'clock. We then print the part that is common until 12 o'clcok. And begin the process again. Some of the more intellectual of the simians, like the chimps, have a very high success rate of not only typing sensible stuff, but also predicting the future correctly. Sometimes, though, we don't have a newspaper ready coz we neither have an infinite number of monkeys, nor do we have infinite time. Then, we hit the panic button, type out some trash like this and send it out. A job well done."

He was interested. He said that he would like to see the whole process some day, but had to rush now since he had to meet someone about some lady who smelt like limburger cheese. Before he left, I showed him a picture of our ace typist, Nym getting down to work. He gulped down the rest of his wine and ran out of their like there was a werewolf chasing him. A weird chap. He told me nothing about the Falchion. As I was saying at the beginning, we don't just print newspapers but also look through our archives for interesting articles that we print in our magazines. That's when I came across this article that described the day that I just had. This whole thing was written by Nym, five days ago. Including this. And this. Not bad for a chimp eh? Well, good bye and don't forget to read the Daily Banshee!!

Hippodromes for hypocrites Part 1

It was another fast night at the Government block. The Government block, contrary to expectations, is where everyone thinks work moves the fastest. Pen screeches on paper, keyboards are scorched owing to friction, clerks face early retirement due to burn outs and kents, well, lets leave the Supermen for later eh? I moved in slo-mo. At every blink, people were moving over 50 metres. Aliasing. Blink fast enough and everything slows down. I start moving faster. The world comes back to normal. The Government block. Nothing moves.

No matter. Nothing happens anyway. When you are a knight, people keep thinking that you're life is exciting, that you actually do some work, that you have a million peasants under you whom you can allocate work yo, whom you can bully, boss over, push off cliffs, feed to the lions and what not. Not true. Little do people know that half the time, you are begging them to give you a fair share of the crops they have sown. Dammit, half the time the crops aren't even sown... and the damn harvest season is coming up soon. Three weeks from now.

So I left the Government Office and decided to ride up to the Clerk's Building. This is where they do all sorts of wizardry with math. Accounting, finances, complex numbers, imaginary profits, you name it, they do it. This is also where they like to store marks you may (or may not) have earned in courses that you do. I had been doing a course on Basic Wizardry at the Apocryphal Academy and wanted to know how I was faring. Don't we all. Alone as I am in my office looking at the clock tower at the other end of town, by leaning out my window as far as I can, tying a string to the back of my belt and the other end to the door knob, I sometimes wonder that if I become a wizard I might not be able to tell the time in an easier fashion. I also fear that someone would open the door someday while I am at my amusing pass time and send me, arms flailing and all, to my doom. There is this garbage can below my window, and out my door and in the room two doors away. There is garbage everywhere here. I wonder....

I digress. My memoirs get worse and worse. This isn't to say that it was bad in the first place. I was in the Clerk's Building trying to juggle a few grades around and, in general, make it appear that I was better at the dark arts of necromancy than I was (I did say that I was a dark and stormy knight if you remember) when my wandering eye happened to notice a D grade on the list. I daren't look up at the face of the gnome at the desk. She was sure to be all aglow, a nice little mocking smile on her face. "Changing the course because of interest, are you? A genuine student, eh? What was that again about not worrying about doing badly in courses? Not worried now either eh? Looks like you have a different definition of bad entirely. What were you fearing? An S?" Hmmm....

Cut to a day later when I went to see this wizard with my pal, another novice at wizardry, though he is far more committed to it than I am. He wasn't in his room, these wizards almost never are. They appear to work all day, and yet, when you need to see them, they vanish. It almost seems as if they know we're lurking around. Perhaps, they do know, perhaps they make it their business to know, perhaps they do that the whole day. That's why they're so busy. The bastards.

He finally came walking to his room. A walk of arrogance, swaying this way and that. Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a wonderful day; I killed a novice, I murdered a fay. So he swaggers in, wonders aloud if we wanted to see little ol' him, and plops his mammoth backside onto this swiveling chair. It doesn't make a sound. It, too, has learnt to shut its trap in front, or behind, a wizard. When he learns what we're there for, he checks his notes, remarks that perhaps we deserve more for our knowledge but not so for our naivete. What with us telling him that we did our work together, when we should have been colluding with each other and trying to outwit him? Children, to have been honest when we should have been lying through our teeth. No wonder we deserved a D. Sheesh.

So what do we learn at the end, eh? Do we come out with any wizardry at all? Of course we do, but how many stay the course? Was the whole thing worth it, I ask myself sitting in the vapours of my office, with the wargs looking down on me as before, with the bloodsuckers getting their sweet nectar without paying their tax. "Why?" I shout, "What happens to the system?" I see a wizard sashaying down a green corridor. He scratches his itching chin, then the sole of his foot and his chin again. I'm better than you, son. I got a griffin service. Got a dozen merchants working my train. I'm sitting watching you at the Colosseum, son, and I like what I see. We want you to work for us kid, prevent you from going anywhere and we have ready labour. Can’t be beat.I went to San Fransisco, brother, and you can't. Why? Coz Hippodromes are for Hypocrites.

I was a dark and stormy knight

I sat at my desk, with the rain pouring like blood from a Tarantino flick. The lousiest title I ever saw. What first words could be worse than this I thought. It would only get worse if I talked about a chick walking into the room. I decided to leave that part for later. It was a cold Sunday evening in hell, with depression looming over the desk like Damocles' sword. I was wondering what a good setting would be for blogs like this- self referrential? A tale within a tale? Car chases? How about a little fantasy thrown in for good measure? Should I be allowed to digress and rant about the world in general while silently screaming out my story? That's when I remembered this great game that I had played, based on Terry Pratchett novels. "A great guy," Jalan would say, "Knows how to write. Perhaps he even knows how to code. I wonder if he ever was a spy like the Winamp guy." That rhymes.

A desk. That would be a great start wouldn't it. It would have to be a desk. A nice oaken desk from a tree cut in the middle of the quad so that Bishop Berkeley would have fits over his existentialist angst. So would Pussy Verghese, for that matter, but that's a different story. Now, we need an office. A damp, dark room in a student's hostel would have to do, I suppose. Frozen rivers, molten mountains and all that. It would, also, have to be raining. Now, that's a must. Where would noirs be if there wasn't any rain, I asked myself. Finally, there came the texture of the story. What would the Maltese Falcon be, if it were in colour eh? So, my tale would be in black and white, with many a fine shade of grey (or gray) to interest the keener observers of the story. There would be none, I'm sure. I'm also quite sure that no one wishes to actually read. Everyone is just caught in this loop of reading each others blogs and linking it in theirs. I, on the other hand, have no idea how to do this. I'm told its rather easy, but ever since I realised I was getting old, I had absolutely no enthusiasm to put on a great show on a blog, for heaven's sake.

As I was saying, it was a cold Sunday evening in hell, when the door opened and she... no let's not bring that in yet. I'm more interested, at the moment, in setting the scene. So, on this cold Sunday evening, I was staring at a warg. Many may think that a warg is a frightening werewolf slobbering all over your face as it bites chunks out of your abdomen. Not quite. A warg, in this tale, is one of many spiders that inhabit the corners of my room. I pay the rent, they board for free. In exchange for this, they try to eat all the mosquitos and allow me to stare at them and make comments gratis. One may now hazard asking what I was doing in a damp, dark room on a cold Sunday evening in hell. Well, I was working. That was for sure. I work all the time. You could say that I'm unemployed. But you wouldn't; for then you'd hear a squelch, crack, angels flying about your head. My ma uses the rolling pin rather well.

Let me introduce myself. A hundred years ago, a band of people, who were also unemployed, decided to go about trying to right lefts, to wring wrongs and to act very pompous. Since they were health fanatics and disliked references to underwear, they refused to take up names like garters or stockings or any such animal. They wished to exalt the one thing that they had believed would change the very face of the earth. They were the Order of the Paperweight. Over the last hundred years, the Order has lost many members. Many lost sight of the original ideals and were forced to serve penances for life. Times are such that the order is now dying. Only one man now is able to weather the harsh discipline, luxury dinners, orgies and rain that the job throws up. I am the last of the Order. I am a dark and stormy knight.