With each heart attack, Guglielmo Marconi grew more desperate to prove that soundwaves lasted forever, and that with a sufficiently-amplified shout, his words could be impressed upon the universe so they’d echo for all eternity.
For years, he’d been listening to the vacuum of space, trying to find the reverberations of souls past, but his time was running out, so he went forward with his plans to make his mark.
He was last seen alive, running through the streets of Rome, shouting “I AM MARCONI!” at the top of his lungs.
Then, mid-shout, he clutched his chest, collapsed, and died.
Tag: history
Oh You Fools
Alexander Pope said that fools rush in where angels fear to tread, but I can’t come up with a single place that an angel would fear to tread.
I’ve lived in some really bad places, and I’ve seen plenty of fools rushing around them.
But angels are supernatural, powerful beings. They serve God as his messengers and soldiers.
There’s nothing here that an angel couldn’t handle.
Why they don’t, well, that’s one of those Free Will arguments I won’t get into.
Or perhaps it’s all the power lines. They don’t want to get their big white wings tangled in them.
Chinese Arch
If you built an arch and had every Chinese person line up and march under it at a rate of one person per second, the line would never end.
But why would you do such a silly thing? What good does marching people in a line do?
And even if you managed to build the arch, I highly doubt that you could convince every Chinese person to line up and march under it.
The Chinese have better things to do than march under an arch forever.
They’re to busy planning to jump all at the same time…
Oh no… EARTHQUAKE!
The Lame Of Thrones
I hear a lot of hype regarding this Game Of Thrones television show, but I don’t have much interest in it.
I mean, how many games can you play with thrones, anyway?
The first one that comes to mind is Musical Thrones.
(It’s like Musical Chairs, but with thrones.)
I can’t see how much fun that would be.
I mean, the king sits in his throne, the queen sits in hers. They win.
And if anybody else tries to sit in their thrones, they get their head cut off.
If I want to watch people getting beheaded, I’ll watch Al-Jazeerah.
The Whorologist Of Babylon
The first thing that Dr. Foster was told when he first joined the Royal Observatory Museum’s staff was to describe his job as researching and maintain historical timepieces.
“People crack jokes when we say horology, and they never take us seriously,” said the museum’s director.
“When I say I’m the director of a horology institute, they ask me if that makes me a pimpologist.”
The director winked, pressed a button, and twenty beautiful women in various states of undress walked into the room.
“I wind everybody else’s watch all day long,” he said. “So why not have them wind mine?”
Let there be light again
God watched as Eve handed the apple to Adam again.
STOP! He shouted.
Everything stopped.
God wiped His brow and growled.
“Why do they keep doing this?” He said, picking up the humans and tossing them into a universe. “No matter what I do, these idiots keep defying me.”
“Beats me,” said the llama. “If you’re finished, can you turn me back into a snake, please?”
God snapped His fingers, and the llama became a walrus.
“No,” said God. “We’re starting from Day Six.”
He reached into the mud, pulled out some clay, and shaped up another Adam to test.
Elegantly
Lying in his hospital bed, Albert Einstein, the smartest man in the world, was dying.
He coughed, smiled and told the doctors “I want to go when I want. It is tasteless to prolong life artificially. I have done my share, it is time to go. I will do it elegantly.”
They nodded respectfully and left the room.
The next morning, he was dead.
Nobody knows Albert Einstein’s last words because he spoke them in German, but the nurse at his bedside only spoke English.
However, I suspect he was saying “Get that pillow off of my face, you bitch!”
Unscholarly
“Sic Semper Tyrannis!”
John Wilkes Booth limps off the stage as chaos overtakes Ford’s Theater.
In the background…
Singing?
“STOP!” shouts Professor Rathbone, clicking a hand control.
Everyone freezes in place, frozen in time.
Rathbone twists a knob on the control, scrolling the scene backwards.
Women and men point and sit back down, Booth flies up to the Presidential box, scuffles with an Army major, and unshoots Lincoln.
Rathbone clicks again, walks to the stage, and spots the quietly singing Rick Astley.
He points the control, clicks, and the hologram vanishes.
The grad students chuckle as Rathbone resets the scene.
Sighting
For centuries, people have claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in various caves and grottos, and pilgrims seek guidance and healing in those places.
To this day, you’ll hear about a cheese sandwich or a piece of driftwood. A water stain in the ceiling of some shithole apartment.
So, imagine my surprise that during my colonoscopy, I’m watching the monitor and the doctor goes “HOLY CRAP!” the same time I do.
Yep. The Virgin Mary. Up my ass.
“Oh that’s where that statue went,” I said.
I promise I’ll wash it before I put it back on the dashboard.
A Loss Of Wax
The museum has a very large collection of wax cylinder recordings, but the ones they display in the museum are all replicas.
The real ones are restricted to researchers like me, and after years of testing, my laser-reader is ready to finish digitizing them all.
I showed up with my equipment, and was quickly escorted to the stairway down.
“There was an electrical fire in a storage room,” says the facilities manager. “The sprinklers weren’t enough. Whatever didn’t burn, warped and melted.”
We slosh through the basement and pull aside a charred door.
Looking upon the ugly ruin, I wept.