Scene: A large posh office. Two clients, well-dressed city gents, sit
facing a large table at which stands Mr. Tid, the account manager
of the architectural firm.
Mr. Tid: Well, gentlemen, we have two architectural designs for this new
residential block of yours and I thought it best if the architects
themselves explained the particular advantages of their designs.
There is a knock at the door.
Mr. Tid: Ah! That's probably the first architect now. Come in.
Mr. Wiggin enters.
Mr. Wiggin: Good morning, gentlemen.
Clients: Good morning.
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-story block combining classical neo-Georgian features
with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here
and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme
comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the
rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily
soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled
flesh slurps into these...
Client 1: Excuse me.
Mr. Wiggin: Yes?
Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?
Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.
Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?
Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?
Client 1: Not really. We asked for a simple block of flats.
Mr. Wiggin: Oh. I hadn't fully divined your attitude towards the tenants. You
see I mainly design slaughter houses.
Clients: Ah.
Mr. Wiggin: Pity.
Clients: Yes.
Mr. Wiggin: (indicating points of the model) Mind you, this is a real beaut.
None of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the
windows incommoding the passers-by with this one. (confidentially)
My life has been leading up to this.
Client 2: Yes, and well done, but we wanted an apartment block.
Mr. Wiggin: May I ask you to reconsider.
Clients: Well...
Mr. Wiggin: You wouldn't regret this. Think of the tourist trade.
Client 1: I'm sorry. We want a block of flats, not an abattoir.
Mr. Wiggin: ...I see. Well, of course, this is just the sort of blinkered
philistine pig-ignorance I've come to expect from you non-creative
garbage. You sit there on your loathsome spotty behinds squeezing
blackheads, not caring a tinker's cuss for the struggling artist.
You excrement, you whining hypocritical toadies with your colour TV
sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic
secret handshakes. You wouldn't let me join, would you, you
blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn't become a Freemason now if
you went down on your lousy stinking knees and begged me.
Client 2: We're sorry you feel that way, but we did want a block of flats,
nice though the abattoir is.
It's all Greek to me ;-D
Stephen Halliwell GREEK LAUGHTER A study of cultural psychology from Homer to early Christianity In the third century BC, when Roman ambassadors were negotiating with the Greek city of Tarentum, an ill-judged laugh put paid to any hope of peace. Ancient writers disagree about the exact cause of the mirth, but they agree that Greek laughter was the final straw in driving the Romans to war. One account points the finger at the bad Greek of the leading Roman ambassador, Postumius. It was so ungrammatical and strangely accented that the Tarentines could not conceal their amusement. The historian Dio Cassius, by contrast, laid the blame on the Romans’ national dress. “So far from receiving them decently”, he wrote, “the Tarentines laughed at the Roman toga among other things. It was the city garb, which we use in the Forum. And the envoys had put this on, whether to make a suitably dignified impression or out of fear – thinking that it would make the Tarentines respect them. But in fact g...
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