Shalampax Speaks

Peeps, if you’re not sitting or lying down I strongly recommend that you do so. I cannot be held responsible for any injuries you may suffer when you collapse in shock upon hearing the news I’m about to relate.

Do you remember the experiment that Dr. Don proposed while Openfly was on the ship? You remember. Dr. Don suggested that the way to prove that Shalampaxians are members of the Homo sapiens species—something that Dr. Don doubted—was for a Homo sapiens, namely Dr. Don, to impregnate Openfly. If the pregnancy resulted in a viable human baby, that would mean that Openfly must be Homo sapiens.

Well, it turns out that the experiment was unnecessary. A product of sex between a Shalampaxian and a non-Shalampaxian has been living on this earth for about 55 years. Can you believe it? Marie was pregnant when she fled Shalampax!

It is well known that Marie was knocked up a few times in the approximately two years she was here. Her promiscuity back then was limited only by the hours in the day. (Openfly tells me that, from what she can tell, age has slowed Marie down, but only a little. Openfly is impressed.)

When she was in Shalampax, Marie induced an abortion as soon as she became aware that she was pregnant. (Nobody admits to knowing how she did it and she hasn’t shared that information with Openfly yet.) Marie fled Shalampax before she could have an abortion after her the last time she conceived here.

We didn’t have contraceptives in Shalampax in those days. Consequently, because of her renowned promiscuity and because Marie didn’t have the estrus display advantage that Shalampaxian women have, Marie was never able to successfully practice the rhythm method while here. As a result, very shortly after Marie had an abortion she’d be pregnant again.

Everyone thought the reason that Marie had abortions was that she shared Shalampaxian women’s strong aversion to bearing children. However, according to what Marie told Openfly, that is not the case. Marie aborted her pregnancies because she felt it would be a crime against humanity—or at least against one human—to bear a child in a hellhole like Shalampax. Many Shalampaxians agree with her on that point.

Once Marie escaped from Shalampax and landed back in America, she was quite happy, and even excited, about having a child.

Marie doesn’t know the identity of her daughter’s biological father. She told Openfly, “It could have been any of at least a dozen guys in Shalampax, most of whom I don’t remember. And I’ve been trying hard to forget the ones I do remember.”

Despite some animosity toward Shalampax, Marie thought it was important for her daughter to know about her Shalampaxian heritage. It is, after all, a part of her. To instill a little of Shalmapax’s culture in her daughter, Marie decided to follow the Shalampaxian baby-naming custom.

That custom, as many of you know, is to name your child after the first interesting thing you see after your child is born, provided that name is not already taken. If it requires more than one word or name to describe that thing, then all of the words and names are rammed together without any spaces. For example, after I was born, my parents saw someone with a stone stuck up his or he nose, hence my name is Stoneupnose. (I still don’t know why that person had a stone up his or her nose, nor do I care.)

Marie did make one change to our naming custom. When our names are assembled from multiple words, we capitalize only the first letter of our name. Because she was back in America, Marie felt it would be appropriate to shake things up a bit and capitalize each component of her daughter’s name, rather than only the first.

So, you are asking, what is that name? I’m getting to that.

Shortly after Marie’s daughter was born a deranged (i.e., mad) woman, who was a patient in the psychiatric ward of the hospital where Marie had her baby, stormed into Marie’s room, shouting at the top of her lungs because she was exceptionally angry (i.e., mad) about the food in the hospital. And what was that mad, mad woman’s name? Margo.

As a result of this incident, Marie named her baby MadMadMargo.

What is particularly interesting is that there has been a MadMadMargo who has commented on this blog from time to time. She played it very coy and occasionally claimed to be a Shalampaxian, but she never provided any justification for that claim.

Not believing it possible for there to be any Shalampaxians off the island without our knowledge, we all assumed that this MadMadMargo was either a nut-job or she was going to try to shake us down. So we either ignored or made fun of her claims.

This raises a dilemma. We’ve never defined the requirements for Shalampaxian citizenship. We’ve always assumed that was unnecessary because we thought that no one had ever been born of a mix of a Shalampaxian and a non-Shalampaxian parent. And we were convinced that everyone born of Shalampaxian parents was born in Shalampax. Therefore, there was never a question of who had citizenship—or so we thought until now.

MadMadMargo was born in the United States to a non-Shalampaxian mother. True, her father is Shalampaxian and her mother, despite not being from Shalampax, was more responsible than anyone else for Shalampax being the nation it is to day. But is that enough to grant MadMadMargo Shalampaxian citizenship? I’ve talked it over with a few people here, but we can’t decide.

The debate continues. If MadMadMargo persists with her claim to Shalampaxian citizenship the final decision will probably have to be made by Parliament.

Openfly thought this news was so important that she cut short her chat with Marie so she could find a computer and email me. As a result, Marie hasn’t yet given Openfly much information about MadMadMargo. I’m sure we’ll hear more in the coming days and weeks.

Being curious, I did a little research on my own.

MadMadMargo maintains a blog called The Screaming Me-Me. Unlike Shalampax Speaks, which presents only staid, factual reporting of people and events in Shalampax, The Screaming Me-Me is a humor blog, and a very good one at that.

MadMadMargo must get her humor from her mother because, as you can tell from this blog, none of us Shalampaxians have a funny bone in our bodies. For her sake, I hope she also got her looks from her mother.

I don’t know if MadMadMargo visits her mother often, but her blog profile says she lives in Arizona. I looked at a map and that’s not all that far from California. In fact, the bottom parts of the two states are adjacent, so maybe Openfly will get a chance to meet MadMadMargo at some point. We’ll see.

That’s all for now, peeps.