It’s rare to find a Shalampaxian upset about anything because getting upset requires more effort than most Shalampaxians are willing to expend on anything that doesn’t stand a good chance of making them great gobs of money. And, even then there are very narrow limits on how much energy we’re willing to devote to the enterprise.
Nonetheless, the anger in the air around here these days is palpable.
Tomorrow is National Gravity Day in Shalampax.
To celebrate this holiday, everyone is expected to honor gravity by staying in bed and not getting up for the whole day. It would be a good idea to prepare for this celebration by putting a stock of nonperishable, unwrapped food beside your pillow and a bedpan beside your midsection before you go to sleep tonight.
Manexposinghimself, the Prime Minister of Shalampax, granted me an exclusive interview yesterday. Knowing that these are challenging times in the world, for most of our half-hour together he talked extensively and with great passion about the current batch of television reality shows. That part of our discussion does not bear repeating, but in an off-hand moment he did mention something interesting.
Prime Minister Manexposinghimself made a promise that I think he’s going to keep, which would be totally out of character for him. He promised that, in the future, his government will be much more decisive and will make its decisions much more quickly.
When Parliament returns from its unexpected recess it plans to pass a new data privacy bill. To date, we don’t have any laws here in Shalampax concerning the protection of the privacy of data collected by businesses. And Shalampaxian companies have been, to say the least, quite lax in this regard.
Once this bill is passed, the following will be mandatory:
To better plan and manage governmental and business affairs, the Government of Shalampax thought it was a good idea to get a more accurate—or at least some—sense of the demographics of Shalampax. To this end, a few weeks ago the government undertook Shalampax’s first comprehensive census.
Censuses had been conducted in the past, but they only counted the number of people here. This census asked 50 questions on Shalampaxian characteristics and practices.
The automated, dial-in time signal, which was installed in March of this year, has broken. Due to the difficulty in getting parts shipped into Shalampax, it is not known how long it will take to repair it, but it could be a few months.
The system still works in a fashion. Now, instead of saying, “at the tone, it will be exactly six p.m.,” it now says, “ “at the tone, it will be exactly 6:45 p.m.”
