Shalampax Speaks

OK folks, here’s a little trivia question for you: What do Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, da Vinci, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Gauguin, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Rodin, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Vivaldi, Bach, Wagner, Genghis Khan, Freud, Copernicus, Galileo, Einstein, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, Churchill, Washington, Lincoln, Kennedy and Obama all have in common?

Give up? The answer is that they are all famous names that are totally unfamiliar to more than 90 percent of the Shalampaxian population.

Here’s a follow-on question: What other world-famous, non-Shalampaxian names belong on that list? If you answered, “all of them,” give yourself some bonus points. Oh, what the heck? Seeing as though they have no monetary value and can’t be redeemed for anything whatsoever, give yourself a million bonus points. I’m feeling generous today.

If this leads you to believe that Shalampaxians are the least informed people on the planet, I have one question for you: You haven’t been paying attention all this time, have you? Either that or you are new to this blog. Get with it.

Miscellaneous famous people

Spiltmilk, that headache with feet who for some reason has deluded herself into thinking that the school board matters and people care, has been doing more research. She’s found that, as far as she has been able to find, no other school board in the world uses the happy/neutral/sad face, student self-assessment report cards that the Shalampax school board introduced just a couple of months ago.

Instead, report cards in other countries usually grade students on what they’ve learned and report on their progress toward achieving educational goals. We don’t currently do that in Shalampax. Students so rarely progress that everyone notices when one of them does. So, there’s no need to report on it. What’s more, parents don’t give a damn how their students are doing at school as long as they stay there for as long as possible and don’t bother their parents at home.

Nonetheless, Spiltmilk is determined to have the Shalampax school issue report cards that are more like those found elsewhere in the world, fruitless exercise though it may be.

The problem is that teachers here will rebel strongly against the work involved in assessing students rather than having students assess themselves. Teachers will also be royally pissed off about having to fill in standard report cards that convey those assessments to parents.

Undaunted, Spiltmilk has solved this problem. She is having report cards preprinted with all “F” grades and the standard comment of “not making any progress whatsoever; not even a bit.” That way, teachers will have to fill in only the student’s name. The number of times that these report card will be inaccurate is so small as to not be a concern.

Miscellaneous

A new service was recently introduced in Shalampax. You can now call a special telephone number to hear the time.

This is a fully automated system, so operators don’t need to be standing by. Exceptionally sophisticated speech synthesis software, running on an extraordinarily powerful computer, speaks the time whenever someone calls the number attached to the computer.

The number to call is 0-600. This number is accessible only in Shalampax. The unavailability of this service elsewhere is not much of a loss to the rest of the world because Shalampax is in a unique time zone that gets reset each morning when Manexposinghimself, our Prime Minister, wakes up.

When the time zone is reset in the morning, all clocks in Shalampax are automatically synchronized with the new time. Thus, this phone service is of use only if you are near a phone, but not near a clock.

One drawback of the new system is that the computer is programmed to only say “at the tone, it will be exactly six p.m.” Shalampaxians are, therefore, asked to be careful to call in only at that time.

Miscellaneous time, time zone

OK, who was the bastard who told Manexposinghimself about my experiment yesterday, in which I decided to not post an article here in order to see if anyone of import noticed? I don’t know who it was, but someone told him. To say he was angry would be the understatement of the century.

As soon as he heard that I hadn’t posted, he stormed over to my apartment and let himself in with a passkey that I didn’t know he had. As it happens, I was in the bathroom with a porn magazine in my left hand and never mind what in my right hand.

I was moments away from finishing my business when Manexposinghimself burst in and screamed at me. Apparently, he wasn’t quite as oblivious to what I was doing as I thought because he threatened that if Shalampax Speaks stopped churning out posts every day he was going to yank what was in my right hand right off my body.

So, consider this my post for the day. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go browbeat one of the other authors into writing something for tomorrow. At least, I think it’s their brow that I’ll beat. I haven’t decided yet.

Miscellaneous

Having a dual role here—both a regular columnist and the editor—might sound like a real bummer, and it is, but it has it’s compensations. For example, one of the truly great things about being the editor of Shalampax Speaks, is that I get to decide what gets published here each day. And what is being published here today is absolutely nothing.

I know what you are thinking, “everything that all of you people write is worth absolutely nothing.” That may be so, but this time I don’t mean that today’s post will, as usual, be totally worthless. I mean that absolutely nothing will appear here.

In truth, this is a test.

Neither I nor any of the other writers here want to do this job. Manexposinghimself, our Prime Minister, decided that Shalampax should have a news outlet and that it should be a blog.

To get this publication off the ground, he rounded up all of the Shalampaxians who were at least semi-literate and about whom he knew the juiciest of secrets. He then threatened to expose our secrets if we refused to write this blog. If you know anything about Shalampaxians, you know that almost nothing shames or embarrasses us. So, if they were sufficient grounds for blackmail, you can be certain that these secrets are especially scandalous.

But here’s my thinking. Parliament is shut down to celebrate an extended National Democracy Month. I seriously doubt that any of our Parliamentarians bother reading Shalampax Speaks. Hell, I doubt they can even read. And, with Parliament shut down, they’re not talking to those one or two members of their staffs who can read. So, if we don’t publish anything today, or until Parliament resumes sitting on March 3 for that matter, they probably won’t know.

So, this is a test. There is no post today. Now, go away.

Miscellaneous

They say, “If you haven’t got anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” That rule is honored more in the exception than the rule here in Shalampax. Were it not for a title and three sentences, this would be an exceptional day.

Miscellaneous