If you are anything like me good reader (and since you are here at all I must assume that, in some small way at least, you are) you look at the image above, and you read the caption, and you wonder, “what does that mean?” It seems simple enough. A quirky drawing; a short caption. You can’t help but run through possibilities– A comic strip? A children’s book? An illustration from an exposé on the secrets of magic? A rejected New Yorker Cartoon? And yet… it remains opaque somehow doesn’t it?. I mean “M. Ivorde’s little man?” That seems odd. And what’s with the space helmet? And what’s that he’s holding? A metal detector? A street sweeper’s dust-pan? Just what exactly is happening here?
I came across this image accidentally, much as you have, and if you’re anything like me you’re a curious sort and would like nothing better than to just click a link real quick, satisfy that curiosity, and move on. Well, having been down that road I have to ask you, in all seriousness, is that really what you want? I mean, couldn’t you just let it go?
I don’t mean to be mysterious or coy, really I don’t. It’s just that if I, you know, put the link right here you’d click it, and having succumb to exactly the same sort of noncommittal “oh, I’ll just poke around in the dark corners of the internet with nary a care” temptation that I did, without even a smidgeon of wariness, all sense of self-preservation lulled to sleep by the comfy familiarity of the action, you might, well… lets just say I feel I ought to do you the favor of warning against it.
It’s for your own good. Really. Because you know what would happen? You’d see things, and your valuable minutes would just start slipping away like so many slapstick banana peels.
For instance, you’d see headlines, preceeded by numbers, in bold blue type, which said strange things, in clipped English translation, like–
#1. Who are these “changelings”
#19. Male UFOnauts love to impersonate saints or Jesus
#I2. How the evolution of God looked like
#8. Why I believe that I have a moral obligation, and a moral right, to declare the “telekinesis free zone”?
#B3. How “Teecee”, means my four-legged friend, companion, and teacher, was murdered with the “machine of UFOnauts for inducing cancers”, and what knowledge emerges for all of us from his painful death
#22. Bitter truth is better than sweet lie
Reading them here in the relative safety of The Nonist’s soft and uncluttered monochrome is one thing. No sweat. You can see them for what they are and chuckle a bit perhaps. But if these headlines were surrounded on all sides by dense blocks of seemingly endless text, in randomly shifting point-sizes and thicknesses, rendered throughout in black and red and blue and green? What then?
More importantly what would happen when it dawned on you that the behind a large portion of the links which pocked each page were images? Images I say! (Oh yes, I know you, with your ravenous eyes.) Would you, curious and careless internaut that you are, have the strength of will to just turn away from it all? More to the point could you resist clicking on links with descriptions like, oh, I don’t know…
The operation of the Johnson telekinetic motor.
Cross-section through the smallest Magnocraft type K3 that shows the design and main features of this starship
Personal propulsion with propulsors in epolettes.
An arrangement of oscillatory chambers called “spider configuration”.
One of Tables that combine different shapes of UFOs.
Magnetic circuits and magnetic whirl.
The design of the telepathic pyramid.
An ancient plan for a cubical Oscillatory Chamber of the first generation, recorded in the form of so-called “tanka” drawing of Tibetan Buddhists.
Path of light in a magnetic lens.
A technique for NO/NO answers in a pendulum.
I didn’t think so.
Of course clicking the links I’ve offered you was painless because I am gentle with you. I love you and don’t want to see you hurt. I don’t want your eyes to bleed and I don’t want to pierce your skull with a headache so loathsome that it went unnamed and uncataloged at the Creation.
But imagine if, instead of the neatly lined-up and underlined links above, there were hundreds, some in bold green, some in blue, some in tiny underlined black, and each one opened a new browser window, and every page was slow to load, and half the pages opened in Polish, and everywhere you clicked you found yourself more disoriented and confused, and every caption you read was full of strangeness, and every paragraph you waded into just turned you in circles and created more exasperating questions than they answered, and everywhere your eye landed there was some sort of frustrating lunacy– angels and telekinesis and UFOnauts and magnocraft and levitating tables and dipolar gravity and bandits and devils and free energy and cover-ups and changelings…
And all you wanted to know was “How M. Ivorde’s little man climbed the back wall.”
Do you see what I’m trying to tell you here?
Allow me to parallel a couple of popular quotations by way of artful clarification-
• The truth is out there.
• You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!
And you know what else? You really don’t even want to.
So please, for the miserly love of a fictitious God, please do not visit this page.
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