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Back in 1490, Leonardo da Ladro (cousin of da Vinci) made a deal with Lorenzo de Medici, great wealthy patriarch of the fabulous de Medicis, promising him he will turn lead into gold. Da Ladro really believed in the idea and employed hundreds of learned practitioners or ‘scientists’.
After ten years and investing millions of gold coins, Lorenzo wanted to pull out and wanted his money back. Da Ladro said he didn’t have it. Lorenzo demanded all those scientists captured and put to work for him as slaves, for the rest of their life to pay off the debt.
The scientists said nix, they had worked for the money and weren’t going into slavery as well. Lorenzo got angry and had a few murdered to frighten them. The scientists murdered some of Lorenzo’s bankers in revenge. Bodies floated in the Grand Canal of Venice.
Da Ladro purchased a cadaver and used it as a proxy to stage his funeral in Venice and get Lorenzo off his back. That done, he sailed to America to develop a recipe making a brown gassy drink laced with cocaine.
One night he drank half a dozen bottles, using too much seasoning. At daybreak, thinking he could outdo his famous cousin, by solving the mystery of flight singlehanded, he glued feathers all over the torso of his drunken drinking mate and pitched him out of a barrel as they rode it down over Niagra Falls.
He later claimed a series of firsts. First Italian to plunge down Niagra Falls, First Stoned Dare-Devil over the Falls, First and Last Attempt to Fly a man away from the Falls etc....
A half-feathered body was found three days later.
A hobo noticed a piece of paper in the poor dead man’s wet pantaloons and quietly took it home. It was handed down through ten generations of the hobo’s family until finally a smart young man decided to try the recipe. He first called it Conka Clonka (brand names were unimportant in those days), but his grandfather, tired of losing his dentures every time he said it, came up with a smoother handle and the rest is history.
The tit-for-tat murders would sometimes wane through the centuries and things would go quiet. But once in a while someone would remember the memory of a murdered ancestor and go looking for a victim. Bankers murdered Scientists (strangled by bankruptcy leading to starvation), or Scientists murdered Bankers (Merry Christmas cigars made of plastic explosives).
We take up the story to-day with two questions –Why are these serial murders happening once again? And –who is behind this outrage?
Why? The supposed reason is revenge –the Calamari symbol on each murdered victim. Another rumoured reason is a Mafia inspired plan to break the bullion vault deep inside a Swiss Mountain and blame it on the possibly extinct Calamari.
Once a year, during the “Ceremony of The Bonuses”, Four Gnomes of Zurich, eminent monsignors of the Capitalist Church, are appointed to press their left ear one after the other to an image-reading device to open the massive doors of the grand bullion vault buried in the Swiss mountains.
(Eye-ball security reading was abandoned after numerous incidents of eye gouging happened, a sloppy technique suddenly made fashionable in a popular book of fiction. Eyeballs were stolen and used to gain entry to Top Secret Science Labs, DisneyLand, basketball games, Masonic Balls (aprons only), executive toilets, etc. On the positive side, these atrocities highlighted recognition of a disabled sector and opened new career opportunities for specialists -one-eyed judges, umpires, parking inspectors, pirates, etc.)
Please take a deep breath and read on......
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“You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.” -said honest Abraham Lincoln, former president of the United States.
“- HAR!-HAR ! That motto is a salesman’s delight ! By logical extension there is always somebody ready to buy something useless sometime.”....argued shifty Noodles, as he thought up ways to make a quick buck........