Category: Fables

• Henry VIII submits a pull request for an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon. The Pope rejected the pull request. Henry VIII forked the Catholic Church as Church of England.
• Martin Luther submits a pull request with 99 changes. The Pope rejects the pull request. Martin Luther creates a new project from scratch in a different programming language. It gets forked lots of times, in spite of Martin Luther’s best efforts.
• The Continental Congress forks the Articles of Confederation into the US Constitution. James Madison submits a pull request for 10 major changes. It takes a while for everyone to review them.
• After about a decade on the prohibition-era branch, the United States reverts to master.
• And so on and so on.
  

Mr. Null had a problem. Everywhere he went, computers gave up the ghost. They just stopped working. No one could figure out why. His good friend Drop Tables had similar problems. Mr. Null hadn’t yet figured out how to buy airplane tickets and good luck signing up for Amazon Prime! It was funny, but he never could find his friend And Not’s webpage. Mr. Null did like backgammon, though, which worked just fine and the birds of the air and the beasts of the field were pretty chummy with him.

Moral: Sometimes you need to change your name to take advantage of all the information age has to offer.

When you sign up with the fable-teller temp agency, they issue you a toga and a pair of sandals (you get the honor of paying for them, natch). Also, an assortment of three to five animals to “listen” to you while you tell your fables. (The dirty little secret is that the animal trainers make easily double, on average, what the contract fable-tellers make.) Unfortunately, most of the time, there’s a real glut of fable-tellers. Just look around. If you see a score of bedraggled folks in togas followed around by weird assortments of animals (sometimes dressed in cute hats and/or vests), chances are good that your town is oversaturated with fable-tellers.

Moral: With so many fable-tellers, you’re better off going to the Sonneteers Agency across the street.

People were enraged. They’d been eating these tacos for years. The taco guy, Gustav, made some pretty terrible tacos. I mean, they were pretty tasty. But they were overpriced, slow, and sometimes they were missing ingredients. And if you wanted to complain, he made you talk to his terrifying children, Ulf and Gerta. They sometimes made you talk to them for hours before you could get another taco and sometimes they wouldn’t talk to you at all. Then one day, this cart swooped into town. This guy was all about fiber. People jumped at the chance. Anything to get away from Gustav!

Moral: Sometimes any alternative is a good alternative.

One time there was this bug who got stuck inside a machine causing it to work incorrectly. This smart woman found the bug and taped it to a piece of paper as a joke. (Ha ha!) That bug was infamous! Soon, whenever a machine would stop working, people would be all, there must be a bug in it! (Ha ha!) Gremlins were right out. All the gremlins packed up their infernal make-it-break tools and trudged sadly home (which was inside a tree). They retooled and soon they were making not-very-delicious cookies that were insanely popular due to a pretty catchy ad campaign. Go figure. The bugs were not pleased with their ascension to metaphorical scapegoat and soon they lost all meaning at all, in the original sense of bug, that is. “Why couldn’t they have used buggy in its original sense (a small, two-wheeled horse-drawn carriage–in Great Britain–four in the U.S.),” all the bugs cried, uniformly, because if you’d seen one bug you’d seen them all. “Speaking of, we don’t even look like bugs anymore! Where’s our six legs? Where’s our exoskeleton? Where’s our antennae? Where’s our (sometimes) wings? Our compound eyes, our segmented bodies, and our thorax?”

Moral: It’s not easy being a metaphor.

One day, this coati came to town. (Don’t know what a coati is? They’re weird looking!) Everyone was perturbed, but not for the reasons you might think. It wasn’t the long, slightly too-pointed snout. Nor was it the vaguely ringed, lemur-like tail. Nope, all the townsfolk were slightly bothered by the fact that the coati wasn’t from around there, from out of town, you might say. The townsfolk liked things the way they were (even though they’d only been that way for about five years or so) and they didn’t want to see that coati waltz in there and change things all around. How the coati might achieve these changes was something of a mystery, but the townsfolk weren’t strong on reasoning when it came to hot button topics like The State of My Town. The coati just sort of wandered around, eating bugs or jello or whatever it is they eat. Some time passed. The town was still there. Everyone was still kind of doing their own thing. A few things had changed, but it had happened so gradually, no one really even noticed. One day, this tarsier came to town. All the townsfolk were perturbed, but not by its big eyes and anglo-saxon sensibilities (it loved meat-heavy breakfasts and tea). No, they were bothered by the fact that the tarsier wasn’t from around there…

Moral: Change is tough to deal with if you assume it’s unusual.

The gnomes were in love with clockwork. They just loved them some gears and wigwams and sprockets. Also, gewgaws. They were always making machines. They loved making machines so much they wanted other people to see them. Especially the elves. Boy, those gnomes loved sending their machines to the elves. The elves were somewhat bemused by all these machines that kept arriving all the time. (By flying clockwork delivery monkeys, natch.) Still, the elves were good sports and started casting effervescent, but strictly-tested, spells upon those machines to make them do other stuff. “Hey gnomes,” they’d say (via magical speakamaphone, obvs), “check out what we’ve magically done to your funky gizmoes! Now they spit out bananas/entice hummingbirds into houses/make everyone just feel groovy/etc/etc/etc!” The gnomes were all, “That’s great, elves. Only hey, we found something slightly off with JoklaryopterKlonk 17a37JuiceMonkeyX7892.xv5! Here’s our new version: JoklaryopterKlonk 17a37JuiceMonkeyX7892.xv6!” The elves were like, “Oh great! Now our hummingbird enticer thingy brings all the hummingbirds to the yard instead of our houses. Geeze.” It basically went on like that forever. But still, it was pretty great to be an elf and gnome, all things being equal.

Moral: Pretty sure the elves are always gonna have a hard time understanding the gnomes and vice versa.

So, you know, Hansel and Gretel were lost in the woods and stuff. They had thrown these breadcrumbs everywhere, but the birds at them all. Kids, amirite? I bet you didn’t know that there was another witch. She lived in a house made of vegetables. Carrots, beets, celery, spinach. You name it, if it was a vegetable, it was in that freaking house. It was all held together with vegemite. Hansel and Gretel took one look at it and ran screaming (further) into the forest.

Moral: No one ever got fat being a vegetable witch.

People were super bummed out, because, turns out, everything except for beets and arugula caused cancer. In order to enjoy stuff vicariously, everyone started watching robots eat stuff. The most popular by far was the bacon-eating robot. People just loved that bacon-eating robot. They couldn’t get enough of the (robot eating the) stuff. There were YouTube channels set up for different camera angles on the robot just chewing and chewing and chewing that bacon. Now, it couldn’t be said that the robot was enjoying the bacon, per se, but its programmers had added some audio tracks to simulate enjoyment. MMmmmms and lipsticks and ohmygods and whatnot. There were even localized voice packs so you could hear the robot “enjoying” bacon in your particular dialect of whatever language. Not to mention male and female voice packs. Also kids. One day there was a massive solar flare and it just fried everyone on the planet. That bacon-eating robot kept on eating that bacon, though. A couple millennia later some aliens sure were mystified by that robot, because it seemed to serve no purpose. (It’s science fiction, all right, I don’t know how it ate bacon for so long!)

Moral: If something brings you delight, maybe it’s worth a slightly higher risk of cancer?

All the other elephants made fun of Stanley, because he kept forgetting stuff. Boy, that sure got him steamed up. It seemed like every 10,000 memories or so, he’d just start losing the older ones. Good luck remembering what he had for breakfast last solstice. The other elephants didn’t seem to have any trouble remembering. So Stanley broke down and paid a bunch of peanuts to the Memorizer (a mystical guru from a small suburb in Cleveland) so that he too could Never Forget Stuff. OK, so that happened, after a lot of mumbo jumbo and hoodoo-type stuff. For a while, it was pretty sweet. But then Stanley realized that there were maybe some things he didn’t really want to remember, like that embarrassing thing he’d said to his cousin Henrietta. Oof. Stanley got so busy rememberin’ that he forgot to do too much other stuff.

Moral: Remembering everything sounds nice, but is it really?