|
200 months ago today a huge
fire swept through
the pink-tiled halls and overcrowded display rooms
of the Municipal Man and Mammal Museum in
Cheesequake, reducing priceless primate fossils to
dust and attracting fire engines like flies from as far
away as Hellmouth and Runnamuck. Sirens could be
heard echoing up and down the lonely Horntoad
River Valley Turnpike as emergency vehicles and
volunteer policemen careened toward Cheesequake
flashing their lights, scraping their fenders on the
Dwight D. Eisenhour Victory Arch, and leaving oil
slicks on the pebbled streets. The actual blaze was
extinguished in about twenty minutes, but some
considerable subsequent damage was done by
various hard-eyed sheriffs and other local rescue
personnel.
200 months
ago today was the disastrous failure
of the attempt by the big international conglomerate
Fruit, Inc. to produce a less-smelly srain of durians, a
failure that they are now, 200 months later, just
beginning to get over. People and primates all over
Asia had been complaining for years about the
noxious odor of this peculiar but popular fruit, when
Fruit, Inc.'s Tropical Products and Commodities
Division stepped in and guaranteed to create a sweet-
smelling durian within two years. Now, after 200
months, we are still waiting.
200 months
ago today was the disappearance of
the famous Petrified Ischial Callosity from the
personal collection of Sir Ian Spotswood Allenby
Crofford-Wiggles, called 'Allen' by his friends, who
found it while motoring across Jujube in 1947. As
every sleepy student of paleoprimatology must know
by now, the ischial callosity, not being bone, does
not fossilize, and so the discovery of one preserved
in an 80,000-year old matrix layer, probably from a
vervet or rubberneck guenon, was really amazing.
But 200 months ago today it disappeared, and no one
has ever seemed to know what to do about it.
|