Go with the Floe

Much like the T.A.R.D.I.S. in the British sci-fi serial Dr. Who, Fakiegrind headquarters, while taking up very little geographical space, actually spreads out into so many other-dimensional nooks and crannies as to inhabit whole continents of what is known by some Philosophers of Flux as G-space. Crafted we know not how by the ingenious Dr. Flavour and his team of trained cybernetic marmosets, the old Fakiegrind Headquarters was installed piecemeal in those out of the way and unused corners of reality that nobody seems to miss, but which hold together the more high-profile and seemingly necessary space-time segments like so much ontological glue. A snip of the temporal fabric here, a tuck of gravitational fields there and pretso! you have a pan-dimensional, extra-temporal embassy of anarchy and retrograde motion woven so finely into the tapestry of impermanence as to be nearly undetectable to most major forms of divination, both modern and archaic.

Yes, we stuffed the old Headquarters (and underlying Vaults of Oldness) with so much cultural debris and cryptological detritus that even the in-house librarian and archivist, Sinbad the Sneezer, didn't know the full extent of our holdings. It's a tired truism that only when you go to move do you realize how much stuff you actually have, and we've been excavating each little treasure trove and spider hole, being careful not to set off any bedpans of mass instruction in the process. The endeavor has been taking a long time, and postings have been dwindling (you might have watched the Fox special last Saturday focusing on the fallout surrounding Fakiegrind's lapse — I had no idea the south Asian lychee nut crop was so intimately linked to our microcosmic publishing efforts!) Please bear with us. Disentangling Dr. Flavour's labyrinth of linked wormholes is a painstaking process requiring our utmost attention and concentration. It just wouldn't do to accidentally cave in a time-flux conduit and wipe out a whole era of geological time, for instance. Extinct dinosaurs are one thing, but think of how upset your kids would be if they never even existed!

The other reason for the lack of recent posts is our difficulties in getting the new headquarters wired for high-speed internet. Until we iron out some minor difficulties surrounding installing cable through the fourteen inch, reinforced steel walls of the Fakiegrind panic room — into which I have been forced to repair due to recent paranoia over the sudden disappearance of the Xister from our 5th-dimensional radar tracking system — I have been resorting to running the blog the old fashion way, that is, via courier.

The process goes like this: I dictate Fakiegrind transmissions to my secretary, Ms. Radixumpoid, who takes it all down in shorthand. She delivers her arcanely-inscribed sheets to Agent Fiss-Mastidon, who proceeds to translate Ms. Radixumpoids scribbles into a cursive those of us not trained in the secretarial arts but having received at least a rudimentary education in the public schooling system can understand. Fiss-Mastidon makes three copies: one goes to the Fakie proof reader, Sigmund Pillfree; the second is sent to the P.R. department to catch any embarrassing gaffs or perversions of truth which might otherwise tarnish the sheen of our exemplar reputation for delivering high grade nonsense at discount prices. The third copy is whisked away by the Fakie Marshal, and locked in a safety deposit box along with the proof of purchases from every box of cereal ever eaten by any of the staff here at Fakiegrind (you can often send them away for prizes).

Once the proof copy is properly screened and cross-referenced with the P.R. copy, we hold a staff meeting to determine how the particular post fits into the blog as a whole, and to discuss directions we might like to take the post in in terms of pictorial supplementation, type-font augmentation, lexicographical-cranial alimentation, and other technical matters. Then we do a test posting and run it through two or three focus groups, which, though picked at random from far-flung segments of the population, always seem to consist of the same four or five characters who are primarily interested in the free sandwiches and pop.

Finally, once the focus group feedback has been analyzed and the marketing team has had a run at it to screen for possible product placement and merchandise spin-offs, the finished text is sent to a buddy of ours with a high-speed internet connection, a fellow in the east end who types it in and posts it when he, like, gets around to it dude.

So, you see, what might appear at first glance like a casual blogging endeavor, done in idle hours for the sheer enjoyment of adding our voice to the multitudes of self-publishing enthusiast who populate the e-wires, is actually a quite involved process relying on the skills of a whole legion of highly-trained individuals to bring it to fruition. And, if it takes a little longer to bring you the time-wasting tidbits you have come to rely upon over the past two years that Fakiegrind has been live, then we hope that you will understand and come to relish those postings that do appear even more, and that you will wait with baited breath for them so that you can leave a comment or two and be part of the whole, glorious process — be immortalized, if only for an instant, in the annals of Fakiedom, until some higher power, perhaps from another, far-away galaxy, or even a whole other dimension, parallel to our own but different in a few crucial ways, thus giving its inhabitants what would seem to us to be incredible powers, comes and pulls the plug on this little festival of frenetic flippancy. 'Till that day comes, be sure to eat your Wheeties and, of course, stay old.