Muffin Hunt

Something about the taunting tone of a comment left on the previous post has driven me to break off all other activities and devote the full resources of Fakiegrind Enterprises to finding the secret blog hideout of the mysterious Ms. Muffin.

However, after several weeks of searching the internet, the best our Agents have come up with is a series of Youtube postings featuring people's cats.

There's this one, for instance.

And this one.

And then there's this one.

But none of these felines bring us any closer to Ms. Muffin's blog, wherein, we have reason to believe, all the secrets of the universe are made clear.

Summer Hits the North

Yes, Fakiegrind Headquarters has moved, but our top secret ultra-new location is still within walking distance of Steeltown's ever-lovin', ever colourful north end. Just today, I was standing in the parking lot of the beer store, talking with an old acquantance whom I hadn't seen in a dog's age, when an overweight man approached on a mountain bike. He was wearing tight-fitting blue shorts and a matching tank-top, and had a large duffle bag slung over one shoulder. Approaching my friend and I, he slowed down.

Now, normally, a north end stranger weilding a large duffle bag and looking to make converstaion can mean only one thing: stolen merchandise available for resale at street-level prices. The only question in my mind was the particular nature of the hot goods being peddled (not that I was interested in procuring such items; my curiosity was purely academic). At any rate, the man was riding his (possibly stolen) mountain bike with one hand, and weilding a dinner fork in the other. Affixed to the end of the fork was a portentious chunk of what looked to be hamburger patty, it's pink innards gloriously exposed to the patchwork afternoon sunlight as it filtered through the overhead canopy of newly leafed trees.

The fellow did not keep my friend and I in suspense for long as to the nature of his wares, but, without dismounting his bike, inquired, his mouth half-full of beef patty,

"D'you guys wanna buy some meat?"

I should not have been surprised, but was, having never had meat solicited to me from a duffle bag in a beer store parking lot before. Though I had no desire to actually buy any of the fellow's product, I couldn't resist asking,

"Is it the same stuff you're currently eating?"

To which he replied, "Yeah!.." and there was a pause as the guy thought over my question, "...but raw".

And then the fellow was on his way, realizing from the tone of my inquiry, and with the sharpened senses of a street hawker to such things, that neither my friend nor I were seriously in the maket for discount street meat.

As he biked away, the guy's shorts revealed more of his posterior than modesty is generally wont to expose, and I quickly averted my gaze, wondering to myself at the colourful panorama of life that seems to burst into view with the first few warm days of summer. The whole encounter took less than twenty seconds, but the image of the short-shorted meat vendor is now burned in my mind: just another real-life Fakiegrind encounter unleashed upon the larger world via the magic of the internet.

More Setbacks

Movement, according to the ancient Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea (not to be confused with 21st century discount DJ, Zeno of Steeltown), is impossible. His reasoning was that, in order to get from point A to point B, one must first pass through the mid-point (C). However, in order to reach mid-point C, one must first reach the half-way point between A and C (point D). Yet, in order to get to point D, one must first pass through the point mid-way between A and D (point E), and so on, to infinity. Because one must pass through infinite half-way points before even reaching the half-way point between A and B, and because all alphabets so far designed by humanity have less than infinite characters, a traveller setting out to make the A-B journey would, argues Zeno, never actually arrive.

In the history of the Fakiegrind Corp. this argument has never been accepted as reasonable grounds for Agents not showing up for work in the morning. However, there seems to be some kind of Zeno-esque effect hindering our recent efforts to move Fakie Central to a new and super-secret location. Try as we might to empty out the Vaults of Oldness, to disconnect and re-install our dated but reliable vacuum tube computer system, and to reach the bottom of Dr. Flavour's stockpile of reference material on the great Papal schism of 1550, we are still not up and running as the reliable purveyors of encoded misinformation and poetic perversions of perversity that we so strive to be. Try as we might to bend time and space to speed up the re-location process, we find ourselves, week by week, even further behind than we though we were when last we evaluated the situation.

And so, we have created a special research team to investigate Zeno's philosophical debate with common sense and see if there might not be some loophole in his logic that we could exploit to our own advantage. While this might seem like a further waste of valuable time and resources, we are confident that, in the final analysis, we will be no further behind or ahead of where we were before we started (which was, essentially, neither here nor there).