The pre-med student looked ecstatic when he showed up in the doorway. Before closing the door, he held up a vial and shouted:
"We've got it, the one hundred day, one hundred percent voice killer"
The three students in the room looked horrified:
"Charlie,will you please sit and pipe down. Half the people in the hall can hear you".
Charlie pushed his mop of hair to one side and before the door was completely shut and announced in a much softer voice:
"They cooked this one from the Bordetella virus. The microbiologists worked all weekend, taking time to test it on a monkey at the animal lab. Works like a charm. That big rhesus is now as mute as a dead cell phone."
The three listeners moved closer and slowly started to smile in unison. One of them volunteered:
"How do you know this is going to last at least until the 4th of November?"
Charlie opened a beer that was handed to him but not before jamming the vial solidly into a shirt pocket.
"Easy, the Chinese call this virus the 'One Hundred Day Cough'. The real name is Pertussis. It works like this: a first toxin attaches to the ciliae in your respiratory tract; it's the 'Crazy Glue' in the virus. A second toxin paralyzes those hairs so that they stop propelling the mucus out of your lungs. The third toxin kills them dead while a final toxin gives a chest cold that you can't expel. The net result is that you cough like hell trying to get rid of mucus that slides right back down, having nothing to retain it. It takes about a hundred days to regrow new pulmonary hairs or ciliae. After that you feel well again.
But what Peter and his people did was to create a Bordetella virus with a genetic mutation...and a real 'cute' one at that".
The student who appeared to be the leader of the group asked for more details, all the while fingering his iPhone. Charlie went on after an extra long gulp of his beer:
" Now get this, they got the first and second toxin to attach to the vocal cords instead of to the lower airways. That mutation was already known so they mostly just had to make a culture.
Then, pointing to his shirt pocket, he added.
And guess what! There's enough virus in this vial for all 15-20 people on our list"
The three listeners' eyes grew wide and one of them added with a wicked smile.
"To get their message out, our victims will need a sound box like the one used by Stephen Hawkins. Can you just see this, Sean Hannity sounding like a robot, trying to make a point at 10 mph while his guests can run circles around him at 100 mph."
The young man next to him interrupted, sticking a friendly elbow to his rib cage.
This is assuming that moron Hannity can type. He would need a keyboard with one of those sound boxes.
.......
The leader had completed his phone call, pocketed the iPhone and checked his watch.
Fantastic work! And the other team has everything they need to know, Wendy's, Chinese Food Delivery, the times, the addresses... the whole enchilada. Get this, fellows, Mike's team will take delivery of the drugs at six am. We need to make eighteen packets, double bagged 'Baggies'. Wash your hands in the sink with lots of Clorox and don't touch your face.
He continued.
They've collected the eating habits of 18 of the people on our list. We need to finish the job and save our country from another Republican administration. From now on we are at the extreme degree of secrecy. We know that these will be highly visible victims. If you guys want to finish your semester outside of a federal jail, just try to go home tonight and forget everything you've seen or heard here. From now on it's the other team's turn to play. Let's just keep them in our prayers...and check your TV sets tomorrow night. If they succeed, we will have a bunch of talking heads out of commission for a very long time.
....
Bill O'Reilly was replaced because of his laryngitis. 'The Factor' had a poor Neilsen rating on the 12th of September as it always does when the 'big guy' is absent. The day before, like clockwork, Bill had for his 12:30PM lunch two pastrami sandwiches on rye with a large diet Coke. That meat had been shaken in the same 'baggie' laced earlier with the modified virus. Three operatives had been on his case, with three others left hanging at the other 5th Avenue caterer, one that sometimes delivered cheeseburgers to Bill at the Fox Studio. With Bill O'Reilly, they were'nt taking any chances.
Sean Hannity had three beef burritos with a strawberry milk shake. His voice attackers had to split the dose after the delivery boy was properly chloroformed in the elevator before having a chance to recognize his assailants. Then one of the burritos was destroyed in the process of swabing it with the virus. The plastic bag was later washed with part of the milk shake and poured back in its container. One of the students wrote a note apologizing for the damaged burrito.
The group leader angrily muttered at him.
You nuts or what?! Your handwriting will nail your ass if we get caught! Let's just deliver and dissolve in the street.
........
The owner of FoxNews, Rupert Murdock was out on his high horse and the receptionist was holding the phone at arms length.
Give me Gibson NOWWW! I'm not about to have FoxNews on sick leave all week.
It was explained to him by a studio head that all the station's stars were suffering a bout of severe laryngitis, Brit Hume, Hannity, O'Reilly, Kristol , Krauthammer, including Gibson. It was possible that the studio should be quarantined.
Murdock had a surprising reaction.
You crazy bum, there's no way I will let the left-wing loonies control the airwaves. I'll send you a few healthy replacements before the 5:00 o'clock Factor. Don't let Colmes or Juan on the air alone. Play some 9/11 tapes all day if you have to...and feed a lot of commercials, the high-paying ones.
No one could suspect at that time that the talking heads would not be back until after the November elections. As a matter of fact, the Murdock recruits all suffered similar cases of laryngitis. It was a less severe kind caught at the water cooler in the studio. This had been a last-minute idea from Dave, one of the gang waiting for Gibson's Chinese food delivery disguised as a FedEx man searching for a bill of lading. When he discovered that the meal was for Gibson's secretary, a cute little thing, the student went for the water cooler and, unseen, managed instead to squeeze the content of the baggie into it.
Even Alan Colmes, FoxNews' token democrat, got it. Everyone got it and the FoxNews Neilsen ratings went down the toilet for good. The replacements, Feith, Abrams, Ralph Peters, Wolfowitz, and young writers from the Weekly Standard and the New York Post went on air briefly one after the other, between documentaries and Billy Mays or Cialis commercials. They all petered out when their voices left.
A New York Times cartoon proclaimed 'The NeoCon...spiracy' showing Murdock as a master puppeteer dangling a bunch of empty strings over an electoral map of the USA.
Since a few liberals were equally affected, the entire episode was attributed to the unsanitary condition of the Fox Studio.
But the phenomenon spread. Karl Rove fell silent as well and the Republican party knew it had a problem. The coughing was a side effect that made Republicans shun all and each other to the point that the secret service would not even let a very hoarse McCain talk to the press or other party members. A microbiologist was assigned to Sarah Palin along with a van containing two nurses, microscopes and detection equipment.
At least Palin's voice was crystal clear when she was asked to represent the entire party in a last debate, just a week before the election. Nothing inappropriate there as the VP is to replace the President at a moment's notice according to the job description.
The first question, served by a cocky Olberman in his booming voice, was the hardest one to answer.
Governor Palin, assuming that Georgia has to live without South Ossetia and Abkhazia now occupied by Russian forces, how do you expect the NATO membership that you have wished for them could change anything. You realize, of course, that the Russians now control the trans-national road AND the gas pipeline, that their entire Black Sea fleet is sitting near Poti and that they are well on the way to completing a missile base in South Ossetia as part of the C.I.S. mutual defense plan?
Under those circumstances, don't you feel Gov Palin that their NATO membership would not do much for them and that it has been foolish to let them believe to the contrary, to believe that we would rush to their defense and risk an all-out war for a territory that is divided and much smaller than Alaska, one that has already lost two of its provinces at the demand of their own residents, most of them holding Russian passports, in the same way as we supported the breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia twelve years ago?
She was splendidly dressed from advice received from Cindy McCain fashion consultant, sporting new designer glasses to the great displeasure of 3,500,000 adoring American women who had just changed their own eyeglasses to the kind Sarah wore at the St Paul convention two months earlier.
Her self-assurance was a beauty to behold, her head cocked to one side as she responded smiling at Olberman's long-winded question.
I trust you expect a long answer with a question like this one Mr Olberman.
The audience laughed heartily. Then, a dead silence fell upon the auditorium as well as through the millions of households throughout North America and the rest of the world.
A moment later, she cocked her head the opposite way and tapped her concealed earpiece with an impatient and heavily lacquered fingernail.
Her panicked eyes hidden by a complex toupee with hair extensions, she was observed to mutter something that no one could hear.
Why don't you feed me my lines you *ucking genius speechwriter!
The genius backstage was having the classic coughing spell, shoving the microphone helmet wildy at Karl Rove without being clearly understood. The dose had been formidable, infecting a coffee pot that the poor man had emptied to the last drop. At any rate, like the seventeen others, Karl would have been incapable to help; he had a few more weeks to go on the silent trail, peppering the party with post-it notes, text messages and other desperate means of giving out his precious advice.
What saved the day for Sarah Palin was her faked coughing spell, delivered with great talent and teary eyes, her face flushed as red as the party colors and prompting Olberman, ever the gentleman, to propose a postponement of the event.
Nothing saved the election, however, as Democrats easily won 300 seats. Americans could not vote for such a sickly bunch nor could they believe in a conspiracy since others that were unconnected were also afflicted. Larry King got it, Oprah got it ...and oh! I was going to forget, even Billy Mays went silent.
A week after the elections, FoxNews lost credibility when all their talking heads came back in full force, claiming that the 'loony left' had poisoned their voices. When MSNBC hit the 10,000,000 viewers in January, FoxNews closed its door at a paltry 200,000 viewers. Murdock had had enough of the humiliation, deciding to sell the news channel to a third party headed by a group of students that had inherited a lot of money. They wanted to create a humorous cable channel. They never told the bitter old man that the station would be called 'FoxNoise' and would be a parody of his old cable news channel. Neither did they tell him that the money for the cash purchase came from George Soros, proud sponsor of the virus research, a man now sitting on Obama's cabinet as a National Health Care advisor.
O'Reilly and Limbaugh, having let down their party, both moved to the Dominican Republic with a ten-year supply of Cialis and prostitutes. 'LaryngoPhobia' is now an ailment described in Wikipedia. The two men only eat canned food that they themselves open and wolf down without touching any plate or utensil for fear of losing their new-found voice. Both have grown so fat and sick as to scare the little kids that hang around their cabanas by the sea. Both were turned down when they applied for a broadcast license for a talk-radio show on the island. Rejected, they both went to the local watering hole to be consoled by a new barman, a freshly shaved American who earlier had lost his advertising business after being sued for breach of contract. He had become another refugee needing to work hard for a living. He wiped the table in front of the two men and, with a loud and clearly irritating voice, readied to take their order.
Billy Mays here, what can I do you for?
.........
Cantamar MX, 2008
"We've got it, the one hundred day, one hundred percent voice killer"
The three students in the room looked horrified:
"Charlie,will you please sit and pipe down. Half the people in the hall can hear you".
Charlie pushed his mop of hair to one side and before the door was completely shut and announced in a much softer voice:
"They cooked this one from the Bordetella virus. The microbiologists worked all weekend, taking time to test it on a monkey at the animal lab. Works like a charm. That big rhesus is now as mute as a dead cell phone."
The three listeners moved closer and slowly started to smile in unison. One of them volunteered:
"How do you know this is going to last at least until the 4th of November?"
Charlie opened a beer that was handed to him but not before jamming the vial solidly into a shirt pocket.
"Easy, the Chinese call this virus the 'One Hundred Day Cough'. The real name is Pertussis. It works like this: a first toxin attaches to the ciliae in your respiratory tract; it's the 'Crazy Glue' in the virus. A second toxin paralyzes those hairs so that they stop propelling the mucus out of your lungs. The third toxin kills them dead while a final toxin gives a chest cold that you can't expel. The net result is that you cough like hell trying to get rid of mucus that slides right back down, having nothing to retain it. It takes about a hundred days to regrow new pulmonary hairs or ciliae. After that you feel well again.
But what Peter and his people did was to create a Bordetella virus with a genetic mutation...and a real 'cute' one at that".
The student who appeared to be the leader of the group asked for more details, all the while fingering his iPhone. Charlie went on after an extra long gulp of his beer:
" Now get this, they got the first and second toxin to attach to the vocal cords instead of to the lower airways. That mutation was already known so they mostly just had to make a culture.
Then, pointing to his shirt pocket, he added.
And guess what! There's enough virus in this vial for all 15-20 people on our list"
The three listeners' eyes grew wide and one of them added with a wicked smile.
"To get their message out, our victims will need a sound box like the one used by Stephen Hawkins. Can you just see this, Sean Hannity sounding like a robot, trying to make a point at 10 mph while his guests can run circles around him at 100 mph."
The young man next to him interrupted, sticking a friendly elbow to his rib cage.
This is assuming that moron Hannity can type. He would need a keyboard with one of those sound boxes.
.......
The leader had completed his phone call, pocketed the iPhone and checked his watch.
Fantastic work! And the other team has everything they need to know, Wendy's, Chinese Food Delivery, the times, the addresses... the whole enchilada. Get this, fellows, Mike's team will take delivery of the drugs at six am. We need to make eighteen packets, double bagged 'Baggies'. Wash your hands in the sink with lots of Clorox and don't touch your face.
He continued.
They've collected the eating habits of 18 of the people on our list. We need to finish the job and save our country from another Republican administration. From now on we are at the extreme degree of secrecy. We know that these will be highly visible victims. If you guys want to finish your semester outside of a federal jail, just try to go home tonight and forget everything you've seen or heard here. From now on it's the other team's turn to play. Let's just keep them in our prayers...and check your TV sets tomorrow night. If they succeed, we will have a bunch of talking heads out of commission for a very long time.
....
Bill O'Reilly was replaced because of his laryngitis. 'The Factor' had a poor Neilsen rating on the 12th of September as it always does when the 'big guy' is absent. The day before, like clockwork, Bill had for his 12:30PM lunch two pastrami sandwiches on rye with a large diet Coke. That meat had been shaken in the same 'baggie' laced earlier with the modified virus. Three operatives had been on his case, with three others left hanging at the other 5th Avenue caterer, one that sometimes delivered cheeseburgers to Bill at the Fox Studio. With Bill O'Reilly, they were'nt taking any chances.
Sean Hannity had three beef burritos with a strawberry milk shake. His voice attackers had to split the dose after the delivery boy was properly chloroformed in the elevator before having a chance to recognize his assailants. Then one of the burritos was destroyed in the process of swabing it with the virus. The plastic bag was later washed with part of the milk shake and poured back in its container. One of the students wrote a note apologizing for the damaged burrito.
The group leader angrily muttered at him.
You nuts or what?! Your handwriting will nail your ass if we get caught! Let's just deliver and dissolve in the street.
........
The owner of FoxNews, Rupert Murdock was out on his high horse and the receptionist was holding the phone at arms length.
Give me Gibson NOWWW! I'm not about to have FoxNews on sick leave all week.
It was explained to him by a studio head that all the station's stars were suffering a bout of severe laryngitis, Brit Hume, Hannity, O'Reilly, Kristol , Krauthammer, including Gibson. It was possible that the studio should be quarantined.
Murdock had a surprising reaction.
You crazy bum, there's no way I will let the left-wing loonies control the airwaves. I'll send you a few healthy replacements before the 5:00 o'clock Factor. Don't let Colmes or Juan on the air alone. Play some 9/11 tapes all day if you have to...and feed a lot of commercials, the high-paying ones.
No one could suspect at that time that the talking heads would not be back until after the November elections. As a matter of fact, the Murdock recruits all suffered similar cases of laryngitis. It was a less severe kind caught at the water cooler in the studio. This had been a last-minute idea from Dave, one of the gang waiting for Gibson's Chinese food delivery disguised as a FedEx man searching for a bill of lading. When he discovered that the meal was for Gibson's secretary, a cute little thing, the student went for the water cooler and, unseen, managed instead to squeeze the content of the baggie into it.
Even Alan Colmes, FoxNews' token democrat, got it. Everyone got it and the FoxNews Neilsen ratings went down the toilet for good. The replacements, Feith, Abrams, Ralph Peters, Wolfowitz, and young writers from the Weekly Standard and the New York Post went on air briefly one after the other, between documentaries and Billy Mays or Cialis commercials. They all petered out when their voices left.
A New York Times cartoon proclaimed 'The NeoCon...spiracy' showing Murdock as a master puppeteer dangling a bunch of empty strings over an electoral map of the USA.
Since a few liberals were equally affected, the entire episode was attributed to the unsanitary condition of the Fox Studio.
But the phenomenon spread. Karl Rove fell silent as well and the Republican party knew it had a problem. The coughing was a side effect that made Republicans shun all and each other to the point that the secret service would not even let a very hoarse McCain talk to the press or other party members. A microbiologist was assigned to Sarah Palin along with a van containing two nurses, microscopes and detection equipment.
At least Palin's voice was crystal clear when she was asked to represent the entire party in a last debate, just a week before the election. Nothing inappropriate there as the VP is to replace the President at a moment's notice according to the job description.
The first question, served by a cocky Olberman in his booming voice, was the hardest one to answer.
Governor Palin, assuming that Georgia has to live without South Ossetia and Abkhazia now occupied by Russian forces, how do you expect the NATO membership that you have wished for them could change anything. You realize, of course, that the Russians now control the trans-national road AND the gas pipeline, that their entire Black Sea fleet is sitting near Poti and that they are well on the way to completing a missile base in South Ossetia as part of the C.I.S. mutual defense plan?
Under those circumstances, don't you feel Gov Palin that their NATO membership would not do much for them and that it has been foolish to let them believe to the contrary, to believe that we would rush to their defense and risk an all-out war for a territory that is divided and much smaller than Alaska, one that has already lost two of its provinces at the demand of their own residents, most of them holding Russian passports, in the same way as we supported the breakaway of Kosovo from Serbia twelve years ago?
She was splendidly dressed from advice received from Cindy McCain fashion consultant, sporting new designer glasses to the great displeasure of 3,500,000 adoring American women who had just changed their own eyeglasses to the kind Sarah wore at the St Paul convention two months earlier.
Her self-assurance was a beauty to behold, her head cocked to one side as she responded smiling at Olberman's long-winded question.
I trust you expect a long answer with a question like this one Mr Olberman.
The audience laughed heartily. Then, a dead silence fell upon the auditorium as well as through the millions of households throughout North America and the rest of the world.
A moment later, she cocked her head the opposite way and tapped her concealed earpiece with an impatient and heavily lacquered fingernail.
Her panicked eyes hidden by a complex toupee with hair extensions, she was observed to mutter something that no one could hear.
Why don't you feed me my lines you *ucking genius speechwriter!
The genius backstage was having the classic coughing spell, shoving the microphone helmet wildy at Karl Rove without being clearly understood. The dose had been formidable, infecting a coffee pot that the poor man had emptied to the last drop. At any rate, like the seventeen others, Karl would have been incapable to help; he had a few more weeks to go on the silent trail, peppering the party with post-it notes, text messages and other desperate means of giving out his precious advice.
What saved the day for Sarah Palin was her faked coughing spell, delivered with great talent and teary eyes, her face flushed as red as the party colors and prompting Olberman, ever the gentleman, to propose a postponement of the event.
Nothing saved the election, however, as Democrats easily won 300 seats. Americans could not vote for such a sickly bunch nor could they believe in a conspiracy since others that were unconnected were also afflicted. Larry King got it, Oprah got it ...and oh! I was going to forget, even Billy Mays went silent.
A week after the elections, FoxNews lost credibility when all their talking heads came back in full force, claiming that the 'loony left' had poisoned their voices. When MSNBC hit the 10,000,000 viewers in January, FoxNews closed its door at a paltry 200,000 viewers. Murdock had had enough of the humiliation, deciding to sell the news channel to a third party headed by a group of students that had inherited a lot of money. They wanted to create a humorous cable channel. They never told the bitter old man that the station would be called 'FoxNoise' and would be a parody of his old cable news channel. Neither did they tell him that the money for the cash purchase came from George Soros, proud sponsor of the virus research, a man now sitting on Obama's cabinet as a National Health Care advisor.
O'Reilly and Limbaugh, having let down their party, both moved to the Dominican Republic with a ten-year supply of Cialis and prostitutes. 'LaryngoPhobia' is now an ailment described in Wikipedia. The two men only eat canned food that they themselves open and wolf down without touching any plate or utensil for fear of losing their new-found voice. Both have grown so fat and sick as to scare the little kids that hang around their cabanas by the sea. Both were turned down when they applied for a broadcast license for a talk-radio show on the island. Rejected, they both went to the local watering hole to be consoled by a new barman, a freshly shaved American who earlier had lost his advertising business after being sued for breach of contract. He had become another refugee needing to work hard for a living. He wiped the table in front of the two men and, with a loud and clearly irritating voice, readied to take their order.
Billy Mays here, what can I do you for?
.........
Cantamar MX, 2008
3 comments:
a bit long but entertaining.
Jacques: I think you've found your "niche." Political satire. Immensely amusing and innovative. Loved the whole Sarah Palin scenario.
I find that political analysis far too complex !
The only fact to take into account with this coming election 2008 in our country is the fact that before that there is also the federal election in Canada. Canada will give itself a conservative majority government.
History shows that under thoses circumstances, it is better to have a republican administration at the White House.
So this is it. All other arguments are minor. We must vote for John Mcain and Sarah Palin.
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