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life's rich pageant
Tuesday, 11 October 2005 10:45 amThe subject line is one of my mother's favourite quotes, and is taken from a particularly sententious announcer on Zim radio who used to follow up reports of practically anything with a head-shaking comment of "It's all part of life's rich pageant". Which is not a patch on the Zim announcer who, clearly bemused, identified the preceding classical piano piece as "Chopping Polonies In A Flat", but is still fairly quotable.
Life's rich pageant this morning was supposed to be a simple one-on-one struggle between the sound effects of the Army of Reconstruction, and my construction of merry encyclopedia entries and rapid-fire editorial comments on Young Mike's Commerce Honours project. Instead, I am being investigated by the police, in the shape of a rather sweet and very Afrikaans Captain from Paarl, plus silent side-kick.
Those who hang around Shire Central with any regularity may remember my occasional run-ins with assorted kooks and weirdos who find my name and/or photograph on the web, usually associated with the SCA, and, constructing elaborate personal scenarios around my mere existence, take it upon themselves to contact me. The opening salvo in this campaign was the gentleman of Native American descent known in local SCA circles as "the Foot Fetishist", who sent me a letter from the US, enclosing a photo of him (dubious, in a speedo) and another of his feet (dubious, hairy, sandalled), and wanted to start a correspondence for purposes of obtaining photos of my feet. I have not yet lived this down. However, the Foot Fetishist had a useful purpose, in that he creeped me out enough that I did a quick purge of all websites pertaining to me in any way, and made sure any contact details were box number only. This was fortunate, since the second approach was from a couple of gentlemen residing in the local maximum security prison.
The letters were, in their peculiarly bent way, works of art; hand-written with the painstaking care and regularity that suggests unhealthy obsession, and decorated with interesting pentagrams, drops of blood, weird symbols and general mystic squiggles. They made dark, cryptic mention of the "secret organisation" to which we both, apparently, belonged, and its high-level council of elders, mysterious powers of life and death, and general occultic menace. One gentleman professed himself willing to die in our cause. This was, of course, exceedingly disturbing, given that the secret organisation to which they referred was apparently our beloved local chapter of the SCA, who, while being medieval loons of the first water, are neither secret nor occultic, and are cryptic only in the higher mystic realms of things like heraldry, Elizabethan costuming and stick-jock tactical jargon.
Having made a valiant, public-spirited and unavailing attempt to inform the prison that some of their inmates were several sandwiches short of a picnic (they weren't interested), I promptly forgot about it. Yesterday, however, after various frantic phone calls between me and the local Marshal, it transpired that the intelligence unit were investigating the SCA, on the grounds of recent "allegations" made by one of these absurd gentleman, who, it turns out, is doing a life sentence for taking out a particularly nasty hit on his wife, and who appears to make a hobby out of baroque and implausible conspiracy theories which attempt to exonerate him from his crime. Apparently I figured in the allegations, by name, as the kingpin of this secret organisation - good lord, I'm an Evil Overlord! - and the local Marshal as the top assassin who implements my Evil Overlordian plans.
In the event, the slightly bemused Intelligence officers appear to be quite happy to accept the letters as evidence of inmate criminal lunacy and various printouts, newsletters and websites as evidence of the SCA's fairly harmless medieval lunacy, and we can all go on our way rejoicing. But the episode has left me with two overwhelming impressions: (a) the life of a life-sentence prisoner must be a bleak and horrible thing from which extended fantasy is the only escape, and (b) the Internet has an awful lot to answer for.
Life's rich pageant this morning was supposed to be a simple one-on-one struggle between the sound effects of the Army of Reconstruction, and my construction of merry encyclopedia entries and rapid-fire editorial comments on Young Mike's Commerce Honours project. Instead, I am being investigated by the police, in the shape of a rather sweet and very Afrikaans Captain from Paarl, plus silent side-kick.
Those who hang around Shire Central with any regularity may remember my occasional run-ins with assorted kooks and weirdos who find my name and/or photograph on the web, usually associated with the SCA, and, constructing elaborate personal scenarios around my mere existence, take it upon themselves to contact me. The opening salvo in this campaign was the gentleman of Native American descent known in local SCA circles as "the Foot Fetishist", who sent me a letter from the US, enclosing a photo of him (dubious, in a speedo) and another of his feet (dubious, hairy, sandalled), and wanted to start a correspondence for purposes of obtaining photos of my feet. I have not yet lived this down. However, the Foot Fetishist had a useful purpose, in that he creeped me out enough that I did a quick purge of all websites pertaining to me in any way, and made sure any contact details were box number only. This was fortunate, since the second approach was from a couple of gentlemen residing in the local maximum security prison.
The letters were, in their peculiarly bent way, works of art; hand-written with the painstaking care and regularity that suggests unhealthy obsession, and decorated with interesting pentagrams, drops of blood, weird symbols and general mystic squiggles. They made dark, cryptic mention of the "secret organisation" to which we both, apparently, belonged, and its high-level council of elders, mysterious powers of life and death, and general occultic menace. One gentleman professed himself willing to die in our cause. This was, of course, exceedingly disturbing, given that the secret organisation to which they referred was apparently our beloved local chapter of the SCA, who, while being medieval loons of the first water, are neither secret nor occultic, and are cryptic only in the higher mystic realms of things like heraldry, Elizabethan costuming and stick-jock tactical jargon.
Having made a valiant, public-spirited and unavailing attempt to inform the prison that some of their inmates were several sandwiches short of a picnic (they weren't interested), I promptly forgot about it. Yesterday, however, after various frantic phone calls between me and the local Marshal, it transpired that the intelligence unit were investigating the SCA, on the grounds of recent "allegations" made by one of these absurd gentleman, who, it turns out, is doing a life sentence for taking out a particularly nasty hit on his wife, and who appears to make a hobby out of baroque and implausible conspiracy theories which attempt to exonerate him from his crime. Apparently I figured in the allegations, by name, as the kingpin of this secret organisation - good lord, I'm an Evil Overlord! - and the local Marshal as the top assassin who implements my Evil Overlordian plans.
In the event, the slightly bemused Intelligence officers appear to be quite happy to accept the letters as evidence of inmate criminal lunacy and various printouts, newsletters and websites as evidence of the SCA's fairly harmless medieval lunacy, and we can all go on our way rejoicing. But the episode has left me with two overwhelming impressions: (a) the life of a life-sentence prisoner must be a bleak and horrible thing from which extended fantasy is the only escape, and (b) the Internet has an awful lot to answer for.
