posted 10-07-2011 06:08 PM                    

quote:

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High on a rocky promontory sat an Electric Monk on a bored horse.
From under its rough woven cowl the Monk gazed unblinkingly down into
another valley, with which it was having a problem.
The day was hot, the sun stood in an empty hazy sky and beat down
upon the grey rocks and the scrubby, parched grass. Nothing moved, not
even the Monk. The horse's tail moved a little, swishing slightly to
try and move a little air, but that was all. Otherwise, nothing moved.
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher
or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus
saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched
tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it
yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what
was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the
things the world expected you to believe.
Unfortunately this Electric Monk had developed a fault, and had
started to believe all kinds of things, more or less at random.
It was even beginning to believe things they'd have difficulty believing in
Salt Lake City. It had never heard of Salt Lake City, of course. Nor
had it ever heard of a quingigillion, which was roughly the number of
miles between this valley and the Great Salt Lake of Utah.

The problem with the valley was this. The Monk currently believed
that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including
the Monk itself and the Monk's horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.
This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from
any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere
impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous. Hence the immobility
of the Monk and the boredom of the horse, which had had to put up with
a lot of silly things in its time but was secretly of the opinion that
this was one of the silliest.

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