Coming soon… Not Very Intelligent Design Too : Planet Earth
Kneeling Man: Oi, God!
God: What?
KM: I’ve done another book. It’s called Not Very Intelligent Design Too : Planet Earth.
God: Yeah, I know.
KM: So why the hell did you create a world that was, theoretically, specifically designed as a perfect place for humans to live and then give seventy percent of it to fish?
God: I work in mysterious ways, Neel. You know that.
KM: Oh for fuck’s sake. Is that the best you can do? You could have said the fish were for us to eat.
God: Well of course they are, Neel. Except for the ones with exoskeletons. They’re aliens. Don’t eat them. You don’t want to annoy the aliens. They might be back any time. And if you’ve been eating their relatives, they’ll not be happy.
KM: You’re making shit up again.
God: It’s what we do, Neel. There’s no such thing as truth any more.
KM: And doesn’t that play right into your hands?
God: You’re not fucking kidding. Just when science and human intelligence were poised to destroy me, here I come, charging back in all my ignorant, vain glory.
KM: Holy shit.
God: Damn tootin’.
KM: Night, God.
God: Night, Neel. Sleep well.
KM: Not a chance.
The Muzak High Rotation Experiment of 2008
Cape Buffaloes are like big angry cows. Or bald angry bison. Nobody knows for sure why they’re so angry most of the time, but if you see one it’s a very good idea to just walk away, whatever your name may be. They kill over 200 people every year. In parts of Africa where the Big Buffs are most common, the song Walk Away Renee by The Left Banke is played every morning, as a cautionary reminder, when the children depart the morning assembly and sashay their way to the classrooms.
Surprisingly this repetition has not caused the song to be widely loathed. In fact the Left Banke, along with Sixto Rodriguez have been in local pop charts continuously for over forty years in South Africa. Muzak researchers discovered that supermarkets where the song is played on high rotation had better sales numbers than where the song wasn’t played at all.
The researchers took things a step further by testing just how much repeated old shit people could possibly endure while trying to buy food in the famous Muzak High Rotation Experiment of 2008 in the Mega Super Value Mart in Cape Town. The sound system was set to play just three songs on permanent rotation, Walk Away Renee, Sugar Man by Sixto Rodriguez, and some piece of shit by Abba (doesn’t matter which one), occasionally interrupted with cheery advertisements which also included stings from the same songs.
The Muzak High Rotation Experiment had a much bigger effect than the researchers could possibly have imagined. Sales plummeted, but that’s hardly surprising. It was the effect on the staff that took the researchers by surprise. Three weeks after the start of the experiment, the researchers arrived at the store to do some first hand observation of shoppers’ habits and found the store looking as though it been hit by an earthquake.
As they got closer they realized it looked more like a battlefield, the epicenter of an intense, recently-concluded firefight. In terms of the recent conclusion of the firefight they were almost correct, but there was one last skirmish still to take place just before brigades of heavily armed police arrived on the scene.
As they made their way into the crumbling, smoldering store the researchers were ambushed by the Mega Super Value Mart staff, who may have initially been mistaken for a pack of rabid zombies, but who had, in fact, formed a well regulated militia. They’d equipped themselves with an array of firearms and blown away every Muzak speaker in the store, along with the amplification equipment and a lot more besides. When you’ve just unloaded an AK47 into a ceiling speaker, it’s pretty hard to avoid the temptation of a fully stacked milk freezer.
Following the restoration of order by police SWAT teams, paramedics had to call for the assistance of a locally known circus strong man, Big Bill, in order to move the bodies of the researchers, such was the weight of lead that had been pumped into them by the gun-crazed shelf-stackers, before they themselves were drilled by a hail of police bullets.
Next time you find yourself rushing to find what you need in order to effect a quick escape from shop speakers farting out some hideous piece of decades old pop muzak shite, you can take comfort in the thought that at least once, in far off Africa, the worst purveyors of this kind of aural pollution got their just desserts. As Toto almost said, there’s nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do, I bless the drains down in Africa, especially for the blood of all those tone deaf cocksuckers that flows down them.
