The History of the Big Dig

Greetings friends and those about to be amused, confused, and perhaps slightly abused.

A friend and regular corespondent, Thomas Moody of New Hampshire, sent this brilliant bit of prose poetry, reminiscent of Lord Buckley's Word Jazz works.

If you are not familiar with Lord Buckley, click here for an introduction to an amazing American poet.

The piece to follow is strange, funny, twisted, and it makes no sense except that it makes a lot of sense. Ready?

An History of the Big Dig

by Thomas Moody

Most people alive today, having never known a world in which the Big Dig
wasn't the primary stimulus of the global economy, wonder how it all
began. Originally dubbed the "Big Pig", the history of this project goes
back to the ancient Celtic sport of Piggyback (Assukk, in the original
Celtic). Prior to their (the pigs') domestication, the Celts dreamt of
mounting the swift swine of southern Scotland (sometimes called England in
the current era), racing them at breakneck speeds around a track marked by
huge upright stone slabs and lintels, and betting on what's for dinner.
The Celts decided to try a proof-of-concept project before expending
limited capital reserves on a massive pig domestication program, so they
built a track, designated some individuals to play the role of pigs and
some to play the role of riders (inadvertently setting off a "this little
piggy" craze that persists to this day), and tried racing the "pigs"
bearing their "Piggybacked" riders, but found that the "pigs" could only
run for several days before collapsing from fatigue. To continue the
experiment, they assigned two foot racers (fetisha) to run
counter-clockwise (bazzakkverd) around an inside track (crook) for each
"pig"-and-rider pair (hiyoporca) running clockwise (tuiztanzhout) around
the outside track (luezer). (Hence the roundabout and driving on the
left.) The hypothesis was that with a net mass of zero Celts running
around the track, the race could go on perpetually. This proved false, as
in molar (molar) terms, there were 2 moles of fetisha going bazzakkverd
for each hiyoporca going tuiztanzhout, leaving nobody in the stands to
drink beer (pist) and place bets, as every man Jack and woman Jill of them
was running on the track due to the severe labour shortage that existed
prior to the perfection of the Viking au pair (uellalla) ship. Even with a
sufficient labour force to test the scheme it would have failed, however,
as there existed a toll system in that time which charged each hiyoporca
going tuiztanzhout on the luezer a shilling per circuit, and each fetisha
going bazzakkverd on the crook a tuppence and halfpenny per circuit, and
due to an inability keep the two tracks moving at equal speed but opposite
angular velocity with any real consistency (the average fetisha tending to
travel at higher speed than the average hiyoporca), a chronic imbalance of
payments would have developed, leading eventually to a currency crisis and
a run on the pound in the dark days before central banking. Needless to
say, after several thousand years, the Celts eventually abandoned the
project, and in an effort to put the painful futility of it all behind
them, they took to herding sheep, from which we get the sense of the
expression, "feeling sheepish". Nevertheless, many ages later, the legend
of this massive project of antiquity, which came to be known as "oops" or
"hoops", laid the basis for a less strenuous game that could be played
indoors with a pneumatic sphere (the "net mass"), and one of the earliest
professional organisations of the modernised parimutuel system is named
the "Celtics" in honour of the athletic tribe of yore. The strain of
accommodating the expanding arrearage of punters made the total
destruction of the Celtics' original venue in Boston's historic North End
inevitable, and realising that "Big Dig" rhymed with "Big Pig", city
planners, in the grip of the Great Tea Shortage of 1773, were inspired to
pick up where the ancient Celts left off, and developed a largely
underground urban renewal program that is still unfolding today.

I was breathless at the end. I look forward to having an audio file of this piece on the coming web site. It was meant to be heard rather than read. As well as a PHD biological sciences that I can't pronounce, Mr. Moody is also a veteran performer of nouveau Vaudevillian and clownbanditry acts of artistic/poetic expression expression.

I don't do these poetic interludes very often but this one was too much fun to read. I had to share it.

Wednesday, I shall continue with the usual attacks against the empire, with a new article entitled "Theocons, Neocons, and Lying Thieving Cons"

You'll find it here, at American Ex.