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Great Wall of China, The (SemiReal)GWOC
Date: 1998/10/04 Agree? Disagree? : Have Your Say Buy Books About This Topic At: Amazon UK Amazon US Send This Article To A Friend: Email It Use Telepathy The Great Wall of China is one of the many large and over-rated "tourist traps" [1] that the unwary hitchhiker may encounter while on Earth. The term "tourist trap" in this article denotes any object that serves the purpose, or attempts to serve the purpose, of attracting large numbers of people to a particular place, specifically in hopes of extracting money from the pockets of said large numbers of people. The name "The Great Wall of China" (The GWOC) is somewhat of a misnomer. It is, undoubtedly, a wall, and it has been firmly established by several reputable and some not so reputable persons that it is, indeed, in China. The aforementioned misnomer lies not in these details (they are true), but in the adjective applied i.e.. "great". The GWOC is not great. That impression is obviously false. To call it great would be to imply that it is somehow impressive. Allow me to elaborate: LOOK AT THE DAMNED THING!!! A wall, by definition, cannot be impressive. Well, it can be, if you decorate it, but The GWOC is not decorated. It is actually 2400 kilometres of unpolished brick. The bricks are reddish brown, but that does not qualify as decoration. I must give the Chinese credit, though, for the valiant albeit completely misguided and ineffective attempt to break 2400 kilometres of uninspired red brick wall with red brick watch towers. They were not, at this point in time, thinking of the aesthetic qualities of defensive constructs. What they were thinking of may require some explanation. The GWOC was built by one Shih Huang Ti. He is reputed to have been somewhat mega- maniacal, which was probably why he was emperor of China. In any case, Shih awoke one day in 240 BC [2] and began to feel rather perturbed. His advisors noted this and said (to themselves), "Oh shit, not again". There were several reasons they were saying this, but most stemmed from the knowledge that whenever the emperor was feeling perturbed, he had most of his advisors impaled. Shih was feeling perturbed because some of his neighbours, the Mongols, liked to stay up late and party really loud and get totally, incredibly drunk, and ride horses whilst wielding spears. They also had a disconcerting habit of burning things for no obvious reason, other than the fact that the things were there, waiting to be burned. The Mongols were somewhat notorious for riding their horses into Shih's villages and borrowing things (gold, slaves, food, lawn care implements) without giving them back. Whenever Shih tried to get these things back, the Mongols would shake off their hangovers and burn a few more villages. Shih did not regard this as particularly polite, and did not really like being told he couldn't have something, primarily, of course, because he was emperor. Suddenly, Shih had the amazingly unspectacular idea of building the ancient equivalent of a picket fence to keep the Mongols from treading on his flower beds. He ceased to be perturbed, much to the relief of his advisors, and began to order the building of a 2400 kilometre long sound barrier. This gave him a headache and he had the advisors impaled anyways, which was not so much to their relief. That, however, was that, and the rest, according to Henry Ford, is bunk. The wall, however, survived the wretched fool by about 2000 years. Great, you know, wonderful. Congratulations on your robust creation, but no thanks for the nuisance. Do you have any idea how many astronauts that thing could kill? Oh, yes, you can see it from space. I can see it now: "Oh, look Bob, the Great Wall of China! Wow. Hey were did I put the camer..." Crunch bang, you've front ended the Mir space station. That's one hell of an insurance claim.
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